No More Learning

The thesis according to which self-consciousness stems from in- tersubjectivity is not only obvious for what we know of child psy- chology. Anthropologists and sociologists have studied in detail the efficacy --in the formation of the individuals' selfhood-- of the 'roles' and the corresponding 'expectations' in a society. Only an immoral tendency could have sometimes prevented one from recognizing that the most basic expectations and the most fundamental roles are of a moral nature.
Let us consider this question: are there roles and expectations without which any kind of society or human community is not possible? For instance, I have the expectation of not being killed by those who come close to me for any given reason; I have the expectation of hearing the truth from those who talk to me; I expect that the others keep the promises they make, etcetera. These expectations impose the respec- tive roles, and all persons bear the same expectations in regard of me and impose me different roles. Without that no human community is possible. When a child incorporates to the preexisting intersubjectiv- ity, these roles and expectations shape and penetrate his subjectivity --and the moral character of the said roles and expectations is undis- putable. The more free-spirited anthropologists have showed this by referring to the most primitive human communities nowadays known. For instance, Robert Redfield says:
The point in which we must insist [. . . ] is that the nexus and the essen- tial order of society in such an early condition of humanity were moral. Humanity reached its enduring and characteristic nature as a multitude of different yet equivalent systems of relations and institutions, each of which was expression of their conception of the good. Each precivilized society was bound by certain ethical conceptions which were most of the time im- plicit but continuously carried out. (Rossi et al. , 1977, 291)
As we shall see later (VI, 2), the utilitarian dogmatism which in- terprets the individual search for self interest as the moral precepts without whose observance no society can exist, lacks significance and refutes itself.
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8. cauSaLity
Two objections had appeared against the characterization of the sub- ject that we previously presented in three steps: one objection is based on the concept of substance and the other on the concept of time. The last objection --which we will answer here-- is supposedly based on the concept of causality and emerges directly against self-determination, but since it is a frustrated attempt, it rests on the idea of natural law and physical necessity. This is the reason why we have postponed this discussion for the very moment in which we have reached the moral necessity called imperative. As we will later see, physical necessity lacks all meaning whatsoever, and the origin of the concept of neces- sity is precisely the moral imperative.
Against the characterization of the subject as pure act, the two former objections put forward the ideas of substance and time, only to collide against the fact that the only possible meaning that these two words can have is the activity itself of the spirit which they are attacking. Now, the same happens to those who put forward causality and necessity against self-determination: the only possible meaning of these words is constituted precisely by the reality they want to raise up against. The objection says that there cannot be self-determined beings since sci- ence holds as a fundamental principle that all phenomena are caused and determined by other phenomena; but the meaning of the verb 'to cause' remains here unexplained, unless one recurs to self-determina- tion, which means that one causes oneself his own determinations.
No one would be surprised today by what we just said if scientists had not taken refuge in their own conceptions, exempting themselves of knowing the contributions that the most piercing minds have ren- dered demonstratively to humanity. Indeed, Hume and Kant demon- strated once and for all that the concept of cause neither does nor can have an empirical meaning. Hume mocked all those who empirically perceive (or believe to perceive) a post and recklessly affirm a propter. There is so little logic in that recurrent ingenuity as is in someone who, at the sight of an ant, would say that such thing is an elephant. If the succeeding from one event to the other meant that there is a causal relationship between the two, we would have to affirm that the night is the cause of the day, because the event called day regularly succeeds the event called night.
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Hume says: "Shall we then rest contented with these two relations of contiguity and succession, as affording a complete idea of causation? By no means. An object may be contiguous and prior to another, with- out being considered as its cause. " (Treatise of Human Nature, I, III, xiv)
Kant simply is analyzing the undeniable content of the concept of cause when he affirms that it is impossible to grant this concept an empirical meaning:
Sensible phenomena provide certainly cases by means of which a rule is possible according to which something happens habitually, but never that such a result is necessary: it follows that the synthesis of cause and effect has a dignity that cannot be expressed empirically, namely, that the effect not only is added to the cause, but rather is put by and follows from it (KRV B124).
It is important to repeat in this context a warning that we made be- fore (II, 3). Although it may be valid in some case to infer a causal rela- tion on the grounds of empirical data, it does not follow from this that what is inferred is an empirical data. Quite the contrary: it is necessary to make this inference, because it was not among the empirical data. By the way, the meaning of the concept whose realization we infer has to be taken from somewhere else, since this meaning does not match any of the empirical data available.
In any case, the fact that B is contiguous to A or that it occurs after A does not mean that B is an effect of A. Contiguity and causality are not synonyms. Temporal succession and causality are not synonyms. Replacing surreptitiously one for the other is always a sophistic maneuver
To add B to A could be an empirical data. From that one could infer that B is an effect of A if he finds the corresponding thesis and demon- strates them. But that does not mean that being an effect is an empirical data. On the contrary, the proof that this is not the case is that it was necessary to infer that. An empirical data does not need to be inferred, since it is already given. By the by, these inferences would be pointless pursuits if one does not define the meaning of 'effect', since we would not understand what has been inferred.
But there is something worse: there are no adequate premises, the inference is invalid. Although it were empirical --as unreflective sci- entists assume-- that B is always added to A, it is not possible to build a legitimate inference by means of which we deduce a causal relation
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between A and B. They will reply: it will be too much chance that there was no causal relation. However, I answer them: precisely this reason- ing shows that they are using an entire theory to legitimate the infer- ence and that the causal relation is not an empirical data, but that theory is false, because the night always is added to the day and nevertheless there is no causal relation between the day and the night, and it is use- less to say that this constant succession would be too hazardous if there was no causal relation; this does not exist, despite all the theories of causality they may come up with. In addition, an 'always' is not an empirical data.
And it is also pointless that they employ the recourse of saying 'we understand by causal relation a constant succession'. It is simply false that they understand that, because they do not understand that the day is not the cause of the night.
What we have said shows that causality is not an empirical data --something that was already demonstrated by Hume and Kant. Now, it follows from this that only self-consciousness can give meaning to the concept of cause. But the only cause we know by self-conscious- ness is the cause that determines itself. Therefore, one cannot put forward against determination a concept whose only meaning is self- determination.
A disturbing but logically unavoidable conclusion is that if we attri- bute causality to other kinds of processes and realities, we only do this in a derived, deficient and diminished way. And even this softened attribution is probably not entirely justified.
Since they did not venture to read Hegel, both the enemies and the champions of free will believed --as an undisputable fact-- that free will is incompatible with causal processes. The first ones denied the existence of free will because they thought that the entire universe consisted in causal processes; the second ones affirmed it by saying that there are free processes in the world besides causal ones. But all the controversy rested on a concept of cause that does not exist. The only true cause is that which determines itself, i. e. the free will.
No one in fact thinks something defined when one uses the word 'cause' in reference to material phenomena, not even in the case in which a moving body collides with another and the latter starts to move. One says 'cause' as if it were some sort of 'hocus pocus'. When vulgar or professional philosophers and scientists believe to have ex- plained an event only by saying that it was 'caused' by some other
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event, they are really explaining obscurum per obscuris. What could it possibly mean that a being 'makes being' another being? How is it pos- sible that the property or characteristic of a being 'transmigrates' and suddenly becomes the property or the characteristic of another object? What kind of metaphysical monster is that which was first an accident, then a substance for a moment of transmigration migration, and finally becomes an accident of another substance?
"The relation called influx belongs to vulgar philosophy. Since one cannot understand how material particles and immaterial qualities can pass from one substance to the other, one must abandon such a repre- sentation" (GP III 240).
The evidently mysterious and magical character of the transmigra- tions mentioned above did not prevent Hobbes and Huygens in the 17th century, Lord Kevin in the 19th century, and the molecular biologists of our century, from playing with billiard balls, as if the movement of the first could explain the movement of the second only because there was 'contact' between them. Furthermore, this illusion of the explana- tory force of something that is in fact more mysterious than that which was being explained underlies the grounding of the entire corpuscu- lar theory of matter, which tried to reduce everything to the clashes between marbles. And all the present efforts from the General Rela- tivity onwards of abolishing Newtonian actions by substituting them with different kinds of 'contact' are still trapped within the disastrous Kelvinian framework; meanwhile, the scientists stubbornly persist to explain the obscure with the darker.
If one replies that the property which first was in one being and then in another is not numerically the same, the magical character and the lack of all explanation become all the more clear: from the fact that a be- ing has some characteristics one invalidly proceeds to say that the other being has such characteristics only by mentioning the word 'cause'. How does this marvel occur is something that remains unexplained; one thinks it is enough to say that one is the cause of the other.
And if it is numerically the same property, the circumstance of the contact does not make more comprehensible the mysterious fact that the characteristic of an object --despite the fact that we are talking of the individual entity itself of that object -- becomes a property and the indi- vidual entity itself of an object that is different from the former one. We must remember: contiguity is not a synonym of causality. Hume had already remarked this: "Motion in the second billiard-ball is a quite
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distinct event from motion in the first; nor is there anything in the one to suggest the smallest hint of the other. " (Enquiry IV, I)
Despite the degree of contiguity of two beings, everything remains unexplained unless one says how one acts upon the other. Therefore, the contact itself is not decisive. And if it does act, then that causality would be what builds up the explanation. For that purpose, contact itself is completely irrelevant.
But precisely this term of causation lacks all intelligible meaning without the reference to self-determination; as we saw with Kant (III 2), self-determination is the most intelligible of all the contents that the mind can understand. What happens to a billiard ball is by no means explained by reference to what happens in some other ball. To say that what happens in a material object is the cause of what happens in an- other object equals to pronounce a spell without providing any intel- ligible content.
The root of this widespread Kelvinian mistake is twofold: first, one believes that what is frequent (everything that simply occurs), does not need an explanation; second, one incurs completely in the sophism de- nounced by Hume: post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
Since the ball always moves after a contact, one believes that this fact, only because it always occurs, does not need an explanation. But true science is characterized by the search of the most ordinary and common facts, that is to say, the facts that always occur. For instance, the theory of gravitation tries to explain the fact that a stone falls to the ground when we drop it. Likewise, the tides are always shifting, but only geology tries strenuously to explain that movement. We already pointed out that if we ask 'why are there black clouds when it thun- ders? ', and one answers us that 'every time that thunders there are black clouds', no one has explained anything.
But what is decisive is that the Kelvinian mentality incurs in the tre- mendous sophism denounced by Hume. Since the second ball moves after the contact, the Kelvinian mind affirms: it moves due to the con- tact. We do not need to repeat that such procedure is as illegitimate as saying that an ant is an elephant, nor that with such a justification we would have to affirm that the night is cause of the day, nor that it is pointless to say that, if the second ball moves after the contact, it would be too much coincidence that this was not provoked by the contact; for we could also say that, if the day succeeds the night, it would be too much coincidence that this did not happen due to the night.
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As if the previous examples were not enough, modern physics has provided us with another argument against the explanation by con- tact: the contact does not exist. This is a thesis worth looking at more closely .
The fields of repulsive force prevent that two bodies touch between them, and this happens even when the vulgar mind believes to be wit- nessing a clash. I quote the mechanical engineer Malcolm McChesney:
In any real gas, even a binary collision --one between two particles only-- is a complicated process, because each particle is surrounded by a force field that varies in space. This force field is such that it attracts another par- ticle when that other particle is relatively far away but repels it when the other particle comes relatively close.
That these intermolecular forces exist is evident from the fact that gases do condense into liquids, a phenomenon that cannot be explained except as a consequence of attractive forces at work between the particles. (EB 23, 697, 2)
McChesney even says this in regard of the explanations of clashes between bodkins:
"The particle description of gases grew from ideas in the 17th and 18th centuries concerning special aspects of the collective behavior of structureless gas particles that were supposed to have no surrounding force fields. " (EB 23, 699, 1)
In Physics one cannot speak of contact anymore, except only when this consists of the forces of a body that act on the other, i. e. one exerts causality upon the other. But then, something very disappointing hap- pens: they wanted to explain causality by means of contact, when in fact contact is explained by causality. One employed supposedly a con- cept in order to make causality intelligible, when in fact the only pos- sible contact would be intelligible if causality was intelligible. This is a bold circularity that confirms what we have been saying; one does not think in something definite when one uses the word cause.
There is another conclusion in regard to the efforts of General Rela- tivity mentioned before --and the more recent ones, based on spaces of eleven dimensions-- which aim to overcome the Newtonian action at distance. If they conceive distance as the negation of contact, that equals the negation of causality, in other words, the negation of the action of a body upon another body. Therefore, the action at a distance turns out to be a strictly contradictory term that lacks content, for that content
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would be action without action. What the relativists are challenging is nothing more than a ghost.
The true problem is not --as the Scholastic philosophers also be- lieved-- the action at a distance, but rather action in itself and causality. And in that regard, physics have nothing substantial to say, because it is impossible to define causality on the physical level. The only causality that we know is the self-determination of the spirit, which really pro- duces new experiences and determinations that did not previously exist. To use the term causality with this point of reference is only to be juggling with words.
For that reason, spirit is the only possible meaning of the word time, since as we saw in Aristotle, there cannot be time where there is no real change, i. e. , the production of something new, and this is why Physics --which lacks the concept of causality-- had no other option than to misunderstand time, confusing it with space.
One could vaguely foresee this when Einstein tried to reduce time to causation. His unexpressed principle was: Propter hoc, ergo post hoc. But since in Einstein --as in all Physics-- causation is not really causa- tion or production of something new, this utterance remained barren. As we saw, the time of Einstein is even reversible because it is nothing more than space. That Einstein does not understand by causation the production of something new is seen in his quest for some sort of contact, suppressing distance by the curvature of space and the false mathematical continuity of the field. One must say emphatically that the Kelvinian explanation by contact presupposes that nothing new is produced: the movement of the first billiard ball is simply transmitted to the second one. Parmenides ho! Nihil fit, nihil movetur!
All the 'explanations' of Physics converge in some conservation principle: everything is conserved; there is nothing new.
As we saw, the subsequent mistake is that --following Parmenides-- they have confounded being with nothingness. Nothingness, indeed, does not change. It neither increases nor diminishes. On the contrary, the true being, which is the constant self-determination of the spirit, consists in producing genuinely new determinations because it only exists in doing that.
This is why Aristotle said that the atomists lacked the 'origin of movement'. As many commentators have noted, the atoms of Leucip- pus and Democritus aim primarily to be the being of Parmenides in miniature, which is tantamount to say that nothing changes. Now, the
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same thing has happened to all physics. All what the Parmenidian 'ex- planations' by conservation --that is to say, by identity-- do is to deny that there is something to explain: nothing changes, there is nothing new. Thus there is no time or causality which can be properly called as such. Physics can use the word causality; since they do not need the real causality, they do not give this word any meaning at all.
In balance, thus, causality without content cannot help to challenge self-determination; whether it has content or not, this causality not only does not challenge self-determination: they are identical.
9. naturaL Law
Consequently, in order to keep denying the concept of self-determina- tion, what some scientists have done is to renounce de facto to the concept of causality and instead they brandish the notion of natural laws.
All modern sciences entrench themselves in the caste of natural law; all the efforts aim 'to discover' this law, and they lay in that the en- tire scientificity of their disciplines. But they do not manage to define by empirical means what a law or a nomological proposition is, and hence no one knows what they are taking about. Now, if the meaning of this word is not empirical, then it must come from self-conscious- ness, which leads us directly to the moral imperative described by our third characterization of spirit, and is precisely what the empirical disciplines wanted to avoid.
To tell the truth, it is a perfectly documented fact that the word law --I refer, evidently, to ancient tongues-- was employed in a moral and juridical sense a millennium before it was being used by Physics. The code of Hammurabi, which dates back to the 18TH century b. C. , says in its introductory paragraph that the law chisels the stony walls of the royal palace so that all the population has knowledge of it. What is really questionable is whether the word law can obtain a meaning that is independent from its original moral and juridical sense. For that to be possible, it would be necessary that an empirical data builds up a new meaning. However, none of the keywords that must be employed to define or enounce a law has an empirical meaning.
It is amazing that a word, whose original meaning is the imperative directed toward rational beings capable of being responsible, was ever someday used in reference to irrational things, beings and phenomena.
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Evidently, this second use had to be derived and with a deficient mean- ing, as it happened with the word causality. Now, transfer or apparent moving away from its original sense is real and is documented; it was a fact of a clearly theological nature and its result does not have the slightest empirical trace. It happened when humanity thought that God gave laws to the entire universe, not only to rational beings; this mo- ment is documented in the Hebrew word huq, because it is undoubtedly a very common idea among the ancient tribes. We read in the Bible: "When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth" (Proverbs, 8, 29). The same meaning can be corroborated in Jeremiah, 5, 24; 31, 35; 33, 25; Job 38, 33.
Without this theology it would be an unexplainable historical fact that at some point one started to speak of laws or imperatives with ref- erence to material things; from this comes undoubtedly the use of the word law that is nowadays common in sciences, although the scien- tists would desire that its meaning were different; the fulfillment of this wish would only happen once they can give the word law an empirical meaning. They will never be able to do this.
But the above mentioned documented historical fact has also re- percussions of huge transcendence backwards; it sheds intense light on the nature of the original meaning itself of the law as an imperative that regulated interhuman relationships and that made society pos- sible (cfr. III, 7) for the first time; this fact shows that this imperative --constitutive of the self and self-consciousness-- was perceived as the law and voice of divinity. As the Phenomenology says: "It is the moral genius which knows the inner voice of what it immediately knows to be a divine voice" (PG 460) This is why Hegel says: "Religion is the first way of self-consciousness" (VG 125).
Any anthropologist knows that, in the origins of mankind, "the civil and state laws were completely identical to the religious laws" (PR I 270). "We know from God's existence, and this knowledge is present in us in a way so immediate that it becomes authority, the intrinsic authority
of conscience" (EGP 195).
"It is certainly true that men must be educated towards religion, but
not towards that which is not there yet" (VG 128).
If the original meaning of the word law had nothing to do with God,
it would have been impossible that somebody else thought that mate- rial things also have law.
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The Anthropology of our century corroborates widely what Hegel just told us. Summing up numerous field investigations, Paul Schebesta affirms: "Up to now it has not been possible to find a people without religion" (Ko? nig, I, 1960, 599). In the same line, Wilhelm Koppers says: "There is a lack of the remembrances and signs of an atheistic or pre- religious state of mankind" (ibid. 130).
Likewise, Ino Rossi makes his the result of Redfield investigations: ". . . in preliterate societies people are united by 'moral ties', that is, by the fact that they share the same moral and religious principles and that these principles are the source of motivation for daily behavior" (Rossi, 1977, 243s). On this account, Redfield himself adduces the words of atheist anthropologist Arthur Kroeber: "The members of these soci- eties 'believe in the sacred things'" (ibid. 291). It is well known that even Comte recognizes that the first stage of humanity was theological.
One should notice that what is here at stake is something more than the 'interesting' and subjective folkloric way in which the primi- tive man perceived the imperative that made him being what he is. Paleonthologists have demonstrated that what is properly human does not date back that long ago if one considers integrally the history of life in this planet; in order to do without some problems, science cannot go back to a past of the human race which is not limited. Since we saw (III 7) that it is impossible that man exists if somebody else does not address him --because "without a thou the I cannot exist" (JS 378), it would be dogmatism not to ask who made the first man by addressing him. The atheist Leslie White plays with the text of Saint John by say- ing 'in the beginning was the Word". But this is a serious matter. It is comical to declare as Kroeber does (1969, 2) that science is not interested in the origins, when all modern anthropology is inspired on a book titled The Origin of Species. Leslie White himself affirms the scientific character of the following question:
If mathematical ideas enter the mind of the individual mathematician from the outside, from the stream of culture into which he was born and reared, the question arises, where did culture in general, and mathemati- cal culture in particular, come from in the first place? How did it arise and acquire its content? (1964, 278)
Let us move forward. We said that some scientists remain attached to the natural laws and to their inherent necessity of denying the
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self-determination of the subject, but they do not manage to clarify what they are saying because none of the keywords required to de- fine or to enounce a law have an empirical meaning. I have sufficiently demonstrated this in Appeal to Reason, but it seems inevitable to sum- marize this in a very concise way.
An example: every acid reacts with a base and forms salt. It is obvious that the word 'every' goes beyond empirical data. We can only perceive some acids: who knows what the meaning of the term 'every' might be! The question here is not to determine whether it is legitimate to infer from some particular cases that all acid behaves in the above mentioned way; this is other problem, the problem of induction, and Hume already demonstrated that the inference is logically unsustainable. What I say is the following: even if we were to suppose that the inference was legitimate, the meaning itself of the word 'every' does not coincide with any of the empirical data nor with the whole of the really empirical data; this is why it is would be necessary to infer it, because we do no experience it. Although they might argue that 'in principle' all cases are perceptible, this statement would lack sense, since they have not defined 'every'. Instead of an empirical data, what they are delivering us is a statement that is not understood. Furthermore: instead of an empirical data they are deliv- ering us a supposition, and a supposition is in essence unverifiable and, most probably, false. Since the acts of observation would be carried out in the future, that supposition would imply this principle: 'The fu- ture is similar to the present', which is unverifiable and most probably not true. It supposes that the conditions of observation would not be modified in the future, that the sensorial organs will not be modified, etcetera. None of these speculations gives the word 'every' an empiri- cal meaning.
Another example: always that an acid is added a base it makes a reaction and forms salt. It is evident that no empirical data matches the word 'always'. What we can experiment is not an 'always' but some or many particular instants; the always is not sensible; even if we dedi- cated our lives to experience particular instants, we would never have the experience of an 'always'.
Another example: law is a presupposition that describes the constant way in which some things behave. The reader is able to realize that the word 'constant' could not be defined without the intervention of the word 'always' or the word 'all'.
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