No More Learning

The definition by decree of Serway, Born and Eddington and all physics do not get at all a grip of the concept of movement. They pro- vide us as definiendum a word or a group of words, or a fantastic image.
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But we have shown that no definition by decree achieves its aim of giv- ing meaning to words without studying the knowing subject.
Another famous case is the decretory ingenuity of Einstein when he says: "one understands by 'time' the position of the minute hand of a watch in the most immediate proximity of an event" (1971, 40).
It is obvious that there is no concept here, for sooner or later one would have to define watch, and one would evidently say that it is a ma- chine to measure time, or in either case, one would say something else in which the word time reappears, and thereby we would be immerged in an absolute circularity. At the end of the day, nothing would have been defined; there would not be any concepts whatsoever. Bridgman even mocks that circularity by suggesting that a watch should be de- fined as a machine that adapts to Einstein's laws. One wonders how serious did Einstein take his own apparently empirical definition when one reads this letter of him quoted by Dyson Freeman: "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. " (Dyson 1979, 193).
There is no doubt that other physical definitions of time are circular. For example, some physics say that one only needs to define 'day', which they believe to be something very concrete. They affirm thus that a day is the lapse of time that goes between two successive sun- rises. But they cannot define lapse or the concept of 'successiveness' without mentioning time. If there is something which is clearly impos- sible to be defined without reference to the subject, that thing is time, as we will later see.
If someone says 'I take by time this' what happens is that he remains with this and forgets about time. This is a valid objection against all ar- bitrary definitions and exhibits them once and for all as illusions, since no knowledge is possible if the data designated by the expression 'this' is actually time as long as we do not know what the word time means, that is to say, as long as we do not have a true definition.
In other words, I cannot understand someone when he says 'I take by time this'. I can understand this, but not time. That person does not understand what he/she is saying. In order to understand his/her phrase we would need to know what time is. But then the arbitrary definition would be unnecessary. The arbitrary definition is an essen- tially unintelligible locution. It does not constitute a public act because it is essentially unintelligible. It is a subjective and whimsical act. It falls outside the realm of science.
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There is a more widespread ruse than arbitrary definitions (and which is even more traditional) employed in order to avoid the study of the object. It is the superstition Locke and the Scholastic Philosophers called the theory of abstraction, according to which concepts have their origin in sensation. Few errors in the history of thought are easier to refute than this one; however, it remains attached to the minds of those who do not dare to make a simple reflection. What is striking is that Plato crushed that belief, once and for all, more than twenty-five cen- turies ago:
"Why, on what lines will you look, Socrates, for a thing of whose na- ture you know nothing at all? Pray, what sort of thing, amongst those that you know not, will you treat us to as the object of your search? Or even supposing, at the best, that you hit upon it, how will you know it is the thing if you did not know? (Meno 80 D)
Hegel says that thus: to make a generalization "it is indispensable to know what it deals with. " (NH 259)
In other words, in order to make a generalization one needs before- hand the concept; in order to abstract the aspect in question one needs beforehand the idea that allows us to focus on that aspect. But then, the concept does not have its origin in sensation; it existed beforehand in the mind because it is the condition of possibility of all the so-called process that leads to the abstraction of the concept from the empirical data.
"To hit the mark with the substantial, one needs to carry along the knowledge of it. Sensation does not know what the substantial is, just as the hand does not (know) what color is. " (VG 259).
The object has one thousand characteristics and aspects. Even the person with the most recalcitrant prejudices must recognize that not everyone have in their minds a determined concept; but how could some- one focus his attention on the aspect that is indeed pertinent and leave aside the irrelevant ones, so that it produces in him the concept in ques- tion, if he does not know beforehand what it is about? And if he knows it, he already has the concept; the causal contribution of sensations comes in late. What could one look for if one does not know that?
That does not mean that ideas are innate, as if children were con- scious of them from the beginning. The spirit needs to develop and take gradually conscious of itself; concepts only stem from self-
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consciousness. "The exterior is only an impulse for the spirit to dis-
play itself" (GP I 471).
The spirit, of course, is in itself undetermined, it is the concept that exists for itself; its development is to reach awareness. The determinations that it produces and takes from itself cannot be called innate. This development must be provoked by something exterior; the initial activity of the spirit is reaction; only thus it acquires knowledge of its own being. (GP III 211).
When that superstition says concept, it imagines an empirical impres- sion (v. g. green), not a concept. For that reason they think it is obvious that that impressions could not be caused by anything else than sensa- tions. But concepts are not that. A spatial figure is not a concept. The entire theory of abstraction is based on a confusion of concepts with the images of fantasy. In order to dissuade their defenders, one would only need to remind them, for instance, that the concept of triangle is a completely different thing than the image of triangle: the image is always very much particular; sometimes we imagine our triangle as a white line against a green screen, sometimes as a black line against a white screen, sometimes we imagine it bigger and sometimes smaller; sometimes we imagine it as an equilateral triangle with its vertex pointing upwards, sometimes as a triangle rectangle with a cathetus over its vertical. On the other hand, the concept of triangle is always the same and it is universal.
One of the essential aims of our next chapter will be to show how concepts are shaped by self-consciousness; the task of our present chapter is to make the reader see how useless are all the efforts made to avoid the study of the subject, one of which is the theory of abstraction. Let us see how Hegel reformulates our central argument against it:
When the unthinking consciousness declares observation and experience to be the source of truth, what it says may well sound as if only tasting, smelling, feeling, hearing, and seeing were involved. It forgets, in the zeal with which it recommends tasting, smelling etc. , to say that it has no less essentially determined the object of this sensuous apprenhension, and this determination is at least as valid for it as the sensuous apprehension. [. . . ] What is perceived should at least have the significance of a universal, not of a sensuous particular. (PG 185)
Had they not determined something, they would not know where to draw their attention. That determination is a concept, and a concept is
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universal; "only the knowledge of the universal points of view guides to what one must essentially observe" (NH 259). The universal is not caused by sensation or observation; it is the condition of possibility of observation itself: "The observation and experiments, when they are well done, come to conclude that only the concept is objective" (GP III 84).
The theory of abstraction presupposes that the mind picks out one data from our sensations, that is to say, it chooses and selects one of them; otherwise, sensation itself would not be the cause of the concept. For that to be true, however, one of the empirical data would have to be universal. But it is absurd to hold that one empirical data is universal.
If the word abstraction, to abstract, is not only a magic word whose spell makes universals appear, then its meaning must be to extract something that was there before. But evidently there was no universal among sensible data; therefore, it is impossible to say that our sensa- tions produce the universal.
And if, when they meet this difficulty, they leave aside all the ety- mologies and they come up with the idea that abstraction is a process of generalization by means of which the universal is produced, the difficulty is now of a triple kind. First, one cannot obtain a given con- cept from any object from the world; the mind would need to focus only on the pertinent ones; but in order to do this it needs beforehand the concept that guides it to them, and this is the reason why the con- cept is not a product of a generalization but the very condition of it. Second, our central argument has already mentioned this: not all the aspects of the object are essential, and in order to focus our attention only on the pertinent ones, our mind would need to have beforehand the concept that leads to them. Third, if the mental operation called generalization provides something that was not in the empirical data, then that is something provided by the concept, which means that sen- sation was not the cause of it. If the mental operation does not provide anything, the sensible data would be as particular as they were before, and we would still lack the universal concept.
That is why we called it superstition. The theory of abstraction re- mains always in a cloud of vagueness; it does not tell us how universals are formed; it believes that by saying 'abstraction! ' a universal appears where it was not before.
It is inadmissible that they prop up their theory with the authority of Aristotle, for he explicitly states that we cannot "acquire knowledge
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without the universal" (Met XIII 1086b 6), which is by the way the same thesis of the Meno, but expressed in a less vivid way.
When Aristotle says that "every idea and knowledge is from the universals" (Met XI 1059b 27) he says the same thing expressed in the three last Hegelian texts we quoted.
The same goes to this passage; "When the particular shows itself to him, the knower knows it through the universal" (Phys VII 247b 7): in the immediate lines before, Aristotle denies that intelligence can be modified by external factors and that intellectual states can be pro- duced by those means.
We would strongly like to draw the attention of the reader to the persistent illusion that underlies both these subjects and the more or less diffuse, vulgar epistemology. One believes that if the reality in front of oneself is exactly as described by a certain concept, one can posit that exterior reality is what produces the concept in the knowing subject. This is some sort of magic trick. One believes that, if the real object is simple, that is enough for us to say that the idea of simplicity appears in the subject. If the object is identical with itself, this is enough to explain the production in the mind of the subject of the concept of identity. If the object is contemporary, that is enough to explain the formation in the subject of the concept of contemporaneity.
By looking at these concepts the reader realizes that such belief is untenable. We can convince a completely illiterate man that the object in front of him is identical with itself, but that is not something that he thought of; he did not had developed the idea of identity in spite of having in front of him an object identical with itself. Therefore, the cause of the said idea is not its belonging reality. If we clearly explain to that individual what substance is, he will agree with us that the objects in his surroundings have always been substances, but he would have never come up with such a round-bout, metaphysical consideration; he did not have the concept despite that he had all the time the reality belonging to it before his eyes.
Although this persistent illusion is unsettlingly crude, many scien- tists fall in its web when they sing the praises of 'mere observation': they really believe that one only needs to open his eyes so that the be- longing concepts appear in the mind of the knowing subject. On the same rough illusion the theory of abstraction we refuted is implicitly based. Its authors were convinced at first that exterior reality is the cause of concepts, and since exterior reality is empirical, it turns out
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that sensation is the cause of concepts. How exactly, is the causal pro- cess is a question they think to be secondary; that is why they leave over it a cloud of vagueness.
We do not need to stop for long in a resort to scare away the subject that is widespread among positivists. It states that it is not necessary to find out the meaning of words because the meaning of each of them is the sum of all the objects to which it is applied.
In the first place, they would have to indicate what does the word 'all' means, an impossible task without taking the subject into account. Thereby, this way out is thwarted. But most of all, since they do not have before their eyes or in their imagination all the objects that the word in question predi- cates, the only way to refer to them is to understand the meaning of this word. The defenders of this way out do not know what they are talk- ing about, neither do we know to which objects they refer. Hence the meaning is needed beforehand, since it is the condition of possibility of the way out itself. The meaning rather reduces this resort to the third modality of decretory definitions; the one that naively believes to have the definiendum in the imagination. But that has already been refuted.
7. coup d'e? tat againSt the Subject?
Let us get finally to the big ruse that intends to scare the subject away. It is some kind of coup d'e? tat on the part of many scientists and can be formulated in the following way: we base ourselves on the objects, the real, the material, and what is empirically observable; science is not interested in the subject.
Hegel answers: "I have been only too often and too vehemently attacked by opponents who were incapable of making the simple re- flection that their opinions and objections contain categories which are presuppositions and which they themselves need to be criticized first before they are employed. " (WL I 20)
Everything leads to think that the authors of the aforementioned coup d'eta? t have not realized that 'object', 'material', 'real', etcetera, are catego- ries and concepts; they have not realized that, if they do not define the words, not even they will know what they are talking about and neither will we: none of them is definable if we do away with the subject.
"Physics do not know that they think like that Englishman who was happy because he knew how to speak prose" (GP III 426).
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Hegel was right
In this Newton is such a perfect barbarian with concepts, that it happened the same to him as what happened to one of his countrymen who was com- pletely surprised when he knew that all his life he had spoken in prose, for he had not realized that he was so smart --only that Newton did never know, did never realize that he had concepts and that he had to deal with them, by believing he had to deal with physical things. (GP III 231).
The reality that lies before us, as we said, has a thousand charac- teristics and a thousand aspects. It is impossible that the scientist or his addressee refer to a particular aspect or characteristic if they do not consider the concept of that reality and its defined meaning. Sign language is of little use here. To point something with our finger has a thousand meanings: Does pointing out something means that the object is present? Does it mean that it is visible? Does it mean that it is real? Does one intend to point out the place where the object is lo- cated? Does doing that means that it is modern? Does it mean the exte- rior? Does it mean the interior? Does it mean that it is contemporary? Does it mean that I like it? Does it mean it has this color? Does it mean it has this consistency? Does it mean it is 'like this' and not that it is 'this'? Does it refer to the genre of the present object or to its species? Does it mean it is as 'healthy or as 'faulty' as this thing is? The questions are endless.
"The thing cannot be different to us than those concepts which we have of it" (WL I 15).
"It happens as always that one alludes or mentions a perception or an experience; as soon as man speaks there is a concept there, there is no way of making it aside, it reappears in the mind as a clear sign of universality and truth, since it is precisely the essential" (GP I 336).
Without thinking and concept, the object is only an imagination or also a name; it is only in mental and conceptual determinations that it is what it is. In fact, those are the only ones that matter; they are the true object and content of reason; and what one understand as object and contrast by com- parison has only meaning by them and in them (WL II 493s).
Only science, in its strict and rigorous sense, can do this. The un- matchable contribution of Hegel has two initial steps that define everything. First, it states that scientists are dealing with concepts and that they cannot do away with them. Second, it poses a very sim- ple question: Gentlemen, these concepts that you have found 'there',
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where do they come from? Or more importantly, how do we know if they have a meaning? How do we know if they capture reality?
It is useless to answer by pointing out some data of the environment, for we cannot know whether that data corresponds to the concept in question so far we do not know what the concept means. Decretory definitions have been already ruled out.
"By the way, they cannot do without the concept; but by some sort of tacit agreement they let certain concepts run, like 'parts', 'forces', etcetera, without knowing in the least if they contain some truth and how they contain it" (GP II 171).
We beg the reader to pay special attention to this passage:
"In the modern, analytical form of mechanics such propositions are put forth simply as results of the calculus, without enquiry whether by themselves and in themselves they have a real significance, i. e. one to which there is a corresponding physical existence and whether such meaning can be demonstrated. " (WL I 276)
Let us first notice that this text echoes Aristotle. Having pointed out that science borrows terms from ordinary language, Aristotle says "Everything that is intelligible and primary to most people is often bare- ly intelligible and contains little or nothing of reality". (Met VII 1029b 3).
But Hegel goes way beyond that, for he holds that the knowing subject must necessarily look for the meanings within himself. What has been put forth in this chapter gives him the reason: "Science cannot start by something objective, but by what is not objective which makes itself into an object for itself as 'original duplicity'" (GP III 430). This last expression he borrows from Schelling.
The above quoted text WL I 276 rubs salt into the wound: scientists demonstrate and prove (or believe that they are proving) many things; but if the preposition that expresses what is demonstrated or proved is not understood, if we do not know what the meaning of the words used in that preposition is, then not even scientists themselves know what they have demonstrated or proved. It is as if they had not demonstrated or proved anything. "It has been demonstrated but it has not been understood" (GP II 591).
In every demonstration concepts have to be employed. Therefore, the vigor and strength of the demonstration depends definitely on what the concepts mean. The contribution of Hegel consists first and foremost in the sole method by means of which it is possible to look for the meaning of concepts. That is why he called The Science of Logic his
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most fundamental work. It has been an astonishing superficiality to believe that he deals there with things that do not have to do with logic. Logic consists in 'what follows', but what determines if a preposition 'follows' from other(s) is not exactly the meaning of concepts.
As far as proofs go, let us say the following: it is useless that scientists show with emphasis an empirically perceived fact; they do not confirm or demonstrate thereby the preposition they are defining since we do not know what it means. It is pointless that they affirm, once and again, that the alluded empirical data corroborates what the said preposition states, for we do not know whether the meaning of the terms employed therein corresponds to the said empirical data. First, one needs to find out what do these terms mean by themselves; only thus we can compare that meaning with the empirical data and see if they match.
Let us suppose for a moment that the technological success which is recklessly boasted against the 'ineffectiveness' of Philosophy demon- strates a thesis of the scientists. The problem is no other than this: What is here demonstrated? What does the so-called demonstrated preposi- tion mean?
If we do not understand that preposition, what do we obtain when it is demonstrated? It has not even been proved that the said preposition has a meaning.
He, who alleges that the technical success of physics demonstrates the reality of the concepts they use, would have not understood anything. The smith and the carpenter, for instance, relentlessly use the idea of surface, they work with surfaces and they obtain certifiable successes day after day; nevertheless, surfaces do not exist: there is not even one single surface in the entire world. If logic is due any respect, this sole example would suffice to show that successful practical results do not prove that the ideas which inhabit the mind of the subject correspond to reality.
Almost all the technology of the prehistoric man was based on mis- taken assumptions, and yet it had sensational successes, which are in fact more important than those of modern technology. Among the successes of the former we find the wheel, the plough, the slingshot, the knife, the hybridization of seeds, navigation, fire and agriculture. I do not stop here to give a detailed account of the mythological ideas which lead the prehistoric man to those monumental inventions; let us only say that the aqueduct was invented by men who held the belief that the Nile was a god.
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Moreover, concepts are not even needed for practical efficiency, like we see in the case of animals, whose technique is often much more refined and skillful than ours. Our aeronautics makes an effort that is still clumsy and rigid to imitate the wings of birds, their plasticity and their adaptability to different circumstances and purposes. Man has not yet invented such delicate radar as that of bats and many fishes, or such heat-detecting mechanism as that of reptiles. If one does not need theories to achieve efficiency and practical success, there can be efficacy with mistaken theories, for the result does not depend upon them. The same goes to tautological theories with no grip of reality: this is the most recurrent case in physics. A tautological theory equals to no theory at all. No theory at all is what animals have. As we have men- tioned before, it has not even been proved that the said preposition has a meaning. Hegel warned us thus: "regardless of whether they have in and by themselves any real meaning". (WL I 276)
The least we ask scientists for is that they know what they are talking about, that is to say, that one understands them. That is the exigency of Hegel. Critics overlooked the fact that the verb begreifen means pre- cisely 'to understand'. This is only one example among many. Ripalda translated it as 'to grab' and Lauer as 'to come to grips with'. All at once they let escape the only exigency of the work of Hegel, the one that makes science a scicentia, knowledge and understanding of things. Strict logic consists in the exigency according to which we must go from one determination to another, because the first determination is not understood but the second one is. This second determination is at least closer to the true concept, which is the only thing that can be re- ally understood.
I do not want to stop for long in this question which is merely in- terpretative. The key to this puzzle is that commentators suppose that one can understand something without begreifen. Even polemically, the following text rules out ex professo that possibility:
According to Kant:
the concepts of reason must serve to begreifen, the ones of the intellect to understand (verstehen) perceptions. However, if the second ones are truly concepts, they are concepts then, by means of which one conceptualizes, and to understand (verstehen) the perceptions by means of concepts of the intellect would be a begreifen (WL II 407).
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Everybody recognizes that the verb verstehen means to understand. This passage explicitly denies the existence of a verstehen that is not a begreifen, something that the critics who do not translate begreifen as 'understanding' assume.
I would like to quote one more text in regard to the subject of cau- sality, for in those discussions the word influx is often used. Hegel holds that such word must be abandoned because it cannot be understood (as in begreifen). Should we translate begreifen in any other way, the ar- gument would lack strength and even sense: "The relation of the influ- ence is a relation of vulgar Philosophy. However, since one cannot understand (begreifen) how can material particles and qualities pass from one substance to another, such representation must be aban- doned" (GP III 240).
Thus we could quote innumerable passages, but this is a question only of interpretation, and our real efforts concern demonstrations. For the rest, the first quoted text settles the interpretative question, since it explicitly denies what mistaken commentators and translators need to presuppose.
What we have said about the way out refutes the coup d'e? tat apo- dictically. Such a coup d'e? tat is ludicrous: it shies away from the con- sideration of the subject because, according to scientists, they refer to reality, to the object; but, as a matter of fact, they only refer to the words, without knowing what they mean and with no intention of finding the meaning out, for that pursuit will require to take the sub- ject into account.
But by their pursuing that way out in their particular conclusions will make our argument even more incisive.
For instance, they say that science only knows the object and not the subject. But in that same phrase they are referring to something else than the object: science. They say they only know about the object, but they claim simultaneously to know about science, which is not the object.