Logic and Natural
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Hegel Was Right_nodrm
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212 Hegel was right
are those impressions about, that is to say, he tries to determine what kind of object or fact lays before him. In other words, what he must do is to determine the essential. It is the Kantian problem of subsumtion. The essence is the universal concept under which we subsume the phe- nomenon: Is it a rock? Is it a tribunal? Is it a circus? Is it a book? Is it a joke? Is it a promise? Is it a requisite? Is it a whim? Is it a wedding? Is it a landscape? Is it a nightingale? Is it a speech? Everything depends on this essential discernment which, by the way, is closely related to the theory of Gestalt, but it is not reduced to the visual, since it com- prises all things intellectual and human. We had already quoted this text: "It happens as always that one alludes or mentions a perception or an experience; so soon man has spoken there is a concept there, there is no way of making it aside, it reappears in the mind as a clear sign of universality and truth, since it is precisely the essential" (GP I 336). The word essence is maybe obsolete, but the concept of essence, it doesn't.
Now, "the essence is determined itself as explanation (Grund)" (WL II 63). This is why Hegel arranged the supposedly explanatory under the captaincy of essence. By definition, the essence of a body explains why the body is like it is. That would be tantamount to explain the most important thing, but evidently, that does not happen here.
When I say that what I have in front of me is a tree, I explain the multiple and varied empirical impressions that are coming to my senses. I do not only orient myself in the middle of a chaotic parade of sensations. Impressions are what they are because what I have be- fore me is a tree.
Therefore, the affirmation according to which being and essence complement each other has two senses. First, this affirmation means that we cannot describe without explaining; the crucial thesis that entirely refutes those who believe science must be reduced to descriptions. In order to describe we need to use some universal concept, and since this concept tries to grab the essence, one infers that it must have an explanatory purpose. Second, the truth of being is the essence because (cf. Zubiri) the essence is in the being itself making it being what it is, so that other aspects or non-essential details are expendable and irrelevant: they are mere appearances.
But this is only a mirror game according to Hegel. Just as in the case of force and law, so the essence is presented to us as an entity that lies beyond the phenomena and explains them, but it is an entity that nobody is able to explain. It offers itself as the explanation of the phenomenon,
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but its only definition is to be the explanation of the phenomenon. This identity between essence and phenomenon has been commented at length, as if it were a thesis that Hegel defended as a part of his system; in reality, that very identity is what Hegel criticizes in the concept of essence in order to reject it.
Hegel rejects every allegedly explanatory concept because the only true explanation of the world is the spirit. We immediately see how this critique is valid against all the above mentioned concepts: field, energy, etcetera. But we need first to examine more closely an interpretative question. Commentators did not perceive that the book of essence is that of the allegedly explanatory concepts; they missed the fact that this book is divided in three parts: essence, phenomenon and reality. The union of the essence and the phenomenon is reality, as synthesis of the thesis and the antithesis, so that all this movement constitutes reality; it explains it in the mind of those who believe in the above men- tioned explanatory concepts. In addition, everything leads us to the most explanatory concept we can think of, which is no other than that of cause, and whose critique we have made in our third chapter.
We already said why Hegel named that entire treatise under the name of essence. As the encyclopedic summary tells us, the essence "is, essen- tially, explanation (Grund)" (EPW 121 A). And the treatise itself tells us: "the essence determines itself as explanation (Grund)" (WL II 63). But a simple glance to the concepts there contained is enough to persuade us that they are only allegedly explanatory concepts. 'Form' and 'mat- ter' since they were coined by Aristotle, have had no other purpose than explaining facts. The conditions in which the existence of a being depends, contribute also to the explanation of that existence. The prop- erties of a being explain why such being operates as it does and how it is in fact constituted. The principles of identity and (no) contradic- tion evidently want to explain why things are this way and cannot be otherwise.
The category whole-parts: certain being is like it is because it is constituted by certain parts, or because it forms part of a certain whole. An attempt to explain its existence was to evaluate a being in terms of 'possible and 'necessary'. And let us not speak about categories like force, substance and Grund.
The substantive Grund and the verb begru? nden need to be succinctly clarified. The term 'explanation' has two different usages that depend on the nature of the grammatical subject (if it is a person or a thing).
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For instance, one person explains certain fact by indicating its causes; but we also say that the cause explains the existence of the effect. The German verb begru? nden has also these two usages. The substantive Grund, in its material meaning, means a ground, a fundament, or a ba- sis. In theory, begru? nden would mean to lay the foundations of some- thing, but in its scientific meaning Grund is a real entity by means of which one explains the existence of an entity or an event. In regard to that meaning, one would have to translate Grund as 'explanatory fac- tor', but we also say that the cause as real entity is the 'explanation' of the effect. This is how we have translated Grund in the previous pages, because 'laying the foundations' would be only a metaphori- cal language that is not pertinent to the question. That we are loyal to Hegel's thought is confirmed by the titles of the two annotations of the section called the "The Determined Grund"; in both of which the word Erkla? rung --which means explanation-- appears. Besides, this is corroborated by the fact that all the systematization effectuated by The Science of Logic would lack if the second book did not thematize the explanatory concepts, in contrast to the first book which thema- tizes the allegedly descriptive ones. Without this dilemma the whole work lacks its sting of truth.
But let us deal now with the modern explanatory concepts.
We lay aside the imaginative figurations, which can be varied. The figurative imagination, of field definition, in physics has the same con- tent --or lack of content-- that the definition of force: an entity that is not empirical in itself, that means to say, that is beyond or underneath the physical manifestations, and whose only characteristic is the ca- pacity of producing this empirically perceptible manifestations. What we see are the metal arrows that are orientated towards the poles, but in moment at all do we see the field itself. One even calls it a 'field of force'; one conceives it as an aggregate of forces. D'Abro says some- thing very illustrative in regard to gravitational fields:
For instance, the force of attraction exerted by the sun on a planet varies with the position of the planet. Let us observe that the gravitational force is disclosed only through the behaviour of the planet; nevertheless, we may reason as though a force were still in existence at each point of space around the sun even in the absence of any planet. We are thus led to conceive of a region of space at each point of which a force is present. The aggregate of such forces is called a field of force. (1952, 215). (The italics are mine)
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To be sure, in electrostatics and electromagnetism one deals not with masses or planets but with charges.
The empirical data is the trajectory and movement of the planet. The field as such is not an empirical data; it is an entity that is posed in order to explain why empirical data are as they are. In this regard, D'Abro makes also an interesting point:
The magnitude of the force at the various points of a given field is proportion- al to the mass of the particle on which the force is acting. There is no sense, therefore, in attributing any definite magnitude to the force at a given point until the mass of the particle has been specified. (ibid. ).
It turns out that the same force of the field is something indefinite; it is not an entity with determined characteristics; it depends upon the 'patient'; the latter determines the magnitude of the form. The mirror game which we have previously criticized could not be more obvious: the allegedly explanatory entity does not have any other content than the phenomenon it intended to explain; we only have the illusion that such phenomenon has been explained, because we have added an en- tity whose only content is to explain it!
As a matter of fact, to speak of a field in this regard is to employ and metaphor and to start poetizing. In its proper sense, a field is a plot of land, an inhabited portion of an earthly surface. What physics mean to say is a certain set of forces, and I do not manage to conceive how they could possibly come to believe that they have abandoned the 'obsolete' Newtonian concept of force. The difference between force and field consists in that physics believe that they imagine the latter as occupying a region of space, while force seems not to have extension. But since the field as such is not visible, then it is not imaginable. The same thing happens as with space: there are people who believe to see the space that exists between that table and the wall, but the only thing he sees is the table, the floor and the ground. The Newtonian scientist affirms the action at distance evidently holds that a force is extended through space from one body to another so that, in terms of extension, there is no difference whatsoever between them.
Margenau's next quote converges with what D'Abro said:
A non-material field is not descriptive of any material property (although it is usually caused by matter) but describes some latent effect that would
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take place at a point of space under certain circumstances. [. . . ] Nothing, however, may actually exist or be evident at that point. What matters is that if a charge were placed at that point defined by x, y, z it would experience a force proportional to the function of the field. (EB 25, 823, 1)
From the above we can say that the content of field poses unrealistic conditionals. D'Abro only ascribed fields a hypothetical 'as if' content. On the one hand, the field does not exist where (space) and while (time) it is not exerted. On the other hand, in the moment in which it is exerted what we have there is a force and only a force. But the Newtonians that speak of action at distance also hold that the only thing that exists between bodies is force. I do not see in what sense does the physics of fields has abandoned the concept of force, nor in what sense it has abandoned the concept of action at distance. Besides, we have shown (III, 8) that this entire problem in regard of the action at distance renders itself as a pseudo-problem when we realize that contact does not exist and that the difficulty lies in action as such, not
in action at distance.
We do not need to go back to the concept of mass --whose defenders
regard it as a truly explanatory concept--, for we have pointed out that force comes within its very own definition. Since the definition of force lacks content, the concept of mass is also undefined. By the way, it is noteworthy that mass is directly conceived as a resistance force that is opposed to displacement, and that inertia itself, whose quantification is mass, is also commonly conceived as a force that resists the change from rest or movement. The only thing that physics perceive in all this business is the displacement and the duration of it: mass as such is not perceptible. It is an entity that is posited in order to explain the empiri- cally perceivable data.
Since momentum is defined as the product of mass by acceleration, the moment implies all the force that is implicated in the mass. There- fore, it carries all the lack of content and all the tautological game of mirrors that the explanatory entity called force entails.
Since Einstein demonstrated that energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared, we have to say the same in regard to energy itself. All the lack of content which characterizes force enters in the definition with mass.
But even leaving that aside, it is perfectly obvious that energy is iden- tified with force, for it is commonly defined as the energy of carrying
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Logic and Natural Sciences 217
out work. Work is the effect, the observable phenomenon, the transla- tion of a body from a position to another that is even higher. In addition, we saw that force is commonly conceived as the capacity of producing certain observable effects: the 'power' of causing certain manifestation. It follows that energy, in perfect identity with that Newtonian force that physics naively believe to have abandoned, is a non-perceptible entity whose existence is posed in order to explain the empirically observable phenomena. This is why Hegel warned us that the concept of force "is the most prominent one" (GP III 84), stressing the fact that it is not prop- erly a concept but rather certain 'way of thinking'. What physics has made after Hegel is to shuffle in very different ways this same concept or lack of concept, in the hope of inventing new and different ideas.
By the way, what the popular formula of Einstein affirms is that mass transforms energy and vice versa: as statement that seemed to be fabulous in its times and which is still regarded so, but if physics with true scientific rigor demanded themselves true definitions with contents, that would not need to surprise anybody, for both mass and energy are always force: a posited explanatory entity that lacks content.
The only difference that exists consists in the diverse kind of mea- surements that scientists whimsically decide to carry out. However, one should notice that they are not measuring mass or energy themselves, in spite of the fact that they believe to be measuring that. In the case of mass, what they measure is the acceleration that a body suffers when certain force is applied to it, that means to say, they measure the space covered by the body in a given time; in other words, they measure a length and they divide it in a certain number of seconds. Best case sce- nario, what would be empirically measurable is length and that thing which physics call time: mass in itself is not perceptible or measurable. In the case of energy what they are measuring is work, that means to say, the distance along which a mass has been moved and the dura- tion of that movement; the bigger the distance the bigger the work; the bigger the time the smaller the work; length and time, that is what they measure; energy itself is not perceptible or measurable. It all depends on the imaginative combinations that physics make with length and time; they call one certain combination mass and the other energy; but that one combination transforms into another should not surprise any- body, since they are all mere multiplications and divisions that one can make with a pencil and a sheet of paper. Since they are only force, mass and energy themselves lack content; and no one should be surprised
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by the fact that a thing that lacks content is transformed into a thing that also lacks content.
Since 1860, and specially since 1890, the law of conservation of energy has become the touchstone of physics and perhaps of all natu- ral sciences up to the extent that Max von Laue says that one intends to deduce from it the rest of all natural laws and constructed an entire worldview around its form (cfr. Schilpp II 1970, 515). As for physics in particular goes, whoever studies these treatises corroborates that they are constructed upon Hamiltonian equations, and all what these supposes is that the sum of kinetic energy and potential energy is un- alterably conserved.
One can appreciate in Taylor and Wheeler to what extent the enthu- siasm for the law of conservation of energy has escalated. Defined in Newton's terms as the product of mass by speed, the momentum is not unalterably conserved in the collision of particles that travel near the speed of light. "We must therefore choose: We must abandon either the Newtonian expression for momentum or the law of conservation of momentum. The law of conservation of momentum has become so im- portant to us that we shift to it as a new foundation. We start with the law of conservation of momentum and from it derive the expression for momentum defined as that vector quantity which is conserved in all frames of reference. " (1966, 102)
In other words, momentum is defined as what is 'conserved'.
At first sight, the person that comes to us, boasting about his large scientific experiments, seems to possess a very profound knowledge of the universe, especially when he says to us that the existing quantity of energy in the world does not decrease or increase: it is always con- served in his opinion. His words are sonorous and impressive; but if we ask him what energy is, what that august, impressive and unalter- able thing is, he answers to us: what is conserved.
The law of conservation of energy has this grandiose content: one conserves what one conserves.
To make such statement one does not need to carry out the most elementary experiment; one does not need either to have any knowledge of reality whatsoever or to open his eyes to look at the world. One only needs certain intellectual masochism to take pleasure in tautologies.
The sharply tautological character of the law of conservation of energy was obvious before Taylor and Wheeler made their mortifying choice. If the term energy does not have content and yet one affirms
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that 'it' is conserved, the only thing we are told is that the 'it' is being conserved. And the proposition is summarized thus: one conserves what one conserves.
Since the first time it was formulated, such thesis was an a priori proposition which was by definition unverifiable. And if it refers to the quantity of energy in the entire universe, one would have to measure the quantity of energy in the entire universe: a task that cannot be com- pleted even by all humans. Even worse: they would have to measure it one minute later to see if it has not increased or diminished, some- thing which would require another team of humans just as numerous because the first team would has not yet finished its task. The law is also unverifiable by definition in the case that it refers to an isolated system or a tiny region in the universe. Even if we were to suppose that we would carry out a measurement in this instant and another one after ten minutes, the thesis would not be probed thereby, because the quantity of energy could augment in the meantime and return to its previous quantity in ten minutes. The verification would suppose the paroxysm of a measurement indefinitely repeated, which is something impossible not only for technical reason but by principle: the proccessus in indefinitum cannot be completed. Let alone the problem of defining what physics call an isolated system, because everything seems to indi- cate that they define it as a 'portion of the universe in which the energy does not increase or decrease', which would render us this wonderful definition: in a portion of the universe in which the energy does not increase or decrease, the energy does not increase or decrease. Indeed, they only know that a system is isolated because of the fact that the energy does not increase or decrease in it. As for the imaginary or real isolating surfaces that limit the system goes, physics only know that they are isolating it because in its interior the energy does not increase or decrease. Therefore, the insolently and sensational tautological for- mulation we just mentioned is unavoidable.
In the entire business of the conservation of energy we find tautolo- gies everywhere. If the particles --which according to the law should be created at a given instant because the observable particles have lost their energy-- are not observable, the physics hold that the new ones commence to exist 'virtually', not effectively nor observably; and then, of course, the sum of all the energies in the system remains unaltered. In order to keep the equality unaltered we can always imagine that the electron is surrounded by a cloud of 'virtual' photons: that is what
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Rosenfeld calls the "dressed electron" (EB 28, 250, 1-2). If we do not need this virtual energy to equalize the sum, then we will simply con- sider that the electron is 'undressed'.
If the number of things that I can call energy is unlimited, I do not have any problems whatsoever to make my results match. But, naturally, if they do not have any common denominator (and they do not have it, because they have not defined energy), if the unlikeness and heterogeneity between them is unlimited, what is conserved is an abstraction; the energy is perhaps the most abstract abstraction ever invented. In fact what is conserved is the capacity of the intellect for making abstractions; what is conserved is the spirit.
We have gone through the principal explanatory concepts that have come into vogue after the death of Hegel. In all of them one confirms the Hegelian demonstration of the tautological failure of all scientific explanations. It is impressive to see how quantum physics have ar- rived to the conclusion that the physical explanations have failed. It is not a change of paradigm, as Kuhn would want; it is something much more earnest, so earnest that Einstein died without accepting it, despite all the efforts of Bohr to convince him.
Classical physics 'explained' fundamentally by saying that there is nothing to explain: it explained by continuity between a past state and a present state of a physical system; quantum physics breaks with this continuity and hence it tears away the possibility of explanation. Margenau says correctly: "If there were gaps in this understanding, missing links in the chain of continuous action, the term causal would not be applied to it. " (1978, 175) What quantum physics discover is that there are leaks; they find that some links are missing. With regard to the luminous phenomena and their dependency on experimental devices, Bohr himself states: "this real situation obligates us to renounce to a rigorous causal explanation" (1964, 8).
Commenting Bohr, Weizsa? cker says:
. . . we are forced, not to renounce classical models, but to renounce models. Nothing like a quantum-mechanical model which replaces classical models and which then would admit of description of nature in terms of an explanation by the quantum-mechanical model, exists. (Bastin 1971, 326)
Now, if the physical explanation of the world has failed --and Hegel demonstrated that it had to fail-- then the only explanation of the
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world is the spirit, or, as it is expressed in the Science of Logic, the true of the essence is the concept (= spirit). Zubiri did not understand this. The concept 'force' --which, as we saw, is the most eminent of the explanatory concepts-- is in short a projection of the concept, which is known directly in the self-consciousness of the cause that determines itself, namely, the self-determination of the spirit. "Will is power in itself, and it is the essence of all power, both in nature and in spirit" (VG 113). "The subject is what is meaningful to itself and what is explained by itself" (A? sth I 435). Reason identified with method is the "supreme force or, more precisely, the only and absolute force [. . . ]
(WL II 486).
Whoever thinks he/she can explain differently the production of
something entirely new in the world is employing a concept of cause (III, 8) which cannot be given any meaning. How childish is the process by which some think a phenomenon is determined by another phe- nomenon --in a magical transmigration of properties-- indefinitely, without ever reaching a being that determines itself, and for that rea- son the entire set lacks determination and remains unexplained. The only source is the spirit: the being that determines itself.
The difficulty that some people bear to accept the Hegelian thesis is a problem of imagination only. We would like to say stress the merely imaginative character of this difficulty which is in itself a triviality but which is very widespread. They suppose that the world is "outside" from the spirit, and they do not realize that this expression lacks mean- ing completely, for the spirit is not a spatial thing of which one can speak of an inside and an outside. The objectors of Hegel are imaginatively creating distances and distinctions that do not even exist.
It is inspiring to see that a physic like Henry Margenau has under- stood that difficulties of such kind lack all kind of meaning:
"As the majority of scientists, Einstein did not solve the basic meta- physical problem that underlies all science, namely, the meaning of exteriority" (1978, 249).
If, in contrast to idealism, realism consists in saying that physical world is 'outside' from the spirit, then it is a thesis which does not have any meaning whatsoever.
Public opinion was shocked when the quantum physics experiments revealed that the electron becomes a bodkin only because the subject chooses to observe its position and that even, as Heisenberg said, "its size depends on the experiment that we carry out" (1930, 34). And
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this does not go only for quantum physics. As Eddington pointed out ". . . the relativity view is that a field of force can, like length and dura- tion, be nothing but a link between nature and the observer. " (1978, 43; orig. 1920) Max Born also said that "A gravitational field [. . . ] has no meaning at all independent of the choice of coordinates" (1962, 345). But the universal astonishment --even among the physics themselves-- evidently had as its cause the so-called belief according to which the world is 'outside' from the spirit, which is pure and sheer non-sense. And if Einstein himself was scared because he thought this was 'te- lepathy', then we can only conjecture that he was imagining that the physical remained far away from the spirit.
It has been a tremendous mistake to believe that Hegel denies the reality of the physical world. What he denies is that 'being real' means 'being outside'. It is the spirit what makes real the material, which means that the material is real. "Natural things are false existences; that does not mean they do not exist, but rather that they do not have their truth in themselves" (EGP 116).
5. probabiLity
Probability deserves a whole different treatment. According to some, it is a theory that is explanatory. Besides, it is a theory on which biology has a keen interest, especially in regard to evolution, which is our next subject.
A probabilistic law is imaginary projected as a real factor which is not empirical in itself but which 'explains the empirical' data. In a like manner as with determinism, one supposes that probability is a real en- tity that works among and in the things themselves, and that it causes some effects which are the phenomenon, which in this case is a certain frequency of events. Of course, the mirror game and the 'double see- ing' is just as true as the other allegedly explanatory entities which we have considered, because the probabilistic law has the same phenom- enon it aims to describe. In this point, there is no difference between a probabilistic and a necessary law, because one supposes that the ob- served frequencies necessarily follow from the 'objective probability': that is the myth of what is 'unpredictable but unavoidable' of Manfred Eigen. In the same line, Mario Bunge says the following: "In short, our version of QM is as deterministic as classical mechanics [. . . ] as soon as
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are those impressions about, that is to say, he tries to determine what kind of object or fact lays before him. In other words, what he must do is to determine the essential. It is the Kantian problem of subsumtion. The essence is the universal concept under which we subsume the phe- nomenon: Is it a rock? Is it a tribunal? Is it a circus? Is it a book? Is it a joke? Is it a promise? Is it a requisite? Is it a whim? Is it a wedding? Is it a landscape? Is it a nightingale? Is it a speech? Everything depends on this essential discernment which, by the way, is closely related to the theory of Gestalt, but it is not reduced to the visual, since it com- prises all things intellectual and human. We had already quoted this text: "It happens as always that one alludes or mentions a perception or an experience; so soon man has spoken there is a concept there, there is no way of making it aside, it reappears in the mind as a clear sign of universality and truth, since it is precisely the essential" (GP I 336). The word essence is maybe obsolete, but the concept of essence, it doesn't.
Now, "the essence is determined itself as explanation (Grund)" (WL II 63). This is why Hegel arranged the supposedly explanatory under the captaincy of essence. By definition, the essence of a body explains why the body is like it is. That would be tantamount to explain the most important thing, but evidently, that does not happen here.
When I say that what I have in front of me is a tree, I explain the multiple and varied empirical impressions that are coming to my senses. I do not only orient myself in the middle of a chaotic parade of sensations. Impressions are what they are because what I have be- fore me is a tree.
Therefore, the affirmation according to which being and essence complement each other has two senses. First, this affirmation means that we cannot describe without explaining; the crucial thesis that entirely refutes those who believe science must be reduced to descriptions. In order to describe we need to use some universal concept, and since this concept tries to grab the essence, one infers that it must have an explanatory purpose. Second, the truth of being is the essence because (cf. Zubiri) the essence is in the being itself making it being what it is, so that other aspects or non-essential details are expendable and irrelevant: they are mere appearances.
But this is only a mirror game according to Hegel. Just as in the case of force and law, so the essence is presented to us as an entity that lies beyond the phenomena and explains them, but it is an entity that nobody is able to explain. It offers itself as the explanation of the phenomenon,
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but its only definition is to be the explanation of the phenomenon. This identity between essence and phenomenon has been commented at length, as if it were a thesis that Hegel defended as a part of his system; in reality, that very identity is what Hegel criticizes in the concept of essence in order to reject it.
Hegel rejects every allegedly explanatory concept because the only true explanation of the world is the spirit. We immediately see how this critique is valid against all the above mentioned concepts: field, energy, etcetera. But we need first to examine more closely an interpretative question. Commentators did not perceive that the book of essence is that of the allegedly explanatory concepts; they missed the fact that this book is divided in three parts: essence, phenomenon and reality. The union of the essence and the phenomenon is reality, as synthesis of the thesis and the antithesis, so that all this movement constitutes reality; it explains it in the mind of those who believe in the above men- tioned explanatory concepts. In addition, everything leads us to the most explanatory concept we can think of, which is no other than that of cause, and whose critique we have made in our third chapter.
We already said why Hegel named that entire treatise under the name of essence. As the encyclopedic summary tells us, the essence "is, essen- tially, explanation (Grund)" (EPW 121 A). And the treatise itself tells us: "the essence determines itself as explanation (Grund)" (WL II 63). But a simple glance to the concepts there contained is enough to persuade us that they are only allegedly explanatory concepts. 'Form' and 'mat- ter' since they were coined by Aristotle, have had no other purpose than explaining facts. The conditions in which the existence of a being depends, contribute also to the explanation of that existence. The prop- erties of a being explain why such being operates as it does and how it is in fact constituted. The principles of identity and (no) contradic- tion evidently want to explain why things are this way and cannot be otherwise.
The category whole-parts: certain being is like it is because it is constituted by certain parts, or because it forms part of a certain whole. An attempt to explain its existence was to evaluate a being in terms of 'possible and 'necessary'. And let us not speak about categories like force, substance and Grund.
The substantive Grund and the verb begru? nden need to be succinctly clarified. The term 'explanation' has two different usages that depend on the nature of the grammatical subject (if it is a person or a thing).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 214 Hegel was right
For instance, one person explains certain fact by indicating its causes; but we also say that the cause explains the existence of the effect. The German verb begru? nden has also these two usages. The substantive Grund, in its material meaning, means a ground, a fundament, or a ba- sis. In theory, begru? nden would mean to lay the foundations of some- thing, but in its scientific meaning Grund is a real entity by means of which one explains the existence of an entity or an event. In regard to that meaning, one would have to translate Grund as 'explanatory fac- tor', but we also say that the cause as real entity is the 'explanation' of the effect. This is how we have translated Grund in the previous pages, because 'laying the foundations' would be only a metaphori- cal language that is not pertinent to the question. That we are loyal to Hegel's thought is confirmed by the titles of the two annotations of the section called the "The Determined Grund"; in both of which the word Erkla? rung --which means explanation-- appears. Besides, this is corroborated by the fact that all the systematization effectuated by The Science of Logic would lack if the second book did not thematize the explanatory concepts, in contrast to the first book which thema- tizes the allegedly descriptive ones. Without this dilemma the whole work lacks its sting of truth.
But let us deal now with the modern explanatory concepts.
We lay aside the imaginative figurations, which can be varied. The figurative imagination, of field definition, in physics has the same con- tent --or lack of content-- that the definition of force: an entity that is not empirical in itself, that means to say, that is beyond or underneath the physical manifestations, and whose only characteristic is the ca- pacity of producing this empirically perceptible manifestations. What we see are the metal arrows that are orientated towards the poles, but in moment at all do we see the field itself. One even calls it a 'field of force'; one conceives it as an aggregate of forces. D'Abro says some- thing very illustrative in regard to gravitational fields:
For instance, the force of attraction exerted by the sun on a planet varies with the position of the planet. Let us observe that the gravitational force is disclosed only through the behaviour of the planet; nevertheless, we may reason as though a force were still in existence at each point of space around the sun even in the absence of any planet. We are thus led to conceive of a region of space at each point of which a force is present. The aggregate of such forces is called a field of force. (1952, 215). (The italics are mine)
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To be sure, in electrostatics and electromagnetism one deals not with masses or planets but with charges.
The empirical data is the trajectory and movement of the planet. The field as such is not an empirical data; it is an entity that is posed in order to explain why empirical data are as they are. In this regard, D'Abro makes also an interesting point:
The magnitude of the force at the various points of a given field is proportion- al to the mass of the particle on which the force is acting. There is no sense, therefore, in attributing any definite magnitude to the force at a given point until the mass of the particle has been specified. (ibid. ).
It turns out that the same force of the field is something indefinite; it is not an entity with determined characteristics; it depends upon the 'patient'; the latter determines the magnitude of the form. The mirror game which we have previously criticized could not be more obvious: the allegedly explanatory entity does not have any other content than the phenomenon it intended to explain; we only have the illusion that such phenomenon has been explained, because we have added an en- tity whose only content is to explain it!
As a matter of fact, to speak of a field in this regard is to employ and metaphor and to start poetizing. In its proper sense, a field is a plot of land, an inhabited portion of an earthly surface. What physics mean to say is a certain set of forces, and I do not manage to conceive how they could possibly come to believe that they have abandoned the 'obsolete' Newtonian concept of force. The difference between force and field consists in that physics believe that they imagine the latter as occupying a region of space, while force seems not to have extension. But since the field as such is not visible, then it is not imaginable. The same thing happens as with space: there are people who believe to see the space that exists between that table and the wall, but the only thing he sees is the table, the floor and the ground. The Newtonian scientist affirms the action at distance evidently holds that a force is extended through space from one body to another so that, in terms of extension, there is no difference whatsoever between them.
Margenau's next quote converges with what D'Abro said:
A non-material field is not descriptive of any material property (although it is usually caused by matter) but describes some latent effect that would
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take place at a point of space under certain circumstances. [. . . ] Nothing, however, may actually exist or be evident at that point. What matters is that if a charge were placed at that point defined by x, y, z it would experience a force proportional to the function of the field. (EB 25, 823, 1)
From the above we can say that the content of field poses unrealistic conditionals. D'Abro only ascribed fields a hypothetical 'as if' content. On the one hand, the field does not exist where (space) and while (time) it is not exerted. On the other hand, in the moment in which it is exerted what we have there is a force and only a force. But the Newtonians that speak of action at distance also hold that the only thing that exists between bodies is force. I do not see in what sense does the physics of fields has abandoned the concept of force, nor in what sense it has abandoned the concept of action at distance. Besides, we have shown (III, 8) that this entire problem in regard of the action at distance renders itself as a pseudo-problem when we realize that contact does not exist and that the difficulty lies in action as such, not
in action at distance.
We do not need to go back to the concept of mass --whose defenders
regard it as a truly explanatory concept--, for we have pointed out that force comes within its very own definition. Since the definition of force lacks content, the concept of mass is also undefined. By the way, it is noteworthy that mass is directly conceived as a resistance force that is opposed to displacement, and that inertia itself, whose quantification is mass, is also commonly conceived as a force that resists the change from rest or movement. The only thing that physics perceive in all this business is the displacement and the duration of it: mass as such is not perceptible. It is an entity that is posited in order to explain the empiri- cally perceivable data.
Since momentum is defined as the product of mass by acceleration, the moment implies all the force that is implicated in the mass. There- fore, it carries all the lack of content and all the tautological game of mirrors that the explanatory entity called force entails.
Since Einstein demonstrated that energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared, we have to say the same in regard to energy itself. All the lack of content which characterizes force enters in the definition with mass.
But even leaving that aside, it is perfectly obvious that energy is iden- tified with force, for it is commonly defined as the energy of carrying
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Logic and Natural Sciences 217
out work. Work is the effect, the observable phenomenon, the transla- tion of a body from a position to another that is even higher. In addition, we saw that force is commonly conceived as the capacity of producing certain observable effects: the 'power' of causing certain manifestation. It follows that energy, in perfect identity with that Newtonian force that physics naively believe to have abandoned, is a non-perceptible entity whose existence is posed in order to explain the empirically observable phenomena. This is why Hegel warned us that the concept of force "is the most prominent one" (GP III 84), stressing the fact that it is not prop- erly a concept but rather certain 'way of thinking'. What physics has made after Hegel is to shuffle in very different ways this same concept or lack of concept, in the hope of inventing new and different ideas.
By the way, what the popular formula of Einstein affirms is that mass transforms energy and vice versa: as statement that seemed to be fabulous in its times and which is still regarded so, but if physics with true scientific rigor demanded themselves true definitions with contents, that would not need to surprise anybody, for both mass and energy are always force: a posited explanatory entity that lacks content.
The only difference that exists consists in the diverse kind of mea- surements that scientists whimsically decide to carry out. However, one should notice that they are not measuring mass or energy themselves, in spite of the fact that they believe to be measuring that. In the case of mass, what they measure is the acceleration that a body suffers when certain force is applied to it, that means to say, they measure the space covered by the body in a given time; in other words, they measure a length and they divide it in a certain number of seconds. Best case sce- nario, what would be empirically measurable is length and that thing which physics call time: mass in itself is not perceptible or measurable. In the case of energy what they are measuring is work, that means to say, the distance along which a mass has been moved and the dura- tion of that movement; the bigger the distance the bigger the work; the bigger the time the smaller the work; length and time, that is what they measure; energy itself is not perceptible or measurable. It all depends on the imaginative combinations that physics make with length and time; they call one certain combination mass and the other energy; but that one combination transforms into another should not surprise any- body, since they are all mere multiplications and divisions that one can make with a pencil and a sheet of paper. Since they are only force, mass and energy themselves lack content; and no one should be surprised
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by the fact that a thing that lacks content is transformed into a thing that also lacks content.
Since 1860, and specially since 1890, the law of conservation of energy has become the touchstone of physics and perhaps of all natu- ral sciences up to the extent that Max von Laue says that one intends to deduce from it the rest of all natural laws and constructed an entire worldview around its form (cfr. Schilpp II 1970, 515). As for physics in particular goes, whoever studies these treatises corroborates that they are constructed upon Hamiltonian equations, and all what these supposes is that the sum of kinetic energy and potential energy is un- alterably conserved.
One can appreciate in Taylor and Wheeler to what extent the enthu- siasm for the law of conservation of energy has escalated. Defined in Newton's terms as the product of mass by speed, the momentum is not unalterably conserved in the collision of particles that travel near the speed of light. "We must therefore choose: We must abandon either the Newtonian expression for momentum or the law of conservation of momentum. The law of conservation of momentum has become so im- portant to us that we shift to it as a new foundation. We start with the law of conservation of momentum and from it derive the expression for momentum defined as that vector quantity which is conserved in all frames of reference. " (1966, 102)
In other words, momentum is defined as what is 'conserved'.
At first sight, the person that comes to us, boasting about his large scientific experiments, seems to possess a very profound knowledge of the universe, especially when he says to us that the existing quantity of energy in the world does not decrease or increase: it is always con- served in his opinion. His words are sonorous and impressive; but if we ask him what energy is, what that august, impressive and unalter- able thing is, he answers to us: what is conserved.
The law of conservation of energy has this grandiose content: one conserves what one conserves.
To make such statement one does not need to carry out the most elementary experiment; one does not need either to have any knowledge of reality whatsoever or to open his eyes to look at the world. One only needs certain intellectual masochism to take pleasure in tautologies.
The sharply tautological character of the law of conservation of energy was obvious before Taylor and Wheeler made their mortifying choice. If the term energy does not have content and yet one affirms
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that 'it' is conserved, the only thing we are told is that the 'it' is being conserved. And the proposition is summarized thus: one conserves what one conserves.
Since the first time it was formulated, such thesis was an a priori proposition which was by definition unverifiable. And if it refers to the quantity of energy in the entire universe, one would have to measure the quantity of energy in the entire universe: a task that cannot be com- pleted even by all humans. Even worse: they would have to measure it one minute later to see if it has not increased or diminished, some- thing which would require another team of humans just as numerous because the first team would has not yet finished its task. The law is also unverifiable by definition in the case that it refers to an isolated system or a tiny region in the universe. Even if we were to suppose that we would carry out a measurement in this instant and another one after ten minutes, the thesis would not be probed thereby, because the quantity of energy could augment in the meantime and return to its previous quantity in ten minutes. The verification would suppose the paroxysm of a measurement indefinitely repeated, which is something impossible not only for technical reason but by principle: the proccessus in indefinitum cannot be completed. Let alone the problem of defining what physics call an isolated system, because everything seems to indi- cate that they define it as a 'portion of the universe in which the energy does not increase or decrease', which would render us this wonderful definition: in a portion of the universe in which the energy does not increase or decrease, the energy does not increase or decrease. Indeed, they only know that a system is isolated because of the fact that the energy does not increase or decrease in it. As for the imaginary or real isolating surfaces that limit the system goes, physics only know that they are isolating it because in its interior the energy does not increase or decrease. Therefore, the insolently and sensational tautological for- mulation we just mentioned is unavoidable.
In the entire business of the conservation of energy we find tautolo- gies everywhere. If the particles --which according to the law should be created at a given instant because the observable particles have lost their energy-- are not observable, the physics hold that the new ones commence to exist 'virtually', not effectively nor observably; and then, of course, the sum of all the energies in the system remains unaltered. In order to keep the equality unaltered we can always imagine that the electron is surrounded by a cloud of 'virtual' photons: that is what
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Rosenfeld calls the "dressed electron" (EB 28, 250, 1-2). If we do not need this virtual energy to equalize the sum, then we will simply con- sider that the electron is 'undressed'.
If the number of things that I can call energy is unlimited, I do not have any problems whatsoever to make my results match. But, naturally, if they do not have any common denominator (and they do not have it, because they have not defined energy), if the unlikeness and heterogeneity between them is unlimited, what is conserved is an abstraction; the energy is perhaps the most abstract abstraction ever invented. In fact what is conserved is the capacity of the intellect for making abstractions; what is conserved is the spirit.
We have gone through the principal explanatory concepts that have come into vogue after the death of Hegel. In all of them one confirms the Hegelian demonstration of the tautological failure of all scientific explanations. It is impressive to see how quantum physics have ar- rived to the conclusion that the physical explanations have failed. It is not a change of paradigm, as Kuhn would want; it is something much more earnest, so earnest that Einstein died without accepting it, despite all the efforts of Bohr to convince him.
Classical physics 'explained' fundamentally by saying that there is nothing to explain: it explained by continuity between a past state and a present state of a physical system; quantum physics breaks with this continuity and hence it tears away the possibility of explanation. Margenau says correctly: "If there were gaps in this understanding, missing links in the chain of continuous action, the term causal would not be applied to it. " (1978, 175) What quantum physics discover is that there are leaks; they find that some links are missing. With regard to the luminous phenomena and their dependency on experimental devices, Bohr himself states: "this real situation obligates us to renounce to a rigorous causal explanation" (1964, 8).
Commenting Bohr, Weizsa? cker says:
. . . we are forced, not to renounce classical models, but to renounce models. Nothing like a quantum-mechanical model which replaces classical models and which then would admit of description of nature in terms of an explanation by the quantum-mechanical model, exists. (Bastin 1971, 326)
Now, if the physical explanation of the world has failed --and Hegel demonstrated that it had to fail-- then the only explanation of the
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world is the spirit, or, as it is expressed in the Science of Logic, the true of the essence is the concept (= spirit). Zubiri did not understand this. The concept 'force' --which, as we saw, is the most eminent of the explanatory concepts-- is in short a projection of the concept, which is known directly in the self-consciousness of the cause that determines itself, namely, the self-determination of the spirit. "Will is power in itself, and it is the essence of all power, both in nature and in spirit" (VG 113). "The subject is what is meaningful to itself and what is explained by itself" (A? sth I 435). Reason identified with method is the "supreme force or, more precisely, the only and absolute force [. . . ]
(WL II 486).
Whoever thinks he/she can explain differently the production of
something entirely new in the world is employing a concept of cause (III, 8) which cannot be given any meaning. How childish is the process by which some think a phenomenon is determined by another phe- nomenon --in a magical transmigration of properties-- indefinitely, without ever reaching a being that determines itself, and for that rea- son the entire set lacks determination and remains unexplained. The only source is the spirit: the being that determines itself.
The difficulty that some people bear to accept the Hegelian thesis is a problem of imagination only. We would like to say stress the merely imaginative character of this difficulty which is in itself a triviality but which is very widespread. They suppose that the world is "outside" from the spirit, and they do not realize that this expression lacks mean- ing completely, for the spirit is not a spatial thing of which one can speak of an inside and an outside. The objectors of Hegel are imaginatively creating distances and distinctions that do not even exist.
It is inspiring to see that a physic like Henry Margenau has under- stood that difficulties of such kind lack all kind of meaning:
"As the majority of scientists, Einstein did not solve the basic meta- physical problem that underlies all science, namely, the meaning of exteriority" (1978, 249).
If, in contrast to idealism, realism consists in saying that physical world is 'outside' from the spirit, then it is a thesis which does not have any meaning whatsoever.
Public opinion was shocked when the quantum physics experiments revealed that the electron becomes a bodkin only because the subject chooses to observe its position and that even, as Heisenberg said, "its size depends on the experiment that we carry out" (1930, 34). And
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this does not go only for quantum physics. As Eddington pointed out ". . . the relativity view is that a field of force can, like length and dura- tion, be nothing but a link between nature and the observer. " (1978, 43; orig. 1920) Max Born also said that "A gravitational field [. . . ] has no meaning at all independent of the choice of coordinates" (1962, 345). But the universal astonishment --even among the physics themselves-- evidently had as its cause the so-called belief according to which the world is 'outside' from the spirit, which is pure and sheer non-sense. And if Einstein himself was scared because he thought this was 'te- lepathy', then we can only conjecture that he was imagining that the physical remained far away from the spirit.
It has been a tremendous mistake to believe that Hegel denies the reality of the physical world. What he denies is that 'being real' means 'being outside'. It is the spirit what makes real the material, which means that the material is real. "Natural things are false existences; that does not mean they do not exist, but rather that they do not have their truth in themselves" (EGP 116).
5. probabiLity
Probability deserves a whole different treatment. According to some, it is a theory that is explanatory. Besides, it is a theory on which biology has a keen interest, especially in regard to evolution, which is our next subject.
A probabilistic law is imaginary projected as a real factor which is not empirical in itself but which 'explains the empirical' data. In a like manner as with determinism, one supposes that probability is a real en- tity that works among and in the things themselves, and that it causes some effects which are the phenomenon, which in this case is a certain frequency of events. Of course, the mirror game and the 'double see- ing' is just as true as the other allegedly explanatory entities which we have considered, because the probabilistic law has the same phenom- enon it aims to describe. In this point, there is no difference between a probabilistic and a necessary law, because one supposes that the ob- served frequencies necessarily follow from the 'objective probability': that is the myth of what is 'unpredictable but unavoidable' of Manfred Eigen. In the same line, Mario Bunge says the following: "In short, our version of QM is as deterministic as classical mechanics [. . . ] as soon as
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