No More Learning

Almost all the technology of the prehistoric man was based on mis- taken assumptions, and yet it had sensational successes, which are in fact more important than those of modern technology. Among the successes of the former we find the wheel, the plough, the slingshot, the knife, the hybridization of seeds, navigation, fire and agriculture. I do not stop here to give a detailed account of the mythological ideas which lead the prehistoric man to those monumental inventions; let us only say that the aqueduct was invented by men who held the belief that the Nile was a god.
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Moreover, concepts are not even needed for practical efficiency, like we see in the case of animals, whose technique is often much more refined and skillful than ours. Our aeronautics makes an effort that is still clumsy and rigid to imitate the wings of birds, their plasticity and their adaptability to different circumstances and purposes. Man has not yet invented such delicate radar as that of bats and many fishes, or such heat-detecting mechanism as that of reptiles. If one does not need theories to achieve efficiency and practical success, there can be efficacy with mistaken theories, for the result does not depend upon them. The same goes to tautological theories with no grip of reality: this is the most recurrent case in physics. A tautological theory equals to no theory at all. No theory at all is what animals have. As we have men- tioned before, it has not even been proved that the said preposition has a meaning. Hegel warned us thus: "regardless of whether they have in and by themselves any real meaning". (WL I 276)
The least we ask scientists for is that they know what they are talking about, that is to say, that one understands them. That is the exigency of Hegel. Critics overlooked the fact that the verb begreifen means pre- cisely 'to understand'. This is only one example among many. Ripalda translated it as 'to grab' and Lauer as 'to come to grips with'. All at once they let escape the only exigency of the work of Hegel, the one that makes science a scicentia, knowledge and understanding of things. Strict logic consists in the exigency according to which we must go from one determination to another, because the first determination is not understood but the second one is. This second determination is at least closer to the true concept, which is the only thing that can be re- ally understood.
I do not want to stop for long in this question which is merely in- terpretative. The key to this puzzle is that commentators suppose that one can understand something without begreifen. Even polemically, the following text rules out ex professo that possibility:
According to Kant:
the concepts of reason must serve to begreifen, the ones of the intellect to understand (verstehen) perceptions. However, if the second ones are truly concepts, they are concepts then, by means of which one conceptualizes, and to understand (verstehen) the perceptions by means of concepts of the intellect would be a begreifen (WL II 407).
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Everybody recognizes that the verb verstehen means to understand. This passage explicitly denies the existence of a verstehen that is not a begreifen, something that the critics who do not translate begreifen as 'understanding' assume.
I would like to quote one more text in regard to the subject of cau- sality, for in those discussions the word influx is often used. Hegel holds that such word must be abandoned because it cannot be understood (as in begreifen). Should we translate begreifen in any other way, the ar- gument would lack strength and even sense: "The relation of the influ- ence is a relation of vulgar Philosophy. However, since one cannot understand (begreifen) how can material particles and qualities pass from one substance to another, such representation must be aban- doned" (GP III 240).
Thus we could quote innumerable passages, but this is a question only of interpretation, and our real efforts concern demonstrations. For the rest, the first quoted text settles the interpretative question, since it explicitly denies what mistaken commentators and translators need to presuppose.
What we have said about the way out refutes the coup d'e? tat apo- dictically. Such a coup d'e? tat is ludicrous: it shies away from the con- sideration of the subject because, according to scientists, they refer to reality, to the object; but, as a matter of fact, they only refer to the words, without knowing what they mean and with no intention of finding the meaning out, for that pursuit will require to take the sub- ject into account.
But by their pursuing that way out in their particular conclusions will make our argument even more incisive.
For instance, they say that science only knows the object and not the subject. But in that same phrase they are referring to something else than the object: science. They say they only know about the object, but they claim simultaneously to know about science, which is not the object. The key proposition turns out to be of the same nature as that of the liar's paradox: it is false because it is contradictory. Therefore, it is false that science only knows about the object.
They say that we only know the empirical, but therewith they make explicit a claim about something that is not sensible: knowledge. They build up a great thesis about knowledge and hold at the same time that they do not know anything about knowledge. They pretend to say nothing about knowledge but in fact they do: "the contradiction of a
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true which cannot be true at the same time" (WL II 441). They say that we cannot distinguish between scientific knowledge and unscientific knowledge, but they also say that we do not know anything about that knowledge.
They say science should only deal with what is perceived by means of sensation. But that sentence makes no sense if they do not define sen- sation. And sensation is definitely not perceived by sensation. Hence, they do not know what they are saying insofar they do not deal with something that is not perceived by sensation. Who knows what the phrase means with which they intend to carry out a coup d'e? tat against the subject?
The most common thing to say is that we should deal with objects, not with the subject. But it is impossible to define 'object' without dealing with the subject.
In fact, they characterize every attempt to define object by means of the negation of the subject, that is to say, by means of contrast with the subject, and consequently they deal with the subject. And this is not something to be surprised about, since, naturally, the thing the subject knows more of is the subject himself; and, in every definition, he who defines should be more known than the definiendum. That is the crucial point of all the discussion, and scientists do not make up their minds to face it: the object (and the same happens with that of 'body') is one of the most abstract, devoid of content notions there are. All they can do is to define it in negative terms: everything that is not spirit, i. e. that which is not determined by itself, "the other of the spirit" (WL I 105).
It is obvious that they cannot define object (or body) as 'what is seen', for, to put an example, although electrons cannot be seen, and they are supposedly to be objects. Electromagnetic fields are not seen and one includes them among other objects. It would be pointless to say that object (or body) is what is seen in itself or in its effects, for one also sees the effects of the soul, in other words, the effects of the subject, i. e. a wave with the hand. The definition of the object would have to distinguish between object and subject, between what is corporeal and incorporeal in itself and not in its effects, for if it is only necessary that the effects are sensible, one could confidently say that everybody has a soul, and hence it would be false to say that science does not deal with the subject. But there is a stronger objection: if they say 'effects', they have to define that word and also causality; but causality, as Hume and Kant have demonstrated and as we will see in our next chapter, is not
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an empirical data and can only be defined in function of the subject. The fictional causality of the physics, which consists in the succession of one object after the other, cannot be applied here, for the so-called 'effect' is a phenomenon; the so-called cause, the electromagnetic field and the electron are not an object: they are not seen.
We have stepped into another variant of the coup d'e? tat: we are dealing here with the material.
Let us repeat the objection: the material is a completely negative no- tion; its only content is that 'it is not spirit'; therefore, to designate a meaning to this new expression of the way-out, they would need to indicate what spirit is and deal with it.
It is true: to the coffee philosophy, lover of the banal, language indi- cates the opposite: the immaterial seems to be a mere negation of the material. And even theologians often incur in such a platitude. They forget what Hegel warns us repeatedly, "the language of ordinary life is made for the world of imagination" (WL II 357), not for the world of concepts which we are examining here. In regard to the world of concepts, Plotinus had already pointed out this very well: "The matter is only through abstraction of the other. That which remains when we take ideas aside, we say it is matter (Hegel GP II 459),
Hegel makes valid the same claim: "When one abstracts every de- terminations and every form of something, what remains is undeter- mined matter. Matter is simply an abstraction" (WL II 70).
It is useless that they say: we understand by matter something else. For they are not understanding anything when they say the word matters. So much so that they do not have the concept and they cannot define it.
It is an abstraction that has been laboriously fabricated by means of negations. For this reason Hegel says: "even physics have come to odds with matter recently" (EPW 389 A). If it is only a mere abstraction, abstractions only exist in the mind, and here we go again back to the subject, that which was tried to be deleted.
The process of rarification of matter in hands of scientists has con- tinued after Hegel at a greater speed. For instance, Taylor and Wheeler explicitly recognize this:
"The best current thinking does not claim that particles are not built out of spacetime" (1966, 193).
The matter of scientists consists in space and time. Could there be a more abstract entity than this? Of the possible attributes of matter the
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only thing that has been retained is spatial location; the other ones have been relegated to the kingdom of shadows, because they would only consist in some relation with the cognitive organs; but what is it that fills space is not said; it remains as a mere negation; matter is what the spirit is not.
Historically speaking, it should be obvious that man would have never called something material if it was not by contrast with some- thing that is not material. We simply would have not come to the idea of calling something material. The same happens with the pair 'exterior-interior': we would have never called the empirical world exterior due to anything else than the contrast with something inte- rior. To affirm that only the material exists is one of those funny theses that in order to have meaning needs to be false. For we would not understand it if we did not know something, in contrast, by which the word 'material' makes sense. It is like with the thesis that states that everything is inexistent: we would not understand it if we did not know something existent.
While making a history of natural religions, Hegel correctly point out that in the ancient Orient "the interior and the exterior are not yet separated, nor the spiritual and the natural" (WG 269).
To the prosaic point of view of nature --as that of the perceiving intellect--, the distinction between something purely natural and something purely spiritual, the intellectual observation of nature with which we look at the empirical is something that comes only very late afterwards, since it re- quires a superior return of reflection over itself. Only when the spirit has autonomously affirmed itself as independent of nature, only then nature presents itself to him as the other, as something exterior. (PR I 203s).
Humanity would have never called something material nor would have given this word any meaning at all, if the knowing subject did not know himself as spiritual. The negative morphology of the word 'im- material' is a bait only taken by the inexperienced.
The attempt to define the material without the subject often states that the material is the extended, and the extended is what has parts. Despite that empirical impressions of taste and smell do not have parts and yet we call them both material --which makes more obvious that being material is not the same as to have parts-- it is not clear that modern physics is willing to remain loyal to a definition according to
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80 Hegel was right
which the material is that which has parts. If physics find some par- ticle or phenomenon that does not have parts, they would still call it material without hesitation, which makes all the more clear that, to them and everybody that reflects a little upon the subject, the material means exclusively that which is not spirit and does not determine it- self. Furthermore, they have already found that phenomenon or mate- rial reality that has no parts: what characterizes the quantum of Planck is precisely that it is not divisible. And no one doubts that it is material.
But the worse surprise for the authors of the aforementioned, tradi- tionally-aimed attempt of definition is that the word 'part' cannot be defined but in function of the spirit (cfr. WL II 138-144; EPW 136 A).
In the material the whole-parts relation does not have objective meaning. Evidently, these two terms are correlative, the former falls in the definition of the latter and vice versa; nothing can be called a whole if it does not have parts, and nothing can be called a part without a whole. By no means two things can be called parts just for being juxtaposed; likewise, by no means something can be called a 'whole' just because we subjectively encompass two things by our eyesight as if they were a whole or parts of a whole. If each of them can exist on their own, they cannot be part of something else. What is objective are not 'as ifs'.
He who calls part a region, a blob or a stain that he imagines becomes a prey of his own imagination. If that region can keep itself in being, then it is an entity on its own account and not a part. That something is a whole does not consist in our encompassing it by our eyesight or our imagination, for we could encompass thus multitudes of different beings which do not have anything to do together and which are not parts.
There can be no real distinction between whole and parts, which is demonstrated by the above mentioned fact that the former falls in the definition of the latter and vice versa. If it was a real distinction, then the whole would not be a whole and the parts would not be parts. Being a part consists in being simultaneously identical and different form the whole, which is impossible in the material and can only be realized in the spirit. As we will see in our next chapter, the subject consists in the multiple determinations that he gives to himself, and does not consist in any other thing "the self is, thus, the completely simple and at the same time a multitude, a richness in itself" (EGP 277). In the realm of nature, only the organism can be --and, by the way, in a vulgar and diminished sense-- fulfillment of the whole-parts relation; but the organic is not what is merely extended and material anymore.
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It has been an illusion to define the extended as that which has parts, because the segments of the extended are nor parts in reality, each of them is an entity that exists on its own account; and our encompassing view cannot make material things be what they are not. Consequently, someone would be inclined to define the extended as 'what we per- ceive as extended', but aside from that evident circularity that defines nothing, the subject reappears in what we 'perceive', and that is pre- cisely what they wanted to scare away.
Once the attempt to define the material as the extended is frustrat- ed, one could want to define it as the sensible; but that would be to incur once again in the maneuver 'we only know the sensible', which has been deemed a fraudulent relative of the liar's paradox. In addi- tion, as curious data, the sensible does not have a common sensible denominator or referent to the object; smells, sounds, and colors are among the most heterogeneous things we may find. The only common denominator between them is that they are perceived by the subject in a non-intellectual operation. Therefore, the general expression 'the sensible' does not have meaning without reference to the subject --that very same subject that they want to scare away. In sum, the material can only be defined as "the other of the spirit".
We have referred to the frustrated attempt to define it as that 'which occupies space'. It is obvious that such pseudo-definition does not tell us what the material is in itself, but only attends to an extrinsic relation that leaves us as ignorant as before. Since there is no intrinsic content, we would be rightly entitled to say that nothingness occupies space. The authors or this pseudo-definition have to provide a content if they want to distinguish between the material and nothingness. But there is something even worse: they would have to define space, an enterprise in which they fail because space is not an empirical data, and hence they cannot point out something with the finger as if that was a defi- nition. If they define space as "what is occupied by matter", the circu- larity would be outrageous, and neither we nor they would know what the material is. Other aims to define space employ the word extension, but we already made clear that they cannot define it.
Leaving aside the variant of coup d'e? tat that says 'we refer to the ma- terial', let us now move to the more interesting one: 'we refer to the real, we are not interested in the subject. '
The solution to this problem, which is, by the way, of utmost im- portance, lies in clarifying what does the expression 'the real' mean.
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Otherwise, neither the authors of the coup d'e? tat nor we would know what they are talking about. All metaphysics, considered as science of being, is here at stake. Scholastic Philosophers also believed that they could understand being without studying the subject, a supposition that makes their entire system perishable.
It would be a relapse, of course, to define the real as 'the empirical'. We refuted those who adopt that position. Electrons and electromag- netic fields are not empirical and yet the promoters of this coup d'e? tat consider these organs to be real. Not to mention that there are empiri- cal data in hallucinations and these very gentlemen consider that no reality corresponds to those data: it is clear that even they distinguish between reality and the empirical data. Consequently, it is false that they understand the sensible.
When they say that they refer to the real and that the subject does not interest them, it is obvious that they are uncritically assuming the recurrent and frivolous conception according to which the real can be defined independently from the self. This definition revolts furiously against itself as a tornado. They are actually defining the real in func- tion of the self. The more independently the real is defined from the self, the more dependent the former becomes to the latter. Without the content of the 'self' it is impossible that something 'distinct from the self has meaning. ' "For the self is that which explains and has a mean- ing by itself. " (A? sth II 435).
There is a very similar definition, which deserves to be commented here because it detonates, with all its explosiveness, the problem we are dealing with. It states: the real is what is outside the mind, outside of thought.
The time has arrived to settle this question once and for all: since thought is neither something spatial nor a tub nor a salon, the expression 'outside of thought' lacks any kind of meaning.
Hegel says: "it is not outside of thought, but the thought from out- side of thought". (GP III 145).
It is useless for them to say that what they mean is 'outside the head', for the encephalic mass and the hypothalamus are inside the head, and these gentlemen consider them to be real. Going back to the first defi- nition, he who defines the real as what is distinguished from the self: does he suppose that the self is real or unreal? In the first case, it is false because the self is not distinguished from the self and yet it is real. In the second one, the definition thereby advanced tries to define the real
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in terms of the unreal, which is an absurd, for the definiendum would lack any characteristic content of the real, and we would still not know what "the real" means. It is obvious that the real would have to be de- fined in function of the real and not vice versa.
But against all their intentions, this recurrent conception hits the mark with the main point: it is impossible to define the real indepen- dently from the self. If the characteristic content of the real is contained in the definiendum due to the relation with the self, the only content possible is this: the self.
We could have conjectured this even a priori: there is nothing more real to the self than the self itself. Which other meaning could the terms 'real' or 'being' have other than 'self'? The first being we know is known to us by means of introspection: "Because in thinking the spirit knows itself as truly existent and real" (GP I 377).
This conclusion should not surprise us, for the present chapter has demonstrated that the cause of the concepts is not exterior and that their origin is not an empirical data. Moreover, the meaning of 'being' is not an empirical data. Neither color nor smell means 'being'. Hegel says: "one cannot see or smell the being". (GP I 517).
[. . . ] the distinction between he who feels and what he has felt, between the touching subject and the touched object, as well as the relation which con- sists in that the object cause an impression in the subject, and this is affected by the object and the object is cause or stimulus, etcetera. None of these distinctions belongs to the point of view of sensation itself, but they all be- long to a posterior reflection of the soul when it has determined itself as self and spirit - [. . . ] this a distinction that does not concern sensation as such (BS 542).
Our next chapter will turn back again to the subject of 'being', but here it is fit to say that Thomas Aquinas had already noticed that being is not an empirical data: "Although there is being in the sensible things, being as such, the formality of being, is not apprehended by the senses [. . . ], since they only apprehend the sensible accidents". (I Sent 19, 5, 1 ad 6um).
Kant also noticed this: "the being of a real object outside of me [. . . ] is never given by perception, but can only be added by thought to per- ception" (KRV A367).
Likewise, Aristotle said: "nor indeed can any of the 'intelligibles', e. g. Unity or Being, be an element; for these apply in every case, even to composite things". (Met XII 1070b 7).
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And Plato as well stated: "Then knowledge is not in the sensations, but in the process of reasoning about them; for it is possible, apparently, to apprehend being and truth by reasoning, but not by sensation. " (Teethetus 186 D). Also Fedon 65 C, and Fedro 247 C
All this authors only base themselves on intellectual honesty of analysis: should we strictly refer to empirical data only, we would have never come up with the idea of being, with the idea that something is real. Of course the object is real; but the senses do not provide us with such metaphysical and perceptive ideas.
It is inevitable to remember the warning we made against the stub- born illusion of those who believe that, for a concept to take form in the mind, it is enough that the object that lies before us is as that concept describes it.
There is no harm in saying that also the empiricists tell us that sensibility does not capture the being as such. For instance, Hume said: ". . . tho' every impression and idea we remember be considered as existent, the idea of existence is not deriv'd from any particular impression. " (Treatise I, II, v i).
Believing the dogma that one can only demonstrate by means of empirical impressions, Popper says: "My thesis is that realism is nei- ther demonstrable nor refutable. " (1973, 38). The idea of Popper is the following one: if the real as such were a sensible data, we could dem- onstrate by sensible data that a reality corresponds to our subjective impressions.
Carnap is also explicit: ". . . the ascription of the property 'real' to any substance (be it matter, energy, electromagnetic field, or what- ever) cannot be derived from any experience and hence would be metaphysical. " (1969, 287)
In short, because the character of 'the real' is not an empirical data, the meaning of this term can only be obtained by introspection and identified with the existence itself of the subject. Real means: like the subject. What happens is that those, who believe that by a coup d'e? tat they only refer to the real in order to do away with the subject, end up emitting meaningless sounds if they do not define real, and if they do define it, they flagrantly return to the subject.
In the light of this result, the authors who evade the subject will decide to take a strategic turn of one hundred eighty degrees and deny that the human mind is capable of knowing reality. This negation is void skepticism, the most modern shape that the Kantian thesis of
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