This fact will do to
demonstrate
that the notion itself of being at two different places does not mean two different bodies.
Hegel Was Right_nodrm
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154 Hegel was right
and his henchmen would want Hegel to think that man was the only thing real, and that all the non-sense about the infinite and the divin- ity were absorbed by the human. They probably missed the Hegelian mockery about the Greek religion in their reading of the Phenomenology: "both gods and men did one and the same thing. The earnestness of those divine powers is a ridiculous superfluity, since they are in fact the power or strength of the individuality performing the action. " (PG 508). In contrast to the God of Christianity, Hegel mocks the Greek divinities for not having personality and real individuality: "They are, in true, endowed with the form of individuality, but this is only in imagination and does not really and truly belong to them; the actual self does not have such an abstract moment for its substance and content" (PG 517s). Let us keep into account that these two texts are in the Phenomenology, which insistently isolated unscientifically from the rest of the Hegelian work, by those who forcefully want to suck the divine into the human.
Hegel denounces that the Indian divinities also lack real subjectivity and autonomy in front of the human subject:
In his essential determination Brahma remains the abstract being, the uni- versal, the substance without subjectivity in itself; therefore, it is not concrete, it is not the spirit (just as it happens with the modern philosophers, who determine God as concrete when they call him the essence of the essences). With such content --which is in fact lack of content-- that masculinum (Brahma) is not an individual subject; the personality is in him an empty form, a personification. It is of utmost importance while studying religions to distinguish between the mere personification of a god and a god, some- thing that one can find in every mythology, and the personality, which is by content. Since personification is something superficial, the objective autono- my of the god before the subject collapses. For instance, at the beginning of the Iliad, when Eros or Pallas prevents that Achilles draws his sword, we immediately take that as the subjective feeling of love, as the good sense that makes itself present in Achilles himself (BS 186).
In its parenthesis, this passage denounces those Western men who are incapable of conceiving God as a true subject. What Hegel rejects is a divinity that lacks real autonomy in front of the human subject. What Hegel explicitly and sharply denies is the absorption that Findlay and his followers want to attribute to him.
Furthermore, Hegel accuses of atheism those Western theologians that do not conceive God as spirit.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 155
They accuse Spinoza of atheism when in fact the intention of Spi- noza is not to deny the existence of God but the existence of the world (acosmism). But this is true: insofar Spinoza dies not conceive God as spirit, he is an atheist in that sense, but many theologians are atheists in that sense too. "Spinozism if far from being atheism in the ordinary sense, but in so far it does not conceive God as spirit, it actually is. Now, in this sense, many atheists are theologians that only call God the omnipotent and supreme being [. . . ]" (GP III, 195), or that reduce Him, as he says in the Encyclopedia, to the "undetermined suprasen- sible" (EPW 73).
When one sees that Hegel even calls the theologians 'athetists', one realizes that the attempts of making him an atheist are only literary attempts which lack seriousness and scientific method. Hegel adds himself expressly to the aphorism "a bad philosophy draws one apart from God [. . . ] and a true philosophy draws one near Him. " (Rph XXIII) He explicitly warns us that "men did not have to wait for philosophy in order to receive the truth and awareness of it. " (PR I 299) While making history of the 3th century of our era, he approves the dictum of Tertullian: "nowadays kids know of God what only the greatest sieges of antiquity knew" (GP II 498).
Against our principle of examining the matters in itself and not the interpretative questions in regard of Hegel's mind, it has been neces- sary to make a brief pause to analyze the latter ones because, if the reader thinks that the author is pretending, all the reference points start shuddering and turn out precarious, and the intellection be- comes impossible. The idiotic accusations of atheism and pantheism have prevented the world from receiving the most profound and true philosophical message that exists. We will demonstrate now that the accusation of pantheism is false, first formally and then in its content. After we have settled some issues, it will be better to leave aside the interpretative pursuit and go to the matter itself.
With the same force with which he criticized the lack of consis- tency and true subjectivity of the mythological gods, Hegel criticizes the lack of consistency and true subjectivity of the human spirit in the non-Christian religions:
"The Parsi place the bodies of the dead exposed to the open air so that the birds would eat them; in so far as the soul goes, they thought that it thins into the universal" (WG 496). "The Indians have also a very gloomy conception, since the last stage is for them the transition to
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 156 Hegel was right
the universal substance" (WG 495). Even in Judaism "the subject does never reach to the consciousness of his autonomy; that is why we do not find among the Jews the faith in the immortality of the soul, since the subject is not existing in and by himself" (WG 457).
In contrast to this, "the Western infinitude and joy of the individual is conformed in such a way that the subject remains in the substance, that it is not debased, that he does not see himself as a slave that de- pends on the substance, destined to annihilation" (EGP 232).
"While in the oriental consciousness, the most important thing lies in the fact that the universal is the truly independent, for us in the Western consciousness the individuality of things and of men is beyond everything" (PR II, I, 128).
In the oriental religions the fundamental situation is that only the true substance as such is what is true and the individual does not have any value at all in himself; he cannot get if while he remains in front of that which is in and by its own; the individual can only have value if he identifies himself with that substance in which he ceases to be an object and fades away into unconsciousness (GP I 140).
To tell the truth, these formal statements of immortality and of true subjectivity point already to the content that decides everything: the only thing on which the accusers of pantheism should focus is if indi- vidual self-consciousness is preserved or not. Every other lucubration ends up confusing spirit with matter:
"The Greeks did not seriously take into account what we call immortality" (A? sth II 572).
On the contrary, according to the Christian conception, "it is the in- dividual, the real subject, in its intern vitality, what has infinite value" (A? sth II 568).
"Plato did not know how to acknowledge or to conciliate with his ideas the willing, the wanting and choosing of the individual" (GP II 129). "One cannot say that Greeks understood death in its essential mean-
ing (A? sth II 571).
According to Hegel, the conception of the Easterners incarnated in
the system of Spinoza reappears in the Western world: "It is the orien- tal conception which is formulated by Spinoza in the Western world for the first time" (GP III 165). And Hegel says the following of that philosophical system:
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 157
What one can reproach to that philosophy is that it conceives God only as substance, not as spirit, not as concrete. The autonomy of the human soul is thereby denied; in the Christian religion every individual is conceived as destined to joy. Here, on the other hand, the individual of the spirit is only a modus, an accident, something which is not substantial (GP III 196).
One cannot ask for more explicit expressions against any absorption of the human in the divine. And they are in the core itself of the Hege- lian system, namely, in the difference between the concept of substance and the concept of spirit. Hegel would have wondered himself about the language one should employ in order to be understood.
5. diStinction
Let us go to the problem itself. Something really simple has happened: those who accuse Hegel of pantheism believe that they can establish a distinction between God and the creature that Hegel cannot establish, but neither they nor Physics --nor common-sensed people, for that matter-- have realized that the only possible meaning of the term dis- tinction is the one presented and defended by Hegel. And the same goes for the words identity and individuality. Fortunately enough --ma- terially constrained by the experiments themselves-- quantum physics has started to question if these expressions have any physical meaning at all. Scientists would have spared themselves an entire century had they read Hegel more carefully.
"According to the concept, the distinction does not have any physi- cal meaning at all" (GP I 206).
"In the sensible things there is no true objective distinction, only in the spiritual" (GP I 315).
"What is not distinguished in thought is not distinguished" (GP III 246).
Everything becomes clearer once we realize that it is impossible to give an empirical meaning to the word distinction or distinct. It follows from this that one obtains the meaning of this concept through self- consciousness. But self-consciousness is intersubjectivity (cfr III, 7), distinction among people. The original meaning must consist in "vital and spiritual relations" (WL I 335).
The most frequent (and funny) thing is to believe that the distinction between two beings consists in that one is 'here' and the other is 'there',
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 158 Hegel was right
believing one can pinpoint them with his own finger. It is ridiculous that whoever talks this way believes he has given an empirical mean- ing to the word distinction.
But so it turns out that Gorbachev and Reagan are not distinct, since they are not in the places pointed out by the finger.
These empirical tricksters would answer: I am not referring exactly to the two places I am pointing at, but to two different places, regard- less of which ones they are.
The reader perceives immediately that what we are given is not an empirical sign but a phrase, and that our definer has failed in his attempt of indicating an empirical data as the meaning of the word distinction. And something even worse has happened: he is saying that being consists in being at two different places. The definiendum reap- pears in the word different, which was what one tried to define in the first place. This dictum pretends to be a manual book that tells us how to find out if there is distinction or not, but in order to be effective the manual book itself requires to be previously understood, and for that to happen the word "distinct" has to have a meaning first, but the whole enterprise had as its very purpose finding that meaning! Con- sequently, we are just like in the beginning, and the allegedly empiric maneuver has proved to be barren.
What such a definer is saying is that the distinction is a visual data, for he supposes that one only needs to opens his eyes to verify it. But if that were so, one could not distinguish two sounds, two smells, two flavors, etcetera. Likewise, the electrons could not be distinct from each other, since they are not visible; and that certainly goes against the intentions of our definer. Needless to say: theologians could not use that distinction in order to say that God and the human spirit are distinct.
Even if we do without the visibility, it is well known in Physics that two electromagnetic fields could be present at the same point of space. According to our definer, these two electromagnetic fields could not be distinct. But in the present context the visibility is decisive, and it is important to notice that the visible limits of a body --its empirical distinction in respect to other bodies, so to speak-- are not reliable data in the natural sciences at all, since the constitutive fields of this body go far beyond the allegedly visible limits of it and even penetrate the zone of space occupied by other bodies. Therefore, the alleged visible distinction cannot be the real distinction by any means.
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But those who try to give an empirical meaning to the word distinct by means of 'here' and 'there' incur even in a bigger mistake. The 'here' is so metaphysical and unempirical as Newton's absolute space and, in fact, as any other space. When someone thinks that he is seeing the space that separates him from the wall before him, what he is seeing is the wall before him, not the space. The space is invisible, and a point within space is even more invisible, for that matter. The 'here' is a point or a region in space; but none of these things are seen. And if someone believes that he can touch the space with his hands, the only thing one can tell him is that he is not touching anything. If our definer pretended to attribute an empirical meaning to the distinction by a 'here' and a 'there', his failure could not be more disastrous.
Besides, if our definer reflects a little, he has to recognize that the idea 'two beings really distinguish themselves' is not the same as the idea 'this being is here and the other being is there'. As Hegel says: "In the here and now as such does not consist the distinction" (GP I 315). Let us make the following question to clarify this: if two beings identify themselves with each other, would they cease to be two bodies? The fact itself that we understand this question implies that being distinct is not the same as being in different places, for we understand the dif- ference between two bodies occupying the same space and two bodies identifying themselves with each other. Even he, who is inclined to respond affirmatively to the question, has to understand it first: this implies that the meanings of 'identifying' and 'being one body' are not the same. Now, this will do: the meaning of distinction supposedly consisted in being at different places, and we have proved that this is not the case.
The same question we made with regard to identity, one should ask it in regard of a 'twofold location'. The question would be: if a body were at two places simultaneously, would it cease to be the same body? The simple fact that the question is intelligible implies that 'being at two different places' does not mean 'being two and not one'. I owe anthro- pologist Leslie White the following information: ". . . it may be remarked that normal children and many primitive peoples find nothing wrong with the notion that a body can be in two different places at the same time" (1964, 279 n. ).
This fact will do to demonstrate that the notion itself of being at two different places does not mean two different bodies.
In addition, one should know that the true extent of the experiment of Young and Taylor --to which we will refer later on-- is that terms
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 160 Hegel was right
like distinction, individuality and identity do not have any meaning in Physics. An example of this is that an electron can be in two places at the same time. Many physics would want to reject this. They reject exactly what they understand. It follows that the concept of two and not one, that is to say, the concept of distinction, does not mean to be in two places at the same time. Let's repeat with Hegel: "In the here and now as such, it does not consist distinction" (GP I 315)
6. individuaLity
Now, if the concept of distinction does not have an empirical meaning, the concept of individuality and identity do not have it too, for it is obvious that individuality implies that a being is distinct from other beings, and identity implies that a being is not distinct from itself. By some way or another, the concept of distinction enters into the defini- tions of individuality and identity, terms whose meaning is not empiri- cal. And vice versa: the distinction between two beings consists in that they are not identical. If some of these concepts are unempirical, then all of them are. This is precisely relevant in regard to the attempts of defining individuality through the localization in space: the individu- ality of a being does not mean that this being is 'here' and not 'there'.
The physic Bernard d'Espagnat has drawn some systematic observa- tions from Jean Piaget about the epistemological development of babies --conclusions that are undeniable in this sense. To identify the identity and the individuality of an object with certain localization in space is a practical construction that is useful to the kid in order to coordinate his movements and to integrate his early 'vision' of the world'. It is an implicit assumption that the baby makes to orient himself, but this does not have a greater probability than the contrary assumption. "This shows", according to d'Espagnat, "that the idea according to which any macroscopic object necessarily occupies some definite region of space --to the exclusion of other regions-- is not an obvious (and hence unquestionable) truth, but rather an element of the definition, useful in given circumstances, of the word 'object'. " (1976, xx)
Alongside the psychological developments of Piaget, one could recourse to the undeterministc physics of Heisenberg, Bohr and Von Neumann, which fortunately does not find today serious opponents among physics. D'Espagnat affirms:
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. . . the fact that the notion of localized objects is but a construct liberates us from the so-called commonsense view [. . . ] according to which individual macroscopic objects obviously --and therefore necessarily-- exist as indi- viduals independently of ourselves; hence it liberates us from the apparent necessity of considering them as more basic than numbers, logical struc- tures, and so on. (ibid. , xxi)
We have to point out "as individuals" we are not dealing with the existence of material.
Physics could have spared themselves the detour that goes through Heisenberg and Schro? dinger (and Piaget) if they had read the section about the sense-certainty at the beginning of the Phenomenology. The 'here' and the 'now' only manage to denote something individual if we understand them in function of the subject that pronounces this words. They express thus
"our intention" (unsere Meinung), as commentators like Lauer, Mure, Bon- siepen and Heinrich have very well understood. Therefore, to attribute an individuality to the material objects that does not depend on the knowing subject, not only means to draw a gratuitous and empirically unjustifiable stamen like that of absolute space, but is in fact a statement that lacks all sense whatsoever. Hegel says "there is no distinction between the atoms" (GP I 362).
"Spirit is, in a much deeper sense, this one thing" (WL II 121).
Two things are important: the concept of identity and individuality lack empirical meaning, and to predicate both things of material things is a thesis which has no meaning.
Hume already remarked the first point: First, "As to the principle of individuation; we may observe, that the view of any one object is not sufficient to convey the idea of identity [. . . ] On the other hand, a multi- plicity of objects can never convey this idea, however resembling they may be supposed" (Treatise I, IV, ii). The last thing is obvious; the simi- larity is not only identity but negation of identity; in order to be alike, the objects need to be two and not one. But the vision of a sole object does not suffice either to evoke in the mind the idea of identity: this is a very abstract contribution on account of the intellect. If we explain to a farm worker what we want to say, he would agree with us in that the rock we have before is identical to itself and is individual, but he would have not come up with such a round-about idea despite he has been
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 162 Hegel was right
seeing that rock for years. In fact, despite how much time we spend observing an object, none of its colors, forms or visible details denote identity or individuality: "the one cannot be seen, it is an abstractum of thought" (GP I 358).
"The word this expresses precisely that distinguishing and sin- gling out something is a subjective designation, which lacks something outside from itself" (WL I 104).
It is frequent and coarse to believe that the individuality of a macroscopic object consists in its having visible and palpable limits that distinguish it from other objects. But we said that the existence of fields and forces that constitute each body go far beyond such empiri- cal limits. This refutes by itself such a belief. In regard to the identity of a body across the course of time, it is obvious that senses only witness at best that the body is exactly the same. That it is in fact the 'same' than a minute ago. This is something that empirical impressions do not tell us. Selfsameness is an idea tremendously metaphysical idea, a re- fined contribution of which the senses know nothing; an (ungrounded) projection towards the material of the self-sameness of the knowing subject, in which the word selfsameness does have sense.
If the observed body would have ceased to exist, and if in its place an exactly same body started to exist, the testimony of the senses would not vary at all. This demonstrates that the senses do not know anything about identity and individuality.
Besides, what difference would there be between a body that remained the same and a body that was replaced by other? The selfsameness of the material does not have any meaning at all. I am not only saying that our empirical perception would not notice anything; I am saying that it is completely indifferent that the body has been substituted for another, and consequently, I affirm that we are extrapolating a concept to the physical that has only meaning in self-consciousness, intersubjectivity and morals. That matter is a principle of individuation is one of the most foolish things that have ever been said in the history of thought. It was originated in the illusion of the localization that was dispelled above. Karl Rahner, the most intelligent Scholastic of our century, re- jected this impossible doctrine:
"Moreover, identity is given to us, now and in the future, by the iden- tity of the spiritual subject of freedom called soul" (Schriften XII 461s). The macroscopic is apparent. Its origin is the subjectivist peculiarity of our senses. If the material possessed identity and individuality, this
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 163
would have to be in the microscopic level. But the most intelligent physics have noticed that "there is no distinction between the atoms" (GP I 362) just as Hegel thought. Besides d'Espagnat, it would be useful to quote other physics, for instance, P. W. Bridgman: "The elemental processes or 'objects' do not have individuality or identificability, nor can they be repeated. The concept of 'sameness' does not apply in the microscopic domain of quantum phenomena (Schilpp II 1970, 346).
Likewise, Eddington says:
". . . distinction of individuality, if it has any meaning at all, has no bearing on physical manifestations" (1978, 175).
The next paragraph of Max Jammer summarizes the thought and the experiments of Heisenberg, Hund, Denisson, Wigner, Heitler and London
These results not only lent weight to the concept of like particles; they also showed that like particles may be indistinguishable, that is, may lose their identity, a conclusion which follows from the uncertainty relations or, more precisely, from the impossibility of keeping track of the individual particles in the case of interactions of like particles. For, contrary to classical dynamics, trajectories could no longer be defined as sharp nonintersecting world- lines but had to be conceived as overlapping each other. In fact, all papers on exchange phenomena and, in particular, the calculations concerning the ground state of the helium atom, in which the wave functions of the two electrons overlap completely, showed clearly that the classical principle of an unrestricted identifiability of particles had to be abandoned. Moreover, it was possible to show that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle was al- ready contradicted by the idea of an approximately continuous sequence of atomic-configuration measurements, designed to identify electrons in lower-energy states and hence requiring positional uncertainties smaller than average electron distances. (1966. 344)
This is related with the 'forbidden distance' or impossible orbits of Bohr's atoms which we will in short bring into consideration. Let us only look first at this quotation of Paul Dirac: "If a system in atomic physics contains a number of particles of the same kind, e. g. a num- ber of electrons, the particles are absolutely indistinguishable one from another. No observable change is made when two of them are inter- changed. " (1981, 207)
Hegel had already said in times of classical mechanics that we are dealing with "exterior objects, not individual ones" (WL II 376).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 164 Hegel was right
In the atomic model of Bohr, the atoms 'jump' from one orbit of radio to another depending on how much energy each of them has. However, as it was experimentally demonstrated by Planck's discovery of the indivisibility ad infinitum of physical realities, an orbit's radio cannot have any dimension, there are radios that are physically im- possible, which means that it is impossible for the electron to be at such a distance from the nucleus. Therefore, it is not the case that the electron passes from one orbit to another, but rather that the intermedi- ate states cannot exist. The only thing that happens is that the electron disappears from one orbit and reappears in another. But how could one affirm that it is the 'same' electron, if there is no continuity between one state and the other? Further: is it relevant at all that it is the same electron or not? The only possible meaning of being the same is con- sidering oneself to be the same. And this happens without any substra- tum. It is not the case that the subject remains the same even when he is not conscious of being the same; we already showed (III, 6) that these intermediate states do not exist. I am myself because I consider myself to be so. This lies in mutual dependency with intersubjectivity (cfr. III, 7): Just as it is true that I consider myself the same in function that the others consider me the same, so it is true that they consider me the same because I consider myself to be the same. "Only in morals this concept of the absolute individuality of consciousness has properly sense. " (GP I, 271). Individuality and identity of matter, is an absolutely unjustified projection of concepts which only have a meaning in the spirit.
In radioactivity, the tunnel effect demonstrates also that it is ab- surd to talk about the identity of the particles. There is a 'prohibited zone' for the particles around the nucleus, but these particles are in fact emitted from the nucleus towards the surrounding world. The zone is prohibited because the kinetic energy of the particle would be negative in it and its speed would be imaginary. Therefore, to say that a particle passes by this zone is to utter something impossible. All the problematic that may rise up in regard of the identity of the particle emitted by the nucleus is based on the ignorance of what the physical world is in contrast with the spirit.
This lack of knowledge was what made Einstein broke up with Bohr, and it is also the reason why he was incapable of accepting the decisive facts of relativity and, more in particular, the disturbing fact discovered by Young's dispositive and Geoffrey Ingram Taylor's technique. This technique is described by Ted Bastin:
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 165
. . .
and his henchmen would want Hegel to think that man was the only thing real, and that all the non-sense about the infinite and the divin- ity were absorbed by the human. They probably missed the Hegelian mockery about the Greek religion in their reading of the Phenomenology: "both gods and men did one and the same thing. The earnestness of those divine powers is a ridiculous superfluity, since they are in fact the power or strength of the individuality performing the action. " (PG 508). In contrast to the God of Christianity, Hegel mocks the Greek divinities for not having personality and real individuality: "They are, in true, endowed with the form of individuality, but this is only in imagination and does not really and truly belong to them; the actual self does not have such an abstract moment for its substance and content" (PG 517s). Let us keep into account that these two texts are in the Phenomenology, which insistently isolated unscientifically from the rest of the Hegelian work, by those who forcefully want to suck the divine into the human.
Hegel denounces that the Indian divinities also lack real subjectivity and autonomy in front of the human subject:
In his essential determination Brahma remains the abstract being, the uni- versal, the substance without subjectivity in itself; therefore, it is not concrete, it is not the spirit (just as it happens with the modern philosophers, who determine God as concrete when they call him the essence of the essences). With such content --which is in fact lack of content-- that masculinum (Brahma) is not an individual subject; the personality is in him an empty form, a personification. It is of utmost importance while studying religions to distinguish between the mere personification of a god and a god, some- thing that one can find in every mythology, and the personality, which is by content. Since personification is something superficial, the objective autono- my of the god before the subject collapses. For instance, at the beginning of the Iliad, when Eros or Pallas prevents that Achilles draws his sword, we immediately take that as the subjective feeling of love, as the good sense that makes itself present in Achilles himself (BS 186).
In its parenthesis, this passage denounces those Western men who are incapable of conceiving God as a true subject. What Hegel rejects is a divinity that lacks real autonomy in front of the human subject. What Hegel explicitly and sharply denies is the absorption that Findlay and his followers want to attribute to him.
Furthermore, Hegel accuses of atheism those Western theologians that do not conceive God as spirit.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 155
They accuse Spinoza of atheism when in fact the intention of Spi- noza is not to deny the existence of God but the existence of the world (acosmism). But this is true: insofar Spinoza dies not conceive God as spirit, he is an atheist in that sense, but many theologians are atheists in that sense too. "Spinozism if far from being atheism in the ordinary sense, but in so far it does not conceive God as spirit, it actually is. Now, in this sense, many atheists are theologians that only call God the omnipotent and supreme being [. . . ]" (GP III, 195), or that reduce Him, as he says in the Encyclopedia, to the "undetermined suprasen- sible" (EPW 73).
When one sees that Hegel even calls the theologians 'athetists', one realizes that the attempts of making him an atheist are only literary attempts which lack seriousness and scientific method. Hegel adds himself expressly to the aphorism "a bad philosophy draws one apart from God [. . . ] and a true philosophy draws one near Him. " (Rph XXIII) He explicitly warns us that "men did not have to wait for philosophy in order to receive the truth and awareness of it. " (PR I 299) While making history of the 3th century of our era, he approves the dictum of Tertullian: "nowadays kids know of God what only the greatest sieges of antiquity knew" (GP II 498).
Against our principle of examining the matters in itself and not the interpretative questions in regard of Hegel's mind, it has been neces- sary to make a brief pause to analyze the latter ones because, if the reader thinks that the author is pretending, all the reference points start shuddering and turn out precarious, and the intellection be- comes impossible. The idiotic accusations of atheism and pantheism have prevented the world from receiving the most profound and true philosophical message that exists. We will demonstrate now that the accusation of pantheism is false, first formally and then in its content. After we have settled some issues, it will be better to leave aside the interpretative pursuit and go to the matter itself.
With the same force with which he criticized the lack of consis- tency and true subjectivity of the mythological gods, Hegel criticizes the lack of consistency and true subjectivity of the human spirit in the non-Christian religions:
"The Parsi place the bodies of the dead exposed to the open air so that the birds would eat them; in so far as the soul goes, they thought that it thins into the universal" (WG 496). "The Indians have also a very gloomy conception, since the last stage is for them the transition to
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 156 Hegel was right
the universal substance" (WG 495). Even in Judaism "the subject does never reach to the consciousness of his autonomy; that is why we do not find among the Jews the faith in the immortality of the soul, since the subject is not existing in and by himself" (WG 457).
In contrast to this, "the Western infinitude and joy of the individual is conformed in such a way that the subject remains in the substance, that it is not debased, that he does not see himself as a slave that de- pends on the substance, destined to annihilation" (EGP 232).
"While in the oriental consciousness, the most important thing lies in the fact that the universal is the truly independent, for us in the Western consciousness the individuality of things and of men is beyond everything" (PR II, I, 128).
In the oriental religions the fundamental situation is that only the true substance as such is what is true and the individual does not have any value at all in himself; he cannot get if while he remains in front of that which is in and by its own; the individual can only have value if he identifies himself with that substance in which he ceases to be an object and fades away into unconsciousness (GP I 140).
To tell the truth, these formal statements of immortality and of true subjectivity point already to the content that decides everything: the only thing on which the accusers of pantheism should focus is if indi- vidual self-consciousness is preserved or not. Every other lucubration ends up confusing spirit with matter:
"The Greeks did not seriously take into account what we call immortality" (A? sth II 572).
On the contrary, according to the Christian conception, "it is the in- dividual, the real subject, in its intern vitality, what has infinite value" (A? sth II 568).
"Plato did not know how to acknowledge or to conciliate with his ideas the willing, the wanting and choosing of the individual" (GP II 129). "One cannot say that Greeks understood death in its essential mean-
ing (A? sth II 571).
According to Hegel, the conception of the Easterners incarnated in
the system of Spinoza reappears in the Western world: "It is the orien- tal conception which is formulated by Spinoza in the Western world for the first time" (GP III 165). And Hegel says the following of that philosophical system:
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What one can reproach to that philosophy is that it conceives God only as substance, not as spirit, not as concrete. The autonomy of the human soul is thereby denied; in the Christian religion every individual is conceived as destined to joy. Here, on the other hand, the individual of the spirit is only a modus, an accident, something which is not substantial (GP III 196).
One cannot ask for more explicit expressions against any absorption of the human in the divine. And they are in the core itself of the Hege- lian system, namely, in the difference between the concept of substance and the concept of spirit. Hegel would have wondered himself about the language one should employ in order to be understood.
5. diStinction
Let us go to the problem itself. Something really simple has happened: those who accuse Hegel of pantheism believe that they can establish a distinction between God and the creature that Hegel cannot establish, but neither they nor Physics --nor common-sensed people, for that matter-- have realized that the only possible meaning of the term dis- tinction is the one presented and defended by Hegel. And the same goes for the words identity and individuality. Fortunately enough --ma- terially constrained by the experiments themselves-- quantum physics has started to question if these expressions have any physical meaning at all. Scientists would have spared themselves an entire century had they read Hegel more carefully.
"According to the concept, the distinction does not have any physi- cal meaning at all" (GP I 206).
"In the sensible things there is no true objective distinction, only in the spiritual" (GP I 315).
"What is not distinguished in thought is not distinguished" (GP III 246).
Everything becomes clearer once we realize that it is impossible to give an empirical meaning to the word distinction or distinct. It follows from this that one obtains the meaning of this concept through self- consciousness. But self-consciousness is intersubjectivity (cfr III, 7), distinction among people. The original meaning must consist in "vital and spiritual relations" (WL I 335).
The most frequent (and funny) thing is to believe that the distinction between two beings consists in that one is 'here' and the other is 'there',
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believing one can pinpoint them with his own finger. It is ridiculous that whoever talks this way believes he has given an empirical mean- ing to the word distinction.
But so it turns out that Gorbachev and Reagan are not distinct, since they are not in the places pointed out by the finger.
These empirical tricksters would answer: I am not referring exactly to the two places I am pointing at, but to two different places, regard- less of which ones they are.
The reader perceives immediately that what we are given is not an empirical sign but a phrase, and that our definer has failed in his attempt of indicating an empirical data as the meaning of the word distinction. And something even worse has happened: he is saying that being consists in being at two different places. The definiendum reap- pears in the word different, which was what one tried to define in the first place. This dictum pretends to be a manual book that tells us how to find out if there is distinction or not, but in order to be effective the manual book itself requires to be previously understood, and for that to happen the word "distinct" has to have a meaning first, but the whole enterprise had as its very purpose finding that meaning! Con- sequently, we are just like in the beginning, and the allegedly empiric maneuver has proved to be barren.
What such a definer is saying is that the distinction is a visual data, for he supposes that one only needs to opens his eyes to verify it. But if that were so, one could not distinguish two sounds, two smells, two flavors, etcetera. Likewise, the electrons could not be distinct from each other, since they are not visible; and that certainly goes against the intentions of our definer. Needless to say: theologians could not use that distinction in order to say that God and the human spirit are distinct.
Even if we do without the visibility, it is well known in Physics that two electromagnetic fields could be present at the same point of space. According to our definer, these two electromagnetic fields could not be distinct. But in the present context the visibility is decisive, and it is important to notice that the visible limits of a body --its empirical distinction in respect to other bodies, so to speak-- are not reliable data in the natural sciences at all, since the constitutive fields of this body go far beyond the allegedly visible limits of it and even penetrate the zone of space occupied by other bodies. Therefore, the alleged visible distinction cannot be the real distinction by any means.
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But those who try to give an empirical meaning to the word distinct by means of 'here' and 'there' incur even in a bigger mistake. The 'here' is so metaphysical and unempirical as Newton's absolute space and, in fact, as any other space. When someone thinks that he is seeing the space that separates him from the wall before him, what he is seeing is the wall before him, not the space. The space is invisible, and a point within space is even more invisible, for that matter. The 'here' is a point or a region in space; but none of these things are seen. And if someone believes that he can touch the space with his hands, the only thing one can tell him is that he is not touching anything. If our definer pretended to attribute an empirical meaning to the distinction by a 'here' and a 'there', his failure could not be more disastrous.
Besides, if our definer reflects a little, he has to recognize that the idea 'two beings really distinguish themselves' is not the same as the idea 'this being is here and the other being is there'. As Hegel says: "In the here and now as such does not consist the distinction" (GP I 315). Let us make the following question to clarify this: if two beings identify themselves with each other, would they cease to be two bodies? The fact itself that we understand this question implies that being distinct is not the same as being in different places, for we understand the dif- ference between two bodies occupying the same space and two bodies identifying themselves with each other. Even he, who is inclined to respond affirmatively to the question, has to understand it first: this implies that the meanings of 'identifying' and 'being one body' are not the same. Now, this will do: the meaning of distinction supposedly consisted in being at different places, and we have proved that this is not the case.
The same question we made with regard to identity, one should ask it in regard of a 'twofold location'. The question would be: if a body were at two places simultaneously, would it cease to be the same body? The simple fact that the question is intelligible implies that 'being at two different places' does not mean 'being two and not one'. I owe anthro- pologist Leslie White the following information: ". . . it may be remarked that normal children and many primitive peoples find nothing wrong with the notion that a body can be in two different places at the same time" (1964, 279 n. ).
This fact will do to demonstrate that the notion itself of being at two different places does not mean two different bodies.
In addition, one should know that the true extent of the experiment of Young and Taylor --to which we will refer later on-- is that terms
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like distinction, individuality and identity do not have any meaning in Physics. An example of this is that an electron can be in two places at the same time. Many physics would want to reject this. They reject exactly what they understand. It follows that the concept of two and not one, that is to say, the concept of distinction, does not mean to be in two places at the same time. Let's repeat with Hegel: "In the here and now as such, it does not consist distinction" (GP I 315)
6. individuaLity
Now, if the concept of distinction does not have an empirical meaning, the concept of individuality and identity do not have it too, for it is obvious that individuality implies that a being is distinct from other beings, and identity implies that a being is not distinct from itself. By some way or another, the concept of distinction enters into the defini- tions of individuality and identity, terms whose meaning is not empiri- cal. And vice versa: the distinction between two beings consists in that they are not identical. If some of these concepts are unempirical, then all of them are. This is precisely relevant in regard to the attempts of defining individuality through the localization in space: the individu- ality of a being does not mean that this being is 'here' and not 'there'.
The physic Bernard d'Espagnat has drawn some systematic observa- tions from Jean Piaget about the epistemological development of babies --conclusions that are undeniable in this sense. To identify the identity and the individuality of an object with certain localization in space is a practical construction that is useful to the kid in order to coordinate his movements and to integrate his early 'vision' of the world'. It is an implicit assumption that the baby makes to orient himself, but this does not have a greater probability than the contrary assumption. "This shows", according to d'Espagnat, "that the idea according to which any macroscopic object necessarily occupies some definite region of space --to the exclusion of other regions-- is not an obvious (and hence unquestionable) truth, but rather an element of the definition, useful in given circumstances, of the word 'object'. " (1976, xx)
Alongside the psychological developments of Piaget, one could recourse to the undeterministc physics of Heisenberg, Bohr and Von Neumann, which fortunately does not find today serious opponents among physics. D'Espagnat affirms:
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. . . the fact that the notion of localized objects is but a construct liberates us from the so-called commonsense view [. . . ] according to which individual macroscopic objects obviously --and therefore necessarily-- exist as indi- viduals independently of ourselves; hence it liberates us from the apparent necessity of considering them as more basic than numbers, logical struc- tures, and so on. (ibid. , xxi)
We have to point out "as individuals" we are not dealing with the existence of material.
Physics could have spared themselves the detour that goes through Heisenberg and Schro? dinger (and Piaget) if they had read the section about the sense-certainty at the beginning of the Phenomenology. The 'here' and the 'now' only manage to denote something individual if we understand them in function of the subject that pronounces this words. They express thus
"our intention" (unsere Meinung), as commentators like Lauer, Mure, Bon- siepen and Heinrich have very well understood. Therefore, to attribute an individuality to the material objects that does not depend on the knowing subject, not only means to draw a gratuitous and empirically unjustifiable stamen like that of absolute space, but is in fact a statement that lacks all sense whatsoever. Hegel says "there is no distinction between the atoms" (GP I 362).
"Spirit is, in a much deeper sense, this one thing" (WL II 121).
Two things are important: the concept of identity and individuality lack empirical meaning, and to predicate both things of material things is a thesis which has no meaning.
Hume already remarked the first point: First, "As to the principle of individuation; we may observe, that the view of any one object is not sufficient to convey the idea of identity [. . . ] On the other hand, a multi- plicity of objects can never convey this idea, however resembling they may be supposed" (Treatise I, IV, ii). The last thing is obvious; the simi- larity is not only identity but negation of identity; in order to be alike, the objects need to be two and not one. But the vision of a sole object does not suffice either to evoke in the mind the idea of identity: this is a very abstract contribution on account of the intellect. If we explain to a farm worker what we want to say, he would agree with us in that the rock we have before is identical to itself and is individual, but he would have not come up with such a round-about idea despite he has been
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seeing that rock for years. In fact, despite how much time we spend observing an object, none of its colors, forms or visible details denote identity or individuality: "the one cannot be seen, it is an abstractum of thought" (GP I 358).
"The word this expresses precisely that distinguishing and sin- gling out something is a subjective designation, which lacks something outside from itself" (WL I 104).
It is frequent and coarse to believe that the individuality of a macroscopic object consists in its having visible and palpable limits that distinguish it from other objects. But we said that the existence of fields and forces that constitute each body go far beyond such empiri- cal limits. This refutes by itself such a belief. In regard to the identity of a body across the course of time, it is obvious that senses only witness at best that the body is exactly the same. That it is in fact the 'same' than a minute ago. This is something that empirical impressions do not tell us. Selfsameness is an idea tremendously metaphysical idea, a re- fined contribution of which the senses know nothing; an (ungrounded) projection towards the material of the self-sameness of the knowing subject, in which the word selfsameness does have sense.
If the observed body would have ceased to exist, and if in its place an exactly same body started to exist, the testimony of the senses would not vary at all. This demonstrates that the senses do not know anything about identity and individuality.
Besides, what difference would there be between a body that remained the same and a body that was replaced by other? The selfsameness of the material does not have any meaning at all. I am not only saying that our empirical perception would not notice anything; I am saying that it is completely indifferent that the body has been substituted for another, and consequently, I affirm that we are extrapolating a concept to the physical that has only meaning in self-consciousness, intersubjectivity and morals. That matter is a principle of individuation is one of the most foolish things that have ever been said in the history of thought. It was originated in the illusion of the localization that was dispelled above. Karl Rahner, the most intelligent Scholastic of our century, re- jected this impossible doctrine:
"Moreover, identity is given to us, now and in the future, by the iden- tity of the spiritual subject of freedom called soul" (Schriften XII 461s). The macroscopic is apparent. Its origin is the subjectivist peculiarity of our senses. If the material possessed identity and individuality, this
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would have to be in the microscopic level. But the most intelligent physics have noticed that "there is no distinction between the atoms" (GP I 362) just as Hegel thought. Besides d'Espagnat, it would be useful to quote other physics, for instance, P. W. Bridgman: "The elemental processes or 'objects' do not have individuality or identificability, nor can they be repeated. The concept of 'sameness' does not apply in the microscopic domain of quantum phenomena (Schilpp II 1970, 346).
Likewise, Eddington says:
". . . distinction of individuality, if it has any meaning at all, has no bearing on physical manifestations" (1978, 175).
The next paragraph of Max Jammer summarizes the thought and the experiments of Heisenberg, Hund, Denisson, Wigner, Heitler and London
These results not only lent weight to the concept of like particles; they also showed that like particles may be indistinguishable, that is, may lose their identity, a conclusion which follows from the uncertainty relations or, more precisely, from the impossibility of keeping track of the individual particles in the case of interactions of like particles. For, contrary to classical dynamics, trajectories could no longer be defined as sharp nonintersecting world- lines but had to be conceived as overlapping each other. In fact, all papers on exchange phenomena and, in particular, the calculations concerning the ground state of the helium atom, in which the wave functions of the two electrons overlap completely, showed clearly that the classical principle of an unrestricted identifiability of particles had to be abandoned. Moreover, it was possible to show that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle was al- ready contradicted by the idea of an approximately continuous sequence of atomic-configuration measurements, designed to identify electrons in lower-energy states and hence requiring positional uncertainties smaller than average electron distances. (1966. 344)
This is related with the 'forbidden distance' or impossible orbits of Bohr's atoms which we will in short bring into consideration. Let us only look first at this quotation of Paul Dirac: "If a system in atomic physics contains a number of particles of the same kind, e. g. a num- ber of electrons, the particles are absolutely indistinguishable one from another. No observable change is made when two of them are inter- changed. " (1981, 207)
Hegel had already said in times of classical mechanics that we are dealing with "exterior objects, not individual ones" (WL II 376).
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In the atomic model of Bohr, the atoms 'jump' from one orbit of radio to another depending on how much energy each of them has. However, as it was experimentally demonstrated by Planck's discovery of the indivisibility ad infinitum of physical realities, an orbit's radio cannot have any dimension, there are radios that are physically im- possible, which means that it is impossible for the electron to be at such a distance from the nucleus. Therefore, it is not the case that the electron passes from one orbit to another, but rather that the intermedi- ate states cannot exist. The only thing that happens is that the electron disappears from one orbit and reappears in another. But how could one affirm that it is the 'same' electron, if there is no continuity between one state and the other? Further: is it relevant at all that it is the same electron or not? The only possible meaning of being the same is con- sidering oneself to be the same. And this happens without any substra- tum. It is not the case that the subject remains the same even when he is not conscious of being the same; we already showed (III, 6) that these intermediate states do not exist. I am myself because I consider myself to be so. This lies in mutual dependency with intersubjectivity (cfr. III, 7): Just as it is true that I consider myself the same in function that the others consider me the same, so it is true that they consider me the same because I consider myself to be the same. "Only in morals this concept of the absolute individuality of consciousness has properly sense. " (GP I, 271). Individuality and identity of matter, is an absolutely unjustified projection of concepts which only have a meaning in the spirit.
In radioactivity, the tunnel effect demonstrates also that it is ab- surd to talk about the identity of the particles. There is a 'prohibited zone' for the particles around the nucleus, but these particles are in fact emitted from the nucleus towards the surrounding world. The zone is prohibited because the kinetic energy of the particle would be negative in it and its speed would be imaginary. Therefore, to say that a particle passes by this zone is to utter something impossible. All the problematic that may rise up in regard of the identity of the particle emitted by the nucleus is based on the ignorance of what the physical world is in contrast with the spirit.
This lack of knowledge was what made Einstein broke up with Bohr, and it is also the reason why he was incapable of accepting the decisive facts of relativity and, more in particular, the disturbing fact discovered by Young's dispositive and Geoffrey Ingram Taylor's technique. This technique is described by Ted Bastin:
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. . .
