No More Learning

7. interSubjectivity
We will now proceed to make explicit the third characterization of spirit, which was lying underneath the two former ones from the very start: intersubjectivity --which is, essentially, ethicity.
If, as we have seen, the subject consists in the awareness of the self, in that mental and ideal content called self-consciousness, then intersub- jectivity is essentially there from the very beginning, for it is obvious that a child does not manage to call himself a 'I', he does not gain awareness of his self --and thus, he is unable to create it for the first time-- until his mother (or somebody else) addresses him in such a way that, by personalizing him, he comes to realize that he is a person; analogously, by giving him responsibilities, he gradually becomes a responsible subject. In the awareness of the self that is being formed the awareness of the other is present in such a way that they are not only inseparable: they stand, in fact, in such a degree of mutual penetration
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that the child has awareness of himself by having awareness of other, and this intersubjective constitution of self-consciousness is always constant, because the consciousness of one's own identity is conscious- ness of one's own distinction with respect to others, and hence it is consciousness of others. Therefore, self-consciousness (i. e. the self) and the consciousness I have others nourish one another; they make each other exist, and, truly, one is the reason of being of the other. It follows from this that his third characterization does not pretend to point out an extrinsic cause of the self but rather its very being and its intrinsic constituent. Now, this consciousness of the others --which makes my self-consciousness-- is of an eminently ethical character. Its content is the following: I do not exist alone; the others also exist. The others are subjects --not objects-- just like I am one; I cannot confuse them with things that can be treated as means, because they are self-conscious- nesses just as me.
If this was not the content of the consciousness I have of the others, if it did not make me responsible, if it was not an exigency that guides my freedom by constituting it, it would not generate self-determi- nation and, therefore, it would not cause a self, for we saw before (III, 2) that, essentially, the self makes itself what it is. To this exigen- cy or imperative the self can answer in very different ways, in very different degrees of consent, in very different degrees of responsi- bility, but by answering to that exigency it provides itself with its own determinations. Furthermore, it conforms right from the start the mass of which moral substance is constituted --but that, of course, is only a metaphor, since we have seen that there is not a substratum. The self is not a material rock: its only real consistency is the mental and ideal content called self-consciousness, as well as the consciousness I have not only of my existence but of the existence of the others --which, most certainly, is the very moral content.
Let us not forget what we previously discussed (III 5). We said, following Kant, that there cannot be consciousness without self- consciousness. And we just added that there cannot be conscience without self-conscience. This is one of the most penetrating discover- ies; it is dated X, b. C. --as we will later see (VI, 1)-- and was made by an anonymous thinker who is called the Yahvist by the exegetes. Hegel takes his discovery extremely seriously.
The Hegelian formulations of our third characterization of spirit en- rich and complement our exposition. This thesis plays a fundamental
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role in the philosophy of Hegel, as it has been noticed by both his smartest (Laure, Mure, Stace), and his superficial (Hyppolite, Koje`ve, etcetera) commentators.
"Without a thou, the self is impossible" (JS 378).
"Spirit is essentially being for the spirit, and it is only spirit in so far in that it is for the spirit" (PR I 201).
"The true contrast that the spirit can have is spirit; only by means of its strangeness in itself can it reach the force of being spirit" (WG 535). The otherness refers to the 'you', the other. Otherness in itself means the consciousness-of-the-other that I have in myself. According to the Philosophy of History, only through it the spirit acquires the capacity of having a self and be properly a spirit. "the subject must turn to another
subject" (PR III 133).
"Self - consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact
that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowl- edged. " (PG 141)
"As consciousness, each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, and immediate being on its own account which at the same time is such only through this mediation. " (PG 143)
"Only in moral this concept of absolute individuality of conscious- ness exists and makes everything" (GP I 271).
"This ethical substance which constitutes the spirit, forms the life and the essence itself of individuality" (GP II 108).
"The ethical, the laws of freedoms, is the supreme and purest form of the spirit; according to its nature it is not something spiritual exterior to it; it is not something extrinsic or fortuitous, but only the nature of the spirit itself" (PR III 19s).
"That the right being in itself and being for itself, is what I am in the ethical substance; this is therefore the essence of selfconscious- ness". (PG 312)
The exigency, the imperative --which we stressed in the conscious- ness that the self has of the others-- imposes to the subject in embryo --the child that is turning to self-consciousness-- the moral necessity of suppressing his merely natural instincts, his animal instincts, for not only he but also the other self-consciousnesses exist in the world, and he cannot treat them as means: this is how a child ceases to be an animal and becomes a spirit. "The soul is spirit only through suppression of the natural willing, of the appetites. That happens when one is subject
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to the ethical, that is to say, by becoming accustomed to the ethical, so that it becomes the second nature of the individual" (PR II,178).
"Man is addressed with the exigency of not being as a natural will, of not being as what he by nature is". (PR III 107).
"The natural is rather what the spirit has to suppress" (GP II 107), "the natural man is egoist" (PR III 115s), "the naturality of the will is precisely the egoism of will" (PR III 116).
The essentially ethical and intersubjective character of the spirit is one of the fundamental theses of the phenomenology. One only needs to take a look at the first heading (A) of chapter six where Hegel deals explicitly with the subject that gives its title to the work: "the true spirit, the ethicity". Hegel says there: "The true spirit is the real and absolute being that holds itself together" (PG 314). As Lauer comments (1977, 92), this is the reason why the work was first called Science of the Experience of Consciousness, (cfr. PG 61) and under that title it was announced in the bibliographical bulletins of its time, but with its ulterior development it finally found its title in Phenomenology of Spirit.
Let us make a brief hermeneutical excursus. The aforementioned suppression of the instinctive egoism for having to work for all, the necessary repression of natural impulses and appetites (Begierde), is what makes the spirit of the slave more capable than the master of be- coming a true spirit, without forgetting that this dialectics (PG 141- 150) belongs to the past figures which, as Hegel warns us, are mere abstrac- tions that do not lead us to ethicity. In the chapters of the Encyclopedia that thoughtfully summarize this dialectic we find this explicit remark: "By serving his master the slave gradually demolishes his own priva- tive wants, suppressing the interior immediateness of his appetites" (EPW 435). In the Phenomenology itself, it is affirmed that in serving the conscience of the slave "suppresses in all its particular elements his attachment to the natural existence and he rules it out" (PG 148). The Encyclopedia says in more detail how this happens: "by means of the negation of immediacy, that is to say, the appetites" (EPW 434). The ethical character of this situation is analyzed in the Philosophy of Right, a propos of the institution of the family: "the egoism of the appe- tites transforms itself into the care and the acquisition for a collective, in something ethical". (RPH 170) Therefore, in order to affirm that work itself in its materialness is what, according to Hegel, transforms the slave, (asi? Marx en Me? xico, EB I 574 y Koje`ve 1947 passim) one needs to
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omit deliberately the key passages and substitute them with the own thoughts of the reader. End of the excursus.
The thesis according to which self-consciousness stems from in- tersubjectivity is not only obvious for what we know of child psy- chology. Anthropologists and sociologists have studied in detail the efficacy --in the formation of the individuals' selfhood-- of the 'roles' and the corresponding 'expectations' in a society. Only an immoral tendency could have sometimes prevented one from recognizing that the most basic expectations and the most fundamental roles are of a moral nature.
Let us consider this question: are there roles and expectations without which any kind of society or human community is not possible? For instance, I have the expectation of not being killed by those who come close to me for any given reason; I have the expectation of hearing the truth from those who talk to me; I expect that the others keep the promises they make, etcetera. These expectations impose the respec- tive roles, and all persons bear the same expectations in regard of me and impose me different roles. Without that no human community is possible. When a child incorporates to the preexisting intersubjectiv- ity, these roles and expectations shape and penetrate his subjectivity --and the moral character of the said roles and expectations is undis- putable. The more free-spirited anthropologists have showed this by referring to the most primitive human communities nowadays known. For instance, Robert Redfield says:
The point in which we must insist [. . . ] is that the nexus and the essen- tial order of society in such an early condition of humanity were moral. Humanity reached its enduring and characteristic nature as a multitude of different yet equivalent systems of relations and institutions, each of which was expression of their conception of the good. Each precivilized society was bound by certain ethical conceptions which were most of the time im- plicit but continuously carried out. (Rossi et al. , 1977, 291)
As we shall see later (VI, 2), the utilitarian dogmatism which in- terprets the individual search for self interest as the moral precepts without whose observance no society can exist, lacks significance and refutes itself.
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8. cauSaLity
Two objections had appeared against the characterization of the sub- ject that we previously presented in three steps: one objection is based on the concept of substance and the other on the concept of time. The last objection --which we will answer here-- is supposedly based on the concept of causality and emerges directly against self-determination, but since it is a frustrated attempt, it rests on the idea of natural law and physical necessity. This is the reason why we have postponed this discussion for the very moment in which we have reached the moral necessity called imperative. As we will later see, physical necessity lacks all meaning whatsoever, and the origin of the concept of neces- sity is precisely the moral imperative.
Against the characterization of the subject as pure act, the two former objections put forward the ideas of substance and time, only to collide against the fact that the only possible meaning that these two words can have is the activity itself of the spirit which they are attacking. Now, the same happens to those who put forward causality and necessity against self-determination: the only possible meaning of these words is constituted precisely by the reality they want to raise up against. The objection says that there cannot be self-determined beings since sci- ence holds as a fundamental principle that all phenomena are caused and determined by other phenomena; but the meaning of the verb 'to cause' remains here unexplained, unless one recurs to self-determina- tion, which means that one causes oneself his own determinations.
No one would be surprised today by what we just said if scientists had not taken refuge in their own conceptions, exempting themselves of knowing the contributions that the most piercing minds have ren- dered demonstratively to humanity. Indeed, Hume and Kant demon- strated once and for all that the concept of cause neither does nor can have an empirical meaning. Hume mocked all those who empirically perceive (or believe to perceive) a post and recklessly affirm a propter. There is so little logic in that recurrent ingenuity as is in someone who, at the sight of an ant, would say that such thing is an elephant. If the succeeding from one event to the other meant that there is a causal relationship between the two, we would have to affirm that the night is the cause of the day, because the event called day regularly succeeds the event called night.
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Hume says: "Shall we then rest contented with these two relations of contiguity and succession, as affording a complete idea of causation? By no means. An object may be contiguous and prior to another, with- out being considered as its cause. " (Treatise of Human Nature, I, III, xiv)
Kant simply is analyzing the undeniable content of the concept of cause when he affirms that it is impossible to grant this concept an empirical meaning:
Sensible phenomena provide certainly cases by means of which a rule is possible according to which something happens habitually, but never that such a result is necessary: it follows that the synthesis of cause and effect has a dignity that cannot be expressed empirically, namely, that the effect not only is added to the cause, but rather is put by and follows from it (KRV B124).
It is important to repeat in this context a warning that we made be- fore (II, 3). Although it may be valid in some case to infer a causal rela- tion on the grounds of empirical data, it does not follow from this that what is inferred is an empirical data. Quite the contrary: it is necessary to make this inference, because it was not among the empirical data. By the way, the meaning of the concept whose realization we infer has to be taken from somewhere else, since this meaning does not match any of the empirical data available.
In any case, the fact that B is contiguous to A or that it occurs after A does not mean that B is an effect of A. Contiguity and causality are not synonyms. Temporal succession and causality are not synonyms. Replacing surreptitiously one for the other is always a sophistic maneuver
To add B to A could be an empirical data. From that one could infer that B is an effect of A if he finds the corresponding thesis and demon- strates them. But that does not mean that being an effect is an empirical data. On the contrary, the proof that this is not the case is that it was necessary to infer that. An empirical data does not need to be inferred, since it is already given.
By the by, these inferences would be pointless pursuits if one does not define the meaning of 'effect', since we would not understand what has been inferred.
But there is something worse: there are no adequate premises, the inference is invalid. Although it were empirical --as unreflective sci- entists assume-- that B is always added to A, it is not possible to build a legitimate inference by means of which we deduce a causal relation
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between A and B. They will reply: it will be too much chance that there was no causal relation. However, I answer them: precisely this reason- ing shows that they are using an entire theory to legitimate the infer- ence and that the causal relation is not an empirical data, but that theory is false, because the night always is added to the day and nevertheless there is no causal relation between the day and the night, and it is use- less to say that this constant succession would be too hazardous if there was no causal relation; this does not exist, despite all the theories of causality they may come up with. In addition, an 'always' is not an empirical data.
And it is also pointless that they employ the recourse of saying 'we understand by causal relation a constant succession'. It is simply false that they understand that, because they do not understand that the day is not the cause of the night.
What we have said shows that causality is not an empirical data --something that was already demonstrated by Hume and Kant. Now, it follows from this that only self-consciousness can give meaning to the concept of cause. But the only cause we know by self-conscious- ness is the cause that determines itself. Therefore, one cannot put forward against determination a concept whose only meaning is self- determination.
A disturbing but logically unavoidable conclusion is that if we attri- bute causality to other kinds of processes and realities, we only do this in a derived, deficient and diminished way. And even this softened attribution is probably not entirely justified.
Since they did not venture to read Hegel, both the enemies and the champions of free will believed --as an undisputable fact-- that free will is incompatible with causal processes. The first ones denied the existence of free will because they thought that the entire universe consisted in causal processes; the second ones affirmed it by saying that there are free processes in the world besides causal ones. But all the controversy rested on a concept of cause that does not exist. The only true cause is that which determines itself, i. e. the free will.
No one in fact thinks something defined when one uses the word 'cause' in reference to material phenomena, not even in the case in which a moving body collides with another and the latter starts to move. One says 'cause' as if it were some sort of 'hocus pocus'. When vulgar or professional philosophers and scientists believe to have ex- plained an event only by saying that it was 'caused' by some other
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event, they are really explaining obscurum per obscuris. What could it possibly mean that a being 'makes being' another being? How is it pos- sible that the property or characteristic of a being 'transmigrates' and suddenly becomes the property or the characteristic of another object? What kind of metaphysical monster is that which was first an accident, then a substance for a moment of transmigration migration, and finally becomes an accident of another substance?
"The relation called influx belongs to vulgar philosophy. Since one cannot understand how material particles and immaterial qualities can pass from one substance to the other, one must abandon such a repre- sentation" (GP III 240).
The evidently mysterious and magical character of the transmigra- tions mentioned above did not prevent Hobbes and Huygens in the 17th century, Lord Kevin in the 19th century, and the molecular biologists of our century, from playing with billiard balls, as if the movement of the first could explain the movement of the second only because there was 'contact' between them. Furthermore, this illusion of the explana- tory force of something that is in fact more mysterious than that which was being explained underlies the grounding of the entire corpuscu- lar theory of matter, which tried to reduce everything to the clashes between marbles. And all the present efforts from the General Rela- tivity onwards of abolishing Newtonian actions by substituting them with different kinds of 'contact' are still trapped within the disastrous Kelvinian framework; meanwhile, the scientists stubbornly persist to explain the obscure with the darker.
If one replies that the property which first was in one being and then in another is not numerically the same, the magical character and the lack of all explanation become all the more clear: from the fact that a be- ing has some characteristics one invalidly proceeds to say that the other being has such characteristics only by mentioning the word 'cause'. How does this marvel occur is something that remains unexplained; one thinks it is enough to say that one is the cause of the other.
And if it is numerically the same property, the circumstance of the contact does not make more comprehensible the mysterious fact that the characteristic of an object --despite the fact that we are talking of the individual entity itself of that object -- becomes a property and the indi- vidual entity itself of an object that is different from the former one. We must remember: contiguity is not a synonym of causality. Hume had already remarked this: "Motion in the second billiard-ball is a quite
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distinct event from motion in the first; nor is there anything in the one to suggest the smallest hint of the other. " (Enquiry IV, I)
Despite the degree of contiguity of two beings, everything remains unexplained unless one says how one acts upon the other. Therefore, the contact itself is not decisive. And if it does act, then that causality would be what builds up the explanation. For that purpose, contact itself is completely irrelevant.
But precisely this term of causation lacks all intelligible meaning without the reference to self-determination; as we saw with Kant (III 2), self-determination is the most intelligible of all the contents that the mind can understand. What happens to a billiard ball is by no means explained by reference to what happens in some other ball. To say that what happens in a material object is the cause of what happens in an- other object equals to pronounce a spell without providing any intel- ligible content.
The root of this widespread Kelvinian mistake is twofold: first, one believes that what is frequent (everything that simply occurs), does not need an explanation; second, one incurs completely in the sophism de- nounced by Hume: post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
Since the ball always moves after a contact, one believes that this fact, only because it always occurs, does not need an explanation. But true science is characterized by the search of the most ordinary and common facts, that is to say, the facts that always occur. For instance, the theory of gravitation tries to explain the fact that a stone falls to the ground when we drop it. Likewise, the tides are always shifting, but only geology tries strenuously to explain that movement. We already pointed out that if we ask 'why are there black clouds when it thun- ders? ', and one answers us that 'every time that thunders there are black clouds', no one has explained anything.
But what is decisive is that the Kelvinian mentality incurs in the tre- mendous sophism denounced by Hume. Since the second ball moves after the contact, the Kelvinian mind affirms: it moves due to the con- tact. We do not need to repeat that such procedure is as illegitimate as saying that an ant is an elephant, nor that with such a justification we would have to affirm that the night is cause of the day, nor that it is pointless to say that, if the second ball moves after the contact, it would be too much coincidence that this was not provoked by the contact; for we could also say that, if the day succeeds the night, it would be too much coincidence that this did not happen due to the night.
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As if the previous examples were not enough, modern physics has provided us with another argument against the explanation by con- tact: the contact does not exist. This is a thesis worth looking at more closely .
The fields of repulsive force prevent that two bodies touch between them, and this happens even when the vulgar mind believes to be wit- nessing a clash. I quote the mechanical engineer Malcolm McChesney:
In any real gas, even a binary collision --one between two particles only-- is a complicated process, because each particle is surrounded by a force field that varies in space. This force field is such that it attracts another par- ticle when that other particle is relatively far away but repels it when the other particle comes relatively close. That these intermolecular forces exist is evident from the fact that gases do condense into liquids, a phenomenon that cannot be explained except as a consequence of attractive forces at work between the particles. (EB 23, 697, 2)
McChesney even says this in regard of the explanations of clashes between bodkins:
"The particle description of gases grew from ideas in the 17th and 18th centuries concerning special aspects of the collective behavior of structureless gas particles that were supposed to have no surrounding force fields. " (EB 23, 699, 1)
In Physics one cannot speak of contact anymore, except only when this consists of the forces of a body that act on the other, i. e. one exerts causality upon the other. But then, something very disappointing hap- pens: they wanted to explain causality by means of contact, when in fact contact is explained by causality. One employed supposedly a con- cept in order to make causality intelligible, when in fact the only pos- sible contact would be intelligible if causality was intelligible. This is a bold circularity that confirms what we have been saying; one does not think in something definite when one uses the word cause.
There is another conclusion in regard to the efforts of General Rela- tivity mentioned before --and the more recent ones, based on spaces of eleven dimensions-- which aim to overcome the Newtonian action at distance. If they conceive distance as the negation of contact, that equals the negation of causality, in other words, the negation of the action of a body upon another body. Therefore, the action at a distance turns out to be a strictly contradictory term that lacks content, for that content
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would be action without action. What the relativists are challenging is nothing more than a ghost.
The true problem is not --as the Scholastic philosophers also be- lieved-- the action at a distance, but rather action in itself and causality. And in that regard, physics have nothing substantial to say, because it is impossible to define causality on the physical level. The only causality that we know is the self-determination of the spirit, which really pro- duces new experiences and determinations that did not previously exist. To use the term causality with this point of reference is only to be juggling with words.
For that reason, spirit is the only possible meaning of the word time, since as we saw in Aristotle, there cannot be time where there is no real change, i. e. , the production of something new, and this is why Physics --which lacks the concept of causality-- had no other option than to misunderstand time, confusing it with space.
One could vaguely foresee this when Einstein tried to reduce time to causation. His unexpressed principle was: Propter hoc, ergo post hoc. But since in Einstein --as in all Physics-- causation is not really causa- tion or production of something new, this utterance remained barren. As we saw, the time of Einstein is even reversible because it is nothing more than space. That Einstein does not understand by causation the production of something new is seen in his quest for some sort of contact, suppressing distance by the curvature of space and the false mathematical continuity of the field. One must say emphatically that the Kelvinian explanation by contact presupposes that nothing new is produced: the movement of the first billiard ball is simply transmitted to the second one. Parmenides ho! Nihil fit, nihil movetur!
All the 'explanations' of Physics converge in some conservation principle: everything is conserved; there is nothing new.
As we saw, the subsequent mistake is that --following Parmenides-- they have confounded being with nothingness. Nothingness, indeed, does not change. It neither increases nor diminishes. On the contrary, the true being, which is the constant self-determination of the spirit, consists in producing genuinely new determinations because it only exists in doing that.
This is why Aristotle said that the atomists lacked the 'origin of movement'. As many commentators have noted, the atoms of Leucip- pus and Democritus aim primarily to be the being of Parmenides in miniature, which is tantamount to say that nothing changes. Now, the
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same thing has happened to all physics. All what the Parmenidian 'ex- planations' by conservation --that is to say, by identity-- do is to deny that there is something to explain: nothing changes, there is nothing new. Thus there is no time or causality which can be properly called as such. Physics can use the word causality; since they do not need the real causality, they do not give this word any meaning at all.
In balance, thus, causality without content cannot help to challenge self-determination; whether it has content or not, this causality not only does not challenge self-determination: they are identical.
9. naturaL Law
Consequently, in order to keep denying the concept of self-determina- tion, what some scientists have done is to renounce de facto to the concept of causality and instead they brandish the notion of natural laws.
All modern sciences entrench themselves in the caste of natural law; all the efforts aim 'to discover' this law, and they lay in that the en- tire scientificity of their disciplines. But they do not manage to define by empirical means what a law or a nomological proposition is, and hence no one knows what they are taking about. Now, if the meaning of this word is not empirical, then it must come from self-conscious- ness, which leads us directly to the moral imperative described by our third characterization of spirit, and is precisely what the empirical disciplines wanted to avoid.
To tell the truth, it is a perfectly documented fact that the word law --I refer, evidently, to ancient tongues-- was employed in a moral and juridical sense a millennium before it was being used by Physics. The code of Hammurabi, which dates back to the 18TH century b. C.