No More Learning

"Therefore, man is evil both by himself or by his nature, as well as through his reflection itself " (Rph 139A).
What the empty fantasy imagines, namely, that the first condition of man was the state of innocence, is the state of naturality, and of animality. [. . . ] Innocence means not to have will. True, one is not evil in this state, but because of that one is not good either. The natural things, the animals, are all good; but the way they are good does not correspond to man. Man must be good with his will (PR III 115).
Because of what we have said, it would be an atrocious superfici- ality to confuse the Yahwist theses of the voluntariness of being with the Pelagian heresy. What the Pelagians defended was the innocence of man. Here, on the other hand, what is affirmed is that "such state of innocence, such heavenly state, belongs to animals. Paradise is a park in which only animals can remain, not men" (WG 728).
"Innocent is, therefore, the inaction of being a stone, not even being a child" (PG 334).
As superficial as the other thesis is to believe that the natural evil- ness of man is irremediable on the grounds of the Yahvist narration; the whole rest of that narrative speaks of the cure, as one can already see in Genesis 12, 3; 18, 19. As for Hegel, the next parts of our present chapter deal exclusively with that remedy. Furthermore, the volun- tariness of the human evilness is in a way a manner of saying that it is curable.
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On the contrary, what makes this evilness incurable is not recogniz- ing its existence. The romanticism which prevails today about children and the savage man consist in that systematic blindness:
According to that opinion, what makes man being what he ought not to be can have only be produced due to external contingencies or due to his inability of not consummating his natural skills, that is to say, the lack of opportunity in the free development of them. That is the hollow opinion of the pedagogy of our time, which, on the one hand, feeds and produces conceit, and on the other hand, does not search thoroughly, does not scru- tinize in the depth of man, and hence does not produce any depth whatso- ever, but moves rather in empty circles of self-indulgence and decadence (PR III 103).
It is absolutely distressing to see how these hollow opinions con- tinue to prevail in spite of the accuracy with which Hegel denounced them and their disastrous consequences. The future of mankind is at stake, and we cannot continue to irresponsibly caress romantic and groundless apriorisms about the naturality of man! Especially now that we know we come from the animals.
Curiously enough, twenty two years after the death of Rousseau, the French found in the forest of Aveyron an unequivocal specimen of the natural man, a knave who was fourteen years old and who had not been modified either by society or by culture. Unlike other 'wolf- children' about which many stupid and unverifiable things are sill said all around the globe, Victor --as his unsuccessful educator, the acclaimed scientist Jean-Marc Itard-- was the object of systematic ob- servation by many of the best naturalists of the world of those times, naturalists whose documented testimonies have come down to us and have been recently compiled with the rigor of modern scholarship by the American investigator Harlan Lane. Before going to what really matters to us, let us make, out of curiosity, a selective extract of the observations that were drawn those days:
Man's debt to nurture proved heavy indeed, even for the most elementary sensory discriminations, reflexes, and drives: the boy was indifferent to temperature and rejected clothing even in the coldest weather; he would put his hand in a fire; his eyes did not fixate; he reached alike for painted objects, objects in relief, and the image of objects reflected in a mirror; he did not sneeze, even with snuff, nor did he weep; he did not respond to
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loud voices; he did not recognize edible food by sight, but by smell; he preferred uncooked food and had no taste for sweets or hard drink; he had no emotional ties, no sexual expression, no speech; he had a peculiar gait and would occasionally run on all fours (1979, 101); ". . . fetid odors had no disagreeable effect on him. " (126)
Let us address the question that directly concerns us. These are the words of Itard: ". . . the emotional faculties, equally slow in emerg- ing from their long torpor, are subordinated to a profound egoism" (ibid. 161).
Another acclaimed naturalist, J. J. Virey, who also studied Victor carefully in the year 1800, wrote the following lines:
It is astonishing how thoroughly this one idea absorbs him completely; he is always looking for something to eat, and he eats a lot [. . . ] is indeed fat. We might say that his mind is in his stomach; it is his life center. [. . . ] I am embarrassed to find natural man such an egoist; but I must report matters as they appeared to me. (ibid. 39)
In 1800, Virey also wrote: "His caretaker has never seen him show any sign of pity. " (ibid. 43)
I wanted to know if this child of nature would be content with his share if I put him with another person and gave them each an equal proportion of the same food - if he would respect that of his neighbor as property not belong- ing to him. But nothing of the sort transpired (ibid. 43).
The same thing is observed by Itard on the same date: ". . . he loves no one; he is attached to no one; and if he shows some preference for his caretaker, it is an expression of need and not the sentiment of grati- tude. " (Ibid. 39)
A refutation of Rousseau appeared few years after he launched to the world his prejudice in regard to natural goodness. As Hegel says, the "natural man is an egoist" (PR III 115).
By the way, we should notice that, against the Yahwist teaching that man tends to evil since his childhood, someone will probably try to entangle the facts and quote Mathew: "Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven" (Mathew, 18, 3). But that was not the original formulation of Christ. The original sentence is the one we find in Mark
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"Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein" (Mark 10, 15). The first text clearly denotes a posterior reflection of the community or of Mathew himself: in order to receive the Kingdom of Heavens as children we must become chil- dren. But that was not the idea. The idea was to receive the Kingdom as children receive things, that is to say, as the children from the villages received Jesus when he went there to announce the Kingdom: recep- tive, without prejudiced nor preformed ideas, capable of hearing some- thing truly new, with time availability, ready to follow up, leaving all other tasks aside. The original text speaks of the way of receiving, not of the way of being of children. Every specialist in the synoptic gospels knows that Mathew and Luke had before their eyes the text of Mark; in this case Luke (18, 17) preserved intact the formulation of Mark; the one that changed it was Mathew, and unfortunately, he wiped out the principal verb: to receive.
Some Bible scholars deny the historical authenticity of such phrase, let alone the formulation of Mathew. But they all agree on something: namely, that it does not speak at all about the innocence of children. For example Eduard Schweizer: "It is not about their purity or impurity" (1967, 117). And Walter Grundmann says: "Jesus does not presuppose a state of innocence in children" (1968, 207). On his part, D. E. Nine- ham says: "The point of comparison is not so much the innocence and humility [or obedience] of children" (1964, 268). Furthermore, C. E. B. Cranfield even attacks that interpretation: "To think of any subjective qualities of children here is to turn faith into a work. " (1966, 324) We could make this list much larger.
It is irresponsible to affirm the illusion about natural goodness, es- pecially now that we know that men come from the animals. Unlike in Hegel's time, today it is necessary to make focus on the biological aspect of our subject.
It may be convenient to start discussing with a great modern cham- pion of all natural will, a convinced denier of the original sin, and, to a certain point, a biological expert: Abraham H. Maslow. In his book about motivation and personality, he dedicated the ninth chapter to hold that destructivity is not instinctive in man. For that purpose, how- ever, he argues that the zoological beasts, which are apparently the most aggressive ones, do not attack motivated by pleasure but only to obtain food or defend themselves. However, he unwillingly says the following:
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Some animals apparently kill for the sake of killing, and are aggressive for no observable external reason. A fox that enters a henhouse may kill more hens than it could eat, and the cat that plays with the mouse is proverbial. Stags and other ungulate animals at rutting will look for fights, sometimes even abandoning their mates to do so. In many animals, even the higher ones, onset of old age seems to make them more vicious for apparently constitutional reasons, and previously mild animals will attack without provocation. In various species killing is not for the sake of food alone. (1970, 118)
I am afraid that the facts that Maslow grants in this passage can only be explained if there exists a natural and instinctive violence in the animal kingdom. The baroque discussion Marlow sets out on in order to distinguish between different types of aggression is pointless. At the end of the day, what this says to us is that the instinct of domination is not evil --as if a difference existed between being killed by domination and being killed for the sake of doing so. I will quote the next passage extensively because the urgency of the matter does not admit any kind of literary or stylistic scruples:
When the higher animals are studied, attacking is found to be correlated more and more with dominance. [. . . ] The animal's place in dominance hierarchy is in part determined by his successful aggression, and his place in the hierarchy determines in turn how much food will he get, whether or not he will have a mate, and other biological satisfactions. Practically all the cruelty manifested in these animals occurs only when it is necessary to vali- date dominance status, or to make a revolution in dominance status. How true this is for other species, I am not sure. But I do suspect that the phe- nomenon of territoriality, of attack on strangers, of jealous protection of the females, of attack on the weak or sick, and other phenomena that are often explained by instinctive aggression or cruelty are very often found to have been motivated by dominance rather than by a specific motivation to aggression for its own sake, e. g. , this aggression may be means behavior rather than end behaviour. (1970, 119)
What a consolation for the attacked ones!
The fact that Maslow wants to explain the phenomenon of attacking the weak, the hurt and the sick ones --a phenomenon particularly frequent among the superior animals, and which in certain human tribes is simply instinctive repulsion-- by appealing to the status of
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the domination, when the weak and the sick ones are actually those who jeopardize it the least, only denotes the power of dogmas on the mind of the scholar. But what Maslow and many of his followers lack is the philosophical approach. Despite its valiant defense of the natural, the hereditary and the biological in man, Maslow recognizes that we inherit from the animals the tendency to kill-in-order-to-obtain-more- food, the instinct of --aggression-to-obtain-more-sex, the impulse of attacking in order to achieve 'other biological satisfactions'. Now, that is not something evil in the animals, since we saw (V 6) that for them the end is the species. In the human realm, however, each and every one of the individuals is an end in itself. Hegel gave us the key to under- stand this: "To the extent that man wants the natural, this is no longer the natural but the negative against the good" (Rph 139 Z).
The destruction of the weak and sick suppresses form the world such genetic source. The only ones that breed are the strong ones, the better specimens of the animal in question. This mechanism is fabulous in the animal kingdom. There the species is the end.
The Nazis would praise the highly selective value that the facts com- piled by Maslow have for the improvement of the race. But in the hu- man realm each individual has infinite dignity and cannot be treated as a means. Whoever takes seriously the commandment 'Thou shall not kill', will only see in the above mentioned fact a conclusive argument which supports the Hegelian thesis that the being of man consists in tearing out the naturality in us. Man is man only insofar he ceases to be natural. Only he for whom his neighbor is an end and not a means can be considered a man:
That man is good by nature is a doctrine of late that has a modern sense; one considers 'good' the inclinations and predispositions so that man is not good insofar he coincides with his concept but only insofar he empirically is, that means to say, only insofar the negative does not intervene in his vitality and existential functionality (PR III 102s).
There are other examples which are more deeply rooted in the bi- ological than those registered by Maslow. I take from biologist Neal Griffith Smith member of the Smithsonian Institute, the following piece of information, which is tremendously disturbing if we take into account that in most mammals polygamy is the dominant system of reproduction:
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In a number of polygynous (mating of one male with more than one female) and promiscuous species, adult females outnumber adult males, some- times by a factor of five or more. It has been erroneously suggested that this sexual imbalance is the cause of the polygynous mating system, in which one male has several female partners. It has been demonstrated, however, in all polygynous species so far studied, that the ratio of males to females is 50-50 at the time of birth; in many cases, this ratio persists until the ces- sation of parental care. Therefore, it is the polygynous relationship that causes the imbalance, not vice versa: because sexual selection is the domi- nant factor in a polygamous and promiscuous species, it results in a grater mortality of males than of females. (EB 14, 686, 2)
The masculine instinct of aggression is something which man in- herits only because of the fact that he descends from animals. In the animal kingdom, where the species is an end, this instinct is marvelous because it makes the species improve qualitatively, since only the fit- test males survive the confrontation and reproduce themselves. But in the human realm this aggression against the weak is absolutely unac- ceptable, because every human being is an end and not a means. To be sure, if one questions the validity of judgments of good and evil, this whole discussion becomes superfluous; but he who affirms that man is good by nature, or that it is good that the human race improves, is accepting the validity of judgments of good and evil; he is accepting the validity of morals. Now, no moral judgment can be grounded or justified if one denies that the person --for the simple fact of being one-- is an end and not a means.
By nature man tends to destroy his rivals. Consequently, man is evil by nature.
And let us not lose sight from the fact that the tendency of polygamy is deeply rooted in the biological. The mass of an ovule is infinitely big- ger than that of the sperm; sometimes it is many million times bigger. Unlike the sperm, the ovule contains cytoplasm, which is a warehouse of nutrients, so to speak. The female organism spends more energy in producing its gamete than that which the male organism employs doing the same. The female tends to be very selective; it tends to mate by nature with the best male exemplaries of its species, for she cannot risk her fecundity of one year or of her entire lifespan. On the contrary, the male can allow himself a great number of bad choices, because his organism wears out very little by producing sperm. Polygamy is natu- ral in the male, while the natural selectivity of the female favors the
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confrontation between males, for all the males have by definition a sexual instinct, not because they are the best exempes of the species. Regardless of sex and reproduction, the instinctive aggressiveness is a fact which is corroborated at behavioral and physiological levels. Let us mention briefly the behavioral aspect, since the physiological one is
much more impressive.
Zoologists distinguish between gregarious and solitary species. The
termites seem to belong to the first group, and it has been thoroughly documented that they eventually end up eating each other (cf. EB 21, 612, 2). But indefectible aggressive behavior has been observed in soli- tary species when we gather many individuals in an enclosed space. When that happens, we can even observe cannibalism among both rats and termites (cf. EB 14, 687, 1). In the case of any solitary species, one only needs to gather in a closed space two individuals, and the result is either that one murders the other or that one becomes completely dominated.
In regard to the physiological one, neurophysiology has made a hideous discovery by means of encephalography: rage, resentment and anger are emotions pleasant for the organism, positive feelings, en- couraging dispositions. Let us summarize the technical procedure that has provided us with that conclusion:
"Little animals could learn systematically to connect to or discon- nect themselves from an electric stream by pushing some pedals connected to their hypothalamus, the inner part of the diencephalon. The intensity of the current has unequivocally something to do with pleasantness and unpleasantness, for when they are subjected to a soft stimulation they immediately learn to get away from the pedal that disconnects them. Now, since one is making of them an encephalo- gram, the experimenter can distinguish two different types of waves in the movements of pleasure and displeasure; the pleasant ones are wide and large wages; the negative ones are narrow and short" (Cfr. Grastya? n: EB 18, 354s).
Once he has come to realize that, the scientist can place the animals in vital, real situations and observe in the screen which kind of waves are produced by different situations. When there is a feeling of fear or anxiety, the waves indicate unpleasantness and suffering; however, when the animal attacks he becomes angry, the waves turn slow and wide, which are characteristics of contempt and self-reinforcement. This is the horrendous discovery we mentioned before.
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Not that this content is entirely new, but anybody that has certain hon- esty of analysis knows that there is pleasure in the act of carrying out an act of revenge and that deeds performed with rage are self-reinforcing. The first thing to say is that the above mentioned experiments cannot be denied or neglected. Second, and more important, they demonstrate that our in itself pleasant, gratuitous aggressiveness is not the product of culture or education, those universal villains to which romanticism attributes all possible evil in order to remain with the reveries of the natural goodness of man. No. Cruelty is something inherited from the animals, it is a natural element of man; and man becomes man in- sofar and to the degree that he abandons naturality. Man is an animal while he remains natural. Insofar he is a man, man has no nature.
To top it all, scientists have been able to discern between the vascular and hormonal changes that come along with pleasure and the vascu- lar and hormonal changes that come along suffering and anxiety: one has found the presence of the first in the moments of rage and resent- ment. This kind of reaction have confirmed this: fury and aggression unconsciously trigger typical movements towards the object, while the unpleasant experience triggers typical movements in which one grows apart.
To summarize what we have said, let us repeat with Hegel: "The evil is no other thing that the deepen-in-itself of the natural being of the spirit" (PG 539).
In order to go further with our exposition, we need to detonate once and for all the Hegelian bomb: "Everything that man is, he owes it to the State; only there he has his essence" (VG 111).
The State, as we will demonstrate later on, consists only in the set of rights and duties which bind man. Now, we have seen (III, 7) that self- consciousness can only be produced by the ethical demands that others address to me and which are called duties; but that which distinguishes man from animals, that which makes him truly a man, is self-awareness. This why Hegel says that everything that man is he owes it to the State. Hegel was the first one to understand in the modernity that the Aristote- lian expression zoon politiko? n is the definition of man. What has hindered the most that one understands Hegel is the chimerical belief that man is good by nature. Only the State, only a set of rights and duties, makes him good; for only the State pulls him off from animality.
In a like way, we showed that (V, 1), if man follows nature, he is not free. When the path of behavior is not determined by the self but by
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an arbitrary impulse, the kind of action we are dealing with is heter- onomous: no one can speak there of freedom. It follows that the set of duties and rights is what makes man free. With the first ethical answer man begins to be free; he begins to be good and, consequently, he be- gins to be a man. "The natural want [. . . ] is worse that the bad want" (Rph, Notiz zu 139 A). "What is morally evil is the worst; it that which absolutely ought not to be; however, nature is even worse" (ibid. ).
Even the most primitive State or polis contains the roles and expec- tation which make man a man by granting him responsibility --not killing, honesty, respect for the others' existence, etcetera. This is what is essential to the State: a set of duties and rights.
"One renounces to the particularity of will in those uncouth statal situations" (VG 113).
"To be sure, one can verify the existence of many situations of sav- ageness, but [. . . ] despite how ignorant these situations are, they are bound to institutions which, as one says, limit freedom" (VG 116).
"The substantial of ethical relationships [. . . ] is already present in an uncultivated society" (PR I 158).
In this context --as we have said before-- the most unlikely ally we can count on is Rousseau himself: "Good social institutions are those that know best how to denature man" (Emile, I).
Man is not free by nature: this Hegelian thesis, which only makes explicit what we have demonstrated (V, 1) is undoubtedly one of the most important truths both in political philosophy and anthropology. Neither liberals nor leftists seem capable to understand it. The truth is that neither liberalism nor communism can define freedom.
If man is not free by nature, then saying that duties 'limit' freedom is absurd. That is the context of Hegels phrases (VG 116), as they say in German sogenannt.
"Duty is not the limitation of freedom, but only the abstraction of it, that means to say, the lack of freedom (Rph 149 Z).
"In duty man frees himself for true freedom" (Rph 149).
"As ethicity, true freedom consists in that the will does not have as an end, subjective and selfish contents, but rather universal content (EPW 469 A).
"Merely natural will is in itself violence against the idea of freedom in itself, which one must protect against uncultivated will" (Rph 93). "As a matter of fact, every law that is truly a law is a freedom, since it contains a rational determination of the objective spirit and hence the
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content of freedom. On the contrary, it is now very common to say that everyone must limit their freedom in relation to the freedom of others, and that the State is that situation of reciprocal limitation, and that the laws are limitations. In such imaginations one conceives truth as a ca- price or a whim" (EPW 539 A).
But the ambiguity of Rousseau begins soon. Man is free, that is the sub- stantial nature of man; and it is not only suppressed by the State for the first time, but in fact is constituted for the very first time within it. The freedom of nature, the aptitude for freedom, is not true freedom; for only the State is the realization of freedom (GP III 307).
"In reality this limitation is the condition of liberation; society and State are rather those situations in which freedom becomes true" (VG 118). As we said before (v, 1), every mistake in this regard has its origin in believing that freedom is something negative, that is to say, lack of something. It is very easy for the natural man to possess from the beginning something which consists in nothing. Aside from the fact that such conception does not define truth and hence does not know what it is speaking about, the absurd that immediately follows from it is that stones would also be free. Natural goodness has a similar ori- gin: if goodness consisted in the lack of something, it follows then that man has it by nature, for one does not need to put many endeavors in obtaining nothingness. That is the origin of Rousseau's apocalyptic cra- ziness: he understands the natural man as a solitary animal, and hence he does not harm anybody, for the sole and simple reason that there is no one around him, and in that sense this man is good: a goodness that consists in a negation or in nothingness. Obviously, Rousseau never un- derstood that intersubjectivity is the only thing which can make a man exist and that a 'solitary man' is a contradictio in terminis. Besides, with
that criterion, even rocks would be morally good.
"In the State freedom is realized positively and is in itself objective.
However, this should not be understood as if the subjective will of the subject came to its realization and enjoyment by means of the general will, in other words, as if the former was a means for the latter. The State is not a coming together of man in which the freedom of all indi- viduals ought to be limited. We would be conceiving freedom as some- thing merely negative if we imagine that each subject limits its freedom with other subjects, so that this common limitation, this common
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'getting in the way' of the others, left everyone with a place in which he could let go. As a matter of fact, only Law, ethicity and the State are the positive realization and achievement of freedom.