No More Learning

Second, having rejected absolute simultaneity for not being an em- pirical data, the theory of relativity tries in vain to preserve relative simultaneity --i. e. the simultaneity of two close events--, disregarding
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 113
the fact that relative simultaneity is as unverifiable as the former. Actually, physics have to define sooner or later relative simultaneity like this: two events that occur in my proximity are simultaneous if I perceive them simultaneously. The definiendum reappears in the defi- nition, and hence nothing has been defined and we still do not know what simultaneity means. Besides, it is obvious that this definition re- sorts to self-consciousness, for what it really says is the following: the events are simultaneous if my perception of the first event is simulta- neous with my perception of the second event. This definition shows that empirical data cannot build up that dimension of time called si- multaneity, just as it happened before with the past.
But there is still more to this. Whoever says that they are simultane- ous if I perceive them simultaneously and in my proximity, presup- poses necessarily that there is simultaneity between the close event and my perception of it, but that has two mayor drawbacks. The first one is circularity, for a simultaneity that is not being defined is presupposed, and that is exactly what we are trying to define. And the second one is that this same presupposition shows that simultaneity is empirically unverifiable. One tries to prove the simultaneity of two close events by the procedure of perceiving them simultaneously, but that very same procedure needs to assume that the occurring of the event and my perception of it are simultaneous due to their proximity. The si- multaneity of two events locally close is not verifiable because every verification processes presupposes it.
It is worthy to notice that the real inclusion of the past in the present --which, as we said, is necessary for the past to be past-- is also necessary in order for the present to be present. Bergson already stat- ed that there is no self-consciousness without memory. That is one of the most valuable observations made on this subject. Consciousness of the present is not --as no act of consciousness can possibly be-- an unextended atom of time. It does not occur in a timeless point, for that would not be consciousness of duration, i. e. consciousness of time. If it does not include the past, the present cannot be present. Those unextended instants just exist in the abstract thinking of mathemati- cians, not even in the imagination of mathematicians, since what is unextended is not imaginable; and, of course, those instants are not time, for they suppress continuity and duration, which are indispens- able in order to speak about time. It is very symptomatic that experi- mental psychologists, being astonished and dazzled by the prestige
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 114 Hegel was right
of mathematics, have substituted the term 'psychological present' for the term 'specious present'. The psychological present has duration and, therefore, really includes the past; in contrast, by definition, the mathematical past does not exist, and this is the reason why a men- tality strongly rooted in physics has to conclude that the psychologi- cal present deceives. They want to correct the only present that exists by means of an unreal one. Besides, they are violating the principle according to which nothing that is not subject to experimentation ex- ists. The only present that exists is the psychological present, that is to say, the present of self-consciousness, since the empirical data do not suffice to build up the present, the past or the future.
We have incorporated the sincere recognition of Rothstein to our analysis by stating, without memory, the word past lacks meaning. It is absolutely transcendental to notice that, if memory or remembrances are considered simple reappearances of the experiences we had, we do not obtain thereof the idea of past, for such experiences did not present themselves as from the past because they did not have that feature and are only being repeated exactly as they occurred.
Such memory that can only repeat things is all what the materialist psychologists manage to conceive. But the idea of the past and the existence of time itself remain unexplained. True memory implies an 'I have experienced this', and consequently, self-consciousness, not as a simple 'companion' but as the identity of contents (cfr. III, 5). One requires the spirit, whose experiences have real continuity between themselves, because the spirit consists in its experiences and, as we saw, it is the substance whose accidents are not accidental.
Referring to experimental psychologists, Hegel said something that nowadays would be the solution to much of this discipline's problems. "The incapacity of understanding this universal which is in itself con- crete but remains simple, is what has triggered by some people the belief of preserving peculiar experiences in peculiar fibers or regions (of the brain); according to them, the diverse can only have an isolated spatial existence" (EPW 453). What such psychologists do not manage to understand is that such localized and spatialized experiences would be just like the past of the physics, which could not be experienced as past, and hence is not past.
"The self must be a totality, and yet this totality must be as simple as the self" (EGP 277). The so-called big problem that psychologists face while dealing with time is not that big at all, since, on the one hand, the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 115
difficulty they come across with stems from the supposed intermediate periods of time during which the spirit does not act --which, by the way, are mistaken, for those periods of time are attributed externally to the soul--; on the other hand, that equals to attribute the soul some- thing that is not time, for the simple reason that the time of physics does not actually exist. Capek says admirably: ". . . forgetting rather than remembering needs an explanation. " (1971, 156).
As a complementary remark, let us just say that most of recent neu- rological researches do not provide favorable results to the so-called thinkers who believe in the storage of experiences in fibers or special regions. Every day we witness more cases in which the extirpation of a zone that was happily declared the monopolizer of certain function only has as its consequence the transitory numbness of the said zone. Ernest D. Gardner comments: "nevertheless, the anatomical distinc- tions are often not clear-cut, the connections between nerve cells are enormously complicated and not at all well understood, functional specificity is often lacking, and species differences in function are hard- ly understood at all. " (EB 24, 832, 1)
Also, in the case of oblivion, emotional inhibitions and personal in- terferences originated in interpersonal relationships have undoubtedly a great bearing. We will soon see that the constituent of the self is in- terpersonality. The following observation of Benton Underwood has a reach that goes beyond biological adaptation:
. . . it is helpful to consider what would happen if memories failed to fade. [. . . ] Without forgetting, adaptive ability would suffer; for example, learned behavior that might have been correct a decade ago may no longer be. Cases are recorded of people who (by ordinary standards) forgot so little that their everyday activities were full of confusion. Thus, forgetting seems to serve the survival of the individual and the species. (EB 23, 947, 1).
We do not even need to deny the 'enagrams' or the recording of ex- periences in certain areas of the nervous tissue. With or without them, what happens is that true memory remains as unexplained as it was before. At the most, the exact repetition of memories would stem from them; but that means, as we previously said, that they do not appear as past memories, for the simple reason that they did not have that character before and, in theory, they are being repeated exactly as they occurred.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 116 Hegel was right
Without an 'I already lived this', there is no past and, consequently, no time. The self identifies itself with its experiences; it is not a substratum different from them; on the contrary, they build up conti- nuity in the strict sense of this word: "the continuity of a universal and a being-with-itself which is not interrupted by the infinitely different limits which are constituted by the impressions and intuitions" (WL I 182). We have seen how in the content of the self all other contents (v. g. substance, being) are included, without this implying that the self ceases to be what it is or that it is interrupted. True memory is of a con- ceptual nature and implies thought and congruency: the imaginary is only a sequel. And Hegel says about this sequel:
"The proceeding of intelligence in the imaginations is both to inte- riorize the immediate and to put itself as perceiving in itself, and to suppress the subjectivity of interiority by freeing itself from itself and from the being in itself in its own exteriority" (EPW, 451).
With respect to the material that comes from empirical impressions, it is obvious that "only in thought does it turn into the concrete im- manence which is the concept" (ibid); only on that level are we aware of it, and, therefore, when it comes to remembering it, that level is the most decisive one.
Therefore, there should not be any misunderstanding about the term memory, when we say that physics strive in vain to make the word time to have a physical meaning, i. e. to make it to have a meaning without the intervention of memory, the self and self-consciousness. They mention, for instance, the lapse that goes between two sunsets. Besides the fact that the words 'lapse' and 'goes' lack empirical mean- ing, (cfr. II, 5) human intelligence has reached the necessary maturity to face, in all its harshness, the fact that two successive sunsets is not an em- pirical data. Furthermore, even if these sunsets were exactly the same in terms of their empirical features, we could say that their being two is not an empirical data. Sensibility cannot perceive numbers. Empiri- cally speaking, each of these dawns is what it is; they exist indepen- dently from each other and have nothing to do between them. Only memory makes them successive, and only there lies time. The time of the physics is not time.
After joyfully rejecting absolute time for being empirically unverifi- able, it is unsettling that physics do not realize that every kind of time is empirically unverifiable, not only the absolute one. They even seem to incur again in the postulation of absolute time when they dump at
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 117
us calculations of millions of years, not only forgetting that the rota- tion of the Earth is not regular and that, in principle, the regularity of the vibrations of cadmium is unverifiable, but also that, if all cosmic movements were ten thousand times faster as they are now --or, in any case, ten thousand times slower--, we would not notice abso- lutely anything, and it follows that those mind-blowing numbers lack all physical meaning just as absolute time does. Besides, the impres- siveness of those numbers depends on the mistaken presupposition of time as a strictly contradictory continuity that does not even exist in space (cfr. supra). The public can peacefully remain calmed before such staggering numbers: the time of physics has nothing to do with real time.
What we said about 'successiveness' can be said of what is 'periodi- cal', for the former enters in the definition of the latter, and that makes it something not empirical. We present this warning because of those careless scientists who believe they can define time by the hands of a watch and avoid Einsteinian circularity (cfr. II, 5) by saying: that a watch is an 'isolated system that runs periodically'. Perhaps circularity is avoided, but one does thereby without empiricity as well, for with- out the intervention of memory and self-consciousness it is impossible to provide meaning to the word periodicity.
7. interSubjectivity
We will now proceed to make explicit the third characterization of spirit, which was lying underneath the two former ones from the very start: intersubjectivity --which is, essentially, ethicity.
If, as we have seen, the subject consists in the awareness of the self, in that mental and ideal content called self-consciousness, then intersub- jectivity is essentially there from the very beginning, for it is obvious that a child does not manage to call himself a 'I', he does not gain awareness of his self --and thus, he is unable to create it for the first time-- until his mother (or somebody else) addresses him in such a way that, by personalizing him, he comes to realize that he is a person; analogously, by giving him responsibilities, he gradually becomes a responsible subject. In the awareness of the self that is being formed the awareness of the other is present in such a way that they are not only inseparable: they stand, in fact, in such a degree of mutual penetration
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 118 Hegel was right
that the child has awareness of himself by having awareness of other, and this intersubjective constitution of self-consciousness is always constant, because the consciousness of one's own identity is conscious- ness of one's own distinction with respect to others, and hence it is consciousness of others. Therefore, self-consciousness (i. e. the self) and the consciousness I have others nourish one another; they make each other exist, and, truly, one is the reason of being of the other. It follows from this that his third characterization does not pretend to point out an extrinsic cause of the self but rather its very being and its intrinsic constituent. Now, this consciousness of the others --which makes my self-consciousness-- is of an eminently ethical character. Its content is the following: I do not exist alone; the others also exist. The others are subjects --not objects-- just like I am one; I cannot confuse them with things that can be treated as means, because they are self-conscious- nesses just as me.
If this was not the content of the consciousness I have of the others, if it did not make me responsible, if it was not an exigency that guides my freedom by constituting it, it would not generate self-determi- nation and, therefore, it would not cause a self, for we saw before (III, 2) that, essentially, the self makes itself what it is.
To this exigen- cy or imperative the self can answer in very different ways, in very different degrees of consent, in very different degrees of responsi- bility, but by answering to that exigency it provides itself with its own determinations. Furthermore, it conforms right from the start the mass of which moral substance is constituted --but that, of course, is only a metaphor, since we have seen that there is not a substratum. The self is not a material rock: its only real consistency is the mental and ideal content called self-consciousness, as well as the consciousness I have not only of my existence but of the existence of the others --which, most certainly, is the very moral content.
Let us not forget what we previously discussed (III 5). We said, following Kant, that there cannot be consciousness without self- consciousness. And we just added that there cannot be conscience without self-conscience. This is one of the most penetrating discover- ies; it is dated X, b. C. --as we will later see (VI, 1)-- and was made by an anonymous thinker who is called the Yahvist by the exegetes. Hegel takes his discovery extremely seriously.
The Hegelian formulations of our third characterization of spirit en- rich and complement our exposition. This thesis plays a fundamental
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 119
role in the philosophy of Hegel, as it has been noticed by both his smartest (Laure, Mure, Stace), and his superficial (Hyppolite, Koje`ve, etcetera) commentators.
"Without a thou, the self is impossible" (JS 378).
"Spirit is essentially being for the spirit, and it is only spirit in so far in that it is for the spirit" (PR I 201).
"The true contrast that the spirit can have is spirit; only by means of its strangeness in itself can it reach the force of being spirit" (WG 535). The otherness refers to the 'you', the other. Otherness in itself means the consciousness-of-the-other that I have in myself. According to the Philosophy of History, only through it the spirit acquires the capacity of having a self and be properly a spirit. "the subject must turn to another
subject" (PR III 133).
"Self - consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact
that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowl- edged. " (PG 141)
"As consciousness, each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, and immediate being on its own account which at the same time is such only through this mediation. " (PG 143)
"Only in moral this concept of absolute individuality of conscious- ness exists and makes everything" (GP I 271).
"This ethical substance which constitutes the spirit, forms the life and the essence itself of individuality" (GP II 108).
"The ethical, the laws of freedoms, is the supreme and purest form of the spirit; according to its nature it is not something spiritual exterior to it; it is not something extrinsic or fortuitous, but only the nature of the spirit itself" (PR III 19s).
"That the right being in itself and being for itself, is what I am in the ethical substance; this is therefore the essence of selfconscious- ness". (PG 312)
The exigency, the imperative --which we stressed in the conscious- ness that the self has of the others-- imposes to the subject in embryo --the child that is turning to self-consciousness-- the moral necessity of suppressing his merely natural instincts, his animal instincts, for not only he but also the other self-consciousnesses exist in the world, and he cannot treat them as means: this is how a child ceases to be an animal and becomes a spirit. "The soul is spirit only through suppression of the natural willing, of the appetites. That happens when one is subject
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 120 Hegel was right
to the ethical, that is to say, by becoming accustomed to the ethical, so that it becomes the second nature of the individual" (PR II,178).
"Man is addressed with the exigency of not being as a natural will, of not being as what he by nature is". (PR III 107).
"The natural is rather what the spirit has to suppress" (GP II 107), "the natural man is egoist" (PR III 115s), "the naturality of the will is precisely the egoism of will" (PR III 116).
The essentially ethical and intersubjective character of the spirit is one of the fundamental theses of the phenomenology. One only needs to take a look at the first heading (A) of chapter six where Hegel deals explicitly with the subject that gives its title to the work: "the true spirit, the ethicity". Hegel says there: "The true spirit is the real and absolute being that holds itself together" (PG 314). As Lauer comments (1977, 92), this is the reason why the work was first called Science of the Experience of Consciousness, (cfr. PG 61) and under that title it was announced in the bibliographical bulletins of its time, but with its ulterior development it finally found its title in Phenomenology of Spirit.
Let us make a brief hermeneutical excursus. The aforementioned suppression of the instinctive egoism for having to work for all, the necessary repression of natural impulses and appetites (Begierde), is what makes the spirit of the slave more capable than the master of be- coming a true spirit, without forgetting that this dialectics (PG 141- 150) belongs to the past figures which, as Hegel warns us, are mere abstrac- tions that do not lead us to ethicity. In the chapters of the Encyclopedia that thoughtfully summarize this dialectic we find this explicit remark: "By serving his master the slave gradually demolishes his own priva- tive wants, suppressing the interior immediateness of his appetites" (EPW 435). In the Phenomenology itself, it is affirmed that in serving the conscience of the slave "suppresses in all its particular elements his attachment to the natural existence and he rules it out" (PG 148). The Encyclopedia says in more detail how this happens: "by means of the negation of immediacy, that is to say, the appetites" (EPW 434). The ethical character of this situation is analyzed in the Philosophy of Right, a propos of the institution of the family: "the egoism of the appe- tites transforms itself into the care and the acquisition for a collective, in something ethical". (RPH 170) Therefore, in order to affirm that work itself in its materialness is what, according to Hegel, transforms the slave, (asi? Marx en Me? xico, EB I 574 y Koje`ve 1947 passim) one needs to
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 121
omit deliberately the key passages and substitute them with the own thoughts of the reader. End of the excursus.
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.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 122 Hegel was right
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.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 123
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
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 124 Hegel was right
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.