It is impossible to hold a thesis as true if we do not
understand
it.
Hegel Was Right_nodrm
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172 Hegel was right
They would not only have to charge Hegel with pantheism, but also Aquinas and the most serious part of the Catholic tradition.
We said (III, 8) that the only real causality we know and the only one of which we have a concept is the cause that determines itself. It follows from this that every attempt to understand creation that does not hold to the self-production of the spirit recourses inevitably to an imaginative figuration but not to a concept. Such attempts intend to play magic tricks by only pronouncing the word cause. Only intersub- jectivity --as a simple and identical entity-- has the capacity of pro- ducing something different without losing its identity. The Thomistic system as such is impotent to confront these things; matter and form are metaphors, evidently, but we are not dealing here with Literature.
And Hegel even makes a precision: "Creating is not a definite thought" (GP III 157). "The term 'creation' comes from religion; but it is a void word taken from imagination; in order to be thought and to have philosophical meaning, it must be more precisely defined" (GP III 240).
And let us see how Hegel himself defines it: "that we are not origi- nal and only in relation to God we come to being" (BS 239). Our third chapter exposed that it is the divine imperative which by means of in- tersubjectivity makes us come to be. "God is the manifestation of him- self to the spirit, and this manifestation is to produce the spirit at the same time" (PR I 200). "This is the content of the Absolute: manifesta- tion" (WL II 164).
The abstract intellect --which separates and stiffens everything-- cannot understand that God is only conceivable in and by means of human intersubjectivity, whose essentially moral character we have highlighted. "To express it in more theological terms, the spirit of God is essentially in its collectivity; God is spirit in so far he is in his collec- tivity" (PR I 52). "God as spirit, if He remains on the other side, does not exist as vital spirit in his community, he remains unilaterally deter- mined as mere object" (PR III 19).
8. phiLoSophy and faith
Since the theology of the abstract intellect does not realize that it does not have the concept of God and that it does not know what it is speaking about, since that theology does not realize that God is only conceiv- able in the moral imperative --whose obedience is a free act, despite
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 173
the natural appearances-- it blindfoldedly holds a difference between Theology and Philosophy, between faith and reason, that does not exist. When this theology speaks of "natural reason" in contrast with faith, it does not know what it says. Reason is not on the side of nature. Being rational is not natural to us. Although one demonstrates irre- futably with reasons --just as this book does-- that the sensible data should not be trusted, man can anyway cling to the empirical data and distrust reasons; and that takes us to its naturality.
Natural reason is a twisted expression. [. . . ] Reason is rather not to be what one immediately is. Spirit consists precisely in raise above nature, to sub- tract oneself from the natural, not only being free from the natural, but to make in the natural that the natural obeys, adapts and surrenders itself to the spirit (PR II, I 10s).
In its most noble but infrequent sense, believing is to know something that is not in sensibility and that goes beyond what our senses witness. It is in this sense in which us the believers know --even by demonstra- tion-- that God exists (cfr PR I 85 n). The moral imperative, which is revealed by God, is knowledge of God with certainty. Evidently, in our context, the trivial meaning of the word 'believing' is irrelevant. "Believing is a word with many meanings" (PR III 199).
The noble sense alluded cannot be opposed to reason, because it co- incides with the knowledge that is characteristic of reason, in contrast with the empirical knowledge of perception.
Perhaps the fundamental mistake of abstract-minded theology is to figure that one can know God doing without the moral imperative. Hegel is as intransigent as Kant in this point, and he is so with justi- fied reason, since this is not only about the affective consequences: "the purpose and essence of every true religion, included ours, is the morality among men" (FS 105). It is the concept itself of God:
True religion and religiosity stems only from ethicity, and it is ethicity that thinks about itself, that means to say, the ethicity that gains awareness of the free universality of its concrete essence. Only in the light of it the idea of God as a free spirit can be known; therefore, it is futile to look outside the ethical spirit for true religion and religiosity (EPW 552 A).
It is about the content itself of the idea of God. And all depends on which elements one takes as a point of departure to raise the mind up
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 174 Hegel was right
to God. "Kant fixed correctly the principal point of this elevation when he considered that the faith in God has its source in practical reason, for the point of departure implicitly encloses the content or material which constitutes the concept of the content of God" (ibid).
In the Kantian vocabulary, the practical reason is the one that per- ceives and obeys the moral imperative.
Kant pointed out with good enough reason that cosmological and teleological arguments demonstrated the existence of many things but not the existence of God. If one does not previously have the concept of God, the demonstration does not fulfill its purpose; and if one does have the concept, it is because we know God in the imperative without which we would not even be thinking, for the imperative is the one that makes us have a self and be humans. For that reason, Hegel told us: "It is very true that men have to be educated towards religion and not towards something that is not even there yet" (VG 128).
Our present chapter --which has dealt with the concept of infinite, and in which it was absolutely necessary to speak about our identity and distinction with regard to God-- could not dismiss the droning thesis of the abstract intellect about the alleged difference between Philoso- phy and Theology, between faith and reason, whose fundamental mis- take has just been pointed out by us. The moral imperative is not an empirical data; to know it is to have certainty of something that is not given by sensibility, and that is the noble sense of the word believing, but this knowledge is the essence itself of reason, the one that makes the man human, in contrast with the animals. Hegel holds exactly the contrary position than that expressed in the above mentioned thesis: "If theology is not philosophy, it does not know what it wants" (WG 838). "The difference between believing and knowing has become a com- mon and vulgar contrast [. . . ]. But in fact, in its essential content, this distinction is something inexistent" (VG 47).
Precisely the Trinity --which according to theologians is the most supernatural content there can be-- is the key concept of identity and distinction, which is at the bottom of all philosophical problems, despite that superficial philosophy hast not yet realized this and cannot solve such problems.
In fact, philosophy does no other thing than to understand this idea of Christianity (GP II 409). This content is present, as a teaching of the Chris- tian church, in the Trinity. God is known as spirit only if one knows him
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 175 as Trinitarian. This new principle is the hinge around which the universal
history revolves. The history counts until and from there (WG 722).
The greatest vulgar and rationalist objection against the Trinity consists in denouncing it as a contradictory dogma since it affirms identity and distinction at the same time. Distinction in their persons --because there is nothing more distinct than a person--, and iden- tity because the dogma says they are the only God, numerically one, so that these persons do not belong to a divine species. Evidently, the objectors think that they can give meaning to the words distinction and identity; but the huge surprise is that the only possible meaning of these terms is the one they have when their realization is the spirit, but the true spirit is Trinitarian. The first thing that the objectors missed is that the spirit is essentially intersubjectivity and distinction between persons.
In regard of personhood, what is characteristic of the person, of the subject, is to depose its isolation. Precisely ethicity, love, and friendship consist in resigning the own peculiarity, the peculiar personality, and widening it un- til one transforms it into universality. [. . . ] The trueness of personhood is acquiring it by submerging oneself in the other, by having submerged in the other (PR III 81).
In order to look with ontological and 'realist' disdain this identifica- tion with-the-other as if it were 'merely psychological', as if it were an emotional subjectivism that does not modify the real state of things, the skeptical would need to suppose that there is a substratum in each person that precisely underlies the acts of consciousness and remains unaffected by them. But we have showed (III 4) that such a substratum would be matter and no one would know what it consists in. If it is spirit, "the spirit is only real in regard to what he knows he is" (Rph 274), for "the spirit itself is only this perceiving itself" (GP I 93), "the spirit is not natural, it is only what he makes himself be" (GP II 494), "we know that there is only in spirit what he produces by his activity" (A? sth 166).
Personality does not consist in being eccentric. On the contrary, one is never so truly himself as when overcomes all peculiarities and in- dividualisms and chooses for the good of everybody and is identified with then. Now, let us remember that the only possible meaning of the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 176 Hegel was right
word substance is self-determination of the spirit, that is to say, the fact that the spirit makes itself what it is.
We said that the true spirit is Trinitarian. Self-consciousness consists precisely in that the spirit produces before itself another that is itself "be- cause he has no figure of being another" (PR III 70 n. ), and then the spirit suppresses it as another, for the recognition in it makes the other stop being another. The reincoroporation and recognition is the third element, but only in that moment the spirit is spirit, for there is no self- consciousness if there is no spirit. The spirit is that relation with oneself as another, regaining the other in the awareness of its identity with it. Life consists in this, taking this word in its most original sense, which is in fact the only possible sense as we will later see (V. 6). The abstract intellect kills all concepts; it makes them inert by separating and fixating them. It is obvious that what we have said in that paragraph is ideal and mental, but whoever opposes it to 'reality' still believes naively that he can define reality doing without the meaning this word has in reference to the spirit.
The spirit is originally Trinitarian: for that reason Hegel affirms that "God is the essence of man" (WG 575). This is what the Bible teaches us when it says that man was made in the image of God.
As Hegel says, the fact that philosophy does not anything more than understanding the Trinity is something that is not demonstrated because the concept of identity and distinction underlies all philo- sophical problems, but because the task of philosophy has been and still is to disentangle the true meaning of all concepts; however, all concepts find their original meaning in the spirit, and it happens to be that the spirit is Trinitarian. As an example of this, one should see the critique of Hegel against the system of Spinoza, a system which is the big synthesis of all the preexisting philosophies.
The absolute substance is the true, but it is not the total true, the substance must be thought of as active, as living, and by those means to determine itself as spirit [. . . ] The philosophy of Spinoza is only a stiff substance, it is not yet spirit, one is not with oneself. In that philosophy God is not spirit, because it is not Trinitarian (GP III 166).
It follows from this that Spinoza does not hit the mark with the meaning of concepts; his categories are simply "collected, without any further ado, he supposes him; no one knows how he arrived to them"
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 177
(ibid. 167). Spinoza's demonstrations might be as geometrical as he wants them to be, but they are perfectly useless because neither he nor anyone knows the meaning of the propositions that are demonstrated like that.
Let us get back on track. If the Trinity is a philosophical matter, everything would indicate that only out of incompetence in their trade theologians could say that theology is not philosophy. It happens to them exactly the same thing that happened to Newton: they have not realized that they use concepts. Now, the task of philosophy is to find out the meaning of concepts, and we have seen (II, 5) how mistaken is the attempt of giving them meaning by decretory means. Even if theol- ogy would try to do without the 'spontaneous' philosophical sophisms --which are the sophisms of the epoch and of the layman--, even if it would want to reduce its work to the recital of Biblical passages, it is an undeniable fact that the Bible uses concepts, and hence it is impossible to understand its message without finding out the meaning of them.
"Theologians [. . . ] ignore philosophy, but only in order that nobody gets in the way of their capricious reasoning" (EGP 156).
It is useless that they demonstrate us a thesis by saying that God revealed or leaning on the authority of the Church, if we do not un- derstand what the thesis mean. Now, if we understand it, the result is that we do not only believe it but we know it.
One of the most impossible and contradictory acts is to say: "I be- lieve in this although I do not understand it". To accept a thesis is not a physical act carried out by the hand; it is a mental act, and it consists in understanding the meaning of the thesis.
It is impossible to hold a thesis as true if we do not understand it. We would not know what we take as true if we did not understand it. "To know is to have something as object before consciousness and be certain about it; and believing is exactly the same" (VG 47). The physical act of reciting with the mouth a thesis and saying that one believes in something is not to believe in the true of that statement; it is sheer exteriority; the fact that the performer does not have the intention of pretending does not transform that exte- riority into true belief, for believing is an intellectual act, not a physical one. The content needs to be understood, for its existing depends only in being understood.
What meaning would it have to believe in anything?
Of course, the Trinity is a mystery, but "it is a mystery to the senses" (PR III 70). For the senses, one thing is here and the other is there, and
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 178 Hegel was right
they cannot be identified. However, for reason, for the spirit, the most understandable thing is its own reality, which is originally Trinitarian, as we have seen.
As we have said, the only true problem is to 'subtract oneself from the natural' and the sensible and become rational, i. e. spirit. "Without regeneration no one escapes from the sphere of the natural intellect to the speculative heights of the living concept" (BS 387). We said that it does not exist that what theologians called "natural reason", if we understand by natural that which can exist only by the forces of nature. Man needs God to be man.
Everything that God reveals to man has to be understood, this prop- osition is tautological.
The content of the revelation is not something physical, but an entity whose reality must be understood.
Now, a content to be intelligible needs concepts; and all concepts acquire their meaning in the realization of them called spirit. Only God can reveal us what spirit is.
Theologians would want certain knowledge to become contingent. But if this word has meaning, all knowledge is contingent, starting with the knowledge that we are spirit; to such a degree this is true that even nowadays theologians do not fully understand what spirit is (III, 1). The very same existence of the knowing man is contingent, if contingent has any meaning at all; therefore, all their knowledge is contingent.
They can define contingent as what is non-necessary, and as we have seen, they believe that they can define necessary independently from freedom and contingence (Cfr. III, 10) They are creating thus a pseudo- problem, as we will later see in detail (VI, 2 and VI 6).
"In absolute terms, theology is only what philosophy is" (GP III 64). "God is the one and only object of philosophy" (PR I 30). "Therefore, philosophy is theology, and dealing with it, or rather, in
it is to worship God" (PR I 30).
"The spirit of truth is no other thing than the religious spirit"
(WG 910s).
"Therefore, philosophy is not opposed to religion; what the former
does is to understand the latter" (EGP 192).
"One has reproached philosophy that it wants to place itself above
religion; but these is indeed false, since philosophy only has the same content and no other; however, it gives this content the form
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 179
of thought; therefore, it places itself above the form of belief, but the content is exactly the same" (PR III 228s 2).
"Philosophy is not the only discipline that is essentially orthodox, but it is the most fundamental one; the statements have always been truth, the fundamental and essential truths of Christianity, are con- served and preserved by it [Philosophy]" (PR III 26s).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? chapter v
Logic and Natural Sciences
? ? In the third and fourth chapters we exposed the core of Hegelian thought. Now, what has prevented people in our century from appreciating the Hegelian logic and the Hegelian critic of natural
sciences has been the incomprehension of that core. That is the reason why I think we are ready now to understand the real range of that logic, which is the only logic possible and whose importance for hu- man history increases every day.
1. diaLecticS
The key of dialects is this: We know that the contradiction or antithesis between two terms is solved, and we know that because the meaning of each of them is the spirit, and the spirit is not contradictory.
The opposition or contradiction is due to the fixational intellect. Moving away from the concrete, this intellect converts the terms into many abstractions that are unintelligible because no one can give them meaning if they remain away from the tangible.
The engine of the dialectics is the exigency of understanding the terms. Once we reach the realization of these terms --which is no
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 182 Hegel was right
other than the spirit-- they will become understood; and only then the oppositions and contradictions will be over. The pseudodialectics which posits that every synthesis becomes a thesis with a new an- tithesis and so on indefinitely, as we have seen (IV, I) does not share anything in common with Hegel and the dialectic; on the contrary, that is the indefinite progress that Hegel despises because it never achieves understanding. That dialectic cartoon lacks an engine, because it does not try to understand: it seeks not to understand. Therefore, every launch of a new thesis constitutes a display of arbitrariness.
The abstract is false [. . . ] The intellect resists the concrete; it insists on flattening it. By its reflections this intellect produces for the first time the abstract, the void, and clings to it in opposition to the truth [. . . ] Philosophy is diametrically opposed to the abstract; Philosophy is precisely the struggle against the abstract, the permanent war against the reflection of the intellect (EGP 113).
"The abstractions correspond to the reflection of the intellect, not to Philosophy" (EGP 97).
"The treatment of such intellect consists in maintaining each deter- mination or content of thought still" (GP III 262).
The pseudodialectic that tries to dissolve any particular notion and place it under skepticism is a cheap sophistic recourse, and this dialec- tic always stands in the middle of the road, since the end of the road is to understand.
"The dialectic that intends to dissolve the particular and to pro- duce thereby the general, is not yet a true dialectic, it does not go yet in the true direction; it is a dialectic that is common to both Plato and the sophists, who were experts in dissolving the particular".
The destiny of the supreme dialectics is to determine in itself the general, which has been the result of the mess of the particular, and in that universal to settle the contrasts, so that the dissolution of the contrast is the affir- mative. Thus the universal is determined as that which dissolves the con- tradictions and contrasts, and all of this has made it in itself; therefore, it is determined as the concrete, as that which is concrete in itself. Therefore, it becomes determined as the concrete, as that which is concrete in itself. From that superior point of view, this dialectics is the properly the Platonic one. This is the speculative dialectic, that which does not end in a negative result (GP II 65).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Logic and Natural Sciences 183
We have already seen (IV, 3) that the true universal is the spirit itself; it is "the universal, but that which determines itself, that is concrete in itself" (GP II 68).
The active universal, living, concrete, is which distinguishes itself in itself and remains in that free. This content consists in the identification of the one with itself in the other, in the many, in the distinct. Of all what is called Platonic philosophy this constitutes the true, the only thing true, the only interesting thing for knowledge; if one does not understand this, one does not understand what is fundamental (GP II 76).
The example of the real dialectic referred here by Hegel is the one we studied before (IV, 7): the abstract intellect separates identity and distinction and presents itself as incapable of defining and under- standing them. On the other hand, when reason comprehends that the very spirit --which is essentially intersubjetive-- is the only possible realization of both the concepts of identity and distinction, it realizes not only that they do not contradict each other, but that they have to be identical in order to exist and have meaning. Hence the opposition between these two concepts was due to the intellect kept them apart, and converted them thereby into abstractions, since they are not sepa- rated in the concrete; they are identical and only in this way can they be understood. Evidently, for the spirit, there cannot be something as concrete as itself.
"If the beginning was the universal, the result is the individual con- crete, subject" (WL II 499).
"Sense and meaning are something concrete" (GP II 591).
"This second negative thing to which we have arrived, the negative of the negative, is the suppression of contradiction; however, [. . . ] it is not the product of extrinsic reflection, but rather the most interior and objective element of life and spirit, that by means of which a subject is a person and is free" (WL II 496s), "the pure personality, the most subjec- tive thing there is" (WL II 502).
One cannot express with greater explicitness that the real dialectic is an exclusive patrimony of the spirit: the only solution of antinomies is the most intimate element of the life of the spirit. The pseudodialectic of materialism is an anti-scientific whim, because, being the realization called spirit the only one that makes that the concepts have meaning and become, for the first time understandable, such pseudodialectic is
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 184 Hegel was right
not directed to understand and hence it has no justification in its transi- tion from one concept to other.
"But as absolute negativity, the negative element of the absolute me- diation is the unity which consists in subjectivity and soul" (WL II 497). The commentators --specially the Marxist ones-- considered that dialectic was important by itself, but the really important thing for Hegel is to show that all the concepts mean spirit. Actually Hegel laughs at the "dull set square of triplicty" by which Kant "inserted the
thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis carelessly" (GP III 385).
It is crucial to distinguish clearly between the Kantian and the Hegelian solution of the antinomies. Kant claimed that human mind is incapable of knowing the reality; hence, the mental categories do not say us anything about the real. It is then irrelevant that they contradict each other, e. g. that free will contradicts the necessary, finite contra- dicts the infinite, simple contradicts the compound, etcetera. It would be bad, Kant says, that the reality itself was contradictory; but it is not, because we do not know anything about reality. Our concepts don't reach it. It is the incognitum x. Our concepts contradict each other, but
reality remains immune from all of this.
The big question that Hegel raises up against such a solution is:
where do these concepts come from? How can one explain their exis- tence? And the great objection: the concepts are still as contradictory as before, the antinomy has not been solved; it has just been reinserted into the subject. Kant is very tender with the reality: he does not want it to be contradictory, so instead he makes the subject contradictory.
Hegel, however, confronts the problem directly: the contradiction has to be solved. That it is really solved is something that our above men- tioned example of identity and distinction proves.
Since each of the two opposed sides contains its other within itself and neither can be thought without the other, it follows that neither of these determinations, taken alone, has truth; this belongs only to their unity. This is the true dialectical consideration of them and also the true result. (WL I 191)
"The third is what is properly speculative, that means, to know the opposites in their truth are one. " (NH 415).
Now, the dialectic of identity and distinction underlies the dia- lectic of the simple and the compound, of the continuous and the
? ? ? ? ?
They would not only have to charge Hegel with pantheism, but also Aquinas and the most serious part of the Catholic tradition.
We said (III, 8) that the only real causality we know and the only one of which we have a concept is the cause that determines itself. It follows from this that every attempt to understand creation that does not hold to the self-production of the spirit recourses inevitably to an imaginative figuration but not to a concept. Such attempts intend to play magic tricks by only pronouncing the word cause. Only intersub- jectivity --as a simple and identical entity-- has the capacity of pro- ducing something different without losing its identity. The Thomistic system as such is impotent to confront these things; matter and form are metaphors, evidently, but we are not dealing here with Literature.
And Hegel even makes a precision: "Creating is not a definite thought" (GP III 157). "The term 'creation' comes from religion; but it is a void word taken from imagination; in order to be thought and to have philosophical meaning, it must be more precisely defined" (GP III 240).
And let us see how Hegel himself defines it: "that we are not origi- nal and only in relation to God we come to being" (BS 239). Our third chapter exposed that it is the divine imperative which by means of in- tersubjectivity makes us come to be. "God is the manifestation of him- self to the spirit, and this manifestation is to produce the spirit at the same time" (PR I 200). "This is the content of the Absolute: manifesta- tion" (WL II 164).
The abstract intellect --which separates and stiffens everything-- cannot understand that God is only conceivable in and by means of human intersubjectivity, whose essentially moral character we have highlighted. "To express it in more theological terms, the spirit of God is essentially in its collectivity; God is spirit in so far he is in his collec- tivity" (PR I 52). "God as spirit, if He remains on the other side, does not exist as vital spirit in his community, he remains unilaterally deter- mined as mere object" (PR III 19).
8. phiLoSophy and faith
Since the theology of the abstract intellect does not realize that it does not have the concept of God and that it does not know what it is speaking about, since that theology does not realize that God is only conceiv- able in the moral imperative --whose obedience is a free act, despite
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 173
the natural appearances-- it blindfoldedly holds a difference between Theology and Philosophy, between faith and reason, that does not exist. When this theology speaks of "natural reason" in contrast with faith, it does not know what it says. Reason is not on the side of nature. Being rational is not natural to us. Although one demonstrates irre- futably with reasons --just as this book does-- that the sensible data should not be trusted, man can anyway cling to the empirical data and distrust reasons; and that takes us to its naturality.
Natural reason is a twisted expression. [. . . ] Reason is rather not to be what one immediately is. Spirit consists precisely in raise above nature, to sub- tract oneself from the natural, not only being free from the natural, but to make in the natural that the natural obeys, adapts and surrenders itself to the spirit (PR II, I 10s).
In its most noble but infrequent sense, believing is to know something that is not in sensibility and that goes beyond what our senses witness. It is in this sense in which us the believers know --even by demonstra- tion-- that God exists (cfr PR I 85 n). The moral imperative, which is revealed by God, is knowledge of God with certainty. Evidently, in our context, the trivial meaning of the word 'believing' is irrelevant. "Believing is a word with many meanings" (PR III 199).
The noble sense alluded cannot be opposed to reason, because it co- incides with the knowledge that is characteristic of reason, in contrast with the empirical knowledge of perception.
Perhaps the fundamental mistake of abstract-minded theology is to figure that one can know God doing without the moral imperative. Hegel is as intransigent as Kant in this point, and he is so with justi- fied reason, since this is not only about the affective consequences: "the purpose and essence of every true religion, included ours, is the morality among men" (FS 105). It is the concept itself of God:
True religion and religiosity stems only from ethicity, and it is ethicity that thinks about itself, that means to say, the ethicity that gains awareness of the free universality of its concrete essence. Only in the light of it the idea of God as a free spirit can be known; therefore, it is futile to look outside the ethical spirit for true religion and religiosity (EPW 552 A).
It is about the content itself of the idea of God. And all depends on which elements one takes as a point of departure to raise the mind up
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 174 Hegel was right
to God. "Kant fixed correctly the principal point of this elevation when he considered that the faith in God has its source in practical reason, for the point of departure implicitly encloses the content or material which constitutes the concept of the content of God" (ibid).
In the Kantian vocabulary, the practical reason is the one that per- ceives and obeys the moral imperative.
Kant pointed out with good enough reason that cosmological and teleological arguments demonstrated the existence of many things but not the existence of God. If one does not previously have the concept of God, the demonstration does not fulfill its purpose; and if one does have the concept, it is because we know God in the imperative without which we would not even be thinking, for the imperative is the one that makes us have a self and be humans. For that reason, Hegel told us: "It is very true that men have to be educated towards religion and not towards something that is not even there yet" (VG 128).
Our present chapter --which has dealt with the concept of infinite, and in which it was absolutely necessary to speak about our identity and distinction with regard to God-- could not dismiss the droning thesis of the abstract intellect about the alleged difference between Philoso- phy and Theology, between faith and reason, whose fundamental mis- take has just been pointed out by us. The moral imperative is not an empirical data; to know it is to have certainty of something that is not given by sensibility, and that is the noble sense of the word believing, but this knowledge is the essence itself of reason, the one that makes the man human, in contrast with the animals. Hegel holds exactly the contrary position than that expressed in the above mentioned thesis: "If theology is not philosophy, it does not know what it wants" (WG 838). "The difference between believing and knowing has become a com- mon and vulgar contrast [. . . ]. But in fact, in its essential content, this distinction is something inexistent" (VG 47).
Precisely the Trinity --which according to theologians is the most supernatural content there can be-- is the key concept of identity and distinction, which is at the bottom of all philosophical problems, despite that superficial philosophy hast not yet realized this and cannot solve such problems.
In fact, philosophy does no other thing than to understand this idea of Christianity (GP II 409). This content is present, as a teaching of the Chris- tian church, in the Trinity. God is known as spirit only if one knows him
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 175 as Trinitarian. This new principle is the hinge around which the universal
history revolves. The history counts until and from there (WG 722).
The greatest vulgar and rationalist objection against the Trinity consists in denouncing it as a contradictory dogma since it affirms identity and distinction at the same time. Distinction in their persons --because there is nothing more distinct than a person--, and iden- tity because the dogma says they are the only God, numerically one, so that these persons do not belong to a divine species. Evidently, the objectors think that they can give meaning to the words distinction and identity; but the huge surprise is that the only possible meaning of these terms is the one they have when their realization is the spirit, but the true spirit is Trinitarian. The first thing that the objectors missed is that the spirit is essentially intersubjectivity and distinction between persons.
In regard of personhood, what is characteristic of the person, of the subject, is to depose its isolation. Precisely ethicity, love, and friendship consist in resigning the own peculiarity, the peculiar personality, and widening it un- til one transforms it into universality. [. . . ] The trueness of personhood is acquiring it by submerging oneself in the other, by having submerged in the other (PR III 81).
In order to look with ontological and 'realist' disdain this identifica- tion with-the-other as if it were 'merely psychological', as if it were an emotional subjectivism that does not modify the real state of things, the skeptical would need to suppose that there is a substratum in each person that precisely underlies the acts of consciousness and remains unaffected by them. But we have showed (III 4) that such a substratum would be matter and no one would know what it consists in. If it is spirit, "the spirit is only real in regard to what he knows he is" (Rph 274), for "the spirit itself is only this perceiving itself" (GP I 93), "the spirit is not natural, it is only what he makes himself be" (GP II 494), "we know that there is only in spirit what he produces by his activity" (A? sth 166).
Personality does not consist in being eccentric. On the contrary, one is never so truly himself as when overcomes all peculiarities and in- dividualisms and chooses for the good of everybody and is identified with then. Now, let us remember that the only possible meaning of the
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word substance is self-determination of the spirit, that is to say, the fact that the spirit makes itself what it is.
We said that the true spirit is Trinitarian. Self-consciousness consists precisely in that the spirit produces before itself another that is itself "be- cause he has no figure of being another" (PR III 70 n. ), and then the spirit suppresses it as another, for the recognition in it makes the other stop being another. The reincoroporation and recognition is the third element, but only in that moment the spirit is spirit, for there is no self- consciousness if there is no spirit. The spirit is that relation with oneself as another, regaining the other in the awareness of its identity with it. Life consists in this, taking this word in its most original sense, which is in fact the only possible sense as we will later see (V. 6). The abstract intellect kills all concepts; it makes them inert by separating and fixating them. It is obvious that what we have said in that paragraph is ideal and mental, but whoever opposes it to 'reality' still believes naively that he can define reality doing without the meaning this word has in reference to the spirit.
The spirit is originally Trinitarian: for that reason Hegel affirms that "God is the essence of man" (WG 575). This is what the Bible teaches us when it says that man was made in the image of God.
As Hegel says, the fact that philosophy does not anything more than understanding the Trinity is something that is not demonstrated because the concept of identity and distinction underlies all philo- sophical problems, but because the task of philosophy has been and still is to disentangle the true meaning of all concepts; however, all concepts find their original meaning in the spirit, and it happens to be that the spirit is Trinitarian. As an example of this, one should see the critique of Hegel against the system of Spinoza, a system which is the big synthesis of all the preexisting philosophies.
The absolute substance is the true, but it is not the total true, the substance must be thought of as active, as living, and by those means to determine itself as spirit [. . . ] The philosophy of Spinoza is only a stiff substance, it is not yet spirit, one is not with oneself. In that philosophy God is not spirit, because it is not Trinitarian (GP III 166).
It follows from this that Spinoza does not hit the mark with the meaning of concepts; his categories are simply "collected, without any further ado, he supposes him; no one knows how he arrived to them"
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(ibid. 167). Spinoza's demonstrations might be as geometrical as he wants them to be, but they are perfectly useless because neither he nor anyone knows the meaning of the propositions that are demonstrated like that.
Let us get back on track. If the Trinity is a philosophical matter, everything would indicate that only out of incompetence in their trade theologians could say that theology is not philosophy. It happens to them exactly the same thing that happened to Newton: they have not realized that they use concepts. Now, the task of philosophy is to find out the meaning of concepts, and we have seen (II, 5) how mistaken is the attempt of giving them meaning by decretory means. Even if theol- ogy would try to do without the 'spontaneous' philosophical sophisms --which are the sophisms of the epoch and of the layman--, even if it would want to reduce its work to the recital of Biblical passages, it is an undeniable fact that the Bible uses concepts, and hence it is impossible to understand its message without finding out the meaning of them.
"Theologians [. . . ] ignore philosophy, but only in order that nobody gets in the way of their capricious reasoning" (EGP 156).
It is useless that they demonstrate us a thesis by saying that God revealed or leaning on the authority of the Church, if we do not un- derstand what the thesis mean. Now, if we understand it, the result is that we do not only believe it but we know it.
One of the most impossible and contradictory acts is to say: "I be- lieve in this although I do not understand it". To accept a thesis is not a physical act carried out by the hand; it is a mental act, and it consists in understanding the meaning of the thesis.
It is impossible to hold a thesis as true if we do not understand it. We would not know what we take as true if we did not understand it. "To know is to have something as object before consciousness and be certain about it; and believing is exactly the same" (VG 47). The physical act of reciting with the mouth a thesis and saying that one believes in something is not to believe in the true of that statement; it is sheer exteriority; the fact that the performer does not have the intention of pretending does not transform that exte- riority into true belief, for believing is an intellectual act, not a physical one. The content needs to be understood, for its existing depends only in being understood.
What meaning would it have to believe in anything?
Of course, the Trinity is a mystery, but "it is a mystery to the senses" (PR III 70). For the senses, one thing is here and the other is there, and
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they cannot be identified. However, for reason, for the spirit, the most understandable thing is its own reality, which is originally Trinitarian, as we have seen.
As we have said, the only true problem is to 'subtract oneself from the natural' and the sensible and become rational, i. e. spirit. "Without regeneration no one escapes from the sphere of the natural intellect to the speculative heights of the living concept" (BS 387). We said that it does not exist that what theologians called "natural reason", if we understand by natural that which can exist only by the forces of nature. Man needs God to be man.
Everything that God reveals to man has to be understood, this prop- osition is tautological.
The content of the revelation is not something physical, but an entity whose reality must be understood.
Now, a content to be intelligible needs concepts; and all concepts acquire their meaning in the realization of them called spirit. Only God can reveal us what spirit is.
Theologians would want certain knowledge to become contingent. But if this word has meaning, all knowledge is contingent, starting with the knowledge that we are spirit; to such a degree this is true that even nowadays theologians do not fully understand what spirit is (III, 1). The very same existence of the knowing man is contingent, if contingent has any meaning at all; therefore, all their knowledge is contingent.
They can define contingent as what is non-necessary, and as we have seen, they believe that they can define necessary independently from freedom and contingence (Cfr. III, 10) They are creating thus a pseudo- problem, as we will later see in detail (VI, 2 and VI 6).
"In absolute terms, theology is only what philosophy is" (GP III 64). "God is the one and only object of philosophy" (PR I 30). "Therefore, philosophy is theology, and dealing with it, or rather, in
it is to worship God" (PR I 30).
"The spirit of truth is no other thing than the religious spirit"
(WG 910s).
"Therefore, philosophy is not opposed to religion; what the former
does is to understand the latter" (EGP 192).
"One has reproached philosophy that it wants to place itself above
religion; but these is indeed false, since philosophy only has the same content and no other; however, it gives this content the form
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of thought; therefore, it places itself above the form of belief, but the content is exactly the same" (PR III 228s 2).
"Philosophy is not the only discipline that is essentially orthodox, but it is the most fundamental one; the statements have always been truth, the fundamental and essential truths of Christianity, are con- served and preserved by it [Philosophy]" (PR III 26s).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? chapter v
Logic and Natural Sciences
? ? In the third and fourth chapters we exposed the core of Hegelian thought. Now, what has prevented people in our century from appreciating the Hegelian logic and the Hegelian critic of natural
sciences has been the incomprehension of that core. That is the reason why I think we are ready now to understand the real range of that logic, which is the only logic possible and whose importance for hu- man history increases every day.
1. diaLecticS
The key of dialects is this: We know that the contradiction or antithesis between two terms is solved, and we know that because the meaning of each of them is the spirit, and the spirit is not contradictory.
The opposition or contradiction is due to the fixational intellect. Moving away from the concrete, this intellect converts the terms into many abstractions that are unintelligible because no one can give them meaning if they remain away from the tangible.
The engine of the dialectics is the exigency of understanding the terms. Once we reach the realization of these terms --which is no
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other than the spirit-- they will become understood; and only then the oppositions and contradictions will be over. The pseudodialectics which posits that every synthesis becomes a thesis with a new an- tithesis and so on indefinitely, as we have seen (IV, I) does not share anything in common with Hegel and the dialectic; on the contrary, that is the indefinite progress that Hegel despises because it never achieves understanding. That dialectic cartoon lacks an engine, because it does not try to understand: it seeks not to understand. Therefore, every launch of a new thesis constitutes a display of arbitrariness.
The abstract is false [. . . ] The intellect resists the concrete; it insists on flattening it. By its reflections this intellect produces for the first time the abstract, the void, and clings to it in opposition to the truth [. . . ] Philosophy is diametrically opposed to the abstract; Philosophy is precisely the struggle against the abstract, the permanent war against the reflection of the intellect (EGP 113).
"The abstractions correspond to the reflection of the intellect, not to Philosophy" (EGP 97).
"The treatment of such intellect consists in maintaining each deter- mination or content of thought still" (GP III 262).
The pseudodialectic that tries to dissolve any particular notion and place it under skepticism is a cheap sophistic recourse, and this dialec- tic always stands in the middle of the road, since the end of the road is to understand.
"The dialectic that intends to dissolve the particular and to pro- duce thereby the general, is not yet a true dialectic, it does not go yet in the true direction; it is a dialectic that is common to both Plato and the sophists, who were experts in dissolving the particular".
The destiny of the supreme dialectics is to determine in itself the general, which has been the result of the mess of the particular, and in that universal to settle the contrasts, so that the dissolution of the contrast is the affir- mative. Thus the universal is determined as that which dissolves the con- tradictions and contrasts, and all of this has made it in itself; therefore, it is determined as the concrete, as that which is concrete in itself. Therefore, it becomes determined as the concrete, as that which is concrete in itself. From that superior point of view, this dialectics is the properly the Platonic one. This is the speculative dialectic, that which does not end in a negative result (GP II 65).
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We have already seen (IV, 3) that the true universal is the spirit itself; it is "the universal, but that which determines itself, that is concrete in itself" (GP II 68).
The active universal, living, concrete, is which distinguishes itself in itself and remains in that free. This content consists in the identification of the one with itself in the other, in the many, in the distinct. Of all what is called Platonic philosophy this constitutes the true, the only thing true, the only interesting thing for knowledge; if one does not understand this, one does not understand what is fundamental (GP II 76).
The example of the real dialectic referred here by Hegel is the one we studied before (IV, 7): the abstract intellect separates identity and distinction and presents itself as incapable of defining and under- standing them. On the other hand, when reason comprehends that the very spirit --which is essentially intersubjetive-- is the only possible realization of both the concepts of identity and distinction, it realizes not only that they do not contradict each other, but that they have to be identical in order to exist and have meaning. Hence the opposition between these two concepts was due to the intellect kept them apart, and converted them thereby into abstractions, since they are not sepa- rated in the concrete; they are identical and only in this way can they be understood. Evidently, for the spirit, there cannot be something as concrete as itself.
"If the beginning was the universal, the result is the individual con- crete, subject" (WL II 499).
"Sense and meaning are something concrete" (GP II 591).
"This second negative thing to which we have arrived, the negative of the negative, is the suppression of contradiction; however, [. . . ] it is not the product of extrinsic reflection, but rather the most interior and objective element of life and spirit, that by means of which a subject is a person and is free" (WL II 496s), "the pure personality, the most subjec- tive thing there is" (WL II 502).
One cannot express with greater explicitness that the real dialectic is an exclusive patrimony of the spirit: the only solution of antinomies is the most intimate element of the life of the spirit. The pseudodialectic of materialism is an anti-scientific whim, because, being the realization called spirit the only one that makes that the concepts have meaning and become, for the first time understandable, such pseudodialectic is
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not directed to understand and hence it has no justification in its transi- tion from one concept to other.
"But as absolute negativity, the negative element of the absolute me- diation is the unity which consists in subjectivity and soul" (WL II 497). The commentators --specially the Marxist ones-- considered that dialectic was important by itself, but the really important thing for Hegel is to show that all the concepts mean spirit. Actually Hegel laughs at the "dull set square of triplicty" by which Kant "inserted the
thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis carelessly" (GP III 385).
It is crucial to distinguish clearly between the Kantian and the Hegelian solution of the antinomies. Kant claimed that human mind is incapable of knowing the reality; hence, the mental categories do not say us anything about the real. It is then irrelevant that they contradict each other, e. g. that free will contradicts the necessary, finite contra- dicts the infinite, simple contradicts the compound, etcetera. It would be bad, Kant says, that the reality itself was contradictory; but it is not, because we do not know anything about reality. Our concepts don't reach it. It is the incognitum x. Our concepts contradict each other, but
reality remains immune from all of this.
The big question that Hegel raises up against such a solution is:
where do these concepts come from? How can one explain their exis- tence? And the great objection: the concepts are still as contradictory as before, the antinomy has not been solved; it has just been reinserted into the subject. Kant is very tender with the reality: he does not want it to be contradictory, so instead he makes the subject contradictory.
Hegel, however, confronts the problem directly: the contradiction has to be solved. That it is really solved is something that our above men- tioned example of identity and distinction proves.
Since each of the two opposed sides contains its other within itself and neither can be thought without the other, it follows that neither of these determinations, taken alone, has truth; this belongs only to their unity. This is the true dialectical consideration of them and also the true result. (WL I 191)
"The third is what is properly speculative, that means, to know the opposites in their truth are one. " (NH 415).
Now, the dialectic of identity and distinction underlies the dia- lectic of the simple and the compound, of the continuous and the
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