No More Learning

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 167
We said that those who accuse Hegel of pantheism should only focus on whether self-consciousness is preserved or not. And the bottom-line is this: this ideal and not physical contraposition between different 'selves', between self-consciousnesses that reciprocally address each other and make each other being, is the only possible meaning of the word distinction. Evidently, however, the ideal and not physical entity they create thereby is only one; there is no way to fragment it because it is not material. There we have distinction in the identity and vice versa; it is impossible to define one without the other in the definition. The great difference between the abstract intellect that does not understand and the reason that understands consists in that the former "commits the same absurdity of making that which is pure relation into something devoid of all relation. " (WL. I 211).
"The elements of the distinction are the identity and the distinction itself" (WL II 34).
It has been nothing more than sheer superficiality to attribute un- intelligibility to the Hegelian thesis according to which "the identity of the identity with the no-identity" (JS 96), for "the identity [. . . ] does not exclude the distinction; it has it essentially in its own determination" (BS 371). The ideal entity called intersubjectivity cannot exist if these poles are not distinguished.
The abstract intellect stiffens: it considers that identity and distinc- tion are things that have nothing to do with each other and are not re- lated at all. One misunderstands thus both of them, since it is impossible to give them meaning by empirical or physical means. The abstract intellect uses these two words without giving them meaning.
In contrast with reason, " in general it stands for the understanding as abstracting, and hence as separating and remaining fixed in its sepa- rations. Directed against reason, it behaves as ordinary common sense and imposes its view that truth rests on sensuous reality, that thoughts are only thoughts, meaning that it is sense perception which first gives them filling and reality" (WL. I 26)
We have long enough demonstrated that this opinion is something utterly impossible. The sensible perception cannot give meaning to the concepts. What happens is that the abstract intellect 'thinks in a simi- lar way than imagination', as Hegel denounces. For imagination, each thing stands on its side with no relation to others; things are unrelated within the (imaginary) space. Properly speaking,
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 168 Hegel was right
thought, mediation, the intellectual determinations as such are forms of relation, but they can be immobilized as imaginary figurations, and just then we must think properly in the form of imagination: the intellect (PR I 293).
But:
this holding apart of likeness and unlikeness is their destruction. For both are determinations of difference; they are relations to one another, the one being what the other is not; like is not unlike and unlike is not like; and both essentially have this relation and have no meaning apart from it (WL. II 36)
The ideal and mental reality called intersubjectivity --which is more real than anything physical, as our third chapter showed-- is a simple entity because it is immaterial; it is identical because it consists in that its poles are distinct from each other; it consists in that every self-consciousness addresses the others directly and reciprocally. This reality is pure act, self-determination of each of the subjects in action and a movement that integrates every one of them; but the intellect separates and makes these things static. It "commits the same absur- dity of making that which is pure relation into something devoid of all relation. " (WL I 211)
"If we take into account [. . . ] that the simple does not need to be void, one dispels the aforementioned impression, as if the simple ex- cluded from itself the distinct" (EGP 277).
The whole point is not to confuse simplicity with nothingness. Intersubjectivity is simple, because it is not material; but it consists in the distinction that exists among the subjects, which is the only real dis- tinction that there can be. According to Hegel, the identity in Aristotle is "activity, movement, repulsion, and therefore it is not inert identity; identity is identical to itself in the distinction" (GP II 164). If the iden- tity is not nothingness, that means to say, if it has content, it contains ipso facto a distinction.
By mere conceptual analysis, Proclus affirmed rightly that the mul- tiple (i. e. distinction) is not in itself; that one can only understand the multiple as included in and streaming from the one (i. e. identity); the multiple would not be multiple if they were not one. Indeed, if they were completely unrelated and had nothing to do with each other, we would not call them many, but we would call each of them one by
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 169
their own, and the mind would not know of the other when consider- ing each of them. The multiple must stream from the one itself; the distinction has to be included in the identity. For that reason Hegel says: "The reality of the contraries and real contraposition can only be brought about by identity" (JS 97). This could only be rejected by whoever manages to give the words 'identity' and 'distinction' another intelligible meaning; not an imaginary one, for we saw that what one can imagine is empirical and no empirical data can correspond to the meaning of these words.
For that reason, Hegel says the following about those who accuse him of pantheism:
These doctrines are of speculative kind, and if there are theologians who are not able to understand them, that in this point they cannot follow the pace of the concept, they should at least, in their weakness, leave alone these speculative subjects. Theology is to understand the religious con- tent; these theologians should acknowledge that they cannot understand, and they should refrain from passing the judgment of pantheism to the concepts they have not understood (PR I 256).
The first thing that these theologians do not understand is the word God. As we saw in our previous chapters (III, 1), they do not know what the spirit is and they tend to define it as the negation of the material. This recourse is pointless since the definiendum does not get thereby any other content than materiality itself. And we saw (IV, 3) that they do not know the meaning of 'infinite' either. This should not surprise us, since the meaning of infinite is the spirit itself. "We, on the other hand, consider God as spirit" (PR I 8); now, "the spirit is essentially being for the spirit" (PR I 201). The spirit is intersubjectivity; but, as we just exposed, there is the identity, and not only does it not loose distinction, but rather there is precisely the identity so that the distinction between God and men can have any meaning.
"This relation with the Absolute is not suppressing both, for there would be no distinct thus, but rather they must remain distinct without losing that nature" (JS 96).
"The principal is the true determination of this identity, and the true identity is the one that exists in the infinite subjectivity, which cannot be conceived as neutralization or reciprocal cancellation, but only as infinite subjectivity" (PR II, II 68).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 170 Hegel was right
In universal history, the only thing that matters is that these two parts re- main in absolute unity, true conciliation, a conciliation in which the free subject does not succumb in the object mood of the spirit, but rather obtains his full autonomy, and in the like way, the absolute spirit, the objective and reluctant unity, obtains its absolute right as well (VG 244).
This subject about identity and distinction is the point in which the famous 'conversion ad phantasma' of the Scholastic philosophers plays a dirty trick against them. It demonstrates not only that it is false that we should cast our eyes to fantasy in order to understand: it also demon- strates that we have to do without fantasy if we want to understand. For this distinction to be real, they imagine that the human spirit must be outside from God, and that God must be outside from the hu- man spirit. This is obviously something absurd, because the spirit is nothing spatial from which we could predicate an 'inside' or an 'outside'. To say that something is outside from God is simply ludicrous.
Another possibility: They could be imagining that besides conscious- ness and intersubjectivity, spirits have a substratum, and that these substrata really distinguish themselves from each other despite that intersubjectivity builds some sort of drawbridge between them. We showed (III 4) that there is no concept of a substance distinct from its acts of self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. Therefore, what they have is an image. Every attempt of intellection fails if one does not start from this assumption: identity and distinction are intelligible, not imaginable. If they imagine the substrata, they become spatial beings, not spirits.
Or else: they place on the left side of the imaginary screen a 'time' in which God had not carried out the act of intersubjective appeal by which he made being the human spirit. We exposed extensively (III 6) that this time of physics is space, not time, and that these lapses in which there are no acts from the spirit do not exist.
The Hegelian commentator W. T. Stace incurred in the same mis- take --only that this time, the mistake took place on the right side from the screen-- when he affirmed that Hegel did not take literally the immortality of men but only as a symbol of "the absolute value of spiritual individuality. Immortality is a present quality of the spirit, not a future fact or event" (1955, 514). Stace pretends to correct both Hegel and the only adequate conception of time which is "something about movement" (Phys IV 219a 9), in name of an exterior absolute
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 171
time that rules over God and the universe only because of the fact that we imagine time as a spatial line that goes from right to left, which exists independently from whatever may happen or not. As we have said, this line is space but no time; therefore, its right segment is no future, nor is the left segment the past in which the Scholastic placed God before he created the human spirit. Of course, the hu- man spirit is not immortal if one understands by immortality that the spirit becomes coextensive with this line that goes to the right, for neither spirit nor true time have extension. Likewise, God is not coextensive with the left segment of this imaginary construction. Time is the 'abstractum of transformation" (PR I 234), i. e. from the self- determination of spirit that transforms itself by giving to itself new and diverse determinations.
In general, when they say that God is or lies beyond, it becomes per- fectly obvious that spatial imagination continues to play tricks with us. The true transcendence consists in the intersubjectivity we have discussed: it consists in that the self is always face to face with a thou which cannot be absorbed or reduced to the self. But this true distinc- tion is at the same time identity. Only there the concept of distinct could have had its origin. If man were only surrounded by things and objects, he would never distinguish himself, just as his own body never distinguishes itself. We would have never come up with the concept of distinction. Consequently, he would not have the concept of a self either. Therefore (III, 7), the intersubjectivity which makes me a distinct being for the first time is the only possible way for a man to exist, that is to say, the only possible way to create man. But it is identity, for only in identity could there be distinction. We tie thereby a loose end that was (III, 8) missing.
Perhaps it will not be superfine to say that Thomas Aquinas also conceived creation in terms of identity. A posture to which a theolo- gian of our century, Karl Rahner, adheres:
Thomas does not regard the supreme mode of production of another, the creating activity of God, as an action that goes out from the agent towards and extrinsic patient, but rather as the immanent action of God, as God's free self fulfillment, which maintains himself completely within himself (De pot. q. 3 a, 15 corp). Thus, it becomes manifest that even the supreme causality towards the outside is more fully a modus of self-realization, and that transitory causality is a peculiar modus of formal causality (1964, 358).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 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
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?