To
summarize
what we have said, let us repeat with Hegel: "The evil is no other thing that the deepen-in-itself of the natural being of the spirit" (PG 539).
Hegel Was Right_nodrm
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
262 Hegel was right
"Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein" (Mark 10, 15). The first text clearly denotes a posterior reflection of the community or of Mathew himself: in order to receive the Kingdom of Heavens as children we must become chil- dren. But that was not the idea. The idea was to receive the Kingdom as children receive things, that is to say, as the children from the villages received Jesus when he went there to announce the Kingdom: recep- tive, without prejudiced nor preformed ideas, capable of hearing some- thing truly new, with time availability, ready to follow up, leaving all other tasks aside. The original text speaks of the way of receiving, not of the way of being of children. Every specialist in the synoptic gospels knows that Mathew and Luke had before their eyes the text of Mark; in this case Luke (18, 17) preserved intact the formulation of Mark; the one that changed it was Mathew, and unfortunately, he wiped out the principal verb: to receive.
Some Bible scholars deny the historical authenticity of such phrase, let alone the formulation of Mathew. But they all agree on something: namely, that it does not speak at all about the innocence of children. For example Eduard Schweizer: "It is not about their purity or impurity" (1967, 117). And Walter Grundmann says: "Jesus does not presuppose a state of innocence in children" (1968, 207). On his part, D. E. Nine- ham says: "The point of comparison is not so much the innocence and humility [or obedience] of children" (1964, 268). Furthermore, C. E. B. Cranfield even attacks that interpretation: "To think of any subjective qualities of children here is to turn faith into a work. " (1966, 324) We could make this list much larger.
It is irresponsible to affirm the illusion about natural goodness, es- pecially now that we know that men come from the animals. Unlike in Hegel's time, today it is necessary to make focus on the biological aspect of our subject.
It may be convenient to start discussing with a great modern cham- pion of all natural will, a convinced denier of the original sin, and, to a certain point, a biological expert: Abraham H. Maslow. In his book about motivation and personality, he dedicated the ninth chapter to hold that destructivity is not instinctive in man. For that purpose, how- ever, he argues that the zoological beasts, which are apparently the most aggressive ones, do not attack motivated by pleasure but only to obtain food or defend themselves. However, he unwillingly says the following:
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 263
Some animals apparently kill for the sake of killing, and are aggressive for no observable external reason. A fox that enters a henhouse may kill more hens than it could eat, and the cat that plays with the mouse is proverbial. Stags and other ungulate animals at rutting will look for fights, sometimes even abandoning their mates to do so. In many animals, even the higher ones, onset of old age seems to make them more vicious for apparently constitutional reasons, and previously mild animals will attack without provocation. In various species killing is not for the sake of food alone. (1970, 118)
I am afraid that the facts that Maslow grants in this passage can only be explained if there exists a natural and instinctive violence in the animal kingdom. The baroque discussion Marlow sets out on in order to distinguish between different types of aggression is pointless. At the end of the day, what this says to us is that the instinct of domination is not evil --as if a difference existed between being killed by domination and being killed for the sake of doing so. I will quote the next passage extensively because the urgency of the matter does not admit any kind of literary or stylistic scruples:
When the higher animals are studied, attacking is found to be correlated more and more with dominance. [. . . ] The animal's place in dominance hierarchy is in part determined by his successful aggression, and his place in the hierarchy determines in turn how much food will he get, whether or not he will have a mate, and other biological satisfactions. Practically all the cruelty manifested in these animals occurs only when it is necessary to vali- date dominance status, or to make a revolution in dominance status. How true this is for other species, I am not sure. But I do suspect that the phe- nomenon of territoriality, of attack on strangers, of jealous protection of the females, of attack on the weak or sick, and other phenomena that are often explained by instinctive aggression or cruelty are very often found to have been motivated by dominance rather than by a specific motivation to aggression for its own sake, e. g. , this aggression may be means behavior rather than end behaviour. (1970, 119)
What a consolation for the attacked ones!
The fact that Maslow wants to explain the phenomenon of attacking the weak, the hurt and the sick ones --a phenomenon particularly frequent among the superior animals, and which in certain human tribes is simply instinctive repulsion-- by appealing to the status of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 264 Hegel was right
the domination, when the weak and the sick ones are actually those who jeopardize it the least, only denotes the power of dogmas on the mind of the scholar. But what Maslow and many of his followers lack is the philosophical approach. Despite its valiant defense of the natural, the hereditary and the biological in man, Maslow recognizes that we inherit from the animals the tendency to kill-in-order-to-obtain-more- food, the instinct of --aggression-to-obtain-more-sex, the impulse of attacking in order to achieve 'other biological satisfactions'. Now, that is not something evil in the animals, since we saw (V 6) that for them the end is the species. In the human realm, however, each and every one of the individuals is an end in itself. Hegel gave us the key to under- stand this: "To the extent that man wants the natural, this is no longer the natural but the negative against the good" (Rph 139 Z).
The destruction of the weak and sick suppresses form the world such genetic source. The only ones that breed are the strong ones, the better specimens of the animal in question. This mechanism is fabulous in the animal kingdom. There the species is the end.
The Nazis would praise the highly selective value that the facts com- piled by Maslow have for the improvement of the race. But in the hu- man realm each individual has infinite dignity and cannot be treated as a means. Whoever takes seriously the commandment 'Thou shall not kill', will only see in the above mentioned fact a conclusive argument which supports the Hegelian thesis that the being of man consists in tearing out the naturality in us. Man is man only insofar he ceases to be natural. Only he for whom his neighbor is an end and not a means can be considered a man:
That man is good by nature is a doctrine of late that has a modern sense; one considers 'good' the inclinations and predispositions so that man is not good insofar he coincides with his concept but only insofar he empirically is, that means to say, only insofar the negative does not intervene in his vitality and existential functionality (PR III 102s).
There are other examples which are more deeply rooted in the bi- ological than those registered by Maslow. I take from biologist Neal Griffith Smith member of the Smithsonian Institute, the following piece of information, which is tremendously disturbing if we take into account that in most mammals polygamy is the dominant system of reproduction:
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 265
In a number of polygynous (mating of one male with more than one female) and promiscuous species, adult females outnumber adult males, some- times by a factor of five or more. It has been erroneously suggested that this sexual imbalance is the cause of the polygynous mating system, in which one male has several female partners. It has been demonstrated, however, in all polygynous species so far studied, that the ratio of males to females is 50-50 at the time of birth; in many cases, this ratio persists until the ces- sation of parental care. Therefore, it is the polygynous relationship that causes the imbalance, not vice versa: because sexual selection is the domi- nant factor in a polygamous and promiscuous species, it results in a grater mortality of males than of females. (EB 14, 686, 2)
The masculine instinct of aggression is something which man in- herits only because of the fact that he descends from animals. In the animal kingdom, where the species is an end, this instinct is marvelous because it makes the species improve qualitatively, since only the fit- test males survive the confrontation and reproduce themselves. But in the human realm this aggression against the weak is absolutely unac- ceptable, because every human being is an end and not a means. To be sure, if one questions the validity of judgments of good and evil, this whole discussion becomes superfluous; but he who affirms that man is good by nature, or that it is good that the human race improves, is accepting the validity of judgments of good and evil; he is accepting the validity of morals. Now, no moral judgment can be grounded or justified if one denies that the person --for the simple fact of being one-- is an end and not a means.
By nature man tends to destroy his rivals. Consequently, man is evil by nature.
And let us not lose sight from the fact that the tendency of polygamy is deeply rooted in the biological. The mass of an ovule is infinitely big- ger than that of the sperm; sometimes it is many million times bigger. Unlike the sperm, the ovule contains cytoplasm, which is a warehouse of nutrients, so to speak. The female organism spends more energy in producing its gamete than that which the male organism employs doing the same. The female tends to be very selective; it tends to mate by nature with the best male exemplaries of its species, for she cannot risk her fecundity of one year or of her entire lifespan. On the contrary, the male can allow himself a great number of bad choices, because his organism wears out very little by producing sperm. Polygamy is natu- ral in the male, while the natural selectivity of the female favors the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 266 Hegel was right
confrontation between males, for all the males have by definition a sexual instinct, not because they are the best exempes of the species. Regardless of sex and reproduction, the instinctive aggressiveness is a fact which is corroborated at behavioral and physiological levels. Let us mention briefly the behavioral aspect, since the physiological one is
much more impressive.
Zoologists distinguish between gregarious and solitary species. The
termites seem to belong to the first group, and it has been thoroughly documented that they eventually end up eating each other (cf. EB 21, 612, 2). But indefectible aggressive behavior has been observed in soli- tary species when we gather many individuals in an enclosed space. When that happens, we can even observe cannibalism among both rats and termites (cf. EB 14, 687, 1). In the case of any solitary species, one only needs to gather in a closed space two individuals, and the result is either that one murders the other or that one becomes completely dominated.
In regard to the physiological one, neurophysiology has made a hideous discovery by means of encephalography: rage, resentment and anger are emotions pleasant for the organism, positive feelings, en- couraging dispositions. Let us summarize the technical procedure that has provided us with that conclusion:
"Little animals could learn systematically to connect to or discon- nect themselves from an electric stream by pushing some pedals connected to their hypothalamus, the inner part of the diencephalon. The intensity of the current has unequivocally something to do with pleasantness and unpleasantness, for when they are subjected to a soft stimulation they immediately learn to get away from the pedal that disconnects them. Now, since one is making of them an encephalo- gram, the experimenter can distinguish two different types of waves in the movements of pleasure and displeasure; the pleasant ones are wide and large wages; the negative ones are narrow and short" (Cfr. Grastya? n: EB 18, 354s).
Once he has come to realize that, the scientist can place the animals in vital, real situations and observe in the screen which kind of waves are produced by different situations. When there is a feeling of fear or anxiety, the waves indicate unpleasantness and suffering; however, when the animal attacks he becomes angry, the waves turn slow and wide, which are characteristics of contempt and self-reinforcement. This is the horrendous discovery we mentioned before.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 267
Not that this content is entirely new, but anybody that has certain hon- esty of analysis knows that there is pleasure in the act of carrying out an act of revenge and that deeds performed with rage are self-reinforcing. The first thing to say is that the above mentioned experiments cannot be denied or neglected. Second, and more important, they demonstrate that our in itself pleasant, gratuitous aggressiveness is not the product of culture or education, those universal villains to which romanticism attributes all possible evil in order to remain with the reveries of the natural goodness of man. No. Cruelty is something inherited from the animals, it is a natural element of man; and man becomes man in- sofar and to the degree that he abandons naturality. Man is an animal while he remains natural. Insofar he is a man, man has no nature.
To top it all, scientists have been able to discern between the vascular and hormonal changes that come along with pleasure and the vascu- lar and hormonal changes that come along suffering and anxiety: one has found the presence of the first in the moments of rage and resent- ment. This kind of reaction have confirmed this: fury and aggression unconsciously trigger typical movements towards the object, while the unpleasant experience triggers typical movements in which one grows apart.
To summarize what we have said, let us repeat with Hegel: "The evil is no other thing that the deepen-in-itself of the natural being of the spirit" (PG 539).
In order to go further with our exposition, we need to detonate once and for all the Hegelian bomb: "Everything that man is, he owes it to the State; only there he has his essence" (VG 111).
The State, as we will demonstrate later on, consists only in the set of rights and duties which bind man. Now, we have seen (III, 7) that self- consciousness can only be produced by the ethical demands that others address to me and which are called duties; but that which distinguishes man from animals, that which makes him truly a man, is self-awareness. This why Hegel says that everything that man is he owes it to the State. Hegel was the first one to understand in the modernity that the Aristote- lian expression zoon politiko? n is the definition of man. What has hindered the most that one understands Hegel is the chimerical belief that man is good by nature. Only the State, only a set of rights and duties, makes him good; for only the State pulls him off from animality.
In a like way, we showed that (V, 1), if man follows nature, he is not free. When the path of behavior is not determined by the self but by
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 268 Hegel was right
an arbitrary impulse, the kind of action we are dealing with is heter- onomous: no one can speak there of freedom. It follows that the set of duties and rights is what makes man free. With the first ethical answer man begins to be free; he begins to be good and, consequently, he be- gins to be a man. "The natural want [. . . ] is worse that the bad want" (Rph, Notiz zu 139 A). "What is morally evil is the worst; it that which absolutely ought not to be; however, nature is even worse" (ibid. ).
Even the most primitive State or polis contains the roles and expec- tation which make man a man by granting him responsibility --not killing, honesty, respect for the others' existence, etcetera. This is what is essential to the State: a set of duties and rights.
"One renounces to the particularity of will in those uncouth statal situations" (VG 113).
"To be sure, one can verify the existence of many situations of sav- ageness, but [. . . ] despite how ignorant these situations are, they are bound to institutions which, as one says, limit freedom" (VG 116).
"The substantial of ethical relationships [. . . ] is already present in an uncultivated society" (PR I 158).
In this context --as we have said before-- the most unlikely ally we can count on is Rousseau himself: "Good social institutions are those that know best how to denature man" (Emile, I).
Man is not free by nature: this Hegelian thesis, which only makes explicit what we have demonstrated (V, 1) is undoubtedly one of the most important truths both in political philosophy and anthropology. Neither liberals nor leftists seem capable to understand it. The truth is that neither liberalism nor communism can define freedom.
If man is not free by nature, then saying that duties 'limit' freedom is absurd. That is the context of Hegels phrases (VG 116), as they say in German sogenannt.
"Duty is not the limitation of freedom, but only the abstraction of it, that means to say, the lack of freedom (Rph 149 Z).
"In duty man frees himself for true freedom" (Rph 149).
"As ethicity, true freedom consists in that the will does not have as an end, subjective and selfish contents, but rather universal content (EPW 469 A).
"Merely natural will is in itself violence against the idea of freedom in itself, which one must protect against uncultivated will" (Rph 93). "As a matter of fact, every law that is truly a law is a freedom, since it contains a rational determination of the objective spirit and hence the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 269
content of freedom. On the contrary, it is now very common to say that everyone must limit their freedom in relation to the freedom of others, and that the State is that situation of reciprocal limitation, and that the laws are limitations. In such imaginations one conceives truth as a ca- price or a whim" (EPW 539 A).
But the ambiguity of Rousseau begins soon. Man is free, that is the sub- stantial nature of man; and it is not only suppressed by the State for the first time, but in fact is constituted for the very first time within it. The freedom of nature, the aptitude for freedom, is not true freedom; for only the State is the realization of freedom (GP III 307).
"In reality this limitation is the condition of liberation; society and State are rather those situations in which freedom becomes true" (VG 118). As we said before (v, 1), every mistake in this regard has its origin in believing that freedom is something negative, that is to say, lack of something. It is very easy for the natural man to possess from the beginning something which consists in nothing. Aside from the fact that such conception does not define truth and hence does not know what it is speaking about, the absurd that immediately follows from it is that stones would also be free. Natural goodness has a similar ori- gin: if goodness consisted in the lack of something, it follows then that man has it by nature, for one does not need to put many endeavors in obtaining nothingness. That is the origin of Rousseau's apocalyptic cra- ziness: he understands the natural man as a solitary animal, and hence he does not harm anybody, for the sole and simple reason that there is no one around him, and in that sense this man is good: a goodness that consists in a negation or in nothingness. Obviously, Rousseau never un- derstood that intersubjectivity is the only thing which can make a man exist and that a 'solitary man' is a contradictio in terminis. Besides, with
that criterion, even rocks would be morally good.
"In the State freedom is realized positively and is in itself objective.
However, this should not be understood as if the subjective will of the subject came to its realization and enjoyment by means of the general will, in other words, as if the former was a means for the latter. The State is not a coming together of man in which the freedom of all indi- viduals ought to be limited. We would be conceiving freedom as some- thing merely negative if we imagine that each subject limits its freedom with other subjects, so that this common limitation, this common
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 270 Hegel was right
'getting in the way' of the others, left everyone with a place in which he could let go. As a matter of fact, only Law, ethicity and the State are the positive realization and achievement of freedom. To be sure, the arbitrari- ness of the individuals is not freedom. What is limited is a freedom that consists of caprice and that has nothing to do with particularities and necessities" (VG 111). (The italics are mine).
What the State and duty must limit is animality and "deepen- in-itself of the natural being", which is not freedom but naturality. The conception we have criticized would need to affirm the absurdity that loving the neighbor is a limitation of oneself, when in fact loving the neighbor is to identify oneself with the others. Nature is not freedom. Freedom is something extremely positive which implies breaking out from the natural, for no natural thing is free.
2. happineSS?
It is amazing that neither Philosophy nor Theology have noticed that the thesis which states that the end of man is happiness is a huge im- morality. If this thesis was correct, all my neighbors would be only a means and nothing else in order to obtain my final happiness --God would be a mere means for that purpose as well. It seems al- most impossible that such a terribly perverse thesis, in spite of being denounced by Hegel with perfect clarity more than a century and a half ago, is nowadays held --implicitly or explicitly-- in politics and even in Theology.
As a means of introduction, let us address the relation between this thesis and our previous theme.
It is obvious that the romanticism of men of letters and poets, in or- der to make beautiful their bucolic descriptions, had to suppose a priori that the natural man was happy. It is what Hegel calls "the frivolous dream of natural happiness" (EPW 475 A).
This apriorism is evident in Rousseau: "Every man wants to be happy, but in order to become happy he must begin by knowing what happi- ness is. The happiness of natural man is as simple as his life: it consists in the absence of pain. Health, freedom, the necessaries of life are its elements" (Emile, III).
Just like goodness and freedom consist in a not -- in a lack and ab- sence of something--, so happiness consists in a 'not suffering'. A thing
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 271
that does not consist of anything is something easy for the natural man to possess from the very beginning.
By idealizing the natural life, romanticism did not realize that those who are civilized are the ones who positively enjoy the fields, the woods, the mountains and the sea. The beauty of it all would be nothing but a mystery to the 'natural man'. Moreover, like Norbert Elias has pointed out, "for the primitive men the natural space is to a larger degree a danger zone; it is full of perils that the civilized man does not know any more of" (1977 II, 405). In order to enjoy natural beauties, one demands the pacification of the environment and the affectivity which are intro- duced by civilization; one demands that forests and fields are no longer the place where men and animals hunt each other. But still today, in our pacified countries, it is by no means true that the uncultivated man is more capable of enjoying the natural beauties than the cultivated one. Hegel says:
"Granted: the savage man does not know any huge amount of pain and unhappiness; that is, something merely negative; freedom, how- ever, must be essentially affirmative. Only the benefits of supreme consciousness are the benefits of the affirmative freedom. " (WG 775)
The observation that the English novelist Willkie Collins made in the middle of the nineteenth century is extremely accurate:
Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature. As children, we none of us possess it. No uninstructed man or woman possesses it. Those whose lives are most exclusively passed amid the ever-changing wonders of sea and land are also those who are most universally insensible to every aspect of Nature not directly associated with the human interest of their calling. Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civi- lized accomplishments which we all learn as an Art; and, more, that very capacity is rarely practiced by any of us except when our minds are most indolent and most unoccupied (The Woman in White I, viii).
Without referring to the enjoyment of natural beauties, the Cyrenaics of the fourth and fifth centuries B. C. --a philosophical school whose stron- gest point of focus was happiness-- stated that only culture and reflection make man capable for joy. Hegel summarizes Aristippus's philosophy thus: the principle of fruition "embraces the feature that culture of spirit and thought is an ineludible condition to achieve delight" (GP I 541).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 272 Hegel was right
Natural happiness seems to be something impossible. It is with all certainty a dogmatic and superficial apriorism.
Because it is clear that happiness cannot be defined as something negative, like a lack of something, e. g. like absence of suffering; for then, the stones would be happy.
If what they mean to say is that absence of suffering is the mere con- dition for happiness, one could agree with that, but it is obvious that we still need a definition of happiness.
In spite of what Rousseau says, health and minimal material goods are evidently not enough, because there are people who are perfectly healthy and have all the things in the world and yet are tremen- dously unhappy.
Perhaps Rousseau would say that those are mere ideas. But one could reply the following: first, that happiness and unhappiness are precisely ideas, and hence health and minimal material goods would become, again, a simple condition and we would still lack a definition of happiness. Second, if unhappiness is a mere idea, Rousseau would be obviously supposing that the natural man is happy because he does not have ideas. He holds a conception of happiness which consists in the mere absence of something. A tree that is healthy and does not need anything would have to be considered happy. In short, the Rous- seaunian definition is untenable.
Fortunately, Rousseau adds after the above quoted text: "Another thing is the happiness of the moral man, but we will not speak about it here". More fortunately, many years afterwards and having changed his mind in his Political Fragments, Rousseau was finally able to recog- nize this: "But the meaning of the term happiness, which is much un- determined among individuals, is even to a greater extent so among the nations" (1964. 509).
This is precisely the problem: men of letters and politicians --and even theologians and philosophers-- have induced mankind to chase eagerly an ideal which nobody knows anything from.
"Happiness is the only imaginary and abstract universality of a content which simply must be" (EPW. 480).
". . . the whim which in happiness gives or not himself a goal" (ibid. ).
It is an imaginary configuration whose only content is the unreach- able. It seems to be a goal, but since it lacks content it isn't one at all.
"Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein" (Mark 10, 15). The first text clearly denotes a posterior reflection of the community or of Mathew himself: in order to receive the Kingdom of Heavens as children we must become chil- dren. But that was not the idea. The idea was to receive the Kingdom as children receive things, that is to say, as the children from the villages received Jesus when he went there to announce the Kingdom: recep- tive, without prejudiced nor preformed ideas, capable of hearing some- thing truly new, with time availability, ready to follow up, leaving all other tasks aside. The original text speaks of the way of receiving, not of the way of being of children. Every specialist in the synoptic gospels knows that Mathew and Luke had before their eyes the text of Mark; in this case Luke (18, 17) preserved intact the formulation of Mark; the one that changed it was Mathew, and unfortunately, he wiped out the principal verb: to receive.
Some Bible scholars deny the historical authenticity of such phrase, let alone the formulation of Mathew. But they all agree on something: namely, that it does not speak at all about the innocence of children. For example Eduard Schweizer: "It is not about their purity or impurity" (1967, 117). And Walter Grundmann says: "Jesus does not presuppose a state of innocence in children" (1968, 207). On his part, D. E. Nine- ham says: "The point of comparison is not so much the innocence and humility [or obedience] of children" (1964, 268). Furthermore, C. E. B. Cranfield even attacks that interpretation: "To think of any subjective qualities of children here is to turn faith into a work. " (1966, 324) We could make this list much larger.
It is irresponsible to affirm the illusion about natural goodness, es- pecially now that we know that men come from the animals. Unlike in Hegel's time, today it is necessary to make focus on the biological aspect of our subject.
It may be convenient to start discussing with a great modern cham- pion of all natural will, a convinced denier of the original sin, and, to a certain point, a biological expert: Abraham H. Maslow. In his book about motivation and personality, he dedicated the ninth chapter to hold that destructivity is not instinctive in man. For that purpose, how- ever, he argues that the zoological beasts, which are apparently the most aggressive ones, do not attack motivated by pleasure but only to obtain food or defend themselves. However, he unwillingly says the following:
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 263
Some animals apparently kill for the sake of killing, and are aggressive for no observable external reason. A fox that enters a henhouse may kill more hens than it could eat, and the cat that plays with the mouse is proverbial. Stags and other ungulate animals at rutting will look for fights, sometimes even abandoning their mates to do so. In many animals, even the higher ones, onset of old age seems to make them more vicious for apparently constitutional reasons, and previously mild animals will attack without provocation. In various species killing is not for the sake of food alone. (1970, 118)
I am afraid that the facts that Maslow grants in this passage can only be explained if there exists a natural and instinctive violence in the animal kingdom. The baroque discussion Marlow sets out on in order to distinguish between different types of aggression is pointless. At the end of the day, what this says to us is that the instinct of domination is not evil --as if a difference existed between being killed by domination and being killed for the sake of doing so. I will quote the next passage extensively because the urgency of the matter does not admit any kind of literary or stylistic scruples:
When the higher animals are studied, attacking is found to be correlated more and more with dominance. [. . . ] The animal's place in dominance hierarchy is in part determined by his successful aggression, and his place in the hierarchy determines in turn how much food will he get, whether or not he will have a mate, and other biological satisfactions. Practically all the cruelty manifested in these animals occurs only when it is necessary to vali- date dominance status, or to make a revolution in dominance status. How true this is for other species, I am not sure. But I do suspect that the phe- nomenon of territoriality, of attack on strangers, of jealous protection of the females, of attack on the weak or sick, and other phenomena that are often explained by instinctive aggression or cruelty are very often found to have been motivated by dominance rather than by a specific motivation to aggression for its own sake, e. g. , this aggression may be means behavior rather than end behaviour. (1970, 119)
What a consolation for the attacked ones!
The fact that Maslow wants to explain the phenomenon of attacking the weak, the hurt and the sick ones --a phenomenon particularly frequent among the superior animals, and which in certain human tribes is simply instinctive repulsion-- by appealing to the status of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 264 Hegel was right
the domination, when the weak and the sick ones are actually those who jeopardize it the least, only denotes the power of dogmas on the mind of the scholar. But what Maslow and many of his followers lack is the philosophical approach. Despite its valiant defense of the natural, the hereditary and the biological in man, Maslow recognizes that we inherit from the animals the tendency to kill-in-order-to-obtain-more- food, the instinct of --aggression-to-obtain-more-sex, the impulse of attacking in order to achieve 'other biological satisfactions'. Now, that is not something evil in the animals, since we saw (V 6) that for them the end is the species. In the human realm, however, each and every one of the individuals is an end in itself. Hegel gave us the key to under- stand this: "To the extent that man wants the natural, this is no longer the natural but the negative against the good" (Rph 139 Z).
The destruction of the weak and sick suppresses form the world such genetic source. The only ones that breed are the strong ones, the better specimens of the animal in question. This mechanism is fabulous in the animal kingdom. There the species is the end.
The Nazis would praise the highly selective value that the facts com- piled by Maslow have for the improvement of the race. But in the hu- man realm each individual has infinite dignity and cannot be treated as a means. Whoever takes seriously the commandment 'Thou shall not kill', will only see in the above mentioned fact a conclusive argument which supports the Hegelian thesis that the being of man consists in tearing out the naturality in us. Man is man only insofar he ceases to be natural. Only he for whom his neighbor is an end and not a means can be considered a man:
That man is good by nature is a doctrine of late that has a modern sense; one considers 'good' the inclinations and predispositions so that man is not good insofar he coincides with his concept but only insofar he empirically is, that means to say, only insofar the negative does not intervene in his vitality and existential functionality (PR III 102s).
There are other examples which are more deeply rooted in the bi- ological than those registered by Maslow. I take from biologist Neal Griffith Smith member of the Smithsonian Institute, the following piece of information, which is tremendously disturbing if we take into account that in most mammals polygamy is the dominant system of reproduction:
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 265
In a number of polygynous (mating of one male with more than one female) and promiscuous species, adult females outnumber adult males, some- times by a factor of five or more. It has been erroneously suggested that this sexual imbalance is the cause of the polygynous mating system, in which one male has several female partners. It has been demonstrated, however, in all polygynous species so far studied, that the ratio of males to females is 50-50 at the time of birth; in many cases, this ratio persists until the ces- sation of parental care. Therefore, it is the polygynous relationship that causes the imbalance, not vice versa: because sexual selection is the domi- nant factor in a polygamous and promiscuous species, it results in a grater mortality of males than of females. (EB 14, 686, 2)
The masculine instinct of aggression is something which man in- herits only because of the fact that he descends from animals. In the animal kingdom, where the species is an end, this instinct is marvelous because it makes the species improve qualitatively, since only the fit- test males survive the confrontation and reproduce themselves. But in the human realm this aggression against the weak is absolutely unac- ceptable, because every human being is an end and not a means. To be sure, if one questions the validity of judgments of good and evil, this whole discussion becomes superfluous; but he who affirms that man is good by nature, or that it is good that the human race improves, is accepting the validity of judgments of good and evil; he is accepting the validity of morals. Now, no moral judgment can be grounded or justified if one denies that the person --for the simple fact of being one-- is an end and not a means.
By nature man tends to destroy his rivals. Consequently, man is evil by nature.
And let us not lose sight from the fact that the tendency of polygamy is deeply rooted in the biological. The mass of an ovule is infinitely big- ger than that of the sperm; sometimes it is many million times bigger. Unlike the sperm, the ovule contains cytoplasm, which is a warehouse of nutrients, so to speak. The female organism spends more energy in producing its gamete than that which the male organism employs doing the same. The female tends to be very selective; it tends to mate by nature with the best male exemplaries of its species, for she cannot risk her fecundity of one year or of her entire lifespan. On the contrary, the male can allow himself a great number of bad choices, because his organism wears out very little by producing sperm. Polygamy is natu- ral in the male, while the natural selectivity of the female favors the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 266 Hegel was right
confrontation between males, for all the males have by definition a sexual instinct, not because they are the best exempes of the species. Regardless of sex and reproduction, the instinctive aggressiveness is a fact which is corroborated at behavioral and physiological levels. Let us mention briefly the behavioral aspect, since the physiological one is
much more impressive.
Zoologists distinguish between gregarious and solitary species. The
termites seem to belong to the first group, and it has been thoroughly documented that they eventually end up eating each other (cf. EB 21, 612, 2). But indefectible aggressive behavior has been observed in soli- tary species when we gather many individuals in an enclosed space. When that happens, we can even observe cannibalism among both rats and termites (cf. EB 14, 687, 1). In the case of any solitary species, one only needs to gather in a closed space two individuals, and the result is either that one murders the other or that one becomes completely dominated.
In regard to the physiological one, neurophysiology has made a hideous discovery by means of encephalography: rage, resentment and anger are emotions pleasant for the organism, positive feelings, en- couraging dispositions. Let us summarize the technical procedure that has provided us with that conclusion:
"Little animals could learn systematically to connect to or discon- nect themselves from an electric stream by pushing some pedals connected to their hypothalamus, the inner part of the diencephalon. The intensity of the current has unequivocally something to do with pleasantness and unpleasantness, for when they are subjected to a soft stimulation they immediately learn to get away from the pedal that disconnects them. Now, since one is making of them an encephalo- gram, the experimenter can distinguish two different types of waves in the movements of pleasure and displeasure; the pleasant ones are wide and large wages; the negative ones are narrow and short" (Cfr. Grastya? n: EB 18, 354s).
Once he has come to realize that, the scientist can place the animals in vital, real situations and observe in the screen which kind of waves are produced by different situations. When there is a feeling of fear or anxiety, the waves indicate unpleasantness and suffering; however, when the animal attacks he becomes angry, the waves turn slow and wide, which are characteristics of contempt and self-reinforcement. This is the horrendous discovery we mentioned before.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 267
Not that this content is entirely new, but anybody that has certain hon- esty of analysis knows that there is pleasure in the act of carrying out an act of revenge and that deeds performed with rage are self-reinforcing. The first thing to say is that the above mentioned experiments cannot be denied or neglected. Second, and more important, they demonstrate that our in itself pleasant, gratuitous aggressiveness is not the product of culture or education, those universal villains to which romanticism attributes all possible evil in order to remain with the reveries of the natural goodness of man. No. Cruelty is something inherited from the animals, it is a natural element of man; and man becomes man in- sofar and to the degree that he abandons naturality. Man is an animal while he remains natural. Insofar he is a man, man has no nature.
To top it all, scientists have been able to discern between the vascular and hormonal changes that come along with pleasure and the vascu- lar and hormonal changes that come along suffering and anxiety: one has found the presence of the first in the moments of rage and resent- ment. This kind of reaction have confirmed this: fury and aggression unconsciously trigger typical movements towards the object, while the unpleasant experience triggers typical movements in which one grows apart.
To summarize what we have said, let us repeat with Hegel: "The evil is no other thing that the deepen-in-itself of the natural being of the spirit" (PG 539).
In order to go further with our exposition, we need to detonate once and for all the Hegelian bomb: "Everything that man is, he owes it to the State; only there he has his essence" (VG 111).
The State, as we will demonstrate later on, consists only in the set of rights and duties which bind man. Now, we have seen (III, 7) that self- consciousness can only be produced by the ethical demands that others address to me and which are called duties; but that which distinguishes man from animals, that which makes him truly a man, is self-awareness. This why Hegel says that everything that man is he owes it to the State. Hegel was the first one to understand in the modernity that the Aristote- lian expression zoon politiko? n is the definition of man. What has hindered the most that one understands Hegel is the chimerical belief that man is good by nature. Only the State, only a set of rights and duties, makes him good; for only the State pulls him off from animality.
In a like way, we showed that (V, 1), if man follows nature, he is not free. When the path of behavior is not determined by the self but by
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 268 Hegel was right
an arbitrary impulse, the kind of action we are dealing with is heter- onomous: no one can speak there of freedom. It follows that the set of duties and rights is what makes man free. With the first ethical answer man begins to be free; he begins to be good and, consequently, he be- gins to be a man. "The natural want [. . . ] is worse that the bad want" (Rph, Notiz zu 139 A). "What is morally evil is the worst; it that which absolutely ought not to be; however, nature is even worse" (ibid. ).
Even the most primitive State or polis contains the roles and expec- tation which make man a man by granting him responsibility --not killing, honesty, respect for the others' existence, etcetera. This is what is essential to the State: a set of duties and rights.
"One renounces to the particularity of will in those uncouth statal situations" (VG 113).
"To be sure, one can verify the existence of many situations of sav- ageness, but [. . . ] despite how ignorant these situations are, they are bound to institutions which, as one says, limit freedom" (VG 116).
"The substantial of ethical relationships [. . . ] is already present in an uncultivated society" (PR I 158).
In this context --as we have said before-- the most unlikely ally we can count on is Rousseau himself: "Good social institutions are those that know best how to denature man" (Emile, I).
Man is not free by nature: this Hegelian thesis, which only makes explicit what we have demonstrated (V, 1) is undoubtedly one of the most important truths both in political philosophy and anthropology. Neither liberals nor leftists seem capable to understand it. The truth is that neither liberalism nor communism can define freedom.
If man is not free by nature, then saying that duties 'limit' freedom is absurd. That is the context of Hegels phrases (VG 116), as they say in German sogenannt.
"Duty is not the limitation of freedom, but only the abstraction of it, that means to say, the lack of freedom (Rph 149 Z).
"In duty man frees himself for true freedom" (Rph 149).
"As ethicity, true freedom consists in that the will does not have as an end, subjective and selfish contents, but rather universal content (EPW 469 A).
"Merely natural will is in itself violence against the idea of freedom in itself, which one must protect against uncultivated will" (Rph 93). "As a matter of fact, every law that is truly a law is a freedom, since it contains a rational determination of the objective spirit and hence the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 269
content of freedom. On the contrary, it is now very common to say that everyone must limit their freedom in relation to the freedom of others, and that the State is that situation of reciprocal limitation, and that the laws are limitations. In such imaginations one conceives truth as a ca- price or a whim" (EPW 539 A).
But the ambiguity of Rousseau begins soon. Man is free, that is the sub- stantial nature of man; and it is not only suppressed by the State for the first time, but in fact is constituted for the very first time within it. The freedom of nature, the aptitude for freedom, is not true freedom; for only the State is the realization of freedom (GP III 307).
"In reality this limitation is the condition of liberation; society and State are rather those situations in which freedom becomes true" (VG 118). As we said before (v, 1), every mistake in this regard has its origin in believing that freedom is something negative, that is to say, lack of something. It is very easy for the natural man to possess from the beginning something which consists in nothing. Aside from the fact that such conception does not define truth and hence does not know what it is speaking about, the absurd that immediately follows from it is that stones would also be free. Natural goodness has a similar ori- gin: if goodness consisted in the lack of something, it follows then that man has it by nature, for one does not need to put many endeavors in obtaining nothingness. That is the origin of Rousseau's apocalyptic cra- ziness: he understands the natural man as a solitary animal, and hence he does not harm anybody, for the sole and simple reason that there is no one around him, and in that sense this man is good: a goodness that consists in a negation or in nothingness. Obviously, Rousseau never un- derstood that intersubjectivity is the only thing which can make a man exist and that a 'solitary man' is a contradictio in terminis. Besides, with
that criterion, even rocks would be morally good.
"In the State freedom is realized positively and is in itself objective.
However, this should not be understood as if the subjective will of the subject came to its realization and enjoyment by means of the general will, in other words, as if the former was a means for the latter. The State is not a coming together of man in which the freedom of all indi- viduals ought to be limited. We would be conceiving freedom as some- thing merely negative if we imagine that each subject limits its freedom with other subjects, so that this common limitation, this common
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 270 Hegel was right
'getting in the way' of the others, left everyone with a place in which he could let go. As a matter of fact, only Law, ethicity and the State are the positive realization and achievement of freedom. To be sure, the arbitrari- ness of the individuals is not freedom. What is limited is a freedom that consists of caprice and that has nothing to do with particularities and necessities" (VG 111). (The italics are mine).
What the State and duty must limit is animality and "deepen- in-itself of the natural being", which is not freedom but naturality. The conception we have criticized would need to affirm the absurdity that loving the neighbor is a limitation of oneself, when in fact loving the neighbor is to identify oneself with the others. Nature is not freedom. Freedom is something extremely positive which implies breaking out from the natural, for no natural thing is free.
2. happineSS?
It is amazing that neither Philosophy nor Theology have noticed that the thesis which states that the end of man is happiness is a huge im- morality. If this thesis was correct, all my neighbors would be only a means and nothing else in order to obtain my final happiness --God would be a mere means for that purpose as well. It seems al- most impossible that such a terribly perverse thesis, in spite of being denounced by Hegel with perfect clarity more than a century and a half ago, is nowadays held --implicitly or explicitly-- in politics and even in Theology.
As a means of introduction, let us address the relation between this thesis and our previous theme.
It is obvious that the romanticism of men of letters and poets, in or- der to make beautiful their bucolic descriptions, had to suppose a priori that the natural man was happy. It is what Hegel calls "the frivolous dream of natural happiness" (EPW 475 A).
This apriorism is evident in Rousseau: "Every man wants to be happy, but in order to become happy he must begin by knowing what happi- ness is. The happiness of natural man is as simple as his life: it consists in the absence of pain. Health, freedom, the necessaries of life are its elements" (Emile, III).
Just like goodness and freedom consist in a not -- in a lack and ab- sence of something--, so happiness consists in a 'not suffering'. A thing
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 271
that does not consist of anything is something easy for the natural man to possess from the very beginning.
By idealizing the natural life, romanticism did not realize that those who are civilized are the ones who positively enjoy the fields, the woods, the mountains and the sea. The beauty of it all would be nothing but a mystery to the 'natural man'. Moreover, like Norbert Elias has pointed out, "for the primitive men the natural space is to a larger degree a danger zone; it is full of perils that the civilized man does not know any more of" (1977 II, 405). In order to enjoy natural beauties, one demands the pacification of the environment and the affectivity which are intro- duced by civilization; one demands that forests and fields are no longer the place where men and animals hunt each other. But still today, in our pacified countries, it is by no means true that the uncultivated man is more capable of enjoying the natural beauties than the cultivated one. Hegel says:
"Granted: the savage man does not know any huge amount of pain and unhappiness; that is, something merely negative; freedom, how- ever, must be essentially affirmative. Only the benefits of supreme consciousness are the benefits of the affirmative freedom. " (WG 775)
The observation that the English novelist Willkie Collins made in the middle of the nineteenth century is extremely accurate:
Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature. As children, we none of us possess it. No uninstructed man or woman possesses it. Those whose lives are most exclusively passed amid the ever-changing wonders of sea and land are also those who are most universally insensible to every aspect of Nature not directly associated with the human interest of their calling. Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civi- lized accomplishments which we all learn as an Art; and, more, that very capacity is rarely practiced by any of us except when our minds are most indolent and most unoccupied (The Woman in White I, viii).
Without referring to the enjoyment of natural beauties, the Cyrenaics of the fourth and fifth centuries B. C. --a philosophical school whose stron- gest point of focus was happiness-- stated that only culture and reflection make man capable for joy. Hegel summarizes Aristippus's philosophy thus: the principle of fruition "embraces the feature that culture of spirit and thought is an ineludible condition to achieve delight" (GP I 541).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 272 Hegel was right
Natural happiness seems to be something impossible. It is with all certainty a dogmatic and superficial apriorism.
Because it is clear that happiness cannot be defined as something negative, like a lack of something, e. g. like absence of suffering; for then, the stones would be happy.
If what they mean to say is that absence of suffering is the mere con- dition for happiness, one could agree with that, but it is obvious that we still need a definition of happiness.
In spite of what Rousseau says, health and minimal material goods are evidently not enough, because there are people who are perfectly healthy and have all the things in the world and yet are tremen- dously unhappy.
Perhaps Rousseau would say that those are mere ideas. But one could reply the following: first, that happiness and unhappiness are precisely ideas, and hence health and minimal material goods would become, again, a simple condition and we would still lack a definition of happiness. Second, if unhappiness is a mere idea, Rousseau would be obviously supposing that the natural man is happy because he does not have ideas. He holds a conception of happiness which consists in the mere absence of something. A tree that is healthy and does not need anything would have to be considered happy. In short, the Rous- seaunian definition is untenable.
Fortunately, Rousseau adds after the above quoted text: "Another thing is the happiness of the moral man, but we will not speak about it here". More fortunately, many years afterwards and having changed his mind in his Political Fragments, Rousseau was finally able to recog- nize this: "But the meaning of the term happiness, which is much un- determined among individuals, is even to a greater extent so among the nations" (1964. 509).
This is precisely the problem: men of letters and politicians --and even theologians and philosophers-- have induced mankind to chase eagerly an ideal which nobody knows anything from.
"Happiness is the only imaginary and abstract universality of a content which simply must be" (EPW. 480).
". . . the whim which in happiness gives or not himself a goal" (ibid. ).
It is an imaginary configuration whose only content is the unreach- able. It seems to be a goal, but since it lacks content it isn't one at all.
