No More Learning

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. That is the hollow opinion of the pedagogy of our time, which, on the one hand, feeds and produces conceit, and on the other hand, does not search thoroughly, does not scru- tinize in the depth of man, and hence does not produce any depth whatso- ever, but moves rather in empty circles of self-indulgence and decadence (PR III 103).
It is absolutely distressing to see how these hollow opinions con- tinue to prevail in spite of the accuracy with which Hegel denounced them and their disastrous consequences. The future of mankind is at stake, and we cannot continue to irresponsibly caress romantic and groundless apriorisms about the naturality of man! Especially now that we know we come from the animals.
Curiously enough, twenty two years after the death of Rousseau, the French found in the forest of Aveyron an unequivocal specimen of the natural man, a knave who was fourteen years old and who had not been modified either by society or by culture. Unlike other 'wolf- children' about which many stupid and unverifiable things are sill said all around the globe, Victor --as his unsuccessful educator, the acclaimed scientist Jean-Marc Itard-- was the object of systematic ob- servation by many of the best naturalists of the world of those times, naturalists whose documented testimonies have come down to us and have been recently compiled with the rigor of modern scholarship by the American investigator Harlan Lane. Before going to what really matters to us, let us make, out of curiosity, a selective extract of the observations that were drawn those days:
Man's debt to nurture proved heavy indeed, even for the most elementary sensory discriminations, reflexes, and drives: the boy was indifferent to temperature and rejected clothing even in the coldest weather; he would put his hand in a fire; his eyes did not fixate; he reached alike for painted objects, objects in relief, and the image of objects reflected in a mirror; he did not sneeze, even with snuff, nor did he weep; he did not respond to
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loud voices; he did not recognize edible food by sight, but by smell; he preferred uncooked food and had no taste for sweets or hard drink; he had no emotional ties, no sexual expression, no speech; he had a peculiar gait and would occasionally run on all fours (1979, 101); ". . . fetid odors had no disagreeable effect on him. " (126)
Let us address the question that directly concerns us. These are the words of Itard: ". . . the emotional faculties, equally slow in emerg- ing from their long torpor, are subordinated to a profound egoism" (ibid. 161).
Another acclaimed naturalist, J. J. Virey, who also studied Victor carefully in the year 1800, wrote the following lines:
It is astonishing how thoroughly this one idea absorbs him completely; he is always looking for something to eat, and he eats a lot [. . . ] is indeed fat. We might say that his mind is in his stomach; it is his life center. [. . . ] I am embarrassed to find natural man such an egoist; but I must report matters as they appeared to me. (ibid. 39)
In 1800, Virey also wrote: "His caretaker has never seen him show any sign of pity. " (ibid. 43)
I wanted to know if this child of nature would be content with his share if I put him with another person and gave them each an equal proportion of the same food - if he would respect that of his neighbor as property not belong- ing to him. But nothing of the sort transpired (ibid. 43).
The same thing is observed by Itard on the same date: ". . . he loves no one; he is attached to no one; and if he shows some preference for his caretaker, it is an expression of need and not the sentiment of grati- tude. " (Ibid. 39)
A refutation of Rousseau appeared few years after he launched to the world his prejudice in regard to natural goodness. As Hegel says, the "natural man is an egoist" (PR III 115).
By the way, we should notice that, against the Yahwist teaching that man tends to evil since his childhood, someone will probably try to entangle the facts and quote Mathew: "Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven" (Mathew, 18, 3). But that was not the original formulation of Christ. The original sentence is the one we find in Mark
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"Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein" (Mark 10, 15). The first text clearly denotes a posterior reflection of the community or of Mathew himself: in order to receive the Kingdom of Heavens as children we must become chil- dren. But that was not the idea. The idea was to receive the Kingdom as children receive things, that is to say, as the children from the villages received Jesus when he went there to announce the Kingdom: recep- tive, without prejudiced nor preformed ideas, capable of hearing some- thing truly new, with time availability, ready to follow up, leaving all other tasks aside. The original text speaks of the way of receiving, not of the way of being of children. Every specialist in the synoptic gospels knows that Mathew and Luke had before their eyes the text of Mark; in this case Luke (18, 17) preserved intact the formulation of Mark; the one that changed it was Mathew, and unfortunately, he wiped out the principal verb: to receive.
Some Bible scholars deny the historical authenticity of such phrase, let alone the formulation of Mathew. But they all agree on something: namely, that it does not speak at all about the innocence of children. For example Eduard Schweizer: "It is not about their purity or impurity" (1967, 117). And Walter Grundmann says: "Jesus does not presuppose a state of innocence in children" (1968, 207). On his part, D. E. Nine- ham says: "The point of comparison is not so much the innocence and humility [or obedience] of children" (1964, 268). Furthermore, C. E. B. Cranfield even attacks that interpretation: "To think of any subjective qualities of children here is to turn faith into a work. " (1966, 324) We could make this list much larger.
It is irresponsible to affirm the illusion about natural goodness, es- pecially now that we know that men come from the animals. Unlike in Hegel's time, today it is necessary to make focus on the biological aspect of our subject.
It may be convenient to start discussing with a great modern cham- pion of all natural will, a convinced denier of the original sin, and, to a certain point, a biological expert: Abraham H. Maslow. In his book about motivation and personality, he dedicated the ninth chapter to hold that destructivity is not instinctive in man. For that purpose, how- ever, he argues that the zoological beasts, which are apparently the most aggressive ones, do not attack motivated by pleasure but only to obtain food or defend themselves. However, he unwillingly says the following:
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Some animals apparently kill for the sake of killing, and are aggressive for no observable external reason. A fox that enters a henhouse may kill more hens than it could eat, and the cat that plays with the mouse is proverbial. Stags and other ungulate animals at rutting will look for fights, sometimes even abandoning their mates to do so. In many animals, even the higher ones, onset of old age seems to make them more vicious for apparently constitutional reasons, and previously mild animals will attack without provocation. In various species killing is not for the sake of food alone. (1970, 118)
I am afraid that the facts that Maslow grants in this passage can only be explained if there exists a natural and instinctive violence in the animal kingdom. The baroque discussion Marlow sets out on in order to distinguish between different types of aggression is pointless. At the end of the day, what this says to us is that the instinct of domination is not evil --as if a difference existed between being killed by domination and being killed for the sake of doing so. I will quote the next passage extensively because the urgency of the matter does not admit any kind of literary or stylistic scruples:
When the higher animals are studied, attacking is found to be correlated more and more with dominance. [. . . ] The animal's place in dominance hierarchy is in part determined by his successful aggression, and his place in the hierarchy determines in turn how much food will he get, whether or not he will have a mate, and other biological satisfactions. Practically all the cruelty manifested in these animals occurs only when it is necessary to vali- date dominance status, or to make a revolution in dominance status. How true this is for other species, I am not sure. But I do suspect that the phe- nomenon of territoriality, of attack on strangers, of jealous protection of the females, of attack on the weak or sick, and other phenomena that are often explained by instinctive aggression or cruelty are very often found to have been motivated by dominance rather than by a specific motivation to aggression for its own sake, e. g. , this aggression may be means behavior rather than end behaviour. (1970, 119)
What a consolation for the attacked ones!
The fact that Maslow wants to explain the phenomenon of attacking the weak, the hurt and the sick ones --a phenomenon particularly frequent among the superior animals, and which in certain human tribes is simply instinctive repulsion-- by appealing to the status of
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the domination, when the weak and the sick ones are actually those who jeopardize it the least, only denotes the power of dogmas on the mind of the scholar. But what Maslow and many of his followers lack is the philosophical approach. Despite its valiant defense of the natural, the hereditary and the biological in man, Maslow recognizes that we inherit from the animals the tendency to kill-in-order-to-obtain-more- food, the instinct of --aggression-to-obtain-more-sex, the impulse of attacking in order to achieve 'other biological satisfactions'. Now, that is not something evil in the animals, since we saw (V 6) that for them the end is the species. In the human realm, however, each and every one of the individuals is an end in itself. Hegel gave us the key to under- stand this: "To the extent that man wants the natural, this is no longer the natural but the negative against the good" (Rph 139 Z).
The destruction of the weak and sick suppresses form the world such genetic source. The only ones that breed are the strong ones, the better specimens of the animal in question. This mechanism is fabulous in the animal kingdom. There the species is the end.
The Nazis would praise the highly selective value that the facts com- piled by Maslow have for the improvement of the race. But in the hu- man realm each individual has infinite dignity and cannot be treated as a means. Whoever takes seriously the commandment 'Thou shall not kill', will only see in the above mentioned fact a conclusive argument which supports the Hegelian thesis that the being of man consists in tearing out the naturality in us. Man is man only insofar he ceases to be natural. Only he for whom his neighbor is an end and not a means can be considered a man:
That man is good by nature is a doctrine of late that has a modern sense; one considers 'good' the inclinations and predispositions so that man is not good insofar he coincides with his concept but only insofar he empirically is, that means to say, only insofar the negative does not intervene in his vitality and existential functionality (PR III 102s).
There are other examples which are more deeply rooted in the bi- ological than those registered by Maslow. I take from biologist Neal Griffith Smith member of the Smithsonian Institute, the following piece of information, which is tremendously disturbing if we take into account that in most mammals polygamy is the dominant system of reproduction:
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In a number of polygynous (mating of one male with more than one female) and promiscuous species, adult females outnumber adult males, some- times by a factor of five or more. It has been erroneously suggested that this sexual imbalance is the cause of the polygynous mating system, in which one male has several female partners. It has been demonstrated, however, in all polygynous species so far studied, that the ratio of males to females is 50-50 at the time of birth; in many cases, this ratio persists until the ces- sation of parental care. Therefore, it is the polygynous relationship that causes the imbalance, not vice versa: because sexual selection is the domi- nant factor in a polygamous and promiscuous species, it results in a grater mortality of males than of females. (EB 14, 686, 2)
The masculine instinct of aggression is something which man in- herits only because of the fact that he descends from animals. In the animal kingdom, where the species is an end, this instinct is marvelous because it makes the species improve qualitatively, since only the fit- test males survive the confrontation and reproduce themselves. But in the human realm this aggression against the weak is absolutely unac- ceptable, because every human being is an end and not a means. To be sure, if one questions the validity of judgments of good and evil, this whole discussion becomes superfluous; but he who affirms that man is good by nature, or that it is good that the human race improves, is accepting the validity of judgments of good and evil; he is accepting the validity of morals. Now, no moral judgment can be grounded or justified if one denies that the person --for the simple fact of being one-- is an end and not a means.
By nature man tends to destroy his rivals. Consequently, man is evil by nature.
And let us not lose sight from the fact that the tendency of polygamy is deeply rooted in the biological. The mass of an ovule is infinitely big- ger than that of the sperm; sometimes it is many million times bigger. Unlike the sperm, the ovule contains cytoplasm, which is a warehouse of nutrients, so to speak. The female organism spends more energy in producing its gamete than that which the male organism employs doing the same. The female tends to be very selective; it tends to mate by nature with the best male exemplaries of its species, for she cannot risk her fecundity of one year or of her entire lifespan. On the contrary, the male can allow himself a great number of bad choices, because his organism wears out very little by producing sperm. Polygamy is natu- ral in the male, while the natural selectivity of the female favors the
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