No More Learning

3. infinite and univerSaL
Infinite is the spirit. Every spirit, "since there cannot be two classes of reason or two classes of spirit" (PR I 43).
This is a necessary consequence of what we have said: since the con- cept of infinite cannot be empirical or imaginary, its origin cannot be sensibility or imagination; therefore, its origin is self-consciousness. But what we know by self-consciousness is the spirit. It follows that the meaning of the said concept is the spirit.
When it comes to the spirit, the point of departure has to be --as Hegel affirms emphatically-- the immensely meritorious contribution of Spinoza: every determination is negation; every peculiarity is limi- tation. Nevertheless, Spinoza did not understand that, if the limit is negation, the infinite is negation of negation.
When I published my previous work I had not yet realized that fini- tum and determinatum are passive past participles. If we say that some- one is infinite, what we are actually doing is denying that this person has been determined, for he is giving himself determinations, that is to say, he is self-determining himself. Infinitude is self-determination.
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"The spirit is not natural; it is only that which he makes of itself" (GP II 494).
Infinite is what is not determined by nature but what gives itself its own determinations which he can wipe out and replace with other ones. "Freedom consists precisely in the indetermination of the will, that is to say, the will does have in itself any natural determination. This is why it is in itself a universal will" (NH 224). "This absolute unity of individuality and universality called the self" (JLMN 163).
"The infinitude is the self-determination which refers to itself, the posing of an immanent and own determination, which is truly some- thing indifferent for he who poses it" (NH 87s).
"The practical spirit (moral) is first and foremost free will in the sense in which the self can abstract from any determination in which he is, and in any determination he remains undetermined and identical with himself" (NH 57).
We showed (III 7) that self-determination consists precisely in moral; the appearances are only natural determinations; self-determination consists precisely in not letting them to determine the self; this task is only for the self to do.
"The awareness of freedom contains the understanding that the sub- ject has of himself as a person, that means to say, as a universal in his individuality, as something which is capable of making abstraction of everything particular and of laying it down as an infinite" (VG 175).
The last thing we said should not be understood as if we were talking as potential infinitude, that is to say, as if infinitude consisted in the spirit's capacity of having all the determinations. It is the other way around: Determination is limit, negation. The infinitude is negation of that negation. The spirit is infinite because it does not have determi- nations "he is only what he makes himself being" (GP II 494).
In itself, the spirit does not have limits, and that is the definition of infinite: that which has no limits. As Hegel says, the limits and the de- terminations that he gives to himself are indifferent to it. In fact, they do not limit him, because he can do without them whenever he wants. Even in the act of giving itself certain determination or peculiarity, the spirit manifests its infinite and universal nature, for he could give itself this one instead of that one; these determinations do not deter- mine the spirit; it holds the dominion over his own acts. "By virtue of this original unity it follows, in the first place, that the first negative, or the determination, is not a limitation for the universal which, on the
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contrary, maintains itself therein and is positively identical with itself. " (WL II 241)
It is useless to object that such thing is not what is commonly under- stood by infinite. By infinite one can only understand that which has no limits. The only sense in which the definiendum can be real is the one we have been referring to. We have showed that people commonly imagine something that is not infinite, despite the fact that mathematicians and physics have the whim of calling it like that. The concept of infinite that we have showed can only be rejected by someone who has anoth- er concept of infinite, but neither philosophers nor physics have such concept or can have it. In particular, we said (IV, 1) that one should not confuse the infinite with a big magnitude. Further, one should not be tempted to say that the infinite is a 'magnitude without limits'! By definition, every magnitude is a limit, so to talk about a magnitude without limit equals to speak about a limit without limit. "What has all determinations" is (implicitly) contradictory, because there are de- terminations that are contradictory between themselves. Besides, if all determination is limitation, this statement would be useless to define what is unlimited and infinite.
Let us do without the resistance of those who are not willing to admit that the human spirit is infinite. Evidently, they think that the human spirit is 'here' or 'there', in a given place and not in the an- tipodes; therefore, they conclude that it is not infinite. The ship of this objection is so feeble that one big wave will be enough to sink it. On the one hand, they suppose that the spirit is something material and spa- tial, for that would be the only way they could speak of location and place. On the other hand, they believe that infinitude is spatial; some- thing so big that is everywhere. We have said enough in this regard. Another recourse the objectors could employ is to say that the infinite is that which has all determinations, denying thereby that the human spirit is not in that case. But we pointed out that this could not be the definition of infinite:
In a word, finitude consists in having a limit, which means to say, that it puts its not-being in that point; in other words, in that point this thing ceases to be and makes reference to some other thing. On the other hand, the infinite reflection consists in that I do not refer to anything else but my- self and I am an object to myself. This pure reference to myself is the self, the root of the infinite Being itself. The leave aside completely, everything
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that is finite. The self as such does not have any content given by nature (immediate), but rather he has only himself as content. This pure form is at the same time his content. Any content given by nature is, in the first place, limited, while the content of the self is unlimited. In the second place, the content of nature is immediate, while the pure self does not have immedi- ate content since it only exists by means of doing without everything else. (NH 221).
"For the characteristic feature of the spiritual is not being abstract, but rather something vital, a universal individual, subjective, which determines and chooses itself" (PR III 47).
It is true that we sometimes express ourselves like that: my will was de- termined by such motives, circumstances, stimuli, impulses. At first, this expression implies that I behaved myself passively. But in fact I did not behave myself passively, but essentially in an active way, namely, my will admitted these circumstances as motives; it made them be regarded as motives [. . . ] By means of reflection, I can go beyond any determination given by the circumstances [. . . ] Circumstances and motives exert so much influence upon man as he lets them have. (NH 222s).
This self, which is essentially universal, is the one that specifies itself with these particular determinations, retaining its universality thereby since it gets hold of them freely and they do not set barriers to his self because the spirit could easily do without them and obtain other deter- minations. The really interesting thing about this is that in exercising its freedom the self truly becomes a self, in other words, it becomes more individual. The more universal and free it is, the more individual it becomes; and this comes about in the act in which it particularizes itself; if the spirit would let itself to be determined by natural im- pulses, it would not be something individual but only another part of nature. It follows that universality, particularity and individuality are identified with what is concrete, subjective and vital, despite the fixational intellect that only deals with abstractions and keeps these three things separated and without understanding them, for the abstract universal is not universal and the abstract individual is not individual. We have seen already (IV, 2) that the abstract intellect does not know what to do with them and does not understand them, for the abstract universal is not universal and the abstract individual is not individual. We saw that this abstract intellect did not know what to do with the
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universal, which by definition is fulfilled in the individual and identi- fies itself with it. This mediocre way out consists in declaring that the universal is not real; but that getaway is blocked by the evident fact that if it is not real it is not universal, because we cannot say that something unreal is realized in the individual.
There is nothing weird about the fact that the spirit is the meaning of the universal. If no empirical or imaginary data is universal, it follows that neither sensibility nor imagination could be the origin of the con- cept of 'universal', and hence the origin of it lies in self-consciousness. But what we know in self-consciousness is the spirit! That is the content of such concept.
By the way, it follows also that the universal and the particular identify themselves, for when the spirit knows itself by means of self- consciousness it knows himself as a self, that is, as individual. This clari- fies the explosive Hegelian thesis according to which judgments can only be true in regard to the spirit; the only thing that the judgment affirms is that the individual is universal:
It must be considered a complete lack of observation the fact that one does not points out in logics that any judgment emitted contains this assessment: "the individual is the universal" [. . . ] It is true that the determinations of individuality and universality, of subject and predicate, are distinguished, but this does not deny the general fact that any judgment declares them identical (EPW, 166A).
The contemporary logicist efforts miss the target completely when they say that the judgment only affirms that the subject is an element of a given set. We pointed out (IV, 1) that a set is not an empirical data and that it does not exist in reality. The only thing the spirit has is concepts, and only in the level of concepts one can give a meaning to every judg- ment. One has to do without the peculiar and the incidental character that the subject or the predicate of the judgment might have. Now, the common meaning to all these judgments is the one that Hegel stresses: the individual is the universal. That is the true form of the judgment: Hegel is right when he says that common logic is not formal enough in spite of its pretensions of being formal.
But let us go back to the infinite, which is our central subject. We have seen that the meaning of infinite is self-consciousness (the self), which is first and foremost self-determination since it is not determined by
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nature. But we said (III, 7) that self-consciousness and the conscious- ness I have of others feed each other, they make the other exist, and one can truly say that one is the being of the other: "without a thou the self is impossible"(JS 378). The most elemental analysis shows us that the meaning of infinite is self-consciousness, and if self-consciousness is essentially intersubjectivity, the very concept of infinite includes distinc- tion, that is to say, it is not a monistic and/or a pantheistic reality, as rightist and leftist superficial critics naively affirmed.
On this point, one cannot be too radical. As we have seen, one can- not give any other meaning to the word 'distinction' or 'distinct' than that which consists in intersubjectivity. It follows from this that not only the imputations of monism lack meaning completely, but also that this contribution of Hegel is one of the most revolutionary and im- portant ones ever made in the history of philosophy and in science in general (including physics, of course).
4. imputationS
If the leftist counterfeiters would have wanted to respect the rigor that science imposes, they would have put more attention to texts like the following one: "The Enlightment came from France to Germany, but with the difference that nobody dealt so openly with the dogma of such knowledge; they were twisted and turned in order to maintain the apparent respect towards religion, something that is still done now" (WG 916s).
It is clear in this text how genuine is the contempt that Hegel has against the hypocrisies that cover up and dissimulate the true ex- tent and meaning of a philosophical doctrine with the purpose of not offending certain religious instances. Besides, it is a text of Hegel's last intellectual period; it is absurd to suppose that they could impute him with the same charge he holds against them. I do not see how Findlay could possibly hold the following posture: "Though Hegel has veiled his treatment of Religion in much orthodox-sounding language, its out- come is quite clear. Theism in all its form is an imaginative distortion of final truth" (1958, 151). What we have here is this: the prestige and the huge intelligence of Hegel are so imposing that the atheists do not give up their wishes of having him on their side. One can read similar forced co-options in Kaufmann, Luka? cs, Althusser, Marx, Feuerbach, Adorno,
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Koje`ve, Marcuse, Garaudy, etcetera.
One does not need to make a big fuzz about this: one only has to distinguish between the publicist and the scientific genre, for the form really has to be subjected to objectivity and to the accuracy of the texts.
Since we mentioned Enlightment, it is worthwhile to read this other passage from Hegel: "Enlightment --that conceit of the abstract in- tellect-- is the fiercest enemy of Philosophy; it hinders that one makes reason patent in the Christian religion; it hinders that Philosophy demonstrates that the testimony of the spirit of truth is placed within religion" (PR III 225).
I do not believe that a careful exegesis could question the sincerity of this declaration of war against Enlightment and in favor of Christianity. If Findlay et al would have said that theism is false and that Hegel was dumb --or, in either case, that he did not see the consequences of his principles-- we would be facing a whole different problem, but to say that Hegel is only pretending is something that cannot be done if one examine texts so aggressive and militant as the last one we quoted.
This other passage says clarifying things in regard of the illuminist pandemic:
That was in the rationalistic, enlightened, and apparently rational religion, but it was nothing else than renouncing to the fundamental teachings of religion, so that everything remained in general and superficial doctrines, such as that there is a God, that a man appeared, Christ, in order to teach de divine commandments and in that sense he appeared as a divine man, et- cetera [. . . ]. A religion that is satisfied with such contents is as insipid as the belonging philosophy [. . . ]. An agreement in which everything is so squat and flattened does not satisfy the depth of religiosity or the depth of the reason that thinks (EGP 292s).
This passage does not need to be commented. Findlay and his fol- lowers lacked the scientific seriousness of the hermeneutic: that is all. There is a point which is closely linked to the subject of our present chapter in which the aforementioned gentlemen would like Hegel to change his mind: Findlay expresses it thus: "Hegel further says that, in his True Infinite, the element of Infinity will absorb and overcome the Finite, but he might equally well have put it the other way round. "
(1958, 164)
We will later see that the divine does not absorb the human; on the
contrary, the former affirms the latter and makes it exist. But Findlay
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and his henchmen would want Hegel to think that man was the only thing real, and that all the non-sense about the infinite and the divin- ity were absorbed by the human. They probably missed the Hegelian mockery about the Greek religion in their reading of the Phenomenology: "both gods and men did one and the same thing. The earnestness of those divine powers is a ridiculous superfluity, since they are in fact the power or strength of the individuality performing the action. " (PG 508). In contrast to the God of Christianity, Hegel mocks the Greek divinities for not having personality and real individuality: "They are, in true, endowed with the form of individuality, but this is only in imagination and does not really and truly belong to them; the actual self does not have such an abstract moment for its substance and content" (PG 517s). Let us keep into account that these two texts are in the Phenomenology, which insistently isolated unscientifically from the rest of the Hegelian work, by those who forcefully want to suck the divine into the human.
Hegel denounces that the Indian divinities also lack real subjectivity and autonomy in front of the human subject:
In his essential determination Brahma remains the abstract being, the uni- versal, the substance without subjectivity in itself; therefore, it is not concrete, it is not the spirit (just as it happens with the modern philosophers, who determine God as concrete when they call him the essence of the essences). With such content --which is in fact lack of content-- that masculinum (Brahma) is not an individual subject; the personality is in him an empty form, a personification. It is of utmost importance while studying religions to distinguish between the mere personification of a god and a god, some- thing that one can find in every mythology, and the personality, which is by content. Since personification is something superficial, the objective autono- my of the god before the subject collapses. For instance, at the beginning of the Iliad, when Eros or Pallas prevents that Achilles draws his sword, we immediately take that as the subjective feeling of love, as the good sense that makes itself present in Achilles himself (BS 186).
In its parenthesis, this passage denounces those Western men who are incapable of conceiving God as a true subject. What Hegel rejects is a divinity that lacks real autonomy in front of the human subject. What Hegel explicitly and sharply denies is the absorption that Findlay and his followers want to attribute to him.
Furthermore, Hegel accuses of atheism those Western theologians that do not conceive God as spirit.
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They accuse Spinoza of atheism when in fact the intention of Spi- noza is not to deny the existence of God but the existence of the world (acosmism). But this is true: insofar Spinoza dies not conceive God as spirit, he is an atheist in that sense, but many theologians are atheists in that sense too. "Spinozism if far from being atheism in the ordinary sense, but in so far it does not conceive God as spirit, it actually is. Now, in this sense, many atheists are theologians that only call God the omnipotent and supreme being [. . . ]" (GP III, 195), or that reduce Him, as he says in the Encyclopedia, to the "undetermined suprasen- sible" (EPW 73).
When one sees that Hegel even calls the theologians 'athetists', one realizes that the attempts of making him an atheist are only literary attempts which lack seriousness and scientific method. Hegel adds himself expressly to the aphorism "a bad philosophy draws one apart from God [. . . ] and a true philosophy draws one near Him. " (Rph XXIII) He explicitly warns us that "men did not have to wait for philosophy in order to receive the truth and awareness of it. " (PR I 299) While making history of the 3th century of our era, he approves the dictum of Tertullian: "nowadays kids know of God what only the greatest sieges of antiquity knew" (GP II 498).
Against our principle of examining the matters in itself and not the interpretative questions in regard of Hegel's mind, it has been neces- sary to make a brief pause to analyze the latter ones because, if the reader thinks that the author is pretending, all the reference points start shuddering and turn out precarious, and the intellection be- comes impossible. The idiotic accusations of atheism and pantheism have prevented the world from receiving the most profound and true philosophical message that exists. We will demonstrate now that the accusation of pantheism is false, first formally and then in its content. After we have settled some issues, it will be better to leave aside the interpretative pursuit and go to the matter itself.
With the same force with which he criticized the lack of consis- tency and true subjectivity of the mythological gods, Hegel criticizes the lack of consistency and true subjectivity of the human spirit in the non-Christian religions:
"The Parsi place the bodies of the dead exposed to the open air so that the birds would eat them; in so far as the soul goes, they thought that it thins into the universal" (WG 496). "The Indians have also a very gloomy conception, since the last stage is for them the transition to
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the universal substance" (WG 495). Even in Judaism "the subject does never reach to the consciousness of his autonomy; that is why we do not find among the Jews the faith in the immortality of the soul, since the subject is not existing in and by himself" (WG 457).
In contrast to this, "the Western infinitude and joy of the individual is conformed in such a way that the subject remains in the substance, that it is not debased, that he does not see himself as a slave that de- pends on the substance, destined to annihilation" (EGP 232).
"While in the oriental consciousness, the most important thing lies in the fact that the universal is the truly independent, for us in the Western consciousness the individuality of things and of men is beyond everything" (PR II, I, 128).
In the oriental religions the fundamental situation is that only the true substance as such is what is true and the individual does not have any value at all in himself; he cannot get if while he remains in front of that which is in and by its own; the individual can only have value if he identifies himself with that substance in which he ceases to be an object and fades away into unconsciousness (GP I 140).
To tell the truth, these formal statements of immortality and of true subjectivity point already to the content that decides everything: the only thing on which the accusers of pantheism should focus is if indi- vidual self-consciousness is preserved or not. Every other lucubration ends up confusing spirit with matter:
"The Greeks did not seriously take into account what we call immortality" (A? sth II 572).
On the contrary, according to the Christian conception, "it is the in- dividual, the real subject, in its intern vitality, what has infinite value" (A? sth II 568).
"Plato did not know how to acknowledge or to conciliate with his ideas the willing, the wanting and choosing of the individual" (GP II 129). "One cannot say that Greeks understood death in its essential mean-
ing (A? sth II 571).
According to Hegel, the conception of the Easterners incarnated in
the system of Spinoza reappears in the Western world: "It is the orien- tal conception which is formulated by Spinoza in the Western world for the first time" (GP III 165). And Hegel says the following of that philosophical system:
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What one can reproach to that philosophy is that it conceives God only as substance, not as spirit, not as concrete. The autonomy of the human soul is thereby denied; in the Christian religion every individual is conceived as destined to joy. Here, on the other hand, the individual of the spirit is only a modus, an accident, something which is not substantial (GP III 196).
One cannot ask for more explicit expressions against any absorption of the human in the divine. And they are in the core itself of the Hege- lian system, namely, in the difference between the concept of substance and the concept of spirit. Hegel would have wondered himself about the language one should employ in order to be understood.
5. diStinction
Let us go to the problem itself. Something really simple has happened: those who accuse Hegel of pantheism believe that they can establish a distinction between God and the creature that Hegel cannot establish, but neither they nor Physics --nor common-sensed people, for that matter-- have realized that the only possible meaning of the term dis- tinction is the one presented and defended by Hegel. And the same goes for the words identity and individuality. Fortunately enough --ma- terially constrained by the experiments themselves-- quantum physics has started to question if these expressions have any physical meaning at all. Scientists would have spared themselves an entire century had they read Hegel more carefully.
"According to the concept, the distinction does not have any physi- cal meaning at all" (GP I 206).
"In the sensible things there is no true objective distinction, only in the spiritual" (GP I 315).
"What is not distinguished in thought is not distinguished" (GP III 246).
Everything becomes clearer once we realize that it is impossible to give an empirical meaning to the word distinction or distinct. It follows from this that one obtains the meaning of this concept through self- consciousness. But self-consciousness is intersubjectivity (cfr III, 7), distinction among people. The original meaning must consist in "vital and spiritual relations" (WL I 335).
The most frequent (and funny) thing is to believe that the distinction between two beings consists in that one is 'here' and the other is 'there',
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believing one can pinpoint them with his own finger. It is ridiculous that whoever talks this way believes he has given an empirical mean- ing to the word distinction.
But so it turns out that Gorbachev and Reagan are not distinct, since they are not in the places pointed out by the finger.
These empirical tricksters would answer: I am not referring exactly to the two places I am pointing at, but to two different places, regard- less of which ones they are.
The reader perceives immediately that what we are given is not an empirical sign but a phrase, and that our definer has failed in his attempt of indicating an empirical data as the meaning of the word distinction. And something even worse has happened: he is saying that being consists in being at two different places. The definiendum reap- pears in the word different, which was what one tried to define in the first place. This dictum pretends to be a manual book that tells us how to find out if there is distinction or not, but in order to be effective the manual book itself requires to be previously understood, and for that to happen the word "distinct" has to have a meaning first, but the whole enterprise had as its very purpose finding that meaning! Con- sequently, we are just like in the beginning, and the allegedly empiric maneuver has proved to be barren.
What such a definer is saying is that the distinction is a visual data, for he supposes that one only needs to opens his eyes to verify it. But if that were so, one could not distinguish two sounds, two smells, two flavors, etcetera. Likewise, the electrons could not be distinct from each other, since they are not visible; and that certainly goes against the intentions of our definer. Needless to say: theologians could not use that distinction in order to say that God and the human spirit are distinct.
Even if we do without the visibility, it is well known in Physics that two electromagnetic fields could be present at the same point of space. According to our definer, these two electromagnetic fields could not be distinct. But in the present context the visibility is decisive, and it is important to notice that the visible limits of a body --its empirical distinction in respect to other bodies, so to speak-- are not reliable data in the natural sciences at all, since the constitutive fields of this body go far beyond the allegedly visible limits of it and even penetrate the zone of space occupied by other bodies. Therefore, the alleged visible distinction cannot be the real distinction by any means.
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But those who try to give an empirical meaning to the word distinct by means of 'here' and 'there' incur even in a bigger mistake. The 'here' is so metaphysical and unempirical as Newton's absolute space and, in fact, as any other space. When someone thinks that he is seeing the space that separates him from the wall before him, what he is seeing is the wall before him, not the space. The space is invisible, and a point within space is even more invisible, for that matter.