No More Learning

They might say that for human nature one should understand 'what is characteristic of man'. But what is characteristic of man is being spirit, and he shares that with God, which is precisely what theologians would like to contrast with man's nature and hence speak of the 'supernatu- ral'. And the only meaning that such an adjective can really have is what cannot exist because of natural causes. But that is what man is, the spirit. "Only the spirit is the absolute interruption of nature; only it is the true miracle against the course of nature, what is really affirma- tive against it" (EGP 176).
Notice that the moral use of the expression 'human nature' is quite widespread and it has nothing to do with the ontological use or mean- ing that I have contested. Since they still do not understand that the im- perative emerges from the infinite dignity of the neighbor and hence the criterion is evaluating if an action treats the neighbor as a subject or as an object, there are moralists that use as criterion of morality the confor- mity or not with the alleged human nature. Evidently there is Rousseau in the middle, since it is supposed that what is natural in man is good.
Even if we can do without every supposition, it is time to denounce the deep immorality of such a moral criterion, regardless of how wide- spread it is among moralists and theologians. There are natural ten- dencies towards incest, there is a natural tendency towards egoism, there is a natural tendency towards aggression, irresponsibility, sloth, cowardice, infidelity, etc. Founding morality in nature is one of the most resounding mistakes ever made. It is tantamount to affirming an obligation to resemble animals.
The epistemological question concerns all human sciences, histori- ography included. It would be interesting to know how people within
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these disciplines would react if told that their object of study, man, is not an empirical datum. Most of the time, of course, we immediately intuit if the object that we have in front of us is a human being or not. But this is not the question; the real question is: How do we intuit it? What kind of knowledge is it? Is that intuition an empirical perception or rather intellectual knowledge?
It is not a fact perceived through the senses that the body in front of us possesses thought. As Hegel remarks, "only the spirit perceives the spirit" (EGP 176). We know that the object is a human being only when we acknowledge its capacity to think. "Everything that is human is such only in so far there is operating thought in there, and outer look can be anyhow; it is human only to the extent it possesses thought" (EGP 81).
In everything human the active part is thinking, the thought. The animal lives too, just like man has needs, feelings, etc. If there is a distinction be- tween man and animal, the feeling has to be human, not animal, i. e. , there has to be a thought involved [. . . ]. In close inspection, we conclude that thinking is not a particular trait, some special capacity, it rather is what is essential, the universal that produces everything else (EGP 82).
A blind person is able to distinguish when he is dealing with a hu- man and when not. Hence, it is not visual data which allow us to iden- tify a man. A deaf personal is able too to make the distinction. Hence, it is not sound which make us confirm the existence of a man.
It might be convenient to recall the testimony of a good anthro- pologist, Leslie White: "It is the symbol which transforms an infant of Homo sapiens into a human being; deaf mutes who grow up without the use of symbols are not human beings. " (1964, 41) "A baby is not a human until he begins to symbol" (ibid. 52). The existence of a symbol is something empirically indemonstrable. One can see certain physi- cal data, hear certain sound, but we do not see, nor listen that such material thing represents something; it is a relation that we can only grasp with our understanding. Therefore, the fact that the body we have in front of us is using symbols is not an empirical datum but fact perceived by reason. It is only then when we know that the body is a human being.
It amazes me that anthropologists do not even seem to suspect what the epistemological implications are of the procedure by which --based
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on common sense certainties-- (they think) they learn a posteriori what is man. According to them, every behavior, configuration and institu- tion man has or have had constitutes an a posterior datum. It is from this datum that, by whole induction, one should figure out what is man. But, how do they know which behaviors are human and which are not. According to which criterion should they be included or excluded from the set? They will say: it is enough that man has them. But how can they determine that is man an organism with certain behavior? Evidently because before the experimental inquiry they already possess a criterion for determining which bodies are men and which not. Hence, it is absolutely false that experimental inquiry teaches them what man is, since they knew it beforehand.
In the end, saying 'this is human' is making a huge value judg- ment. It is the anti-moralist allergy what impedes human sciences from recognizing that the starting point of all of them is a moral judg- ment and makes them to blindly hold the thesis that they are empiri- cal disciplines.
Before throwing a materialist thesis about man (e. g. that he differs from animals only in degree, or that the world psyche is just a name, just like 'heat', etc. ), the psychologist or the anthropologist has to offer a justification for the fact that he actually uses the word man. It is not a universal obtained by generalization of a posteriori data, since it is re- quired for building up the set of objects from which they pretended to obtain it by generalization. They have no right to use that word if they have not known a being specifically distinct, irreducible.
In order to keep the illusion of empiricism, it is common to believe that the lack of facial hair is enough for distinguishing a man from a monkey. But in 1986 there was a Mexican TV show that presented a family from Loreto, Zacatecas, whose children have their entire body covered with hair --including forehead and head-- it must be said, with hair longer than a simian. Scientists from all over the world came to confirm the fact, and anyone can visit today that family. The children are normal in everything else: they speak and think as any of their neighbors.
It is usually also mentioned, with great vagueness, 'human appear- ance'. But Harlan Lane quotes John Locke who speaks of certain priest called Saint-Martin who, when he was born,
. . . had so little the figure of a man that it bespake him rather a monster. It was for some time under deliberation whether he should be baptized
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time should show what he would prove. (1979, 31)
Who says 'this is a man' is saying how he ought to treat the body in front of him. It is a moral judgment.
In the second half of the eighteenth century something happened to European thinkers that should be enough to demonstrate the anti- empiricism that I have been posing. Lane himself sums up:
The search for terms of comparison led out of society and into near and distant wilds. Numerous expeditions returned with samples of alien flora and fauna, including a parade of orangutans, gorillas and chimps as well as Pygmies and Hottentots, all of whom were subjected to detailed naturalistic and ana- tomical observation. Orangutans (whose name comes from Malaysian and means homme sauvage) were especially prized. [. . . ] Many of the finest minds in Europe were busy dissecting the same orangutans, and even proposed, to the outrage of the cergy, that one be mated with a prostitute. (1979, 20)
It is clear that the lack of hair or tail did not seem to Europeans, neither to the Malaysians, a sufficient empirical datum for identifying a man.
The verticality of the trunk was considered too, for long time, a safe sign. But J. R. Napier, from London University, specialist in primate biology, confirms: "The view that the possession of uprightness is a solely human attribute is untenable; man is merely one species among the 189 that constitute the order who has exploited the potential of his ancestry to his ineffable advantage" (EB 23, 425, 2).
There were some physicalists hopes placed in the opposable thumb, but that trait has turned out to be particularly vulnerable, since some marsupials have it, while some primate lack it.
Regarding the brain's size, the differences among men are greater than those between the less gifted men and gorillas. There are men with 2000cm3 and there are even some men with 850cm3, while in gorillas there are cases of 685cm3. If a difference of 165cm3 were enough for settling the difference of species, human race would not be one species. Leslie White has to recognize: "So far as is known the only difference between the brain of man and the brain of an ape is a quantitative one", and he adduces the following to A. J. Carlson, which is very relevant: "man does not have new kinds of cells or new connections among those cells" (White 1964, 49).
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It is interesting to notice that anthropoid monkeys have in the lar- ynx and its neighborhood the whole required mechanism for producing articulated sounds. They do not speak, and there lies the whole prob- lem; but physically they have everything is required to talk.
Many physicalist hopes were placed on our set of teeth, on whether the superior premolar has three or two roots, on the number and position of the cusps and grooves, on whether the size of the molars increases or decreases. But these are also differences of degree, and specialists talk with caution: 'generally' there is such and such in man. For example:
The upper first bicuspid generally has two roots, and sometimes one. The second generally has one root, sometimes two; the inferior premolars gen- erally have one root each. [. . . ] the upper molars have four (sometimes three) cusps whereas the lowers have five (sometimes four). The number and position of the cups and the character of the grooves between them differ among individuals. Generally, the upper molars have three roots and the lowers two. In persons of European origin, the first molar usu- ally is large, the second smaller, and the third the smallest. In some other groups the third molar es larger than the second though smaller than the first (EB 17, 283, 1).
The reader understands that, with these premises, if afterwards some differences of this kind are discovered between the dentition of some monkeys and the human dentition, saying that that difference does mean a transition of species while the difference between the Ti- betan molars and the European ones is not decisive is just an emotive arbitrariness. Evidently, whoever makes this decision already knew that the Tibetan and the European were men and the monkey was not. Such knowledge is not obtained from the analysis of the molars. This explains why the eminent English paleontologist Kenneth Page Oak- ley concluded that no physical evidence is enough to distinguish man from animal. Paul Overhage says: "Oakley explicitly empathizes that after the discovery of new fossils a definition of man is impossible on the base of just bodily and anatomical traits that clearly distinguish man from animal and from its bodily structure" (1961, 117).
In Hegel's time the shape of the teeth was as arbitrary as the lobe of the ear; so that Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, founder of the physical anthropology, pointed it out as an anatomical characteristic that distin- guished man from the rest of the animals. It was discovered afterwards
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 337 that some monkeys have it. And regarding all these physical issues
Hegel said very well:
By its exteriority it is easy to notice that the knowledge of the concept did not start in them; it was rather an obscure presentiment, an indeterminate but deeper sense, a guess of the essential, what preceded the discovery of species in nature and spirit; and only after that it was seek, for the abstract intellect, some determinate exteriority (WL II 456).
Up to our days, anthropologists and paleontologists have failed with all the physical traits they have proposed as distinctive, in spite of the fact that they ignored a fundamental methodological requirement: they were supposed to discover what was essential, i. e. , a trait that ex- plained the existence of everything else and of the set as such; it would have to be a trait that explain why man has thought and animals do not. This is way things like the ear's lobe are ludicrous.
Even if they were able to detect in the future a physical trait exclu- sive of man, Hegel's paragraph hit the bull's-eye: they first determine by other methods which existing bodies are men and which are ani- mals, and only after that they look for a physical trait that adorns the former and is absent in the latter. This means that the concept of man was not obtained a posteriori but through self-consciousness.
When we say 'this is a man' we actually say 'he is like me'.
It is self-determination what we perceive through self-consciousness as constitutive of the self. "I am only what I am related with my free- dom" (Rph no. 117 Z).
When Ortega says 'I am myself and my circumstances', he is no doubt thinking in the influence that other factors, including animal- ity, can exert over me. But, if that was the case, things like air, soil, vegetation, the Sun, and the whole cosmos should be incorporated to the definition of man. But then the definition does not accomplish its goal, the essential goal of every definition, which in this case would be distinguishing man from everything else. It lacks rigor such inso- lence from Ortega; it overlooks that the mental operation called defi- nition is subject to certain essential rules. Hegel said that man is not free because certain movement commences within him, but because he can stop it and decide himself to what point such factor is deter- minant or not at all. This is why I am only what am related with my freedom.
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When I call other objects men, the only thing I mean is that they are like me. It is principally a moral act. Referring to the aforementioned monstrous priest, Harlan Lane comments:
But savages, primates and wild children all share with the abbe this lack of resemblance to the man in the street. The status of savages was decided once and for all by papal bull in 1537: the Americans discovered by Colum- bus were declared human. (1979, 22)
There were no empirical data by which the Europeans could know if the Indian and the black are men or not. The atrocity committed by some or many Europeans when denying them their humanity did not consist in that they were seeing that they were men and they denied it knowingly; but in the fact that they did not executed the moral act of recognizing that the other is like me and hence he is an end and not means and hence he has infinite dignity. Without this moral act is im- possible to corroborate that the object in front of me is a man. You do not know that such object is a man as long as you do not perceive the 'you shall not murder'.
"What is free exists only for what is free; only for a free man the other exists as free too" (PR III 94).
"The kind of relationship of man with other men, that is what is hu- man" (PR II, II 65).
Those who think that demonstrating the infinite dignity of every human being is hard, is because they think that first they could verify empirically the existence of a human being, and afterwards it should be inquired if he has or not the property of infinite dignity, which, for being a valuation, lies outside the scientific. But 'man' is not em- pirical data. There is no knowledge of a man without moral obligation regarding that man, i. e. , without categorical imperative. And this is synonymous with infinite dignity. The concept of 'end and not means' has no other content than the one of infinite dignity. "The Scripture says that God made man in his image; that is the concept of man" (PR III 127).
Historians and philosophers fool themselves in the same fashion when they believe they can constitute without value judgments the object of study of historiography and this is why they reject that hu- man history has a goal and is directed toward an end. They think that there are many 'real' facts that are not directed toward the thorough
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realization of the concept of spirit. But how do they know that such facts are human and hence that they pertain to history? "The mere de- sire, savagery and coarseness of will are left out of the stage and scope of universal history" (VG 95).
Human acts are directed towards the humane, towards what is every time more humane. Without such finality they would not be human. Humanity is not an instantaneous entity; it is not a timeless verifiable entity. Its movement towards true humanity pertains essentially to the object. Loose facts and particular cultures can only be judged and de- scribed according to this movement. Those who try to verify humanity as it is at a particular moment fool themselves trying to do without an end ofhistory. They are implicitly saying that it is completely human as it is. This is a value judgment, false by the way.
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