No More Learning

"Since there are many philosophies they conclude that there is none. " (EGP 272).
Not yet dealing with contents, Hegel responds to them: "In the first place one must say: there is only one Philosophy. This has a formal sense, since each Philosophy is at least Philosophy" (EGP 123)
The aforementioned skeptics disregard the only essential thing: the fact itself of the existence of Philosophy, the historical and consistent wonder in which the human reason, after millenniums of irrationality in the adoption of worldviews, has finally decided to seek, definitively and demonstratively, which of them are truth and which of them are false. "The knowledge of truth", so calls Aristotle, Philosophy (Met II 993b20). In this sense, Philosophy is only one. Philosophers did not exist first and, in order to lunge with prestige their trade, showed up later saying that Philosophy is the profession of finding the truth. No. In
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one moment of history, human reason had to protest against the above mentioned irrationality; and that moment and the corresponding ac- tivity of reason is called Philosophy. The successive linking of systems that there has been is amazing. Of course, 'coffee philosophers' are ex- cluded from the list of genuine seekers of the truth, as well as those who practice a "hazardous philosophizing", as Hegel calls it, by elabo- rating dilettante and rabble-rousing writings, "often is only chit chat and whimsical opinions what they call Philosophy" (EGP 123) "many philosophical writings limit themselves only to the prattling of feelings and opinions" (EPW 14A).
Thousands who deal with trivial things have been forgotten; only one hun- dred names have been preserved. The Mnemosyne of universal history does not confer the unworthy with prestige; just as happens with the deeds of the heroes of the outward history, the only heroes that the history of Philosophy acknowledges are the deeds of the thinking reasons. Those are our object. (EGP 124)
"Philosophizing without a system cannot be scientific" (EPW 14A). In regard of the contents, to show that Philosophy has been one and that it is false that some systems displace the others, constitutes the content of this unmatchable Hegelian work called The History of Philosophy. To put it briefly, without raising a veil of mystery over the question, we must say that each philosophical system employs concepts less abstract and hence better defined than those of former systems; consequently, it sheds light on more problems and with more concretion than what other philosophies did:
The beginning as a beginning is simple i. e. the abstract. What is first is actu- ally the rudimentary, that which has not been developed. The principles of the most ancient Philosophy are therefore completely abstract. The most abstract is the easiest: an acute intelligence finds that quickly. (EGP 279)
"In the history of Philosophy the goal is the development of thought. One takes sides in favor of this. " (EGP 283) As thought develops, the concepts it uses become more capable of depicting reality because they are more concrete. If we take the principles of the different philoso- phies in their original abstraction, they overthrow one another; but if we attend to the reality that they cumbersomely tried to point out, that does not occur:
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Hegel was right
For instance, the atomistic Philosophy adopts the principle according to which the atom is the absolute; the atom is indivisible, the one --in its ulterior determination, the individual, and, even more determined, the subjective. I am also one, one individual; but I am subject and, hence, spirit. Nevertheless, the atom is the being-for-itself completely abstract, the pure one; [. . . ] The spirit is, of course, also one, but is not the one within such abstraction. (EGP 128)
This subject is extremely important. Physics have not even no- ticed that the exact translation of a? tomon to latin is individuum, and, of course, they have not asked themselves what is the original meaning of this word, i. e. what is the origin of this concept. Empirical experience does not show us any atomic reality, for every sensible data is extended and has parts, and hence the origin of this concept cannot be empiri- cal but introspective: what this concept signifies is what we perceive by means of introspection: the spirit. "The atom and the vacuum are not things of experience" (GP I 359). Who knows what Empedocles, Leucippus and Democritus imagined when they used the term atom? However, what matters is not what they imagined but what they said. To be sure, they did not imagine an atom, for the simple reason that the atom is not imaginable; everything that we imagine is extended, and consequently, divisible. They could not have been referring to what they imagined or to what they saw, because an atom is neither imagin- able nor visible. When they said that the absolute was an atom, that is to say, something individual, they had all the reason in the world, and the Philosophy of Plato, Aristotle and Hegel did not displace this the- sis; it only made it more explicit, exact and concrete. Materialism has never been able to define its terms, and hence it has not been able to declare its grounds without incurring in blunt spiritualism.
The works of the history of Philosophy are not commonly read with the exigency of strict rigor, with the exigency of scientificity, as Hegel reads them. One last and brief example of this: we will see in the last part of the present chapter what is nowadays manifest and evident to intelligent scientists and to anyone who reflects a little, namely, that science cannot trust immediate observation, i. e. empirical data. Immediate observation tells us v. g. that earth is still; but nowadays we know that earth travels 30 km per second. Our unbendable sensations tell us that there is an 'up' and a 'down'; but nowadays we know that this sensation does not correspond to any reality at all, for people in
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the Patagonia call up what we call down. And this was the first dis- covery of Philosophy since its birth with the Ionians, the Eleats and the Pythagoreans. As Hegel says about Thales of Miletus: "Here we are introduced into the distancing of what is in our sensible percep- tion, the distancing of that immediate being --a retreating from that" (GP I 203). When the founders of Philosophy affirmed that the only real thing in the world was an underlying element, they were distrust- ing the testimony of sensation, as if sensible data were only apparent: "one needs great nerve of spirit in order to put aside that richness of the being immediate of the natural world and to reduce it instead to a simple substance that keeps itself as such" (GP I 203). For the Eleats it was the "being", the one; for the Pythagoreans it was the numbers; for the Ionians it was some other element. But that is incidental and mar- ginal: the central thesis is the difference of the empirical data, and this has been confirmed, not displaced, by the subsequent development of science.
But let us get back on track. As a matter of fact, the apparent dis- placement of some systems by others in the history of Philosophy was a mere pretext of aestheticist culturalism for not taking Philosophy se- riously. "The only consequent means against reason is not to deal with reason at all" (WL II 369).
The predominance within a society of the aestheticist criterion in the choosing of a worldview is a demagogy foretold by Plato, who accuses poets and orators of being 'adulators' of the people by giving them what they 'like' instead of what they need (cfr. Gorgias 502 B y E, 463A et passim). It is perplexing that a diagnose so certain and profound, masterfully expressed twenty-four centuries ago, whose pertinence is even bigger today than in those times for the reason I will immediately expose, does not hold the attention either of po- litical thinkers, sociologists or intellectuals. The remedy to this is not governmental intervention. Undoubtedly, men in our society, with a certain sense of responsibility, must do something about this, given that the predominance of pleasantness has created an effective and unbendable mechanism of repression --as I mentioned before in re- gard of rebellious, tolerant pluralism. Since only 'pleasant' writings have commercial success, and negotiating editors (who are the majority) only publish what brings them money, the immediate result is that Philosophy is censured. . . unless it becomes Literature. If Philosophy accepts the rules of this game, its message would not convince because
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it demonstrates but because it pleases; it would precisely reinforce the irrationality which it must attack.
Men of letters and their editors blame corny soap-operas and yellow journalism because, in their opinion, both things distort the taste of the public and make it incapable of enjoying good Literature. But they do exactly the same in regard of Philosophy, only that in this case some- thing much more important is at stake: the rationality of man. The repressive artifact shuts its doors: the macabre press and the non-sense of novels can intend to challenge us, if we are smart enough, to hit the mark with the taste of people just exactly as they do.
Furthermore, both Literature and pasquinades can give a political tone to the discussion by saying that hitting the mark with what people want is democracy, while pretending to provide them with what they need --instead of with what they want-- is totalitarism. In a very simi- lar fashion, vulgar Marxism holds that only the people know what they want. Plato was right when he said that in all this there was too much demagogy involved. This allows us to get at last to the bottom of the problem we have discussed so far, and with respect to which, what Hegel and recent Anthropology have to say, acquires the importance of a revelation.
Probably the biggest mistake that has carried the most unlucky and disastrous consequences over the past two centuries is to believe with Rousseau that man is good by nature. I say 'believe' because Rousseau did only not provide any demonstration of such a grandiloquent claim --a claim which is irreconcilable with the Western intellectual tradi- tion-- but practically did not even attempt to provide it. Charron, Buffon and Kolben came before him but they did not have any market echo; it was the first successful Discourse of Rousseau what gave this prejudice the enormous popularity it now holds. It besieges liberals, leftists, and even theologians; nobody dares to say the terribly unpopu- lar truth that man is evil by nature, despite it would do a lot of good to our contemporary world. It is the turn of Philosophy to take some action, not by default, but because originality, popularity, commer- cial success, the mainstream, etcetera, are things of which Philosophy could not care less.
At first, theologians opposed to Rousseau's mistake. But unpopu- larity is an annoying companion. In particular, the unpopularity that blocks missionary enterprises: to say that man is evil by nature implies that one only becomes good by means of true civilization, something
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that sounds as intense eurocentrism and seems to be offensive to in- digenous cultures. Theology ended up making original sin more subtle and, consequently, more anecdotic, as if it were something committed by someone else, or something that does not discriminate any addressee of learning and does not offend anyone. To blame it on someone who did not perform it would be an arbitrary deed in which one evidently does not have the slightest trace of responsibility; in addition, the re- generative work would consist in the hilarious process of convincing the imputer to stop imputing things. Amidst such subtleties, the op- position to Rousseau ended up fading away. One of its residues has been civilizatory relativism, since if man is good by nature any culture produced by man is good. Other remains have been indigenism and the awareness of those who only look to please or earn money with their writings, for if man is good by nature, his natural tastes and sponta- neous preferences would be so too, and he who flatters people and is condescending with them does not do anything wrong.
This third consequence, although historically and logically inevi- table, would have outraged Rousseau, but that should not surprise us since logic, as we said before, was not one of his strong points. Let us quote these valuable lines: "There will always be this difference, he who makes himself useful works for others, and he who only thinks in making himself more pleasant, works only for himself. The adulator, for instance, does not spare efforts with the purpose of pleasing, and yet he only does wrong" (Rousseau 1964, 74). This quotation is also pertinent "Truth does not make one rich" (ibid. 371). And from the III book of E? mile: "he who rules the folk is not who resembles it". These are sturdy remarks from a very peculiar man.
In order to refute the central non-sense of Rousseau, indigenism and the other two consequences, one would only need to repeat today with Darwin something that sounds rude but which is essential: we come from animals! It is a clear symptom of passion and limited lucidity of in- digenisms the fact that they have forgotten (in their explicit or implicit ap- praisal of their turn to the origins) that we were animals in the beginning. Civilizatory relativism is untenable if the quality of a culture depends on the degree by which man is able to draw away from animality.
To put it in a word: by nature man is not even good; by nature he is not even a man.
Independently from Darwin and Hegel, recent Anthropology, in a detailed study of all the human groups that inhabit our planet Earth,
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has arrived to a conclusion which our literary writers have not been able to assimilate. I quote Leslie White, one of the most acclaimed modern anthropologists, who is a convinced atheist:
It used to be said that beneath the endless variety of cultural expression lay a common constant factor.
This was called human nature, and the omniscient layman was wont to say, as if making a pronouncement, that 'human nature is the same the world over'. But his universal constant is not human nature; 'human nature' is cultural, not 'natural'. There may well be, and we think, there probably is, a common biological factor underlying all cultures. But it is an animal, a primate animal, factor. Culture, and it alone, can make it human. (Rossi et al. , 1977, 250).
One and a half century before, by means of an analysis much more profound and evident in comparison, Hegel had said: "Man achieves what he has to be only by means of culture, by discipline; what man immediately is, is only the possibility of being, that is to say, the pos- sibility of being rational and free, only the destination and duty to be that" (VG 58).
The soul is spirit only through suppression of the natural will and the appetites. This happens by subjugation under the ethical, by getting used to the ethical as a second nature of the individual; that is, in a word, the work of education, of culture. (PR II, II 178).
"The natural is rather what the spirit has to suppress" (GP II 107). "We used to begin the fiction of a natural state, but that is not the state of the spirit, of the rational will, of the animals between themselves. The war of everybody against everybody is the true natural state, as Hobbes very well remarked" (GP II 108). "The nature of man consists in that he is not what he ought to be" (PR III 109).
"The exigency directed to man is not to be as a natural will, not to be as he is by nature" (PR III 107).
Its true nature is to abandon his immediacy and to look at it as a mood of being in which he must not be. Man as an immediate and natural man has to look himself as somebody who is like he must not be. This has been expressed thus: "man is evil by nature" (PR III 106); "evil is no other thing that the penetration-in-itself of the natural being of the spirit" (PG 539).
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And by the way the natural will is not the will as it ought to be, for it must be free, and the will of the appetites is not free. By nature the spirit is not as it ought to be; it can only be that through freedom; this is exposed by saying that will is evil by nature. But only man is to blame in so far as he remains in his naturalness. (PR I 275).
"The fundamental principle is that man is not a natural being as such; he is spirit, not an animal. " (PR, II, I 27)
The principal mistake of Rousseau as well as of civilizatory rela- tivism, indigenism and the eased consciousness of those who earn money pleasing natural 'tastes' fall within what Voltaire expressed in a sharply and incisive judgment:
"On n'a jamais tant employe? d'espirit a? vouloir nous render Be^tes".
This fulminating line is contained in a letter of August 30, 1755, addressed to no other than Rousseau 1964, 1369). The word-game with spirit and be? te is not translatable into English.
Let us not stop to discuss the argument of those who against West- ern culture say that other cultures are closer to nature; they obviously demonstrate the opposite of what they intend. Let us rather consider civilizatory relativism and indigenism on a pure logical and cold level.
It is clear that if one professes an axiological relativism, according to which the word 'valuable' does not have sense, the problem is entirely different. I have refuted this doctrine in my Appeal to Reason. In the present context let us only say that axiological relativism means to hold that a society cannot be more human than what it already is --something which would not be supported by any nation on this earth. Civiliza- tory relativism and indigenism want to be based on the sentiments of people.
If axiological relativism is excluded, whoever says that all cultures are equally valuable does not realize that he is advancing the most implausible thesis one could possibly imagine. It would be a miracle, an authentic wonder, that the diverse human groups, which have de- veloped in cultural processes of the most different kinds and have overcome conditioning factors and obstacles of every different sort af- ter being millenniums by their own, have reached today exactly the same result and degree of humanity. The other logical option would be to accept that the results existing today, obtained by different cultural processes, are differently valuable. But since it is ruled out to under- stand by different the cultures in themselves, this difference has to be
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explained by biological factors, that means race, and so it seems that indigenists are racists, and worst of all, racists with their own people, unless they embrace axiological relativism, which is for them out of the question --unless they choose the absurd and characteristic regionalism typical of little villages, according to which their piece of land is the best one in the world.
By the way, we could understand one indigenism of this sort --but not without a certain smile--, for a priori only one of the existent indigenous cultures could be the most valuable; but that is always said from inside hermetism, any comparison with something beyond their piece of land being forbidden. What is complete non-sense is a recent 'universal in- digenism' which implicitly exhorts each indigenous culture to feel the best of them all. This amounts to free oneself completely from logic and the duty of knowing the truth.
The possibility that each of the cultures of our planet has arrived to the same stage is a 'superastronomical improbability', to use the expres- sion of biologist Manfred Eigen; in plain words, it is something simply impossible. But, mathematically speaking, it is also a superastronomical improbability that two of them have reached equally valuable results. Looking at things with plain objectivity, only one of these cultures can be the most developed in terms of humanity and rationality. I do not know what indigenist spokesmen are so scandalized about.
The indigenous have been the most exploded ones; practical and affective preference for them is not only justified but obligatory; however, only as long as affection does not turn the lights out and pro- duces an ideology that does more against indigenous people than in their benefit.
Every ideology, whose effect is to forbid that a human group in- corporates the most advanced level of authentic humanity and the adequate civilization without which its seed cannot germinate, is an ideology that works against a human group by means of adulation. The worst enemy of people is he who flatters them. He who does that betrays them by saying 'you are fine, keep things going that way'. He deprives them from the shame of being savages, something that would be their salvation. The spoiled yearning for the origins protects semira- tionality by defending it against every 'intrusion' of full rationality. It is irrational to hope that this exiguous and rustic culture, which vegetates at the margins of true and compelling civilization, will gradually reach the best degree of humanity there is now. To begin with, that would
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mean to condemn to a paltry level of humanity future generations of humans that will not see that happen. Besides, even implausibly supposing that this is possible, when that time comes, universal civi- lization would reach new heights of true humanity, from which the culture 'protected by indigenists' will be margined.
By the way I would like to say the following. Superficial leftism has contributed to reinforce the paralyzing Rousseaunian conviction that man is good by nature, because if they blame perverted capitalism for the evils of man, it follows that, if capitalism did not exist, man would be good; when in reality what capitalism has made is to disloyally cul- tivate what man was given by nature, i. e. animality. Besides, at least in Latin-America, it is obvious that the fomented 'class mentality', 'the class sentiment', has been a permit of rusticity and lack of culture, a license for us to be as fool as always. Class mentality should not be confounded with the struggle of classes; without the latter it is impos- sible that the world arrives to justice. The mentality of classes favors shamelessness; the struggle of classes favors communism.
2. Science without dogmatiSm
The time has come, we said with Hegel, in which all these dilettantisms and irrationalities come to an end: the time in which man demands a scientific demonstration in order to adopt a theory or a worldview. From now on science has to be the criterion. "The inner necessity that truth must be science lays in the nature itself of the knowledge, and the satisfactory explanation of it is the exposition of Philosophy itself" (PG 12).
Such an exigency must be taken literally serious; it all depends on it, especially, the understanding of Hegel's message: "one of the weak points of our times is not to be able to deal with greatness, properly speaking, the excess of the exigency of the human spirit, the feeling of being overwhelmed and the coward retreat from the enterprise" (GP II 20).
To start with, science is not belief, it does not accept anything by appealing to authority: "What is true has its root in the spirit itself and belongs to its nature; every authority is thereby denied" (GP II 44). But we would incur in the same mistake if we take by authority the concept of science held by some people who nowadays call themselves
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scientists. First, how could we know if they are true scientists or not? By the public opinion that declares them as such? That would be ac- cepting something by authority, which is unscientific. Second, even though we knew that those persons were scientists, how could we know that the act by which they define science is scientific? We cannot assume that: "First, we cannot make suppositions; this is a big principle which is extremely important" (GP III 128). If we start making suppo- sitions, someone else could make contrary suppositions and all would depend at the end of the day on one's whim --something that is the ne- gation itself of science. If scientists themselves say that the act by which they define science is scientific, we would accept by their authority the scientificity of such act, which is an invalid procedure. Furthermore, we would not know if the second act by which they declare scientific the first one is also scientific, for not all acts of men are scientific. They sometimes speak of baseball, sometimes of politics, sometimes of good wines, etcetera.
We do not need to stop here to say that to accept a university degree as a demonstration of the scientificity of a person would be to accept something by authority. First, we know that there are charlatans with a university degree. Second, we would not determine whether the act by which the university granted him the title was scientific.
There are people who, neglecting that which is unscientific to accept a concept of science by simply saying 'I was told so', are still determined to obtain by those means the concept of science they are going to adopt. It is of utmost importance, both to systematic thinking and to the his- torical moment that the world is going through, to realize that the con- cept of science cannot be obtained a posteriori. It is impossible to obtain it by a generalization or by an induction of the particular acts of science. Scientists and commentators have been reluctant to pay attention to the passage (WL I 23) in which Hegel affirms that determining 'the concept itself of science' is a task of Philosophy. But it is neither arro- gance, nor a wish of Hegel, nor a thing that should happen (i. e. some- thing optional). It is simply a fact. It is always a Philosophy or a pseudo Philosophy in the head of the person who calls something scientific what determines that he does so. Without a previous concept of what scientific is, we could not know which of the innumerable human acts in the world constitute the reduced group of which one would have to extract, by means of generalization, the definition of science. This concept has to exist in our heads before we start the evaluative quest of
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scientific acts or actions; otherwise, we could not know which acts or actions we ought to examine. It is thus a philosophical concept what defines this despite the negligence of some men of science who claim the opposite.
Even though laymen and some scientists have unscientifically ob- tained from others the definition of science, this same definition for- mulated by scientists is a philosophical concept, which has not been obtained by an a posteriori induction. Physics do not define as physics what is scientific; they do this as philosophers. Hypothetically speaking, physics could obtain a posteriori the definition of Physical sciences by generalizing their own actions; but when they speak of science they do not only refer to their science; on the contrary, they refer to science as such, so that if the particular discipline called physics seems to them scientific, it is because it matches the concept of science as such, which was not obtained a posteriori by the observation of the actions of physics, for not all the actions of physics seem to them scientific. Instead, they select which of these actions are scientific by an a priori criterion. A scientist would deceive himself if he believes that he obtains a posteriori from his own individual praxis the concept of science, for neither all of his actions are scientific nor he holds them to be so.
For instance, when someone conceives the idea (which, by the way, is wrong and mistaken as we will see) that only the act of empirical observation is scientific, he would only judge as scientific his own or other's actions which consist in empirical observation; but that idea is of a philosophical kind and has not been obtained by empirical ob- servation.
If all the scientists of the world could gather and settle on a defi- nition of science, they would achieve this by means of philosophical reasons, not by observation of the things which scientists have done so far, for not everything that scientists have done is scientific.
Einstein's claim that "it is easier to denature plutonium than it is to denature the evil spirit of man" (Schilpp II 1970, 655), will seem scientific to some scientists and unscientific to others, depending on the philosophical concept each of them has of science. If it were a matter of making an induction, some would think that this statement should be included in a scientific data-base, but others would disagree. This makes clear that the intended generalization comes in rather late, for the definition of what is scientific does not only preexist; it is a con- dition of possibility for the aimed generalization.
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The same would happen with the thesis of Einstein contained in his letter to Max Born of December 4, 1926: "The [quantum] theory yields much, but it hardly brings us close to the secrets of the Ancient One.