No More Learning

When we predicate being of other things, we do this in a diminished and derived way. The true being is to determine oneself. As we have seen, things other than this can only be defined as "the other of the spirit". That is the reason why Hegel says that the truth of being and nothingness is werden, to become, to turn into, the movement, the pro- cess and the action of determining oneself and of acquiring determina- tions. The only intelligible content lies therein: this is what Hegel means when he says that a certain concept is the truth of another concept.
Neither Parmenides nor the principle of conservation of the physics speaks of reality, but only of an abstraction of which they have de- prived all content. The content of the word reality is change itself, to create incessantly new determinations; whoever does not refer to that content cannot use the word reality, for not even he knows what he is talking about.
4. SubStance
Let us examine now the substantialist objection that, apparently, can be raised against the two characterizations of spirit we have made.
To be sure, we will not examine the irreflective objection of those who, having accepted that God is pure act, figure that the immortality of the human spirit could be jeopardized if the spirit itself did not con- sist of a permanent substratum which is independent from its multiple acts of thought and will. If being pure act as God does not entail that danger, the same goes in the case of man.
This 'something else' that the substantialist theory desires is, without question, the self. They think it is obvious that the self remains identi- cal through all the changing determinations. But, evidently, a mistake lies in here, because the self consists precisely in the act of perceiving oneself; it is even tautological to say that the self does not exist inde- pendently from the act of self-perception. The self is something purely ideal, whose reality consists in being perceived. It is here where imagi- nation plays tricks with the objectors' minds: they imagine that the self is some kind of material rock that remains unaltered through several acts of will and thought. But the self is something purely ideal, a mental
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content that we call self-consciousness. The objectors believe that, in the act of self-consciousness, the rock called the 'self' is perceived but it doesn't perceive; this is why I say that they imagine a material self, because this self cannot know: it can only be known. They do not seem to understand that self-consciousness implies, by definition, a perfect identity between the object known and the knower: it implies the abso- lute purity in which knowing is the same as being known.
It would be useless, of course, that they called immaterial that 'some- thing else' which they posit. We saw that it would be circular and hence null and void to define the material in terms of the immaterial, that is to say, to define the immaterial as the negation of the material. In order to define the immaterial, it is necessary to refer to the spirit and to deny the other. Consequently, the spirit has to be understood directly. But we also saw that the only possible meaning of spirit is the acts of will and reason. Therefore, if this 'something else' is immaterial, it has to consist in the acts of willing and thinking, and hence cannot be something different from will and reason.
If they contend that we do not understand the difference between ens quod and ens quo, I respond to them that neither do they, because the thing they refer to is only Latin gibberish. Leaving aside verbal curtains of smoke, what matters is to know if the spirit really distinguishes itself from its acts. If it can be distinguished, nobody can point out what does it consist of without reducing it to something material, despite they call it immaterial.
But let us give a closer look to the epistemological root of the problem. Fortunately enough, half of the journey is already past be- hind us, for those who despise the concept of substance and those who have a more positive image of it accept that the meaning of the con- cept is not empirical. All we perceive with our senses are accidents of the substance, not the substance itself. Hence, the origin of this con- cept is not sensation but self-consciousness or, if one prefers to say this otherwise, introspection. Now, all introspection is an act of introspec- tion; all self-consciousness is an act of self-consciousness. Our objectors cannot refer to a concept of substance without act, because they have never perceived a substance without act, and only in such a perception could that subject have had its origin. The concept of a substance that is radically different from its accidents does not exist. They do not have the concept of a substance which does not consist in some acting. By the mere fact of perceiving the substance they have perceived it in act.
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Such an act is the true substance. They have an image --a very blurry one, indeed--, because, if possible, they would strip it off from all de- terminations, since every determination would be an accident. And who knows? Perhaps they imagine a white mass in order to take all the color away, or perhaps they imagine it without form, since all form would be an accident. But, evidently, it must be extended; or else, it would not be imaginable. And from this follows that what they imagine is not spirit! In addition, the substance would not differ from the accident, since extension is an accident, and, let us not forget, whiteness is an accident too.
We have just expressed what is decisive: the act itself of the spirit is the true substance.
Substance is commonly defined as that which exists in itself and not in something else. Now, one cannot understand how something can exist in itself if such thing does not give to itself the determinations of its existence --and that is self-determination, the definition of spirit, "for the essence of freedom consists in being by means of itself what it is" (A? sth I 468). If its true realization is not spirit, the word substance does not have any meaning at all.
In considering that the spirit and the concept are exactly the same thing, Hegel expresses thus a decisive point: "The concept is the truth of the substance" (WL II 214). We pointed out before that when Hegel says that a notion is the truth of another notion, what he is really trying to say is that the latter only becomes intelligible in the former. By the way, this is the key to The Science of Logic: all the determinations that are studied in the first two books --among which, we find the concept of substance--, have their truth in the spirit or the concept, which is the object of study of the third book. Only if the realization of those determinations is the spirit itself, they become intelligible; otherwise, they cannot be understood.
"Subjectivity is even the absolute form and the existing reality of substance. " (Rph 152); "this infinite reflection in itself [. . . ] is the pleni- tude of the substance. But this plenitude is not the substance itself, but rather something superior: the concept, the being. " (WL II 216).
As such, substance and accident are correlative terms. It is impossible to understand one without the other in the definition, for the accident is commonly conceived as that which finds its existence in a substance. In addition, the etymology of substance entails essentially something that is underneath the accidents. It is a very vulgar and coarse spatial
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conception that which speaks in terms of 'upside' and 'down'. It is evi- dent that one would have to reject it, but even assuming it we could argue that, if the notions of substance and accident imply one another, the word accident turns out to be very deceptive because it denotes something that is accessorial, but we know that the substance cannot exist without the accidents and hence the accidents are not accessorial. "The substance is the totality of the accidents" (EPW 151), "the substance is the necessity of its accidents" (NH 21). Now, this only comes about fully in the spirit, for the spirit is a substance that consists in its very acts of will and thought. The spirit is precisely a substance whose ac- cidents are not accidental.
"This movement of accidentality is the actuality of the substance as a peaceful producing itself [. . . ] and the accidentality is the substance itself (WL II 186). "
"Only the whole has reality as such" (PG 476); therefore, substance and accident, imagined as distinct beings, turn out to be two abstrac- tions carried out by the abstract intellect in its pursuit of immobilizing reality in order to supposedly understand it better. "To distinguish be- tween the simple identity of being and the movement of the accidents in the substance is a way of sheer appearances. The first thing is the uninformed substance of imagination [. . . ] which has no truth at all" (WL II 186s).
5. on the method
We cannot postpone any longer a fundamental reflection upon the method which we have followed, for the way by which we have given meaning to 'being' and 'substance' exemplifies, paradigmatically, the way all concepts receive their meaning. Our second chapter showed that it is impossible to grant an empirical origin to the meanings in the mind. On the contrary, a search for those meanings always leads back to the knowing subject and the spirit. Hegel says: "We cannot be satisfied with the empirical way; we should rather posit the ulterior question, how does the spirit arrive to the content, that is to say, the spirit as such, we or the individuals or the peoples? " (VG 53). It is not enough to know that the meanings have their origin in the knowing subject himself. It is still necessary to clarify how the subject shapes and con- stitutes each of them.
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In order to answer that question, Hegel turns to Kant's enduring contribution of the first Critique: without the 'I think' there cannot be consciousness of the object and without self-consciousness there cannot be consciousness.
Hegel says:
One of the profoundest and most certain intuitions that are found in the Critique of Pure Reason is to discover that the unity in which the essence itself of the concept consists is the original synthetic unity of apperception; that is the unity of the 'I think', the unity of self-consciousness. [. . . ] Object, Kant says there, is that in which the concept of the multiple from the given sensible intuition is unified" Therefore, this unity of consciousness is the only one that refers the representations to an object, and hence makes them have the validity of an object, something on which even the possibility of the intellect depends (WL II 221).
In other words: phenomenologically speaking, there cannot be any object without subject; it is impossible that the multiple, intrinsically chaotic and incoherent empirical impressions are unified in the making up of an object if there is no self or an 'I think' before whom and for whom the impressions make up an object.
An object is that which is independent from the self. But notice the following: in order that the expression 'independent from the self' has meaning, it is necessary that the term 'self' has already a meaning.
Hegel also expresses this idea in his own terms:
The truth of consciousness is self-consciousness, and the second is the ex- planation of the first, so that in the facts each consciousness or perceiving of other object is self-consciousness: I know about the object insofar it is my object (it is a representation of mine), therefore, I know about myself in that (EPW 424).
Kant's ground-breaking discovery is true and has an unmatchable value but it is still incomplete. According to Kant, it is necessary that the 'I think' accompanies our awareness of the object; it is necessary that self-consciousness accompanies consciousness; otherwise, the latter could not exist. But Hegel makes this sharp observation: "The I must 'accompany' it; what a barbaric expression" (GP III 343).
Hegel was right. What can that companionship or juxtaposition could possibly mean? A profound analysis shows that consciousness-of-the-
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object and self-consciousness do not simply go hand in hand. Undoubted- ly, Kant was right in saying that, without self-consciousness, the concept by which we gain awareness of the object cannot exist, but both things constitute an inseparable unity. They do not accompany one another; but rather, they make up one and the same experience. "I know about my ob- ject and I know about myself; these two things are not separable" (VG 54).
If they are not separable, something logically follows from this: "The thoughts and representations that I make mine are given the content of that which I am myself" (PR I 22).
The content of the concepts by which I gain awareness of the ob- jects has to be the same content of self-consciousness. This is exactly what happened to us with the concepts of being and substance. And the same must go for all the rest of the concepts.
If the meaning of the concepts cannot be an empirical data, the meaning must lie in the subject. But if the awareness of the object is inseparable from self-consciousness, the content of the former has to be the same as that of the latter. "The truth of consciousness is self- consciousness" (EPW 424). We could have demonstrated this at the beginning of this chapter by recurring to Kant's indisputable contribu- tion, but without some examples it would have been quite difficult to understand. "The knower [. . . ] hast the concept of the essentiality of the objective world entirely" (WL II 438); "we are, as a self, the base of all our determinations. Insofar the object is thought, it receives the form of thinking and transforms itself into a thought object. It is equaled self, that is to say, it is thought" (NH 164).
If it is not equaled to the self, it cannot be understood.
That the true of consciousness is self-consciousness means that only the second is understood.
"Reason is the supreme unification of consciousness and self- consciousness, that is to say, of the knowledge of an object and the knowledge of itself. It is the certainty that its determinations are objec- tive determinations of the essence of things as they are in our thoughts. It is, in one and the same thinking, with all the power of the certainty of itself, subjectivity, as being or objectivity" (NH 122).
We will get back to this later. However, it is important to say here that the abstract intellect --in contrast to reason-- considers these two things separately, and hence it cannot understand.
"Abstractions of the intellect are not ideas; the idea contains essen- tially the point of unity of subjectivity" (WG 588).
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"The objectivity hast the object in the concept, and this is the unity of self-consciousness, to which the object is incorporated; therefore, its objectivity, that is to say, the concept, is nothing else than the nature of self-consciousness, it has no more elements or determinations than the self itself" (WL II 222).
In that sense "the intelligence is acknowledging" (EPW 465), and if the intelligence does not recognize itself in the object, it would not understand anything. Because of this, Hegel says that the reason of sci- entists and rationalists --which believes that its only activity consists in observing the phenomena-- deludes itself completely about what it is and does.
As observing consciousness reasons addresses things, truly believing as if they were empirical things opposed to the self, but what it really does con- tradicts such a belief, for it knows things, it transforms sensibility of them in concepts, that is to say, in a being which is simultaneously a self (PG 184).
"To know things means precisely to eliminate what is alien and bi- zarre in consciousness, and thus it is a return of subjectivity towards itself" (WG 730).
The content of all concepts must consist in '"vital and spiritual situa- tions" (WL I 335), for that is the content of self-consciousness and the self. We have just demonstrated this in regard of the concept of being: in what could the act of existing consist of if not in the act and movement of self-realization, in giving oneself determinations and in creating from nothing new experiences? According to Tomas Aquinas, the self is act. And the same goes for the substance: one cannot understand in what sense something can exist in itself other than in giving determinations to itself. Analogously, the meanings of force, cause, infinite, identity, and distinction are also spiritual and vital. One could contend this abso- lutely central thesis of Hegel only if one is able to provide an empirical meaning to those concepts, but we will see that such thing is impossible.
In order to complete our study of the substance, let us quickly draw our attention to the fact that those who deny the existence of the soul are being deluded by a concept of substance that lacks all kind of mean- ing: we made clear already that such 'something else' imagined by the substantialists objectors would be matter and not spirit. A good exam- ple of the negation of the spirit based on the void concept of substance is provided to us by anthropologist Alfred Kroeber:
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Dr. Ha? berlin puts in the foreground of Wundt's thought the idea that mental phenomena possess, through their immediacy to ourselves, an actuality as great as that of physical phenomena. This actuality must be consistently distinguished from substantiality. Only on the basis of this distinction is it possible to speak of the existence of a 'soul'; but in the sense of an actuality there is no denying this existence. (1952, 53).
In order to distinguish between the acts, the mental phenomena and the substance, Kroeber would have to give another meaning to the word substance. But we have seen that such content is an image of the fantasy and not a concept, because there cannot be a concept of a substance which is different from its own acts. When Kroeber grants the existence of actuality he has granted everything. By the way, this is precisely the true and imperishable substance, but we will get later to this point.
6. time
In appearance, the following objection raised by our imaginative objec- tors against our characterization of the spirit, as the act of thinking and self determination, is conclusive. The objection can be formulated as a question: during the time that the spirit does not think or is conscious, does the spirit cease to exist?
The answer can also be formulated as a question: what makes them think that such time exists?
It is not the case that the soul does not exist during the time it does not act, but rather that such time does not even exist.
Time is not an empirical data. It can only be known by self- consciousness, but self-consciousness is an act; therefore, it is impos- sible to perceive time without action. Our objectors presuppose time illegitimately with no grounds whatsoever.
Aristotle made these conclusive remarks: "time is something related to movement" (Phys IV 219a 9); "it is evident that there is no time with- out movement and change" (ibid. 218b 34).
If there is neither movement nor change in the soul, there cannot be any time in it. Our objectors speak of an exterior time which they be- lieve to find in the movement of the stars and the earth. However, such attribution is completely mistaken: it lies entirely in the Newtonian
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myth of an absolute time that comprises the universe. Apart from be- ing a myth, the absolute time has been refuted by the science of our century.
Such attribution, as I said, is ungrounded, since we are not entitled to attribute to the soul a time of which it has no experience. The soul could not care less of what happens to the celestial bodies and other things alike.
The absolute time has been refuted. If Einstein demonstrated some- thing that thing was the relativity of simultaneity. Although not many physics think about this, such relativity means that there is no cosmic 'now' that penetrates the entire universe. This inexistent cosmic 'now' is the absolute time that our objectors want to introduce into the soul from the outside, i. e. , from the exterior things. As we said, however, the soul has its own time, a time that, as any other time, is essentially 'something about movement', because 'it is evident that without move- ment and change there is no time'. Therefore, there can be no time in the soul without experience. This time had already been discussed in the study of the 'time' that elapses (? ) between the death and the corpo- real resurrection, but the most lucid theologians suspected wisely that this was a pseudo-problem, for such time is extrinsic to the soul and has nothing to do with it.
It is important to mention here --as Hegel already stated it (cfr. II 1)-- that the absolute time is nothing more than an abstraction. By means of experience we can only know concrete time and real events. Just like absolute space, so absolute time is a mental construct completely separated from experience. Such an abstraction has been constructed by men in order to determine a universal, but this they do by eliminating the concrete times which each of us experiments and which are the only ones real. This has been stated by the sociologist Niklas Luhmann:
Time is gradually being abstracted, separating itself from the empirical world, it loses its intrinsic dependence from the habitual succession of events and things, it breaks the knot which bounded it to the vital rhythms [. . . ] It transforms into an abstract continuum of points of time in which everything can move itself according to 'laws' and 'systems' which are not time (1976, 56s).
We will demonstrate afterward that this abstraction in fact is not time. Before we do that, however, it is important to emphasize that
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Newton himself, in his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, was not unaware of the fact that he was constructing a big abstraction that was different from what he calls 'vulgar time', which is the one that we truly experiment and that actually exists. Newton says there:
Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent, and common time, is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year (1977, 8).
As we will later say in a more detailed analysis, time cannot be an empirical data, not even relative time. But what is really amazing of this ghostly construct is that Newton does not even try to define his absolute space or time --something that he could not do because those things were only the products of his own imagination. On the one hand, he justifies his not providing a definition of space and time by saying that everybody knows what they are; on the other hand, he in- sists in distancing himself from what everybody understands by space and time, because such vulgar ideas do not seem reliable to him:
I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe, that the common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and appar- ent, mathematical and common (Ibid).
What a resort! First he says that he does not need to define space or time because the laymen know what they are, and then he rejects the conception that the laymen have of them. It is evident that Newton needed some way out: he was unable to define absolute time for the simple reason that it does not exist.
With the above we have refuted the objection raised against us, since it rested entirely on the myth of absolute time. But we need to clarify, once and for all, the concept of time: the central thesis of this chapter still has to be confirmed and studied in more depth.
It is obvious that our objectors --as innocent as only they can be-- suppose that time is continuous. Newton would also like to capture such
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continuity when he says that time 'flows' and that it is 'mathematical'. Now, in the sense that Newton and our objectors conceive it, conti- nuity is not a data of our psychological or empirical experience. It could not be the former case, because no one can be incessantly having acts of self-consciousness, but it could not be the latter either, because even if we gratuitously suppose that physical time is continuous, our per- ception of time is not uninterrupted: no one can be carrying out acts of perception incessantly.
In our century something both curious and incongruent has hap- pened: even though physics have rejected absolute time for not being an empirical data, they still believe in a relative time that possesses the same dubious continuity which is not and cannot be an empirical data. And they do exactly the same thing in regard of absolute and relative space.
The highly dubious continuity we have alluded to is the mathemati- cal one. Following Bergson, Capek has very well remarked that the mathematical is a "disguised discontinuity" (1973, 321), for it supposes the existence of several different units --called 'points' in the case of space and time--; one wants them to yield the impression of continu- ity because one thinks of them as standing in a juxtaposition, but in fact they are external from one another. That is called contiguity, not continuity.
As Poincare? noticed, one demands a strong nexus between the ele- ments of the continuum for that is what really makes it a whole; in the real continuity, the point has no priority over the line, but rather the line has priority over the point. According to its true concept, the continuum is unity in multiplicity; but in mathematical continuity "only the multi- plicity subsists; the unity has disappeared. " (1909, 30)
Hegel had observed this long time ago: "To the imagination that lacks the concept, continuity easily transforms into juxtaposition, which is an extrinsic relation of the units between themselves, in which each unity preserves its absolute discontinuity and exclusion" (WL I 181).
The inescapable conclusion --a conclusion which requires an intel- lectual honesty of which physics commonly lack-- is that the time and the space of the physics are contradictory entities:
It is not contradictory in imagination that one puts points in space, mo- ments in the continuous time or the now of time within continuity length (day, year), but its concept is contradictory. The identity within itself means
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absolute continuation, extinction of all distinction, of the negative, of all the being-on its-own; on the other hand, the point is the pure being-on-its-own, the absolute distinguishing itself and suppression of all identity and coher- ence with others. Now, both things are affirmed as one in space and time; therefore, space and time are contradictions (GP I 307).
"The space is within itself the contradiction of the indifferent exte- riority and the continuity without distinction" (EPW 260).
Notice well that this is not only about absolute time and space. We are not rejecting certain entities on the grounds that they cannot be made objects of our experience. This is much more about all sorts of space and time in Physics. What Hegel demonstrated was that space and time in Physics are contradictory in their very same concept. In the name of this strictly contradictory time, the objection was raised against the spirit as act of self-consciousness and self-determination.
Since mathematical continuity is not true continuity, it is now im- portant to emphasize that the time of the physics is not time.
Jerome Rothstein is very brave to admit that the empirical data do not suffice to build up time. He explicitly states the following: "It is hard to give any sense at all to the term 'past' without presupposing memory or a record of some kind" (Bastin, 1971, 293). Resorting to memory is to witness the reflection of the subject upon himself, that is to say, to wit- ness self-consciousness; so we are in the true time, identified with our self. In contrast, the alluded time of the physical world is simply not time. I don't know why it has taken so long for an exceptional physic like Rothstein to realize that, since Hegel had already demonstrated this with absolute clarity.