No More Learning

In this present subject would be very artificial to deal with interpre- tative questions separately, dealing with specific matters in indepen- dent sections as we have done so far. Our exposition will be from this point onwards more discursive, except in cases like Hegel's iusnatural- ism, which has been put into question by some.
One unequivocally notices that Hegel's message about man and the State, insofar it is a demonstrated truth, acquires the importance of a revelation. This is the reason why we must deal with theologians in our study too, for we are speaking about the end of man and the meaning of the entire human history.
1. naturaL goodneSS?
Any thinking person can see that men of letters and poets attributed natural goodness to farmers and countrymen in order to idealize pas- toral life. Without this element, they did not consider this landscape
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'beautiful' enough to be treated by the arts. Obviously, this assumption of natural goodness is an apriorism. Unfortunately, the political left nowadays moves entirely within this apriorism. In order to be sup- portive with the oppressed, the indigenes and the proletariat, the left has blindly assumed that each one of its members is truthful, honest and moral. The leftist reacts with indignation when someone demon- strates him that all the felonies and crimes that the poor commit against each other are deeds as perverted as those which the working class suffers under the hands of the wealthy class. Although the rational and moral justification of the struggle in favor of the exploded ones does not need at all such romantic assumptions --which, in fact, only hinder us from constructing a world that is truly just and good--, it is very understandable that the left has felt the psychological need of employ- ing them. The left has given much more importance to this objection than what it actually has: why should one commit oneself with a class that is not morally better than the other class? As an objection against the just revolutionary class this is useless; however, as a scientific question that demands and answer, it has a tremendous power and depth from which the left has in vain tried to escape.
Neither political struggle nor science can be grounded on vulgar, romantic reveries and argumentations. A clear example of this is rude kind of reasoning is the opinion according to which the Christian thesis of the natural evilness of man is 'outdated', only because it was formu- lated many centuries ago. Two plus two equals four is a truth that was formulated many more centuries ago and no one questions it.
The Christian teaching according to which man is evil by nature is superior to that which affirms man is good by nature; it is necessary to understand its philosophical meaning. As a spirit man is a free being whose destiny is not to be determined by his natural impulses. Therefore, in conditions of immediacy and ignorance, man is in a situation in which he should not to be and from which he must free himself. This is the meaning of the doctrine of the original sin, without which Christianity would not be the religion of freedom (Rph 18 Z).
I believe that no honest intelligence can consider as a 'matter of theologians' something which in our century made Einstein say: "it is easier to denature plutonium than it is to denature the evil spirit of men" (Schilpp II 1970, 655). These words of Einstein (Conacyt revue,
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february 1983, p. 32) are extremely eloquent as well: "The true measure of a man is the degree to which he has managed to subjugate his ego". Sigmund Freud was not a theologian but a very convinced atheist. Despite of that, however, he went against his deepest philosophical convictions when he discovered that every child around the age of four is a "polymorphic universal criminal". The romanticism we were speaking about has to include the child, for one understands by natu- ral man someone who has not yet been modified by education, society or culture. Now, this apriorism collides painfully against the fact --which can be witnessed by anybody who does not idealize things-- that children are consummate egoists who are capable of all imagin-
able cruelties.
Against the opinions and wishes of a sick philanthropy who wanted to draw men back to original innocence is opposed the reality itself, and even the very nature of this matter, namely, that man is not destined to such na- ture. And in regard of children, it is in this period where their egoism and cruelty are displayed (PR II, I 33n).
In this context, there are few testimonies as evident as Rousseaunian one we mentioned before. He is the champion of the natural goodness of man: "Let us lay it down as an incontestable maxim that the first movements of nature are always right. There is no original perversity in the human heart" (Emile, II). Rousseau is the author that spread widely this prejudice. In an apparent innocuous note of that very book, however, we find the following thesis:
So there is only one of the child's desires which should never be com- plied with, the desire to make himself obeyed. From which it follows that in whatever they ask for it is the motive behind their asking that must be paid attention to. As far as possible give them everything they ask for pro- vided it can really give them a real pleasure; always refuse what they ask for out of fantasy or simply to wield authority (Emile, II)
If Rousseau had studied history carefully, or if he had lived in the times of Nazism, he would have known that the desire of domination has caused much more cruelties and atrocities than any other; and if that impulse is something natural in man, as Rousseau himself recog- nizes in that note, then his thesis about the natural goodness of man falls immediately apart.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 251 In another apparently inoffensive note, we read this as well:
I have seen silly women inciting children to rebellion, encouraging them to hit people, allowing themselves to be beaten, and laughing at the harm- less blows, never thinking that those blows were in intention the blows of a murderer, and that the child who desires to hit people now will desire to kill when he is grown up (Emile, II).
Whenever it comes about dealing with reality --instead of recklessly blurting apriorisms to the world-- Rousseau hits always the mark. If it were within his power, the child would kill. And Hobbes is absolutely right when he says that the savage man is simply a puer robustus.
In regard to the savage man, Rousseau himself refutes his principal thesis, the one that gave him worldwide appraisal, when he says that "All savages are cruel". However, the vegetarian explanation he pro- vides for this is laughable at its very best: "it is not their customs that tend in this direction; their cruelty is the result of their food" (Emile, II). This explanation is entirely futile. What matters is the Rousseaunian testimony of a very concise fact: cruelty is something natural to man. The time has come in which we must say --regardless of those who accuse us of 'misanthropy'-- that considering the savage as guilty is the only way of regarding him as a person. The sick and 'understanding' anthro- pology that makes pleas for him treats him as an animal, an irresponsible baby or a mentally disabled individual. Moreover, those who pamper man and make him believe that he should live 'carelessly' actually de- spise him. The best there is in man --an impulse towards authentic solidarity-- is not given to him by nature, and one does need to live care- lessly in order to follow it. It only demands that one overcomes egoism and a selfish calculus of loss and gain --things which are indeed natural.
I insist on this point: quoting Rousseau is a confrontation test and a cross-examination. Such means proves to be effective because it refutes his principal thesis.
The proverbial optimism of the Greek culture in regard to man --a culture one would never say was biased by Christianity-- can provide us with another indisputable testimony. Hegel says of that culture the following:
it originally contains joy and harmony. The Christian religion is not as joy- ful as this one; rather, it provokes the lack of joy; it begins with pain; it
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wakens one up and tears apart the natural unity of the spirit, it destroys natural peace. Here we have an original sin: man is evil in his origin; there- fore, in the more internal realm, he is something negative in regard to him- self (PR I 23).
I quoted Einstein and Freud before because they were very reluc- tant with Christianity. Now I will quote Plato, a true exponent of the optimistic Greek culture, in which the Christian influx is automatical- ly ruled out. One should not believe that natural evilness is a Christian invention. It is the ascertainment of a fact whose importance cannot be neglected anymore by true science. We read the following in the book X of the Republic: "This description has carried us too far, but the point we have to notice is this, that in fact there exists in every one of us, even in some reputed must respectable, a terrible, fierce and lawless brood of desires, which it seems are revealed in our sleep" (Republic, IX 572 B)
Aristotle, another key figure of Greek culture, who possesses the same intellectual honesty as Plato, expressively warns against "the evil that exists in each and every one of men" (Politics 1319 a 1).
The most ancient testimonial of this fact dates back to the tenth cen- tury before Christ. It is contained in the first book of the Bible: Genesis 2, 4b; 3, 24. Hegel devoted many pages to analyze this passage and we can only do the same. First, because its depth is bigger than that of all the other testimonies we have seen before. Second, because, even though this narration originated the Christian thesis with which we are dealing, it has been and continues to be completely misinterpreted by systematic theology, as we already said in our first chapter. In this context, it is important to say that the specialization in theology does not correspond at all to the specialization in Biblical sciences, nor is it a good preparation for their study because it commonly predisposes one to read certain theses of systematic theology in Biblical passages that state other kind of things.
The first thing that our public --Christian and non-Christians-- should know about the passage we referred to above is that it does not speak of an individual man called Adam. All the modern exegetists and translators know this. I cannot explain myself why the Churches refrain from telling this explicitly to the wider audience. As Hegel mar- velously interpreted it-- before the exegetical science had done it--, the passage does not speak of an individual man, but of all man.
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Hegel says: "the expression 'first man' is tantamount to say 'man as such', not someone individual, fortuitous, or someone among many" (PR III 127).
"Therefore, we could say: it is the eternal history of the freedom of man the fact that he awakes from the slumber he is in during his first years and gets to the light of awareness, more precisely and in absolute terms, the fact that good and evil start to exist for him" (PR II, I 32).
The Hebrew expression ha^'a^da^m with the article means: 'the man'. On the contrary, the expression a^da^m without the article means a proper name like John or Robert. A similar case is found in our language in names like pearl or Pearl, rose and Rose, etcetera. That difference in Hebrew --which is expressed by the article-- is the one we express by the capital letters. Now, in our passage we never find the expression ha^ a^da^m. It follows that the author wants to say something about man, about every man, about the initial processes that we all go through as human beings. This is of course some powerful evidence, something that really makes a great noise. If we analyze this with a rigorous meth- od, we will see that it is not a sin committed by some other person, something hereditary or something that God attributes to everybody for unknown reasons. The Biblical story does not speak of a personal individual but of all men. J. Blinzer, a Catholic who is not a scientific exegetist, shows this: "We do not find anywhere some determined statement which says that the first of the first father was transmitted to their descendents" (LTK III 965).
The worst thing of all is not the mistaken interpretation that sys- tematic theology has made, but the fact that this distraction has hin- dered people from understanding what the Biblical author has to say about all men. He makes two affirmations of such depth that not even the exegetists have acknowledged it; they say they are as busy as they were before in dissipating the mistakes of dogmatic theology.
First, the author, who is called the Yahwist by the exegetists, says that man makes himself, that he does not come to be a man but only by means of his own deeds and activities.
One should notice that, in order to know this, the Yahwist did not need any special revelation whatsoever: he only needed to think -- just like Aristotle did six centuries afterwards-- upon the fact that "the mind is nothing before it thinks" (De anima 429b 32), "it does not have actual existence before thinking" (ibid. 429a 24).
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Where does the Yahwist say that man becomes by his own work to be man? In Genesis 3, 5 and 3, 22.
Furthermore, the priestly narrative of the same fact (1, 1-2, 4a) is much more abstract. It tells us that God make man in his image but he does not tell us how. That led the readers to think that God made man with the same deficient characteristics he nowadays has. The last complier or priestly writer wanted by all means to avoid that kind of interpretation; for that purpose, he simply juxtaposed the narrative of the Genesis, 2, 4b- 3, 24, which was written precisely with the intention of correcting and refuting the widespread idea according to which man was made by God as he is today; savage, egoist, etcetera.
It is not the case that the Yahwist author knew or had before him the priestly narrative that has come down to us. Although it was written at a later time, what cannot be denied is that Genesis 1, 1-2, 4a contains that creational conception which was tremendously wide spread, even if it was written in a latter period. Modern investigators are positive in saying that these ancient beliefs were not only part of an oral tradition but of a written tradition as well. They hold that the priestly writer remade some ancient document in which we have variants like 'God made' instead of 'God said', the latter being now a monotonous repeti- tion that characterizes many rituals. Much more likely, the ancient writ- ings did not set in a time sequence the creational activity of God within seven days. That was rather a major concern for the priestly writer, who had to justify the sabbatical rest by saying that God himself rested in the seventh day.
We can appreciate both in the final compiler and the Yahwist the intention of changing that original conception of the Creation. Many particular features reveal that purpose.
For instance, according to the priestly narrative, God made the animals before man (Genesis 1, 24-25). The Yahwist narrative, on the contrary, with a highly interesting etio- logical purpose, says that the creation of the animals came after the creation of man. Likewise, according to the priestly narrative, God cre- ated woman and man simultaneously (Ge? nesis 1,27); while the Yahwist narrative says " the man said: this one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" (Genesis 2, 23), taking the creation of the animals as an intermediate stage. God did not obtain the material from the ground but from the body of man himself.
If the intention of the Yahwist --as all modern exegetists recognize-- is to amend the archaic conception which came down to us through
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the priestly narrative, it becomes obvious that the 'resemblance with God', which makes man to be what he is, does not exist from the very beginning as the priestly narrative suggests (Genesis 1, 26-27), but only after man knows good and evil: "Then Yahweh God said, 'Now that the man has become like one of us in knowing good from the evil" (Genesis 3, 22).
Before he ate from "the tree of knowledge of good and evil" (Genesis 2, 17), that means to say, when he came out from the very hands of God, he was not yet a man. He was simply a 'living being', an expression that the whole Bible employs to denote animals. The Yahwist says with great accuracy about this very first moment: "Yahweh God shaped man from the soil of the ground and blew the breath of life into his nostrils, and man became a living being" (Genesis 2, 7) --a passage which is in clear contrast with "now that the man has become like one of us" (Genesis 3, 22).
This expression 'living soul' is employed in the entire Bible in rela- tion to animals, just as it can be seen in the same priestly narrative a few passages before (Genesis 1, 20). The examples of this are innumerable. The Ecclesiastes explicitly says that, in having a living soul, man is no different than the animals: "they have all one breath" (Ecclesiastes 3:19).
According to the Yahwist, in order to become truly a man --in other words, in order to resemble God-- man must exercise his own activity and decision in regard to good and evil. In fact, we saw (III, 7) that conscience is the cause of self-consciousness, and that being a man is to have self-consciousness (III, 1). To interiorize the moral imperative has the effect upon man of giving rise to a self which is made account- able for his actions by the preexisting intersubjectivity around him that makes him responsible. The response to that self --whether it is positive or negative-- is the act by which man makes himself. As we have said before, the Yahwist only needed to reflect by himself upon the difference between humans and animals in order to discover that. We cannot project upon the first moment a kind of being different to that which we confirmed now as its characteristic way of existing and being. Hegel comments thus the narrative of the Genesis:
"What is opposed to believe that what is conceptually the man could be previously present as actual existence? That is opposed to the very nature of the spirit. The spirit is only that what he makes himself being" (PR II, I 28n). "The fundamental teaching is this: man is not a natural entity as such, he is not an animal, but a spirit" (PR II, I 27).
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It is astounding that Hegel suspected directly the bottom of the Yahwist's thought, while modern exegetists can barely grasp it. The ones who approached themselves more to the thought of the Yahwist were Stoebe and Gunkel. Stoebe remarks: "In fact, man becomes like God by distinguishing between good and evil and imbedding his life with autonomy" (1953, 397s). Gunkel, on his part, said accurately: "The awakening of reason occurred with a sin against Yahweh" (1966, 31) If both commentators had remembered something that they already knew and affirmed in other contexts, namely, that this story speaks of 'man', of every man and not of any particular individual, they would have come to understand that the strong point of the Yahwist teaching is that every man becomes man by means of an act of his own. To be sure, this happens under the moral exigency that Yahweh addresses to him. According to the Yahwist, the thesis of the ancient text is still true, in the sense that it was God who made man in his image, since all the self-determination of man depended on the fact that God ad- dressed an imperative to him; but resembling God is something that man does by means of his own activity and not something that occurs passively .
To be sure, one would be misinterpreting the genre of the texts if one raised the objection that man could speak before he ate from the tree and hence was already a man. The snake, which was also an animal, spoke as well and was not a man: Genesis 3, 1-5. Even with certain sar- casm against the lucubrations of the theologians, it is nowhere stated that the snake was the demon. On the contrary, the Yahwist warns explicitly that "the snake was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made" (Genesis 3, 1). And certainly it is not a punishment to the devil to eat dust and crawl upon the ground (3, 14). His punishment is certainly not of that kind.
The literary genre that the Yawhist decided to employ here is the myth, which was the most widespread literary genre in other cultures to explain the origin of the world (v. g. The Epic of Gilgamesh). Now, if one picks up that genre, as Hegel says: "the inconsistencies are un- avoidable" (PR II, I 30). Another inconsistency: the marriage of Cain (Genesis 4, 17) with a woman nobody knows anything about. Further- more, what is said in Genesis 2, 17 is barely understandable to man ("for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die"), namely, the meaning of the verb 'to die', for he had never seen anybody die. The examples are endless.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 257 Hegel observes this correctly:
If the speculative, the true, is exposed in sensible figures under the guise of events, there will always be certain traces of inconsistency. That is what happens to Plato when he speaks of the ideas by means of images: inad- equate situations may always show up when that occurs. (PR II, II 85).
Let us summarize what we have said: the Yahwist speaks of all men. He wants to elucidate the process by means of which every man becomes a man, and the key to that process is an act in which one de- cides between good and evil.
The next statement is as strong as the previous one: this first act, by means of which every man comes to the use of reason, is always a sin. Few things have been said that can be compared to the honesty of analysis of such thesis formulated more than thirty centuries ago. Traditional theology has not had the guts to accept that teaching of the Bible: every human being begins with an act of egoism. It preferred to reduce original sin to a curious anecdote that occurred long time be- fore, and made up a series of juridical terms in order to say that the act
of that first person can be attributed to all people.
I do not know why one could doubt that the thesis of the narra-
tive we are now dealing with is the one we have appointed, since the Yahwist himself says that "the desires of man's heart are evil from his youth" (Genesis 8, 21).
Another relevant passage is this one: "And God saw that the wick- edness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" (Genesis 6, 5). In order to understand the writings of the Yahwist, that thesis if of primal importance, because it makes one feel that Yahweh must necessarily intervene in human history in order to change things, as can be seen in Genesis 12, 3; 18, 19.
Everybody sins when he or she comes to the use of reason; it is not the case that everybody inherited some strange sin that is alien to us. The thesis was newly formulated by the author of the book of Kings: "there is no man that sinneth not" (1 Kings 8, 46). And the Salmist says something that echoes that passage: "And enter not into judgment with thy servant: for in thy sight shall no man living be justi- fied" (Psalms, 143, 2). We read the same in Proverbs: "Who can say, I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin? " (Proverbs 20, 9) In
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the book of Job, one can sufficiently corroborate the thesis that every man and woman commits sin: 4, 17; 14, 4; 15, 14.
Whenever theologians wield innumerable Pauline texts in order to say that sin is hereditary --in clear opposition to the teaching that sin is an act committed by each individual man-- the first thing one must answer them is that they are defending the thought of Paul, not that of the Yahwist. Not only is it very dubious that Paul understood the Yahwist correctly, but it is evident that Paul, influenced by certain Jewish decadence, read a proper name where the Yahwist clearly says 'man'. As the eminent Biblical authority Claus Westermann suggests, Paul depends on the apocryphal fourth book of Ezra that says "Adam, what have you done! When you sinneth, your fall did not only befall upon you but upon us too, your descendants" (4 Ezra 7 118). Wester- mann clearly remarks that the doctrine of Paul cannot be grounded on Genesis 2-3. It is important to notice that the name of Adam is not even pronounced once by Christ; the conception of Paul cannot be based on the authority of Christ.
But this second point is even stronger: in the same passage (Rom. 5) that theologians refer to, Paul explicitly says: "for that all have sinned" (Romans 5, 12d). Neither Pauline exegetists --either leftists or rightists-- nor experts in the Greek language would tolerate nowadays that the expression ef'ho is translated "in which". It is an explanatory or causal conjunction which means 'because'. We need only to refer to the Catholics Zerwick and Juss, and to the Protestants Zerwick and Kuss. In a like manner, they all energetically reject that one interprets the aorist he? marton as 'sinful state', because in reality it means act: 'to have sinned'. It is equivocal that, according to Paul, every man commits an actual sin, something which was carefully exposed in the precedent chapters of the same letter, since when Paul says "for we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin" (Romans 3, 9), the only thing he has demonstrated --by means of description-- are multiple concrete sins of envies, injustices, homicides, arrogances, ambitions, etcetera. (Cfr. 1, 28-32)
If we distinguish, according to the theological terminology, between the original originating sin (which according to the Yahwist does not exist) and the original originated sin (which would be the effect of the former), what Paul says is incoherent. According to him, the original originated sin consists in the sins that all men actually commit. It follows that no one can understand what Paul says without acknowledging
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that every man commits sin by himself. A thing of which God would be the only guilty one cannot be attributed to us. The truth is --as Hegel neatly understood in the Yahwist narrative-- that "the natural man is egoist [. . . ] the naturality of the will is the egoism of the will" (PR III 115s).
"The essential content is that evil as such has its foundation in the spirit, neither in an action that happened once nor in an external natu- rality common to everybody" (EGP 289).
"The content is this: by nature man is not what he ought to be. He must be spirit, but the natural being is not spirit" (PR III 106).
"The evil is no other thing that the deepen-in-itself of the natural be- ing of the spirit" (PG 539).
"To the extent that man wants the natural, this not purely natural but the negative against good" (Rph 139Z).
"Therefore, man is evil both by himself or by his nature, as well as through his reflection itself " (Rph 139A).
What the empty fantasy imagines, namely, that the first condition of man was the state of innocence, is the state of naturality, and of animality. [. . . ] Innocence means not to have will. True, one is not evil in this state, but because of that one is not good either. The natural things, the animals, are all good; but the way they are good does not correspond to man. Man must be good with his will (PR III 115).
Because of what we have said, it would be an atrocious superfici- ality to confuse the Yahwist theses of the voluntariness of being with the Pelagian heresy. What the Pelagians defended was the innocence of man. Here, on the other hand, what is affirmed is that "such state of innocence, such heavenly state, belongs to animals. Paradise is a park in which only animals can remain, not men" (WG 728).
"Innocent is, therefore, the inaction of being a stone, not even being a child" (PG 334).
As superficial as the other thesis is to believe that the natural evil- ness of man is irremediable on the grounds of the Yahvist narration; the whole rest of that narrative speaks of the cure, as one can already see in Genesis 12, 3; 18, 19. As for Hegel, the next parts of our present chapter deal exclusively with that remedy. Furthermore, the volun- tariness of the human evilness is in a way a manner of saying that it is curable.
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On the contrary, what makes this evilness incurable is not recogniz- ing its existence. The romanticism which prevails today about children and the savage man consist in that systematic blindness:
According to that opinion, what makes man being what he ought not to be can have only be produced due to external contingencies or due to his inability of not consummating his natural skills, that is to say, the lack of opportunity in the free development of them.