Second, and more im- portant, this
dogmatism
refutes itself when it is asked: how can one die in self-interest?
Hegel Was Right_nodrm
The happiness of natural man is as simple as his life: it consists in the absence of pain.
Health, freedom, the necessaries of life are its elements" (Emile, III).
Just like goodness and freedom consist in a not -- in a lack and ab- sence of something--, so happiness consists in a 'not suffering'. A thing
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 271
that does not consist of anything is something easy for the natural man to possess from the very beginning.
By idealizing the natural life, romanticism did not realize that those who are civilized are the ones who positively enjoy the fields, the woods, the mountains and the sea. The beauty of it all would be nothing but a mystery to the 'natural man'. Moreover, like Norbert Elias has pointed out, "for the primitive men the natural space is to a larger degree a danger zone; it is full of perils that the civilized man does not know any more of" (1977 II, 405). In order to enjoy natural beauties, one demands the pacification of the environment and the affectivity which are intro- duced by civilization; one demands that forests and fields are no longer the place where men and animals hunt each other. But still today, in our pacified countries, it is by no means true that the uncultivated man is more capable of enjoying the natural beauties than the cultivated one. Hegel says:
"Granted: the savage man does not know any huge amount of pain and unhappiness; that is, something merely negative; freedom, how- ever, must be essentially affirmative. Only the benefits of supreme consciousness are the benefits of the affirmative freedom. " (WG 775)
The observation that the English novelist Willkie Collins made in the middle of the nineteenth century is extremely accurate:
Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature. As children, we none of us possess it. No uninstructed man or woman possesses it. Those whose lives are most exclusively passed amid the ever-changing wonders of sea and land are also those who are most universally insensible to every aspect of Nature not directly associated with the human interest of their calling. Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civi- lized accomplishments which we all learn as an Art; and, more, that very capacity is rarely practiced by any of us except when our minds are most indolent and most unoccupied (The Woman in White I, viii).
Without referring to the enjoyment of natural beauties, the Cyrenaics of the fourth and fifth centuries B. C. --a philosophical school whose stron- gest point of focus was happiness-- stated that only culture and reflection make man capable for joy. Hegel summarizes Aristippus's philosophy thus: the principle of fruition "embraces the feature that culture of spirit and thought is an ineludible condition to achieve delight" (GP I 541).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 272 Hegel was right
Natural happiness seems to be something impossible. It is with all certainty a dogmatic and superficial apriorism.
Because it is clear that happiness cannot be defined as something negative, like a lack of something, e. g. like absence of suffering; for then, the stones would be happy.
If what they mean to say is that absence of suffering is the mere con- dition for happiness, one could agree with that, but it is obvious that we still need a definition of happiness.
In spite of what Rousseau says, health and minimal material goods are evidently not enough, because there are people who are perfectly healthy and have all the things in the world and yet are tremen- dously unhappy.
Perhaps Rousseau would say that those are mere ideas. But one could reply the following: first, that happiness and unhappiness are precisely ideas, and hence health and minimal material goods would become, again, a simple condition and we would still lack a definition of happiness. Second, if unhappiness is a mere idea, Rousseau would be obviously supposing that the natural man is happy because he does not have ideas. He holds a conception of happiness which consists in the mere absence of something. A tree that is healthy and does not need anything would have to be considered happy. In short, the Rous- seaunian definition is untenable.
Fortunately, Rousseau adds after the above quoted text: "Another thing is the happiness of the moral man, but we will not speak about it here". More fortunately, many years afterwards and having changed his mind in his Political Fragments, Rousseau was finally able to recog- nize this: "But the meaning of the term happiness, which is much un- determined among individuals, is even to a greater extent so among the nations" (1964. 509).
This is precisely the problem: men of letters and politicians --and even theologians and philosophers-- have induced mankind to chase eagerly an ideal which nobody knows anything from.
"Happiness is the only imaginary and abstract universality of a content which simply must be" (EPW. 480).
". . . the whim which in happiness gives or not himself a goal" (ibid. ).
It is an imaginary configuration whose only content is the unreach- able. It seems to be a goal, but since it lacks content it isn't one at all. Regardless of the harshness of the example, we could say that the whole situation is like putting a carrot in the end of some stick so that
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 273
some animal chases it. Except for the fact that the carrot is something concrete, while happiness does not have content. It is, by definition, the processus in indefinitum.
It would be very simple to say that happiness is the satisfaction of impulses. But, in the first place, some impulses contradict each other. Thus the satisfaction of one inclination is the dissatisfaction of an- other. It would not be enough to satisfy only one of them, for the distinction between happy and unhappy men would disappear and the concept in question would lose all cognitive value, since man are always satisfying some impulse, despite how mundane it may be.
In the second place, there are killer impulses too, or at least, incli- nations that are harmful to the others; therefore, one cannot say that the end of man is the satisfaction of impulses. In this context, there is no difference here between natural and acquired impulses; the fact is that they are there. If one answers that one must distinguish between different kind of impulses, then the definition we are dealing with proves to be inefficient, for all impulse demands satisfaction, and the criterion to discern between impulses would be based in the fact that they are impulses; one needs as a higher criterion and a new content that are not provided by this definition. Therefore, the previous definition re- mains undetermined. Besides, let us not forget that there are impulses which are harmful to the subject and hence the satisfaction of them cannot be the definition of happiness.
In the third place, experimental psychology nowadays has demon- strated that our most decisive impulses are acquired; they have their origin in education, social influence and culture. Now, this makes of the expression 'satisfaction of impulses' a completely undetermined term, because education and social influence can create all kind of im- pulses, which can be contradictory and incompatible. But if the term in question does not have any determined content, it does not work as a definition. In order to reinforce this third point we will discuss in short the thesis of psychologist Judson B. Brown.
The impression that the definition we have criticized leaves is that we need to satisfy only those impulses which aim at happiness. But if that is so, then the tautology and the lack of content therein become evident, for it turns out that happiness is the satisfaction of the impulse towards happiness. There can be no more lack of content than in an expression which only in appearance defines things. Hegel was right: "happiness is the undetermined" (PR II, II 228).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 274 Hegel was right
Let us now present an historic argument of appreciable forcefulness about the intrinsic indetermination of eudemonism: Epicurus, the most acclaimed specialist in the pursuit of the pleasant, arrives to the same 'ideal' of behavior that Stoicism, whose asceticism and contempt against the pleasant are paradigmatic. This fact is not fortuitous: who talks about happiness imagines something 'pleasant', but precisely the 'pleasant' lacks content and is undetermined: "one can understand by 'pleasant' anything" (GP I 539). The result is that "in Epicurus, the wise man is described with the same characteristics, negatives by the way, that in the stoics" (GP II 325). "The systems of that time, Stoicism, Epicureism and skepticism, although opposed to each other, lead at the end of the day to the same, namely, to make the spirit indifferent with respect to everything that reality has to offer" (WG 718).
The logical process of Epicurus is not fortuitous. It places from the very beginning pleasure and contentment as the end of men; but it realistically understands two things that make of that very criteri- on something thwarted and equivocal. First, not only the corporeal produces pleasure, but culture and intelligence too, as Aristippus af- firmed. Furthermore, culture and intelligence provide more pleasure than the corporeal and are a condition sine qua non of true joy. Second: the negative, the absence of pain and nuisance, must be considered as an element of happiness it and may be the true constitutive of it. The pursuit of pleasure is not a univocal compass that we could follow to the end, because that pursuit is always interrupted by the avoidance of the unpleasant.
And the worst is that, when both considerations are carried out, the criterion falls apart completely, because there are displeasures of the soul --e. g. fear, anxiety and concern --that probably hinder one more than the displeasures of the body. If we add remorse --which necessarily must be added, because it is a psychological fact, despite what the im- moralist says about it is objective validity--, the eudemonist criterion becomes something ludicrous, because when morals steps in joy has ceased to be the norm. The hedonistic logic, the consequent pursuit of happiness, is what makes that Epicurus prefer tranquility, the ataraxia, which is very similar to nirvana and nothingness. What started as an easy pursuit of pleasure ends up being a rigid discipline of affections and passions that preserves imperturbability. One could not come up with a better demonstration of the vacuity of the pseudoconcept of happiness.
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By other way, the cyrenaic Hegesias arrived at that negative and ataraxic result before Epicurus did. He proceeded thus: It is necessary to choose between complete situations, not between an aspect of a situation and an aspect of other situation; the real is not the pleasure that a man feels in a given moment, but all what that man feels in that moment, because it is possible that he experiences displeasure with regard to some other thing. Now, a completely happy situation does not exist. How could we know if the welfare of a dead man with no anxieties or troubles is superior to that of a living man who experiences some sort of pleasures? Why do we prefer to be alive? The disciples of Hegesias started to commit suicide and the authorities were forced to forbid him to teach.
Hegel comments this very well:
The body, says Hegesias, is distressed by several ailments and the soul suffers with it; this is why it is indifferent to choose between life and death. As such, Hegesias says, nothing is pleasant or unpleasant; it is futile to pro- claim the liking as the normative; because, on the contrary, it is the null what does not have any determination in itself; it is negation of objective determination (GP I 548).
The refutation of eudemonism is not only the question: what is that thing called happiness? There is a question that goes even deeper: who said that happiness is what man wants the most?
As Victor Hugo very well remarked: "The reflective spirits use this expression very little: the happy and the unhappy ones" (Les Miserables IV, VII, i). In this regard, we find a very eloquent of Rousseau in his Political Fragments: "Hurry to abandon the laws, for they only are use- ful to make you happy" (1964, 556).
And in the Emile we read: "They say we are indifferent to everything but self-interest; yet we find our consolation in our sufferings in the charms of friendship and humanity, and even in our pleasures we should be too lonely and miserable if we had no one to share them with us. " (Book IV)
"One says that one contributes to the common good by one ? s own interest. Where does the idea come from according to which the just contributes against his own interest? How can one die looking for his own benefit? " (ibid).
There is a very widespread dogmatism --whose purpose is, un- doubtedly, to justify one's own selfishness-- that says that in the last
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 276 Hegel was right
instance the only thing that motivates man is self-interest. First, this dogma does not say anything, because it cannot provide the expres- sion 'self-interest' with a meaning whatsoever.
Second, and more im- portant, this dogmatism refutes itself when it is asked: how can one die in self-interest? How can one find satisfaction with acts which are completely disinterested? They can only juggle with words when they try to answer that. They end up recognizing, implicitly or explicitly, that man is capable of acting without pursuing his own interest. To say that one takes benefit from not taking benefit is only a game of words which does not respect the principle of contradiction.
In order to talk about of 'impulse' towards one's own benefit, the mentioned dogma needs to focus on introspection, because no impulse can be called an empirical data, not even hungriness. But if we rely on introspection, we find there other motives besides self-interest, which is enough to refute this dogma, for according to it the only thing that moves us is self-interest.
Morals and my neighbors are ends in themselves. Those moralists who believe that morals are a means to obtain the final happiness have not read Kant, let alone Hegel. They have not come to realize the difference between a categorical and a hypothetical imperative. And they do not know anything about God.
About the human plenitude involved in the truly moral act Hegel makes the most important and precise observation: "This happiness, in contrast with the other one, could be called real happiness, but in that very moment happiness becomes an inadequate expression [. . . ] it is a reality that becomes deformed if one calls it happiness" (GP II 288s).
"To direct oneself towards happiness and spiritual joy, to chitchat about the wonders and delights of science and art, is something fu- tile; for the very thing that occupies oneself there does not have the form of pleasure; in other words, that entire conception is suppressed" (GP II 289).
"All that empty speech is left behind and loses all interest. The true spirit consists in dealing with the thing in itself, with something that is in itself universal and not a means for pleasure, that is to say, not as if it were the constant reflection of the relation with oneself as individual" (GP II 289).
The last three texts are the key to the whole issue. It is complete- ly false that in the genuine moral act --and even the activities that are not as elevated as that one, such as the scientific quests and the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 277
creation of art-- one is relating to oneself as individual; the pleasure is experience of the individual as such. About the true morals we will talk later.
The above mentioned dogmatism does not need to verify if in a very specific case the motive was self-interest or not; that dogmatism believes to know everything and does not need to verify what it says. It is one of those pampered theses which need no contact whatsoever with reality and, consequently, cannot refute anything at all. Whether things are A or not-A is indifferent to them.
Another example would be the thesis that the only motive of man is the desire of self-sacrifice or of mortifying himself. In light of the bacchanals and bons vivants, it would be enough to say that men adopt such conducts even going against their own liking and inclinations, and they pretend to feel joy so that the triumph over themselves be- comes of a more sophisticated nature. As in the case we are dealing with, this second apriorism acts stubbornly despite what reality may say. It is simply a mental toy, not a real knowledge.
In order to refute the second apriorism above mentioned, the eude- monists would need to use the introspection, a recourse in which we would certainly find some hedonistic impulses. But they are lost; the introspection also refutes them, because it testifies that there can be in men other motives different than self-interest; for instance, the presence of the moral imperative.
To be sure, there is satisfaction in universal history, but that is not what is called happiness, for it is the happiness that goes beyond particular in- terests. The ends that have real value in universal history need to be kept firmly by means of strong will and energy. The relevant individuals in uni- versal history --who pursuit such ends-- were rewarded, it is true, but to be happy was not what they wanted (VG 92s).
Delight is something secondary, concomitant to the fact. When the substan- tial is realized, delight is added to the extent in which the work is perceived to be the work of the subject. Who sets out on the quest of delight, only looks for oneself in the accidental. Who cares of great works and interests, only looks for the realization of the thing in itself. He directs himself towards the substantial, does not remember himself in it, and forgets about himself in the thing. People use to pity men of great interests and works, because they have little satisfactions, that is to say, because they live only in the thing, not in the accidental (NH 255).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 278 Hegel was right
One should understand here clearly that I am not encouraging asceticism or austerity. I am only pointing out that happiness --besides being something completely undetermined and with no definable con- tent-- is not the only or the deepest motive of man.
"As an individual one must strive for one's reasonable wellbeing and the more pleasant the better. But one does not need to make big fuzz or great speeches about this, as if this were a matter of great importance and intelligence" (GP II 289).
Hegel warns us explicitly about Stoicism:
But to reduce as much as possible our dependence from necessities is a mere abstract freedom. Once we have achieved indifference with respect to necessities, true freedom consists not in the diminution of them but in being free in joy itself, and in remaining with ethicity in being part of the life of men in law. On the other hand, the abstract freedom suppresses the ethicity: the individual retracts himself to his subjectivity; such freedom, hence, is a factor of immorality (GP I 553).
Once we have made that clear, we can move forward. The eudemonist apriorism has become so unreflectively widespread, that theologians have posed as the final goal and end of man the beatific vision of God. Beatific meaning: what makes one happy.
Being God a spiritual entity, to talk about 'seeing him' is nothing more than a metaphor, and in such a serious issue like this one there is no room for literature. To bring up the words of Saint Paul, who says that we will see God "face to face" (1 Corinthians 13, 12 ), is something that a careful treatise writer should not do, knowing that God does not have a body. Even Paul in his first letter to Timothy explicitly warns: "whom nobody has seen and cannot be seen" (1 Timothy 6, 6).
The same warns Saint John, making thematically evident that God can only be known by means of loving the neighbor: "No one has ever seen God, but as long as we love one another, God remains in us and his love comes to its perfection in us" (1 John 4, 12). Blass and DeBrun- ner, two of the most intelligent scholars of the New Testament, point out that those forms of aorist (like our 'has seen') does not refer to the past but are in fact gnomic aorists; the expression we are dealing with means 'has never been seen', in an intemporal form. And when the passage adds that our love for God has reached its perfection if we love the neighbor, which evidently means there is no knowledge of God that goes beyond this.
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The postulate of a 'vision' that we criticized suffers from another evident superficiality: it believes that the best way to know a person is looking at it as if it were an object. As a matter of fact, to know a per- son means to be addressed by another: the essence itself of a person is dialogical and intersubjective. The character and depth of his appeal is what matters; his unconformities and his conformities, his ambi- tions and his plans, his wishes and his preferences, his patience and his impatience, his historical burden, his lucidity about reality, his de- gree of consciousness in respect to the world and other people, his tolerance, his trajectory, his dialogical intensity, his capacity or inca- pacity to sacrifice, and above all, his degree of true morality, his affec- tivity, his intelligence, his keeping his word, his honesty, his delicacy, his tenderness. The spirit is act, it consists in its acts, especially God, who the Scholastic philosophers called 'pure act'. To imagine a 'divine essence' which does not consist in acts is tantamount to imagine God as a material being.
And let us now address the central point. Who said that knowing God deeply has to be 'delightful' and 'beatific'? We need to say with Hegel: "it is a reality that becomes deformed if one calls it happiness" (GP II 289). Pleasure and pleasant are words completely inadequate and even childish, when they mean to describe an overwhelming as- tonishment; an amazement that cannot decrease or increase, whose nature inspires piercing veneration. It is a boundless wonder which never ceases to be disturbing and powerful. T he predominance of the eudemonist terminology confused theologians.
As we have seen, Hegel defends eagerly and coherently the im- mortality of the individual soul. However, that does not mean at all 'another world'. For a long time, theologians were deceived by the expression 'the Kingdom of Heaven', which, as the parallel passages of Mark and Luke can bear witness, was an expression introduced by Mathew instead of the original expression of Christ, the 'Kingdom of God'. All the exegetists --whether liberals or conservatives-- know that Mathew uses there the circumlocution employed in later Judaism in order to avoid pronouncing the name of God, which was a poorly respect towards the divinity and a merely legalist interpretation of the prohibition of using the name of God in vain. Mathew himself teaches us explicitly in the parable of the tares that the place where the King- dom is reestablished is no other "the world" (13, 38), and that Christ will return to such Kindgom to expel from it all the people who perform
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 280 Hegel was right
inequity (13, 41). And in the teaching that our Savior taught us, we do not read "take us to thy Kingdom" but rather "thy Kingdom come" (6, 10). The resurrection of the bodies is not only an argument against what we have been saying. It reinforces our entire point. The bodies need a physical ground; they have to be in this world. There is no single Bibli- cal text that says that the Kingdom of God belongs to another world. Now, the Kindgom which Christ started to conform was a State. As Hegel says: "the reality of the Kingdom of Heavens is the State" (FR 231). We will see later on how little they understand the Philosophy of Right those who do not see that the reality called State is a part of universal history (Rph. 341, 360) and that the universal history is directed to the
realization of the Kingdom of God.
One cannot put into question that the Kingdom that Christ wanted to
gather and form --and of which he always said 'it has come' (Mathew 12, 28; Luke 11, 20), the verb phtha? no does not mean 'to approach' but 'to come' -- consists in the set of persons bounded by duties and rights. And in the parable of the grain of mustard seed (Mark 4, 30-32) the thesis is that this Kingdom, although it may now be of small propor- tions, will grow one day more than any other.
This kingdom is the only end of man. Only in this kingdom, true ethicity among mankind is reached and God becomes truly conceivable. It is intolerable the immorality that says that my neighbors and my interrelation with them are a means to the consecution of my heavenly happiness or to the consecution of any other thing. Man must find his own realization and plenitude in responding positively and creatively to this continuous ethical appeal, to this intersubjectivity in which the kingdom of God consists. As Hegel says, the subject 'must find his sat- isfaction in his ethical situation' (VG 264).
This is the point where Kant failed in a lamentable way, and this is the reason why Hegel criticizes the Kantian morals, in spite of the fact that its distinction of categorical and hypothetical imperatives is an undisputable merit of Kant and the key to overcome definitively eudemonism. The Kantian postulate of a future harmony between the moral good and the physical good (= happiness) hinders that the end of man is morality and the neighbor. "The harmony is not present, it is not real; it only must be. The postulate itself is perennizing" (GP III 370s). "The immorality expresses here precisely what it is: that moral- ity itself is not what matters, but happiness as such, with any relation to the former" (PG 440).
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With regard to Kant, Jacobi and Fichte, Hegel says: "It is false that these philosophies abandon eudemonism; they rather perfect it to its maximum extent" (JS 294).
As I have said, Hegel, makes this objectively irrefutable criticism, in spite of the fact that he recognizes that the key to overcome eudemonism is in Kant: "before the Kantian philosophy, morals, as eudemonism, was grounded on the notion of happiness" (GP I 186).
Intersubjectivity --i. e. the vinculation and unification among men-- is not a means for something else, but rather an end in itself. This is the key to Hegel's Philosophy of Right, the most misunderstood work within his oeuvre: "The unification as such is in itself the true content and end, and the destiny of individuals is to realize a universal life" (Rph 258A).
"We now know that the ethical and the just in the State is also the di- vine and the commandment of God, and that insofar the content there is no other thing which is higher or holier" (WG 888).
"The divine is no longer represented as a beyond" (WG). Those who questioned that man could find his own realization in intersub- jectivity and perfect plenitude understood him wrongly and ignore the most recent physiological and anthropological discoveries. Psy- chologist Abraham Maslow --an impartial witness in this case-- says this very clearly: "At the highest level of life [. . . ] duty is pleasure" (1970, 102).
Those who put this into question commit two mistakes. Fist, they still have the immoral belief that one needs to satisfy his natural and animal impulses, as if we did not possess also killer impulses that enter into conflict with the other impulses. Second, and most important, they have not realized that only the acquired impulses are in fact the only ones that count for experimental psychology nowadays, because they obliterate the natural ones and erase them practically from the list of motivations which demand to be satiated. Psychologist Judson B. Brown says:
. . . the doctrines which hold instinctive sources of motivation to be of sig- nificance for human behavior have all but vanished from the psychological scene. These and other influences have led many to the belief that the im- portant human motives are produced by learning during the processes of socialization and acculturation. (Teevan/Birney, 1964, 80)
If the word happiness had a meaning, it could only consist in the sat- isfaction and fulfillment of the acquired impulses. The Hegelian thesis
? ? ? ? ?
Just like goodness and freedom consist in a not -- in a lack and ab- sence of something--, so happiness consists in a 'not suffering'. A thing
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 271
that does not consist of anything is something easy for the natural man to possess from the very beginning.
By idealizing the natural life, romanticism did not realize that those who are civilized are the ones who positively enjoy the fields, the woods, the mountains and the sea. The beauty of it all would be nothing but a mystery to the 'natural man'. Moreover, like Norbert Elias has pointed out, "for the primitive men the natural space is to a larger degree a danger zone; it is full of perils that the civilized man does not know any more of" (1977 II, 405). In order to enjoy natural beauties, one demands the pacification of the environment and the affectivity which are intro- duced by civilization; one demands that forests and fields are no longer the place where men and animals hunt each other. But still today, in our pacified countries, it is by no means true that the uncultivated man is more capable of enjoying the natural beauties than the cultivated one. Hegel says:
"Granted: the savage man does not know any huge amount of pain and unhappiness; that is, something merely negative; freedom, how- ever, must be essentially affirmative. Only the benefits of supreme consciousness are the benefits of the affirmative freedom. " (WG 775)
The observation that the English novelist Willkie Collins made in the middle of the nineteenth century is extremely accurate:
Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature. As children, we none of us possess it. No uninstructed man or woman possesses it. Those whose lives are most exclusively passed amid the ever-changing wonders of sea and land are also those who are most universally insensible to every aspect of Nature not directly associated with the human interest of their calling. Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civi- lized accomplishments which we all learn as an Art; and, more, that very capacity is rarely practiced by any of us except when our minds are most indolent and most unoccupied (The Woman in White I, viii).
Without referring to the enjoyment of natural beauties, the Cyrenaics of the fourth and fifth centuries B. C. --a philosophical school whose stron- gest point of focus was happiness-- stated that only culture and reflection make man capable for joy. Hegel summarizes Aristippus's philosophy thus: the principle of fruition "embraces the feature that culture of spirit and thought is an ineludible condition to achieve delight" (GP I 541).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 272 Hegel was right
Natural happiness seems to be something impossible. It is with all certainty a dogmatic and superficial apriorism.
Because it is clear that happiness cannot be defined as something negative, like a lack of something, e. g. like absence of suffering; for then, the stones would be happy.
If what they mean to say is that absence of suffering is the mere con- dition for happiness, one could agree with that, but it is obvious that we still need a definition of happiness.
In spite of what Rousseau says, health and minimal material goods are evidently not enough, because there are people who are perfectly healthy and have all the things in the world and yet are tremen- dously unhappy.
Perhaps Rousseau would say that those are mere ideas. But one could reply the following: first, that happiness and unhappiness are precisely ideas, and hence health and minimal material goods would become, again, a simple condition and we would still lack a definition of happiness. Second, if unhappiness is a mere idea, Rousseau would be obviously supposing that the natural man is happy because he does not have ideas. He holds a conception of happiness which consists in the mere absence of something. A tree that is healthy and does not need anything would have to be considered happy. In short, the Rous- seaunian definition is untenable.
Fortunately, Rousseau adds after the above quoted text: "Another thing is the happiness of the moral man, but we will not speak about it here". More fortunately, many years afterwards and having changed his mind in his Political Fragments, Rousseau was finally able to recog- nize this: "But the meaning of the term happiness, which is much un- determined among individuals, is even to a greater extent so among the nations" (1964. 509).
This is precisely the problem: men of letters and politicians --and even theologians and philosophers-- have induced mankind to chase eagerly an ideal which nobody knows anything from.
"Happiness is the only imaginary and abstract universality of a content which simply must be" (EPW. 480).
". . . the whim which in happiness gives or not himself a goal" (ibid. ).
It is an imaginary configuration whose only content is the unreach- able. It seems to be a goal, but since it lacks content it isn't one at all. Regardless of the harshness of the example, we could say that the whole situation is like putting a carrot in the end of some stick so that
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 273
some animal chases it. Except for the fact that the carrot is something concrete, while happiness does not have content. It is, by definition, the processus in indefinitum.
It would be very simple to say that happiness is the satisfaction of impulses. But, in the first place, some impulses contradict each other. Thus the satisfaction of one inclination is the dissatisfaction of an- other. It would not be enough to satisfy only one of them, for the distinction between happy and unhappy men would disappear and the concept in question would lose all cognitive value, since man are always satisfying some impulse, despite how mundane it may be.
In the second place, there are killer impulses too, or at least, incli- nations that are harmful to the others; therefore, one cannot say that the end of man is the satisfaction of impulses. In this context, there is no difference here between natural and acquired impulses; the fact is that they are there. If one answers that one must distinguish between different kind of impulses, then the definition we are dealing with proves to be inefficient, for all impulse demands satisfaction, and the criterion to discern between impulses would be based in the fact that they are impulses; one needs as a higher criterion and a new content that are not provided by this definition. Therefore, the previous definition re- mains undetermined. Besides, let us not forget that there are impulses which are harmful to the subject and hence the satisfaction of them cannot be the definition of happiness.
In the third place, experimental psychology nowadays has demon- strated that our most decisive impulses are acquired; they have their origin in education, social influence and culture. Now, this makes of the expression 'satisfaction of impulses' a completely undetermined term, because education and social influence can create all kind of im- pulses, which can be contradictory and incompatible. But if the term in question does not have any determined content, it does not work as a definition. In order to reinforce this third point we will discuss in short the thesis of psychologist Judson B. Brown.
The impression that the definition we have criticized leaves is that we need to satisfy only those impulses which aim at happiness. But if that is so, then the tautology and the lack of content therein become evident, for it turns out that happiness is the satisfaction of the impulse towards happiness. There can be no more lack of content than in an expression which only in appearance defines things. Hegel was right: "happiness is the undetermined" (PR II, II 228).
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Let us now present an historic argument of appreciable forcefulness about the intrinsic indetermination of eudemonism: Epicurus, the most acclaimed specialist in the pursuit of the pleasant, arrives to the same 'ideal' of behavior that Stoicism, whose asceticism and contempt against the pleasant are paradigmatic. This fact is not fortuitous: who talks about happiness imagines something 'pleasant', but precisely the 'pleasant' lacks content and is undetermined: "one can understand by 'pleasant' anything" (GP I 539). The result is that "in Epicurus, the wise man is described with the same characteristics, negatives by the way, that in the stoics" (GP II 325). "The systems of that time, Stoicism, Epicureism and skepticism, although opposed to each other, lead at the end of the day to the same, namely, to make the spirit indifferent with respect to everything that reality has to offer" (WG 718).
The logical process of Epicurus is not fortuitous. It places from the very beginning pleasure and contentment as the end of men; but it realistically understands two things that make of that very criteri- on something thwarted and equivocal. First, not only the corporeal produces pleasure, but culture and intelligence too, as Aristippus af- firmed. Furthermore, culture and intelligence provide more pleasure than the corporeal and are a condition sine qua non of true joy. Second: the negative, the absence of pain and nuisance, must be considered as an element of happiness it and may be the true constitutive of it. The pursuit of pleasure is not a univocal compass that we could follow to the end, because that pursuit is always interrupted by the avoidance of the unpleasant.
And the worst is that, when both considerations are carried out, the criterion falls apart completely, because there are displeasures of the soul --e. g. fear, anxiety and concern --that probably hinder one more than the displeasures of the body. If we add remorse --which necessarily must be added, because it is a psychological fact, despite what the im- moralist says about it is objective validity--, the eudemonist criterion becomes something ludicrous, because when morals steps in joy has ceased to be the norm. The hedonistic logic, the consequent pursuit of happiness, is what makes that Epicurus prefer tranquility, the ataraxia, which is very similar to nirvana and nothingness. What started as an easy pursuit of pleasure ends up being a rigid discipline of affections and passions that preserves imperturbability. One could not come up with a better demonstration of the vacuity of the pseudoconcept of happiness.
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By other way, the cyrenaic Hegesias arrived at that negative and ataraxic result before Epicurus did. He proceeded thus: It is necessary to choose between complete situations, not between an aspect of a situation and an aspect of other situation; the real is not the pleasure that a man feels in a given moment, but all what that man feels in that moment, because it is possible that he experiences displeasure with regard to some other thing. Now, a completely happy situation does not exist. How could we know if the welfare of a dead man with no anxieties or troubles is superior to that of a living man who experiences some sort of pleasures? Why do we prefer to be alive? The disciples of Hegesias started to commit suicide and the authorities were forced to forbid him to teach.
Hegel comments this very well:
The body, says Hegesias, is distressed by several ailments and the soul suffers with it; this is why it is indifferent to choose between life and death. As such, Hegesias says, nothing is pleasant or unpleasant; it is futile to pro- claim the liking as the normative; because, on the contrary, it is the null what does not have any determination in itself; it is negation of objective determination (GP I 548).
The refutation of eudemonism is not only the question: what is that thing called happiness? There is a question that goes even deeper: who said that happiness is what man wants the most?
As Victor Hugo very well remarked: "The reflective spirits use this expression very little: the happy and the unhappy ones" (Les Miserables IV, VII, i). In this regard, we find a very eloquent of Rousseau in his Political Fragments: "Hurry to abandon the laws, for they only are use- ful to make you happy" (1964, 556).
And in the Emile we read: "They say we are indifferent to everything but self-interest; yet we find our consolation in our sufferings in the charms of friendship and humanity, and even in our pleasures we should be too lonely and miserable if we had no one to share them with us. " (Book IV)
"One says that one contributes to the common good by one ? s own interest. Where does the idea come from according to which the just contributes against his own interest? How can one die looking for his own benefit? " (ibid).
There is a very widespread dogmatism --whose purpose is, un- doubtedly, to justify one's own selfishness-- that says that in the last
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instance the only thing that motivates man is self-interest. First, this dogma does not say anything, because it cannot provide the expres- sion 'self-interest' with a meaning whatsoever.
Second, and more im- portant, this dogmatism refutes itself when it is asked: how can one die in self-interest? How can one find satisfaction with acts which are completely disinterested? They can only juggle with words when they try to answer that. They end up recognizing, implicitly or explicitly, that man is capable of acting without pursuing his own interest. To say that one takes benefit from not taking benefit is only a game of words which does not respect the principle of contradiction.
In order to talk about of 'impulse' towards one's own benefit, the mentioned dogma needs to focus on introspection, because no impulse can be called an empirical data, not even hungriness. But if we rely on introspection, we find there other motives besides self-interest, which is enough to refute this dogma, for according to it the only thing that moves us is self-interest.
Morals and my neighbors are ends in themselves. Those moralists who believe that morals are a means to obtain the final happiness have not read Kant, let alone Hegel. They have not come to realize the difference between a categorical and a hypothetical imperative. And they do not know anything about God.
About the human plenitude involved in the truly moral act Hegel makes the most important and precise observation: "This happiness, in contrast with the other one, could be called real happiness, but in that very moment happiness becomes an inadequate expression [. . . ] it is a reality that becomes deformed if one calls it happiness" (GP II 288s).
"To direct oneself towards happiness and spiritual joy, to chitchat about the wonders and delights of science and art, is something fu- tile; for the very thing that occupies oneself there does not have the form of pleasure; in other words, that entire conception is suppressed" (GP II 289).
"All that empty speech is left behind and loses all interest. The true spirit consists in dealing with the thing in itself, with something that is in itself universal and not a means for pleasure, that is to say, not as if it were the constant reflection of the relation with oneself as individual" (GP II 289).
The last three texts are the key to the whole issue. It is complete- ly false that in the genuine moral act --and even the activities that are not as elevated as that one, such as the scientific quests and the
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creation of art-- one is relating to oneself as individual; the pleasure is experience of the individual as such. About the true morals we will talk later.
The above mentioned dogmatism does not need to verify if in a very specific case the motive was self-interest or not; that dogmatism believes to know everything and does not need to verify what it says. It is one of those pampered theses which need no contact whatsoever with reality and, consequently, cannot refute anything at all. Whether things are A or not-A is indifferent to them.
Another example would be the thesis that the only motive of man is the desire of self-sacrifice or of mortifying himself. In light of the bacchanals and bons vivants, it would be enough to say that men adopt such conducts even going against their own liking and inclinations, and they pretend to feel joy so that the triumph over themselves be- comes of a more sophisticated nature. As in the case we are dealing with, this second apriorism acts stubbornly despite what reality may say. It is simply a mental toy, not a real knowledge.
In order to refute the second apriorism above mentioned, the eude- monists would need to use the introspection, a recourse in which we would certainly find some hedonistic impulses. But they are lost; the introspection also refutes them, because it testifies that there can be in men other motives different than self-interest; for instance, the presence of the moral imperative.
To be sure, there is satisfaction in universal history, but that is not what is called happiness, for it is the happiness that goes beyond particular in- terests. The ends that have real value in universal history need to be kept firmly by means of strong will and energy. The relevant individuals in uni- versal history --who pursuit such ends-- were rewarded, it is true, but to be happy was not what they wanted (VG 92s).
Delight is something secondary, concomitant to the fact. When the substan- tial is realized, delight is added to the extent in which the work is perceived to be the work of the subject. Who sets out on the quest of delight, only looks for oneself in the accidental. Who cares of great works and interests, only looks for the realization of the thing in itself. He directs himself towards the substantial, does not remember himself in it, and forgets about himself in the thing. People use to pity men of great interests and works, because they have little satisfactions, that is to say, because they live only in the thing, not in the accidental (NH 255).
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One should understand here clearly that I am not encouraging asceticism or austerity. I am only pointing out that happiness --besides being something completely undetermined and with no definable con- tent-- is not the only or the deepest motive of man.
"As an individual one must strive for one's reasonable wellbeing and the more pleasant the better. But one does not need to make big fuzz or great speeches about this, as if this were a matter of great importance and intelligence" (GP II 289).
Hegel warns us explicitly about Stoicism:
But to reduce as much as possible our dependence from necessities is a mere abstract freedom. Once we have achieved indifference with respect to necessities, true freedom consists not in the diminution of them but in being free in joy itself, and in remaining with ethicity in being part of the life of men in law. On the other hand, the abstract freedom suppresses the ethicity: the individual retracts himself to his subjectivity; such freedom, hence, is a factor of immorality (GP I 553).
Once we have made that clear, we can move forward. The eudemonist apriorism has become so unreflectively widespread, that theologians have posed as the final goal and end of man the beatific vision of God. Beatific meaning: what makes one happy.
Being God a spiritual entity, to talk about 'seeing him' is nothing more than a metaphor, and in such a serious issue like this one there is no room for literature. To bring up the words of Saint Paul, who says that we will see God "face to face" (1 Corinthians 13, 12 ), is something that a careful treatise writer should not do, knowing that God does not have a body. Even Paul in his first letter to Timothy explicitly warns: "whom nobody has seen and cannot be seen" (1 Timothy 6, 6).
The same warns Saint John, making thematically evident that God can only be known by means of loving the neighbor: "No one has ever seen God, but as long as we love one another, God remains in us and his love comes to its perfection in us" (1 John 4, 12). Blass and DeBrun- ner, two of the most intelligent scholars of the New Testament, point out that those forms of aorist (like our 'has seen') does not refer to the past but are in fact gnomic aorists; the expression we are dealing with means 'has never been seen', in an intemporal form. And when the passage adds that our love for God has reached its perfection if we love the neighbor, which evidently means there is no knowledge of God that goes beyond this.
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The postulate of a 'vision' that we criticized suffers from another evident superficiality: it believes that the best way to know a person is looking at it as if it were an object. As a matter of fact, to know a per- son means to be addressed by another: the essence itself of a person is dialogical and intersubjective. The character and depth of his appeal is what matters; his unconformities and his conformities, his ambi- tions and his plans, his wishes and his preferences, his patience and his impatience, his historical burden, his lucidity about reality, his de- gree of consciousness in respect to the world and other people, his tolerance, his trajectory, his dialogical intensity, his capacity or inca- pacity to sacrifice, and above all, his degree of true morality, his affec- tivity, his intelligence, his keeping his word, his honesty, his delicacy, his tenderness. The spirit is act, it consists in its acts, especially God, who the Scholastic philosophers called 'pure act'. To imagine a 'divine essence' which does not consist in acts is tantamount to imagine God as a material being.
And let us now address the central point. Who said that knowing God deeply has to be 'delightful' and 'beatific'? We need to say with Hegel: "it is a reality that becomes deformed if one calls it happiness" (GP II 289). Pleasure and pleasant are words completely inadequate and even childish, when they mean to describe an overwhelming as- tonishment; an amazement that cannot decrease or increase, whose nature inspires piercing veneration. It is a boundless wonder which never ceases to be disturbing and powerful. T he predominance of the eudemonist terminology confused theologians.
As we have seen, Hegel defends eagerly and coherently the im- mortality of the individual soul. However, that does not mean at all 'another world'. For a long time, theologians were deceived by the expression 'the Kingdom of Heaven', which, as the parallel passages of Mark and Luke can bear witness, was an expression introduced by Mathew instead of the original expression of Christ, the 'Kingdom of God'. All the exegetists --whether liberals or conservatives-- know that Mathew uses there the circumlocution employed in later Judaism in order to avoid pronouncing the name of God, which was a poorly respect towards the divinity and a merely legalist interpretation of the prohibition of using the name of God in vain. Mathew himself teaches us explicitly in the parable of the tares that the place where the King- dom is reestablished is no other "the world" (13, 38), and that Christ will return to such Kindgom to expel from it all the people who perform
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inequity (13, 41). And in the teaching that our Savior taught us, we do not read "take us to thy Kingdom" but rather "thy Kingdom come" (6, 10). The resurrection of the bodies is not only an argument against what we have been saying. It reinforces our entire point. The bodies need a physical ground; they have to be in this world. There is no single Bibli- cal text that says that the Kingdom of God belongs to another world. Now, the Kindgom which Christ started to conform was a State. As Hegel says: "the reality of the Kingdom of Heavens is the State" (FR 231). We will see later on how little they understand the Philosophy of Right those who do not see that the reality called State is a part of universal history (Rph. 341, 360) and that the universal history is directed to the
realization of the Kingdom of God.
One cannot put into question that the Kingdom that Christ wanted to
gather and form --and of which he always said 'it has come' (Mathew 12, 28; Luke 11, 20), the verb phtha? no does not mean 'to approach' but 'to come' -- consists in the set of persons bounded by duties and rights. And in the parable of the grain of mustard seed (Mark 4, 30-32) the thesis is that this Kingdom, although it may now be of small propor- tions, will grow one day more than any other.
This kingdom is the only end of man. Only in this kingdom, true ethicity among mankind is reached and God becomes truly conceivable. It is intolerable the immorality that says that my neighbors and my interrelation with them are a means to the consecution of my heavenly happiness or to the consecution of any other thing. Man must find his own realization and plenitude in responding positively and creatively to this continuous ethical appeal, to this intersubjectivity in which the kingdom of God consists. As Hegel says, the subject 'must find his sat- isfaction in his ethical situation' (VG 264).
This is the point where Kant failed in a lamentable way, and this is the reason why Hegel criticizes the Kantian morals, in spite of the fact that its distinction of categorical and hypothetical imperatives is an undisputable merit of Kant and the key to overcome definitively eudemonism. The Kantian postulate of a future harmony between the moral good and the physical good (= happiness) hinders that the end of man is morality and the neighbor. "The harmony is not present, it is not real; it only must be. The postulate itself is perennizing" (GP III 370s). "The immorality expresses here precisely what it is: that moral- ity itself is not what matters, but happiness as such, with any relation to the former" (PG 440).
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With regard to Kant, Jacobi and Fichte, Hegel says: "It is false that these philosophies abandon eudemonism; they rather perfect it to its maximum extent" (JS 294).
As I have said, Hegel, makes this objectively irrefutable criticism, in spite of the fact that he recognizes that the key to overcome eudemonism is in Kant: "before the Kantian philosophy, morals, as eudemonism, was grounded on the notion of happiness" (GP I 186).
Intersubjectivity --i. e. the vinculation and unification among men-- is not a means for something else, but rather an end in itself. This is the key to Hegel's Philosophy of Right, the most misunderstood work within his oeuvre: "The unification as such is in itself the true content and end, and the destiny of individuals is to realize a universal life" (Rph 258A).
"We now know that the ethical and the just in the State is also the di- vine and the commandment of God, and that insofar the content there is no other thing which is higher or holier" (WG 888).
"The divine is no longer represented as a beyond" (WG). Those who questioned that man could find his own realization in intersub- jectivity and perfect plenitude understood him wrongly and ignore the most recent physiological and anthropological discoveries. Psy- chologist Abraham Maslow --an impartial witness in this case-- says this very clearly: "At the highest level of life [. . . ] duty is pleasure" (1970, 102).
Those who put this into question commit two mistakes. Fist, they still have the immoral belief that one needs to satisfy his natural and animal impulses, as if we did not possess also killer impulses that enter into conflict with the other impulses. Second, and most important, they have not realized that only the acquired impulses are in fact the only ones that count for experimental psychology nowadays, because they obliterate the natural ones and erase them practically from the list of motivations which demand to be satiated. Psychologist Judson B. Brown says:
. . . the doctrines which hold instinctive sources of motivation to be of sig- nificance for human behavior have all but vanished from the psychological scene. These and other influences have led many to the belief that the im- portant human motives are produced by learning during the processes of socialization and acculturation. (Teevan/Birney, 1964, 80)
If the word happiness had a meaning, it could only consist in the sat- isfaction and fulfillment of the acquired impulses. The Hegelian thesis
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