And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which it will be
convenient
to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and appar- ent, mathematical and common (Ibid).
Hegel Was Right_nodrm
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102 Hegel was right
In order to answer that question, Hegel turns to Kant's enduring contribution of the first Critique: without the 'I think' there cannot be consciousness of the object and without self-consciousness there cannot be consciousness.
Hegel says:
One of the profoundest and most certain intuitions that are found in the Critique of Pure Reason is to discover that the unity in which the essence itself of the concept consists is the original synthetic unity of apperception; that is the unity of the 'I think', the unity of self-consciousness. [. . . ] Object, Kant says there, is that in which the concept of the multiple from the given sensible intuition is unified" Therefore, this unity of consciousness is the only one that refers the representations to an object, and hence makes them have the validity of an object, something on which even the possibility of the intellect depends (WL II 221).
In other words: phenomenologically speaking, there cannot be any object without subject; it is impossible that the multiple, intrinsically chaotic and incoherent empirical impressions are unified in the making up of an object if there is no self or an 'I think' before whom and for whom the impressions make up an object.
An object is that which is independent from the self. But notice the following: in order that the expression 'independent from the self' has meaning, it is necessary that the term 'self' has already a meaning.
Hegel also expresses this idea in his own terms:
The truth of consciousness is self-consciousness, and the second is the ex- planation of the first, so that in the facts each consciousness or perceiving of other object is self-consciousness: I know about the object insofar it is my object (it is a representation of mine), therefore, I know about myself in that (EPW 424).
Kant's ground-breaking discovery is true and has an unmatchable value but it is still incomplete. According to Kant, it is necessary that the 'I think' accompanies our awareness of the object; it is necessary that self-consciousness accompanies consciousness; otherwise, the latter could not exist. But Hegel makes this sharp observation: "The I must 'accompany' it; what a barbaric expression" (GP III 343).
Hegel was right. What can that companionship or juxtaposition could possibly mean? A profound analysis shows that consciousness-of-the-
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 103
object and self-consciousness do not simply go hand in hand. Undoubted- ly, Kant was right in saying that, without self-consciousness, the concept by which we gain awareness of the object cannot exist, but both things constitute an inseparable unity. They do not accompany one another; but rather, they make up one and the same experience. "I know about my ob- ject and I know about myself; these two things are not separable" (VG 54).
If they are not separable, something logically follows from this: "The thoughts and representations that I make mine are given the content of that which I am myself" (PR I 22).
The content of the concepts by which I gain awareness of the ob- jects has to be the same content of self-consciousness. This is exactly what happened to us with the concepts of being and substance. And the same must go for all the rest of the concepts.
If the meaning of the concepts cannot be an empirical data, the meaning must lie in the subject. But if the awareness of the object is inseparable from self-consciousness, the content of the former has to be the same as that of the latter. "The truth of consciousness is self- consciousness" (EPW 424). We could have demonstrated this at the beginning of this chapter by recurring to Kant's indisputable contribu- tion, but without some examples it would have been quite difficult to understand. "The knower [. . . ] hast the concept of the essentiality of the objective world entirely" (WL II 438); "we are, as a self, the base of all our determinations. Insofar the object is thought, it receives the form of thinking and transforms itself into a thought object. It is equaled self, that is to say, it is thought" (NH 164).
If it is not equaled to the self, it cannot be understood. That the true of consciousness is self-consciousness means that only the second is understood.
"Reason is the supreme unification of consciousness and self- consciousness, that is to say, of the knowledge of an object and the knowledge of itself. It is the certainty that its determinations are objec- tive determinations of the essence of things as they are in our thoughts. It is, in one and the same thinking, with all the power of the certainty of itself, subjectivity, as being or objectivity" (NH 122).
We will get back to this later. However, it is important to say here that the abstract intellect --in contrast to reason-- considers these two things separately, and hence it cannot understand.
"Abstractions of the intellect are not ideas; the idea contains essen- tially the point of unity of subjectivity" (WG 588).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 104 Hegel was right
"The objectivity hast the object in the concept, and this is the unity of self-consciousness, to which the object is incorporated; therefore, its objectivity, that is to say, the concept, is nothing else than the nature of self-consciousness, it has no more elements or determinations than the self itself" (WL II 222).
In that sense "the intelligence is acknowledging" (EPW 465), and if the intelligence does not recognize itself in the object, it would not understand anything. Because of this, Hegel says that the reason of sci- entists and rationalists --which believes that its only activity consists in observing the phenomena-- deludes itself completely about what it is and does.
As observing consciousness reasons addresses things, truly believing as if they were empirical things opposed to the self, but what it really does con- tradicts such a belief, for it knows things, it transforms sensibility of them in concepts, that is to say, in a being which is simultaneously a self (PG 184).
"To know things means precisely to eliminate what is alien and bi- zarre in consciousness, and thus it is a return of subjectivity towards itself" (WG 730).
The content of all concepts must consist in '"vital and spiritual situa- tions" (WL I 335), for that is the content of self-consciousness and the self. We have just demonstrated this in regard of the concept of being: in what could the act of existing consist of if not in the act and movement of self-realization, in giving oneself determinations and in creating from nothing new experiences? According to Tomas Aquinas, the self is act. And the same goes for the substance: one cannot understand in what sense something can exist in itself other than in giving determinations to itself. Analogously, the meanings of force, cause, infinite, identity, and distinction are also spiritual and vital. One could contend this abso- lutely central thesis of Hegel only if one is able to provide an empirical meaning to those concepts, but we will see that such thing is impossible.
In order to complete our study of the substance, let us quickly draw our attention to the fact that those who deny the existence of the soul are being deluded by a concept of substance that lacks all kind of mean- ing: we made clear already that such 'something else' imagined by the substantialists objectors would be matter and not spirit. A good exam- ple of the negation of the spirit based on the void concept of substance is provided to us by anthropologist Alfred Kroeber:
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 105
Dr. Ha? berlin puts in the foreground of Wundt's thought the idea that mental phenomena possess, through their immediacy to ourselves, an actuality as great as that of physical phenomena. This actuality must be consistently distinguished from substantiality. Only on the basis of this distinction is it possible to speak of the existence of a 'soul'; but in the sense of an actuality there is no denying this existence. (1952, 53).
In order to distinguish between the acts, the mental phenomena and the substance, Kroeber would have to give another meaning to the word substance. But we have seen that such content is an image of the fantasy and not a concept, because there cannot be a concept of a substance which is different from its own acts. When Kroeber grants the existence of actuality he has granted everything. By the way, this is precisely the true and imperishable substance, but we will get later to this point.
6. time
In appearance, the following objection raised by our imaginative objec- tors against our characterization of the spirit, as the act of thinking and self determination, is conclusive. The objection can be formulated as a question: during the time that the spirit does not think or is conscious, does the spirit cease to exist?
The answer can also be formulated as a question: what makes them think that such time exists?
It is not the case that the soul does not exist during the time it does not act, but rather that such time does not even exist.
Time is not an empirical data. It can only be known by self- consciousness, but self-consciousness is an act; therefore, it is impos- sible to perceive time without action. Our objectors presuppose time illegitimately with no grounds whatsoever.
Aristotle made these conclusive remarks: "time is something related to movement" (Phys IV 219a 9); "it is evident that there is no time with- out movement and change" (ibid. 218b 34).
If there is neither movement nor change in the soul, there cannot be any time in it. Our objectors speak of an exterior time which they be- lieve to find in the movement of the stars and the earth. However, such attribution is completely mistaken: it lies entirely in the Newtonian
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 106 Hegel was right
myth of an absolute time that comprises the universe. Apart from be- ing a myth, the absolute time has been refuted by the science of our century.
Such attribution, as I said, is ungrounded, since we are not entitled to attribute to the soul a time of which it has no experience. The soul could not care less of what happens to the celestial bodies and other things alike.
The absolute time has been refuted. If Einstein demonstrated some- thing that thing was the relativity of simultaneity. Although not many physics think about this, such relativity means that there is no cosmic 'now' that penetrates the entire universe. This inexistent cosmic 'now' is the absolute time that our objectors want to introduce into the soul from the outside, i. e. , from the exterior things. As we said, however, the soul has its own time, a time that, as any other time, is essentially 'something about movement', because 'it is evident that without move- ment and change there is no time'. Therefore, there can be no time in the soul without experience. This time had already been discussed in the study of the 'time' that elapses (? ) between the death and the corpo- real resurrection, but the most lucid theologians suspected wisely that this was a pseudo-problem, for such time is extrinsic to the soul and has nothing to do with it.
It is important to mention here --as Hegel already stated it (cfr. II 1)-- that the absolute time is nothing more than an abstraction. By means of experience we can only know concrete time and real events. Just like absolute space, so absolute time is a mental construct completely separated from experience. Such an abstraction has been constructed by men in order to determine a universal, but this they do by eliminating the concrete times which each of us experiments and which are the only ones real. This has been stated by the sociologist Niklas Luhmann:
Time is gradually being abstracted, separating itself from the empirical world, it loses its intrinsic dependence from the habitual succession of events and things, it breaks the knot which bounded it to the vital rhythms [. . . ] It transforms into an abstract continuum of points of time in which everything can move itself according to 'laws' and 'systems' which are not time (1976, 56s).
We will demonstrate afterward that this abstraction in fact is not time. Before we do that, however, it is important to emphasize that
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Newton himself, in his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, was not unaware of the fact that he was constructing a big abstraction that was different from what he calls 'vulgar time', which is the one that we truly experiment and that actually exists. Newton says there:
Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent, and common time, is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year (1977, 8).
As we will later say in a more detailed analysis, time cannot be an empirical data, not even relative time. But what is really amazing of this ghostly construct is that Newton does not even try to define his absolute space or time --something that he could not do because those things were only the products of his own imagination. On the one hand, he justifies his not providing a definition of space and time by saying that everybody knows what they are; on the other hand, he in- sists in distancing himself from what everybody understands by space and time, because such vulgar ideas do not seem reliable to him:
I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe, that the common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects.
And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and appar- ent, mathematical and common (Ibid).
What a resort! First he says that he does not need to define space or time because the laymen know what they are, and then he rejects the conception that the laymen have of them. It is evident that Newton needed some way out: he was unable to define absolute time for the simple reason that it does not exist.
With the above we have refuted the objection raised against us, since it rested entirely on the myth of absolute time. But we need to clarify, once and for all, the concept of time: the central thesis of this chapter still has to be confirmed and studied in more depth.
It is obvious that our objectors --as innocent as only they can be-- suppose that time is continuous. Newton would also like to capture such
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 108 Hegel was right
continuity when he says that time 'flows' and that it is 'mathematical'. Now, in the sense that Newton and our objectors conceive it, conti- nuity is not a data of our psychological or empirical experience. It could not be the former case, because no one can be incessantly having acts of self-consciousness, but it could not be the latter either, because even if we gratuitously suppose that physical time is continuous, our per- ception of time is not uninterrupted: no one can be carrying out acts of perception incessantly.
In our century something both curious and incongruent has hap- pened: even though physics have rejected absolute time for not being an empirical data, they still believe in a relative time that possesses the same dubious continuity which is not and cannot be an empirical data. And they do exactly the same thing in regard of absolute and relative space.
The highly dubious continuity we have alluded to is the mathemati- cal one. Following Bergson, Capek has very well remarked that the mathematical is a "disguised discontinuity" (1973, 321), for it supposes the existence of several different units --called 'points' in the case of space and time--; one wants them to yield the impression of continu- ity because one thinks of them as standing in a juxtaposition, but in fact they are external from one another. That is called contiguity, not continuity.
As Poincare? noticed, one demands a strong nexus between the ele- ments of the continuum for that is what really makes it a whole; in the real continuity, the point has no priority over the line, but rather the line has priority over the point. According to its true concept, the continuum is unity in multiplicity; but in mathematical continuity "only the multi- plicity subsists; the unity has disappeared. " (1909, 30)
Hegel had observed this long time ago: "To the imagination that lacks the concept, continuity easily transforms into juxtaposition, which is an extrinsic relation of the units between themselves, in which each unity preserves its absolute discontinuity and exclusion" (WL I 181).
The inescapable conclusion --a conclusion which requires an intel- lectual honesty of which physics commonly lack-- is that the time and the space of the physics are contradictory entities:
It is not contradictory in imagination that one puts points in space, mo- ments in the continuous time or the now of time within continuity length (day, year), but its concept is contradictory. The identity within itself means
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 109
absolute continuation, extinction of all distinction, of the negative, of all the being-on its-own; on the other hand, the point is the pure being-on-its-own, the absolute distinguishing itself and suppression of all identity and coher- ence with others. Now, both things are affirmed as one in space and time; therefore, space and time are contradictions (GP I 307).
"The space is within itself the contradiction of the indifferent exte- riority and the continuity without distinction" (EPW 260).
Notice well that this is not only about absolute time and space. We are not rejecting certain entities on the grounds that they cannot be made objects of our experience. This is much more about all sorts of space and time in Physics. What Hegel demonstrated was that space and time in Physics are contradictory in their very same concept. In the name of this strictly contradictory time, the objection was raised against the spirit as act of self-consciousness and self-determination.
Since mathematical continuity is not true continuity, it is now im- portant to emphasize that the time of the physics is not time.
Jerome Rothstein is very brave to admit that the empirical data do not suffice to build up time. He explicitly states the following: "It is hard to give any sense at all to the term 'past' without presupposing memory or a record of some kind" (Bastin, 1971, 293). Resorting to memory is to witness the reflection of the subject upon himself, that is to say, to wit- ness self-consciousness; so we are in the true time, identified with our self. In contrast, the alluded time of the physical world is simply not time. I don't know why it has taken so long for an exceptional physic like Rothstein to realize that, since Hegel had already demonstrated this with absolute clarity. In regard to the three dimensions of time, Hegel explicitly made this remark. "In addition, one cannot distinguish in nature [. . . ] such distinctions; they are only necessary in the concep- tion of the subject, in memory, fear or hope" (EPW 259 A). This is why Hegel said that, sooner or later, the meaning of all concepts consist in "vital and spiritual situations" (WL I 335).
The absolute lack of time that characterizes the time of physics, instead of diminishing, has been accentuated with the theory of rela- tivity: the expression 'space-time' denotes this, for the four-dimension- al space of Minkowski is simply space (not time), but physics have the whim of calling it so. It happens just what we saw (II 5) with decretory definitions: what they do is to stick to something different and leave time aside.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 110 Hegel was right
Eddington expresses this naively: "In the four-dimensional world we shall accordingly regard 1 second as the equivalent of 300,000 ki- lometres, and measure lengths and times in seconds and kilometres indiscriminately" (1978, 46).
Their procedure is very simple: since a six inches bomb irrigates one hectare of wheat, they take 'wheat' as a synonym of 'water' in- discriminately .
A more lucid physic, Herbert Dingle, has expressed this clearly:
It is therefore because of our voluntary choice of measuring processes that we can speak of the 'union' of space and time into 'space-time'. This has nothing to do with any philosophical notions of space and time in themselves; it is a consequence of the wisdom of making sure that, after expressing motion in terms of space and time, the measurement of time shall depend on the measurement of space. Only on this account is it possible, as Minkowski did, to represent the time-co-ordinate as a fourth space-co-ordinate and describe motion geometrically as a track in a four- dimensional continuum. (Schilpp, ed. , II 1970, 543s).
Although they intend to preserve relative time and evade absolute time, the physics of our century fail in fact to recognize time itself --something that also happened in classical physics with the pos- tulation of an absolute time. This, of course, should not surprise us because time is not something physical.
Mathematical time is not time because --as Hegel demonstrated-- it lacks true continuity. We will later study real continuity as real time. Following a very different path, physics introduced an 'infinite divisibil- ity', which seemed to be a proper feature of space, but the quantum of Planck has demonstrated that it does not even exist in space.
According to the experimental discoveries of quantum physics, it is false that the material reality is infinitely divisible. If we start frac- tioning the material, we will find sooner or later something that is not further divisible. But it surprises me that physics had to wait for Planck, since Hegel demonstrated this in the text we quoted before (GP I 307): it is contradictory not only that time consists of temporal points, but also that space consists of spatial points. In addition, it is evident that something extended cannot be the result of unextended elements.
By means of a dilemma whose second branch derives into a new di- lemma, it is easy to explain that, whoever affirms the infinite divisibility
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of space and rejects the quanta, forcefully affirms that the ulterior com- ponents of space are unextended points. The dilemma is the following one: the ulterior components are either divisible or indivisible. And if they are indivisible, they must necessarily be either extended (quanta) or unextended (points).
We cannot choose the first branch of the dilemma, for if they are divisible they cannot be the ulterior components; they can only be the resulting segments of the last division.
But if we say they are divisible, we would necessarily have to choose between extended or unextended ulterior components. Therefore, whoever rejects the quanta affirms that the ulterior components are points.
It is evident, however, that the sum of unextended elements cannot render something extended. Even before Planck's experiments, the only thing logically sustainable was that the ulterior components of space were quanta i. e. indivisible extended elements. Mathematical space --meaning a space that is infinitely divisible-- is a contradiction of which Hegel timely warned us. Now, on the grounds of the spurious identification of space and time, physics always presented the image of an infinitely divisible time in substitution of a continuous time which is, as we will later see, the only true one. Physics incurred and keeps incurring in two big mistakes: first, to confuse time with space; second, to attribute an infinite divisibility to time that even space lacks.
It is of primal importance to notice that the confusion of space and time is a widespread epidemic: the layman does not have the concept of time. This does not wash away the blame of physics, since the pur- pose of science is not to reaffirm indefinitely the false beliefs of common people. Some figure that time is a fluid, as we saw Newton did; but a fluid is something spatial; evidently, they are imagining themselves being right at the side of a river, which is something spatial: but none of that can be comprised in the concept of time. Others --and this occurs more often-- imagine a line that goes all across the imaginary visual field from one end to the other; they call the left segment 'past' and the right segment 'future'; they call 'present' a very little segment (or point, as they commonly refer to it) that falls within the visual axis.
All those things are spatial and have nothing to do with time. Besides, it is clear that all those images suffer from the aforementioned exteriority between their elements, and thus they lack the true conti- nuity that characterizes time.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 112 Hegel was right
Again, what the physics and the laymen have is a fantastic image of time, not its concept. No image can be proclaimed the meaning of the word time because all images are spatial. They only need to imagine time to transform it into something which it is not.
The past imagined by the physics is of an illusory nature; it con- sists in a physical fact with its own observable characteristics, but the character of past as such is not empirically observable, not even by a magnifying glass. Even if it was situated in the past, the present or the future, the object would be entirely the same in terms of its empirical features. Therefore, time is an instance that the knowing subject intro- duces into the picture. He takes it not from the empirical data but from the spirit. A determined event belongs to the past for the spirit; and this is so because the spirit remembers it. Rothstein remarked correctly that it is difficult to give meaning to the word past without presupposing memory.
No object has a label that says 'I come from the past'. It is perfectly obvious that 'past' is something that has to be predicated from the present. Consequently, the past has to be contained in the present, and that proposition is not metaphorical but strictly rigorous. That is really a continuum; the multiplicity in unity; the multiplicity that is both iden- tical with and different from the unity. It is not a contiguum or a juxta- position of external elements. Just in the truly and authentic continuity can be time, but it only exists in the spirit. By no means can an event become from the 'past' only because I imagine it placed on the left side of my imaginary screen, or because I imagine it somewhere 'behind'. Both 'left' and 'behind' are spatial contents; they have absolutely noth- ing to do with time. If the past is not present in the present, it is no past at all, given that if it is not present, what we have is exteriority and not continuity .
Likewise, the present character of an object or a fact --in other words, its 'simultaneity with me'-- is not empirically verifiable, even though physics have invested in this proof incalculable endeavors and witty arguments. First, it is obvious that, if the objective data was past or future instead of being simultaneous with me, its empirical features would be exactly the same; hence, its simultaneity with me is not one of its empirical features.
Second, having rejected absolute simultaneity for not being an em- pirical data, the theory of relativity tries in vain to preserve relative simultaneity --i. e. the simultaneity of two close events--, disregarding
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 113
the fact that relative simultaneity is as unverifiable as the former. Actually, physics have to define sooner or later relative simultaneity like this: two events that occur in my proximity are simultaneous if I perceive them simultaneously. The definiendum reappears in the defi- nition, and hence nothing has been defined and we still do not know what simultaneity means. Besides, it is obvious that this definition re- sorts to self-consciousness, for what it really says is the following: the events are simultaneous if my perception of the first event is simulta- neous with my perception of the second event. This definition shows that empirical data cannot build up that dimension of time called si- multaneity, just as it happened before with the past.
But there is still more to this.
In order to answer that question, Hegel turns to Kant's enduring contribution of the first Critique: without the 'I think' there cannot be consciousness of the object and without self-consciousness there cannot be consciousness.
Hegel says:
One of the profoundest and most certain intuitions that are found in the Critique of Pure Reason is to discover that the unity in which the essence itself of the concept consists is the original synthetic unity of apperception; that is the unity of the 'I think', the unity of self-consciousness. [. . . ] Object, Kant says there, is that in which the concept of the multiple from the given sensible intuition is unified" Therefore, this unity of consciousness is the only one that refers the representations to an object, and hence makes them have the validity of an object, something on which even the possibility of the intellect depends (WL II 221).
In other words: phenomenologically speaking, there cannot be any object without subject; it is impossible that the multiple, intrinsically chaotic and incoherent empirical impressions are unified in the making up of an object if there is no self or an 'I think' before whom and for whom the impressions make up an object.
An object is that which is independent from the self. But notice the following: in order that the expression 'independent from the self' has meaning, it is necessary that the term 'self' has already a meaning.
Hegel also expresses this idea in his own terms:
The truth of consciousness is self-consciousness, and the second is the ex- planation of the first, so that in the facts each consciousness or perceiving of other object is self-consciousness: I know about the object insofar it is my object (it is a representation of mine), therefore, I know about myself in that (EPW 424).
Kant's ground-breaking discovery is true and has an unmatchable value but it is still incomplete. According to Kant, it is necessary that the 'I think' accompanies our awareness of the object; it is necessary that self-consciousness accompanies consciousness; otherwise, the latter could not exist. But Hegel makes this sharp observation: "The I must 'accompany' it; what a barbaric expression" (GP III 343).
Hegel was right. What can that companionship or juxtaposition could possibly mean? A profound analysis shows that consciousness-of-the-
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 103
object and self-consciousness do not simply go hand in hand. Undoubted- ly, Kant was right in saying that, without self-consciousness, the concept by which we gain awareness of the object cannot exist, but both things constitute an inseparable unity. They do not accompany one another; but rather, they make up one and the same experience. "I know about my ob- ject and I know about myself; these two things are not separable" (VG 54).
If they are not separable, something logically follows from this: "The thoughts and representations that I make mine are given the content of that which I am myself" (PR I 22).
The content of the concepts by which I gain awareness of the ob- jects has to be the same content of self-consciousness. This is exactly what happened to us with the concepts of being and substance. And the same must go for all the rest of the concepts.
If the meaning of the concepts cannot be an empirical data, the meaning must lie in the subject. But if the awareness of the object is inseparable from self-consciousness, the content of the former has to be the same as that of the latter. "The truth of consciousness is self- consciousness" (EPW 424). We could have demonstrated this at the beginning of this chapter by recurring to Kant's indisputable contribu- tion, but without some examples it would have been quite difficult to understand. "The knower [. . . ] hast the concept of the essentiality of the objective world entirely" (WL II 438); "we are, as a self, the base of all our determinations. Insofar the object is thought, it receives the form of thinking and transforms itself into a thought object. It is equaled self, that is to say, it is thought" (NH 164).
If it is not equaled to the self, it cannot be understood. That the true of consciousness is self-consciousness means that only the second is understood.
"Reason is the supreme unification of consciousness and self- consciousness, that is to say, of the knowledge of an object and the knowledge of itself. It is the certainty that its determinations are objec- tive determinations of the essence of things as they are in our thoughts. It is, in one and the same thinking, with all the power of the certainty of itself, subjectivity, as being or objectivity" (NH 122).
We will get back to this later. However, it is important to say here that the abstract intellect --in contrast to reason-- considers these two things separately, and hence it cannot understand.
"Abstractions of the intellect are not ideas; the idea contains essen- tially the point of unity of subjectivity" (WG 588).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 104 Hegel was right
"The objectivity hast the object in the concept, and this is the unity of self-consciousness, to which the object is incorporated; therefore, its objectivity, that is to say, the concept, is nothing else than the nature of self-consciousness, it has no more elements or determinations than the self itself" (WL II 222).
In that sense "the intelligence is acknowledging" (EPW 465), and if the intelligence does not recognize itself in the object, it would not understand anything. Because of this, Hegel says that the reason of sci- entists and rationalists --which believes that its only activity consists in observing the phenomena-- deludes itself completely about what it is and does.
As observing consciousness reasons addresses things, truly believing as if they were empirical things opposed to the self, but what it really does con- tradicts such a belief, for it knows things, it transforms sensibility of them in concepts, that is to say, in a being which is simultaneously a self (PG 184).
"To know things means precisely to eliminate what is alien and bi- zarre in consciousness, and thus it is a return of subjectivity towards itself" (WG 730).
The content of all concepts must consist in '"vital and spiritual situa- tions" (WL I 335), for that is the content of self-consciousness and the self. We have just demonstrated this in regard of the concept of being: in what could the act of existing consist of if not in the act and movement of self-realization, in giving oneself determinations and in creating from nothing new experiences? According to Tomas Aquinas, the self is act. And the same goes for the substance: one cannot understand in what sense something can exist in itself other than in giving determinations to itself. Analogously, the meanings of force, cause, infinite, identity, and distinction are also spiritual and vital. One could contend this abso- lutely central thesis of Hegel only if one is able to provide an empirical meaning to those concepts, but we will see that such thing is impossible.
In order to complete our study of the substance, let us quickly draw our attention to the fact that those who deny the existence of the soul are being deluded by a concept of substance that lacks all kind of mean- ing: we made clear already that such 'something else' imagined by the substantialists objectors would be matter and not spirit. A good exam- ple of the negation of the spirit based on the void concept of substance is provided to us by anthropologist Alfred Kroeber:
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Dr. Ha? berlin puts in the foreground of Wundt's thought the idea that mental phenomena possess, through their immediacy to ourselves, an actuality as great as that of physical phenomena. This actuality must be consistently distinguished from substantiality. Only on the basis of this distinction is it possible to speak of the existence of a 'soul'; but in the sense of an actuality there is no denying this existence. (1952, 53).
In order to distinguish between the acts, the mental phenomena and the substance, Kroeber would have to give another meaning to the word substance. But we have seen that such content is an image of the fantasy and not a concept, because there cannot be a concept of a substance which is different from its own acts. When Kroeber grants the existence of actuality he has granted everything. By the way, this is precisely the true and imperishable substance, but we will get later to this point.
6. time
In appearance, the following objection raised by our imaginative objec- tors against our characterization of the spirit, as the act of thinking and self determination, is conclusive. The objection can be formulated as a question: during the time that the spirit does not think or is conscious, does the spirit cease to exist?
The answer can also be formulated as a question: what makes them think that such time exists?
It is not the case that the soul does not exist during the time it does not act, but rather that such time does not even exist.
Time is not an empirical data. It can only be known by self- consciousness, but self-consciousness is an act; therefore, it is impos- sible to perceive time without action. Our objectors presuppose time illegitimately with no grounds whatsoever.
Aristotle made these conclusive remarks: "time is something related to movement" (Phys IV 219a 9); "it is evident that there is no time with- out movement and change" (ibid. 218b 34).
If there is neither movement nor change in the soul, there cannot be any time in it. Our objectors speak of an exterior time which they be- lieve to find in the movement of the stars and the earth. However, such attribution is completely mistaken: it lies entirely in the Newtonian
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myth of an absolute time that comprises the universe. Apart from be- ing a myth, the absolute time has been refuted by the science of our century.
Such attribution, as I said, is ungrounded, since we are not entitled to attribute to the soul a time of which it has no experience. The soul could not care less of what happens to the celestial bodies and other things alike.
The absolute time has been refuted. If Einstein demonstrated some- thing that thing was the relativity of simultaneity. Although not many physics think about this, such relativity means that there is no cosmic 'now' that penetrates the entire universe. This inexistent cosmic 'now' is the absolute time that our objectors want to introduce into the soul from the outside, i. e. , from the exterior things. As we said, however, the soul has its own time, a time that, as any other time, is essentially 'something about movement', because 'it is evident that without move- ment and change there is no time'. Therefore, there can be no time in the soul without experience. This time had already been discussed in the study of the 'time' that elapses (? ) between the death and the corpo- real resurrection, but the most lucid theologians suspected wisely that this was a pseudo-problem, for such time is extrinsic to the soul and has nothing to do with it.
It is important to mention here --as Hegel already stated it (cfr. II 1)-- that the absolute time is nothing more than an abstraction. By means of experience we can only know concrete time and real events. Just like absolute space, so absolute time is a mental construct completely separated from experience. Such an abstraction has been constructed by men in order to determine a universal, but this they do by eliminating the concrete times which each of us experiments and which are the only ones real. This has been stated by the sociologist Niklas Luhmann:
Time is gradually being abstracted, separating itself from the empirical world, it loses its intrinsic dependence from the habitual succession of events and things, it breaks the knot which bounded it to the vital rhythms [. . . ] It transforms into an abstract continuum of points of time in which everything can move itself according to 'laws' and 'systems' which are not time (1976, 56s).
We will demonstrate afterward that this abstraction in fact is not time. Before we do that, however, it is important to emphasize that
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Newton himself, in his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, was not unaware of the fact that he was constructing a big abstraction that was different from what he calls 'vulgar time', which is the one that we truly experiment and that actually exists. Newton says there:
Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent, and common time, is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year (1977, 8).
As we will later say in a more detailed analysis, time cannot be an empirical data, not even relative time. But what is really amazing of this ghostly construct is that Newton does not even try to define his absolute space or time --something that he could not do because those things were only the products of his own imagination. On the one hand, he justifies his not providing a definition of space and time by saying that everybody knows what they are; on the other hand, he in- sists in distancing himself from what everybody understands by space and time, because such vulgar ideas do not seem reliable to him:
I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe, that the common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects.
And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and appar- ent, mathematical and common (Ibid).
What a resort! First he says that he does not need to define space or time because the laymen know what they are, and then he rejects the conception that the laymen have of them. It is evident that Newton needed some way out: he was unable to define absolute time for the simple reason that it does not exist.
With the above we have refuted the objection raised against us, since it rested entirely on the myth of absolute time. But we need to clarify, once and for all, the concept of time: the central thesis of this chapter still has to be confirmed and studied in more depth.
It is obvious that our objectors --as innocent as only they can be-- suppose that time is continuous. Newton would also like to capture such
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continuity when he says that time 'flows' and that it is 'mathematical'. Now, in the sense that Newton and our objectors conceive it, conti- nuity is not a data of our psychological or empirical experience. It could not be the former case, because no one can be incessantly having acts of self-consciousness, but it could not be the latter either, because even if we gratuitously suppose that physical time is continuous, our per- ception of time is not uninterrupted: no one can be carrying out acts of perception incessantly.
In our century something both curious and incongruent has hap- pened: even though physics have rejected absolute time for not being an empirical data, they still believe in a relative time that possesses the same dubious continuity which is not and cannot be an empirical data. And they do exactly the same thing in regard of absolute and relative space.
The highly dubious continuity we have alluded to is the mathemati- cal one. Following Bergson, Capek has very well remarked that the mathematical is a "disguised discontinuity" (1973, 321), for it supposes the existence of several different units --called 'points' in the case of space and time--; one wants them to yield the impression of continu- ity because one thinks of them as standing in a juxtaposition, but in fact they are external from one another. That is called contiguity, not continuity.
As Poincare? noticed, one demands a strong nexus between the ele- ments of the continuum for that is what really makes it a whole; in the real continuity, the point has no priority over the line, but rather the line has priority over the point. According to its true concept, the continuum is unity in multiplicity; but in mathematical continuity "only the multi- plicity subsists; the unity has disappeared. " (1909, 30)
Hegel had observed this long time ago: "To the imagination that lacks the concept, continuity easily transforms into juxtaposition, which is an extrinsic relation of the units between themselves, in which each unity preserves its absolute discontinuity and exclusion" (WL I 181).
The inescapable conclusion --a conclusion which requires an intel- lectual honesty of which physics commonly lack-- is that the time and the space of the physics are contradictory entities:
It is not contradictory in imagination that one puts points in space, mo- ments in the continuous time or the now of time within continuity length (day, year), but its concept is contradictory. The identity within itself means
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absolute continuation, extinction of all distinction, of the negative, of all the being-on its-own; on the other hand, the point is the pure being-on-its-own, the absolute distinguishing itself and suppression of all identity and coher- ence with others. Now, both things are affirmed as one in space and time; therefore, space and time are contradictions (GP I 307).
"The space is within itself the contradiction of the indifferent exte- riority and the continuity without distinction" (EPW 260).
Notice well that this is not only about absolute time and space. We are not rejecting certain entities on the grounds that they cannot be made objects of our experience. This is much more about all sorts of space and time in Physics. What Hegel demonstrated was that space and time in Physics are contradictory in their very same concept. In the name of this strictly contradictory time, the objection was raised against the spirit as act of self-consciousness and self-determination.
Since mathematical continuity is not true continuity, it is now im- portant to emphasize that the time of the physics is not time.
Jerome Rothstein is very brave to admit that the empirical data do not suffice to build up time. He explicitly states the following: "It is hard to give any sense at all to the term 'past' without presupposing memory or a record of some kind" (Bastin, 1971, 293). Resorting to memory is to witness the reflection of the subject upon himself, that is to say, to wit- ness self-consciousness; so we are in the true time, identified with our self. In contrast, the alluded time of the physical world is simply not time. I don't know why it has taken so long for an exceptional physic like Rothstein to realize that, since Hegel had already demonstrated this with absolute clarity. In regard to the three dimensions of time, Hegel explicitly made this remark. "In addition, one cannot distinguish in nature [. . . ] such distinctions; they are only necessary in the concep- tion of the subject, in memory, fear or hope" (EPW 259 A). This is why Hegel said that, sooner or later, the meaning of all concepts consist in "vital and spiritual situations" (WL I 335).
The absolute lack of time that characterizes the time of physics, instead of diminishing, has been accentuated with the theory of rela- tivity: the expression 'space-time' denotes this, for the four-dimension- al space of Minkowski is simply space (not time), but physics have the whim of calling it so. It happens just what we saw (II 5) with decretory definitions: what they do is to stick to something different and leave time aside.
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Eddington expresses this naively: "In the four-dimensional world we shall accordingly regard 1 second as the equivalent of 300,000 ki- lometres, and measure lengths and times in seconds and kilometres indiscriminately" (1978, 46).
Their procedure is very simple: since a six inches bomb irrigates one hectare of wheat, they take 'wheat' as a synonym of 'water' in- discriminately .
A more lucid physic, Herbert Dingle, has expressed this clearly:
It is therefore because of our voluntary choice of measuring processes that we can speak of the 'union' of space and time into 'space-time'. This has nothing to do with any philosophical notions of space and time in themselves; it is a consequence of the wisdom of making sure that, after expressing motion in terms of space and time, the measurement of time shall depend on the measurement of space. Only on this account is it possible, as Minkowski did, to represent the time-co-ordinate as a fourth space-co-ordinate and describe motion geometrically as a track in a four- dimensional continuum. (Schilpp, ed. , II 1970, 543s).
Although they intend to preserve relative time and evade absolute time, the physics of our century fail in fact to recognize time itself --something that also happened in classical physics with the pos- tulation of an absolute time. This, of course, should not surprise us because time is not something physical.
Mathematical time is not time because --as Hegel demonstrated-- it lacks true continuity. We will later study real continuity as real time. Following a very different path, physics introduced an 'infinite divisibil- ity', which seemed to be a proper feature of space, but the quantum of Planck has demonstrated that it does not even exist in space.
According to the experimental discoveries of quantum physics, it is false that the material reality is infinitely divisible. If we start frac- tioning the material, we will find sooner or later something that is not further divisible. But it surprises me that physics had to wait for Planck, since Hegel demonstrated this in the text we quoted before (GP I 307): it is contradictory not only that time consists of temporal points, but also that space consists of spatial points. In addition, it is evident that something extended cannot be the result of unextended elements.
By means of a dilemma whose second branch derives into a new di- lemma, it is easy to explain that, whoever affirms the infinite divisibility
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of space and rejects the quanta, forcefully affirms that the ulterior com- ponents of space are unextended points. The dilemma is the following one: the ulterior components are either divisible or indivisible. And if they are indivisible, they must necessarily be either extended (quanta) or unextended (points).
We cannot choose the first branch of the dilemma, for if they are divisible they cannot be the ulterior components; they can only be the resulting segments of the last division.
But if we say they are divisible, we would necessarily have to choose between extended or unextended ulterior components. Therefore, whoever rejects the quanta affirms that the ulterior components are points.
It is evident, however, that the sum of unextended elements cannot render something extended. Even before Planck's experiments, the only thing logically sustainable was that the ulterior components of space were quanta i. e. indivisible extended elements. Mathematical space --meaning a space that is infinitely divisible-- is a contradiction of which Hegel timely warned us. Now, on the grounds of the spurious identification of space and time, physics always presented the image of an infinitely divisible time in substitution of a continuous time which is, as we will later see, the only true one. Physics incurred and keeps incurring in two big mistakes: first, to confuse time with space; second, to attribute an infinite divisibility to time that even space lacks.
It is of primal importance to notice that the confusion of space and time is a widespread epidemic: the layman does not have the concept of time. This does not wash away the blame of physics, since the pur- pose of science is not to reaffirm indefinitely the false beliefs of common people. Some figure that time is a fluid, as we saw Newton did; but a fluid is something spatial; evidently, they are imagining themselves being right at the side of a river, which is something spatial: but none of that can be comprised in the concept of time. Others --and this occurs more often-- imagine a line that goes all across the imaginary visual field from one end to the other; they call the left segment 'past' and the right segment 'future'; they call 'present' a very little segment (or point, as they commonly refer to it) that falls within the visual axis.
All those things are spatial and have nothing to do with time. Besides, it is clear that all those images suffer from the aforementioned exteriority between their elements, and thus they lack the true conti- nuity that characterizes time.
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Again, what the physics and the laymen have is a fantastic image of time, not its concept. No image can be proclaimed the meaning of the word time because all images are spatial. They only need to imagine time to transform it into something which it is not.
The past imagined by the physics is of an illusory nature; it con- sists in a physical fact with its own observable characteristics, but the character of past as such is not empirically observable, not even by a magnifying glass. Even if it was situated in the past, the present or the future, the object would be entirely the same in terms of its empirical features. Therefore, time is an instance that the knowing subject intro- duces into the picture. He takes it not from the empirical data but from the spirit. A determined event belongs to the past for the spirit; and this is so because the spirit remembers it. Rothstein remarked correctly that it is difficult to give meaning to the word past without presupposing memory.
No object has a label that says 'I come from the past'. It is perfectly obvious that 'past' is something that has to be predicated from the present. Consequently, the past has to be contained in the present, and that proposition is not metaphorical but strictly rigorous. That is really a continuum; the multiplicity in unity; the multiplicity that is both iden- tical with and different from the unity. It is not a contiguum or a juxta- position of external elements. Just in the truly and authentic continuity can be time, but it only exists in the spirit. By no means can an event become from the 'past' only because I imagine it placed on the left side of my imaginary screen, or because I imagine it somewhere 'behind'. Both 'left' and 'behind' are spatial contents; they have absolutely noth- ing to do with time. If the past is not present in the present, it is no past at all, given that if it is not present, what we have is exteriority and not continuity .
Likewise, the present character of an object or a fact --in other words, its 'simultaneity with me'-- is not empirically verifiable, even though physics have invested in this proof incalculable endeavors and witty arguments. First, it is obvious that, if the objective data was past or future instead of being simultaneous with me, its empirical features would be exactly the same; hence, its simultaneity with me is not one of its empirical features.
Second, having rejected absolute simultaneity for not being an em- pirical data, the theory of relativity tries in vain to preserve relative simultaneity --i. e. the simultaneity of two close events--, disregarding
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the fact that relative simultaneity is as unverifiable as the former. Actually, physics have to define sooner or later relative simultaneity like this: two events that occur in my proximity are simultaneous if I perceive them simultaneously. The definiendum reappears in the defi- nition, and hence nothing has been defined and we still do not know what simultaneity means. Besides, it is obvious that this definition re- sorts to self-consciousness, for what it really says is the following: the events are simultaneous if my perception of the first event is simulta- neous with my perception of the second event. This definition shows that empirical data cannot build up that dimension of time called si- multaneity, just as it happened before with the past.
But there is still more to this.
