No More Learning

As we have seen --and this something accepted by the biologists themselves --, not a single or a set of empirically perceivable data is the meaning of the word life. Now (cfr II, 2), it follows that this concept does not have an empirical origin, since its cause would have to be some empirically perceivable data. The inevitable conclusion of this is that the concept itself of life was originated in self-consciousness, and that its primal meaning is a reality known by self-consciousness. When someone said 'life' for the first time, what he said was: like myself. Life, in its fullest sense, is the self-determination and -causation of the spirit. We predicate life of plants and animals in a diminished and deficient sense. As Hegel says: "his own self-consciousness is that which man makes objective to himself" (PR II, I 94, 1); "in so far as the mind thinks of itself as changing but remaining simple on that change, it thinks life as such" (GP II 452). The 'salient point' in the concept of life is "the moving of oneself, the direction of oneself as such" (EPW 359 A).
In order to understand the next paragraph, one must keep in mind that the concept is the spirit, and by reflection, in its derogatory sense, Hegel means the activity of the abstract intellect with its mirror games (Cf. V, 3), since they do not add any content at all.
The omnipresence of the simple on the multiple exteriority is for the reflec- tion an absolute contradiction; and insofar that it is forced by the perception of the life to understand such omnipresence and to concede the reality of that idea, it results to him an unintelligible mystery, for the said reflection does not understand either the concept or the concept as substance of life (WL II 416). [. . . ] It is from the idea of life that the idea of spirit has issued. (WL II 435).
True life is self-determination. Biologists could deny this concept only if they had another one. But we have seen that they do not have another one.
There have been many snobbish people who pretend to get indig- nant about the traditional judgment that catalogs animals and plans as
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inferior living forms. But in order to make meaningful such a grandilo- quent statement, the person in question would have to define life in a different way than Hegel. But he or she is unable to do that.
The Aristotelian definition of life, motus ab intrinseco et in intrinsecum, only comes about fully in the spirit, since in the inferior living beings some parts are exterior with respect to other parts and hence movement is not entirely intrinsic. At the end of the day, however, movement does not originate inside of animals, but in the agent who put inside them such instincts and tendencies; we would not say that a toy moves it- self. What moves the toy is the person who sets it into motion. On the contrary, the decision to move can go in man against the impulses and the natural inclinations; the origin and the last instance of movement is the self itself, and the determinations that are produced thereby are the being itself of the spirit, the intrinsic.
Life of animals --although, as life, it is an idea-- does not represent yet the infinitude and freedom itself which is only manifest when the concept permeates its adequate reality so fully, that only has itself, and it makes no other thing that producing itself (A? sth I 229).
Animals and plants have life insofar they resemble man; insofar they, in a gradual way, possess self-determination and move them- selves. A horse moves itself --although this is not very intrinsic--, for his legs are exterior with respect of the rest of his body.
It is true that mind has before itself a general image of the vitality and of its organization; but in real nature this general organism is dividend in a realm of particularities, from which each of them has its own limited type and figure and their own particular degree of development (A? sth I 227).
"The inmediacy of the idea of life consists in that the concept does not exist as such in life; therefore, its concreteness its submitted to multiple constraints and circumstances of the external nature and may appear in the more measly forms" (EPW 368 A).
The range or scale is very wide, precisely because the life one predicates of plants and animals consist in 'resembling to [. . . ]', and that every re- semblance says 'more or less'; gradation is inherent to the very concept of resemblance. Hegel would have seen a confirmation of his thesis in the fact, recently discovered, that viruses --the lowest degree of life we
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know from-- is sometimes organic and sometimes inorganic, a phe- nomenon which perplexes biologists nowadays.
In addition, this gradation is the epistemological root of the judg- ment of health or sickness, normality or abnormality, in regard of which the naivety of the empiricism is portentous. The biologist, the physician, and even the psychiatrist believe that they are making an empirical verification when they say that certain specimen or certain behavior is abnormal, but that is in fact a judgment of value --that kind of judg- ments which were apparently banished by the empirical sciences.
The key is that the above mentioned professionals use judgments of value that are commonly accepted ('healthy', 'sick', 'bad functioning'), and they do not realize the nature of the judgments they draw, because everybody agrees with them and hence they infer that they must be empirical data. But how could that happen if, according to them, hu- mans could only agree about empirical data! The judgments in ques- tion have an evident evaluative nature, but it is trivial, uncontroversial and, for the same reason, unapparent.
In their best attempt to reduce normality and abnormality to empiri- cal data, the above mentioned disciplines say that normal is the average, that quantitative data which is available for anyone who knows how to count. For instance, the abnormal functioning would be that which en- tails death before the organism in question reaches the average longevi- ty of its species. However, it is obvious that longevity does not constitute a good functioning when it comes along with never-ending pain. The existence of painful, chronic diseases is an undeniable fact. Another misguided recourse to the quantitative would be to call healthy and normal what is standard among a population, but every responsible physician would contradict that criterion, not only because it is diffi- cult to find one single country in which the majority of the population lacks sickness, but fundamentally because the concept itself of sickness resists against that reduction to the quantitative, a reduction by means of which one would declare --with a reckless apriorism --, that it is in itself impossible that the majority (or even the totality) of the human kind became infected by a dangerous and contagious plague. A medical science that reacts by saying that there is no care because the majority has it, would have lost sight of the importance of his mission and even conscience.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow says this correctly: "It is average in our society to have a sick, pathological sexual life (from the psychiatric
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point of view). This does not make it desirable or healthy. We should learn to say average when we mean average. " (1970, 266s).
'Healthy' and 'more 'frequent' are not synonymous concepts. By a simply decree we cannot exclude a priori the possibility that sickness is more frequent than health.
As a matter of fact, despite it deceives itself by stating the contrary, the criterion of frequency is not the one employed by the medical science in order to judge whether an organism is healthy or sick. First, this science judges that a certain group of individuals are healthy, and later seeks a sensible data that such individuals share as a common denominator, and once this is found, it uses it as practical and opera- tive criterion of health. This is why some figure that the judgment of health or sickness is in fact an empiric judgment; but in fact the elec- tion of this criterion depended on a previous judgment that was not empirical. If physiologist would have found in the first place that indi- viduals with seventy-two palpitations per minute suffered from chest pain and breathed with difficulty, they would have not adopted this quantitative data as criterion of 'good functioning'. The key question is the following one: how would they know, by empirical data, that the average number of palpitations constitutes a good functioning? The fact that the majority possess that number of palpitations is not a synonym of health, since the majority could be sick. First, medicine assumed that the majority was healthy, and it did that gratuitously, that is to say, by means of a judgment of value whose nature remained unveiled because the rest of people shared the same thought. As we said before, those are trivial and uncontroverted judgments. Only be- cause the majority believes to be healthy, medicine takes the criterion of what the majority believes. In fact, however, the medical science does not exclude the possibility that a population that considers itself to be healthy is actually sick.
Despite, the impetuosity of those biologists who claim that health is an empirical data, we have seen that that is not the case. One could ask then, what is the origin of the judgment of health?
'Vital' in its original meaning, is the thing that entirely determines itself --which is the spirit. It follows from this that 'less vital' (i. e. , sick) is what is being determined, in higher or lesser degree, by outer agents which reduce its self-determination, liberty or capacity of moving to itself. The lesser point of reference is the inorganic, it is to say, the 'object' that is externally determined by others and has no initiative
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whatsoever. The organism is reduced to that state in a higher or lesser degree by sickness.
The same gradation that allows us to affirm life in plans and ani- mals --insofar they resemble more or less the self-determination of the spirit-- constitutes the possibility of judgments of health and sick- ness. The self-determination of animals and plants consists in that the specificity of their reactions, forms and characteristics is not determined by the environment but by the hereditary germ which each species pos- sess. This makes us see that it is not a full self-determination, for it is not the individual organism the one that decides but rather the species, that "universal individual" as Hegel called it (PG 218). However, even the limited and flawed self-determination decreases in case of illness, and illness should be defined by the diminution whose extreme possibility is suppression (death).
Let us note finally that the same gradation of the concept of life --whose concretion, Hegel told us, "is subjected to multiple condi- tionings and circumstances of the external nature" (EPW 368 A). The gradation rules the formation of the concept of the diverse species of the organic.
The multiple attempts that Biology has made in order to determine the species on the grounds of physical and empirical features have failed. That was the case of a person named Blumenbach, who in times of Hegel affirmed that the earlobe was the essential feature of the hu- man species. Biology could have spared too many troubles had it read carefully what Hegel said about such physical features:
By their exteriority one notices that the knowledge of concept did not origi- nate in them: it was an obscure premonition, an indeterminate yet pro- found sense, a forewarning of the essential, what preceded the discovery of the species in nature and in the spirit, and one only searched afterwards, for the abstract intellect, some determined exteriority (WL II 456).
It has been a delusion, an illusion of the empiricism like the one we mentioned apropos the judgments of health and sickness.
For responsible biologists it is nowadays evident that their disci- pline cannot justify by empirical data the formation of their concepts of species. As Munson and York report, "some biologists have concluded that species have only a subjective existence merely as convenient la- bels for arbitrary assemblages and have only a minimum of biological
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significance" (EB 25, 686, 2). Furthermore, Herbert H. Ross, one of the most acclaimed specialists in taxonomy, makes all the more evident this spectacular failure: "We might find that different populations each previously considered to be separate species are only one, or that dif- ferent populations previously considered to be a single species actually represent many species. " (1974, 13).
For centuries, in an effort to set their concepts of species in empirical data, Biology drew its attention to describable features and characteris- tics. But this attempt failed innumerable times in facts like the follow- ing one: some butterflies have only four legs in contrast with the model of six legs that characterizes almost all insects: having six legs could not be longer considered any longer to be a particular empirical feature of insects, because on the 'basic' and 'fundamental' level, butterflies had to be considered as insects. This was the crack that made the entire building of the anatomical criterion fall down: to call some features es- sential and other not is a judgment of value and not an empirical data. To justify such a judgment by empirical observation is impossible, for this judgment determines precisely which observations are basic and fundamental and which observations are not. We could quote many examples like this.
In the light of this failure, biology --not willing to renounce to its status of empirical science-- employed the criterion of mating and intraspecific fertility: it decreed that species is characterized by the fact that their individuals mate between themselves and have offspring. But this failure is just as spectacular as the past one. First, many species reproduce themselves by simple fission, others by parthogenesis, other species are hermaphrodite, and so it turns out that we cannot divide animals in species by look only to the fact of the mating of the individu- als; the above mentioned types of reproduction --more particularly, the first one-- are quantitatively very important in the animal king- dom, and in those realms the term 'mating' does not have any mean- ing at all. Second, if one adopts this criterion, one must abandon the previous one, namely, the description of the essential characteristics. Biology, however, does not come to terms with this idea. Baker and Allen tell us: "Two progenitor plants, which are capable of producing a hybrid offspring, are eventually considered as distinct species because they differ in their anatomy and in other important details" (1970, 462). Biology works ludicrous conceptual tricks to feed its own complacent delusion of being an empirical science.
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Third, the objection of Benjamin Burma is tremendously powerful:
What, then, is a species? It would seem thus far to be the whole of any one series of breeding populations. . .
[But the] definition as it stands unfortu- nately puts all living and fossil animals in one species, since there is a con- tinuity of germ-plasm back from John [an individual animal] to the original primordial cell, and from it forward to every living animal (not to mention plant). (EB 25, 686, 2)
In order to reply to Burma's objection, one could define species as the set of populations that have intercourse at a period of time, but then the number of species would be infinite. There would not be a temporal continuity among a species, which is something utterly absurd.
The origin of all this mess was to believe that the concept of spe- cies is obtained a posteriori, i. e. by generalization of all the particular cases. But from a logical or an epistemological point of view this is impossible. How could we know from which individuals --among the many existing ones in the world-- should we abstract the concept in question, if we do not observe the world with the concept that will de- termine our selection? By means of which criterion can we rule out the sets of animals that are not useful for us? By means of which criterion, if is not the a priori concept, can we rule out the monstrosities and hy- brids, that the very experience displays us?
The trouble lays in the impotence of nature to hold the concept in its veri- fication [. . . ]. Nature revolves everywhere the essential boundaries, which always present new instances against every firm decision, even within a determined species (e. g. men), by means of monstrosities that, on the one hand, must be ascribed to the species in question, and on the other hand, lack the determinations that must be regarded as the characteristics of the species. In order to consider such forms as defective and deformed, one must suppose a fixed type, but that cannot be collected from experience, for experience provides us also with such monstrosities, engenders, etcet- era; a fixed type supposes rather the autonomy and dignity of a concept (EPW. 250 A)
"It follows from this that only life in general can be valid for the ob- servation of the concrete forms, but when that life is fragmented it does not have any order or rational classification in itself, it is not a round- about system of forms" (PG 219). The concept of life, as we have said,
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is obtained by means of self-consciousness; it is a priori, not a posteriori. Its content is the self-determination of reason and of the spirit: that is life in general. From plants and animals we predicate life in a deficient and diminished sense, because such a realization of life "is subjected to many conditionings and circumstances of exterior nature" and non organic. Each species is life insofar it possesses such material condition- ings and particularities; we obtain the concept of species by means of selection, that is to say, by selecting the true content of life according to the possibilities that the material world offers. One species crystal- lizes in front of our eyes --so to speak-- only when a picture of uncon- nected points suddenly appears to us, as in the gestalt experiments, as a figure that 'makes sense'. In our case, to have meaning means that it is viable and can have life. One should not be surprised that such configurations called species have a provisory character, as the taxono- mist Ross warned us. We maintain that species only insofar that there is not instance that contradicts it. We maintain it because it has sense, because it is a possible form or realization of the a priori concept of life.
7. conduct
Although Hegel could not foresee the contemporary boom of the con- cept of behavior, such notion falls undoubtedly under the judgment that he left Hegel formulated: "Life as an example of what cannot be understood with the abstract intellect" (PR III 71). After all, a behavior is a piece of life, one piece among the many that conform life, one unit of that which we call vitality. If only by means of self-consciousness is possible to grant meaning to the term life, the same must happen with the term behavior.
"In the empirical reality each action has many precedents, so that it is very difficult to determine in which point is the beginning" (A? sth III 274).
In the search of a behavior we find the same gestalt procedure we just mentioned in regard to the concept of species: a behavior is a vital unity that 'has sense'. We could not justify by empirical data the con- ceptual selections we make in the temporal continuum in the life of an organism in order to affirm that there is a behavior between the two cuts. The rat does not cease to move once it eats. And, in fact, the rat was not still before. No sensible data tells us: here a behavior ends and
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here another begins. To be sure, there are empirical data: but none of them means 'limit'. The criterion by means of which we will judge the ulterior movement does not belong to the behavior to which we paid attention before: evidently, it is a question that is not determined by empirical data. The temporal continuum which is the life of the ob- served organism is not empirically sectioned in parts. Our verbs of action --projected over the said organism-- constitute different types of unities. The subject experimented as a unity certain segment of his own existence and named that set of movements. Only afterwards he projected those unities and the cuts that limit them over the other or- ganisms. It is only due to the interiority of the subject that such sets have unity.
I am not saying that we do not know when a behavior ends and another begins. Of course we know that, but not by means of empiri- cal data. If the observer remains in the empirical, he could only speak at best of movements, but not of behaviors. Behavior says something much more that movement: it means activity. Now, if some concept was originated in self-consciousness, was the concept of activity. It im- plies causation, and we have seen (III 8) that causality is not an empiri- cal data. One says that he behaviors himself in one way or another, only because he realizes that it is him who determines the course of his ac- tions. If that was not the case, he would not behave himself he would be manipulated by something else. Only in a deficient and derived sense we can say that animals behave themselves: "Both the action and the event are originated in the interiority of the spirit" (A? sth III 139), "the agency begins with subjectivity" (PR II 211).
It is amusing that behaviorism --grounded itself entirely in an in- trospective and 'mental' concept-- criticizes all other psychological methods, accusing them of mentalism and anti-empirical.
If the behaviorists decree that 'behavior' is movement 'for them', they are going directly to a death end. In fact, a behavior comprises many movements, but the important questions are: How many? With which criterion does the observing mind comprise them as a unity? On what grounds does the observer affirm that many movements constitute only one behavior and not many?
For instance, how could we know in a banquet if I had one or several behaviors? If I drank one glass of wine in five sips, did I have one be- havior or five? If the rat ceases to eat while eating, would we say that it carried out as many behaviors as the times it stopped moving?
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Two extreme behaviorists, Tolman and Guthrie, addressed this sub- ject, but they displayed an astounding lack of reflection while dealing with the epistemological problem that it entails. Winfred Hill describes this very accurately:
Walking a city block, for example, is a molar act made up of an enormous number of molecular movements --expansions and contractions of the various muscles of the legs and other parts of the body. Guthrie is an exam- ple of a theorist who puts a good deal of emphasis on molecular analysis. Tolman, on the other hand, states explicitly that he is concerned only with molar behavior. The ways in which molecular movements work together to produce molar acts are of no concern to his system. (1983, 133)
We must say something in regard of the tastes and preferences on account of these investigators:
First, Guthrie himself falls short in his analytic preference. For instance, biologist Frank Brown speaks of "This is well illustrated by the complex movements of swallowing in mammals; in the dog, for example, 11 sepa- rate muscles or muscular systems are found to discharge one after the other, precisely timed to a matter of milliseconds". (EB 14, 636, 2). Accord- ing to the preferences of Tolman, one behavior would comprise a long series of events. On the contrary, Guthrie would say that each single move- ment is a behavior. Furthermore: if one tries to reduce behavior --doing without its genuine meaning-- to physical movements, why should one exclude the atomic movements of each muscle from our analysis?
Second, if it depends on the taste of the observer the number of behaviors we are dealing with, it follows that the object of study of be- haviorism is not an empirical data. The criterion by means of which the investigator builds up a behavior is not extracted by empirical data but from his own understanding and self-consciousness. Therefore, behaviorism is no other thing that a reloaded mentalism.
Against the above mentioned decree, we would like to pose a di- lemma which seems to us to be definitive. And this, of course, has to do with still behaviors. But before we formulate it, let us see some other problems first.
Will behaviorism deny that a paralytic has a behavior? Should we say that a disabled person that pays us attention does not have any behavior at all? Is hearing not a behavior? Is looking carefully instead of being distracted not a behavior? If I stay still during five minutes
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while listening a sonata with attention, could someone say that I am not behaving myself somehow? Is listening to a sonata not a behavior? These still behaviors can have tangible effects. For instance, a forester can contemplate attentively a fire during five minutes in certain direc- tion, and then make a phone call in which he says that there is no fire at the place he has to watch. If it has some undeniable empirical effects,
would the behaviorists deny that such still behavior existed?
And let us go now to our dilemma. Against the behaviors we have
mentioned previously, behaviorism can assume two positions:
First, behaviorism can acknowledge that there are in fact behaviors. In order to do so, it would appeal to the (supposed) movements of the neurons inside the head of the agent. But then the circulation of blood would be a conduct which, by the way, is not motivated by an exte- rior stimulus. That would be a decisive proof against the behaviorist theory, for it pretends to explain any conduct by exterior stimuli, and ignore the mentalist entities. The recourse it could employ is to distin- guish the behaviors of the paralytic and the forester in one hand and in the other the circulation of the blood pointing out that the firsts are in terms of voluntarism, and the second don't. However, if that happens, the will would be an essential element of conduct, and few things are
as introspective and mental as that!
Second, behaviorism could stubbornly affirm that the allegedly
still behaviors are not behaviors because they are not exterior move- ments of an organism. If that were the case, the salivary and gastric secretion of the Pavlov dogs would not be a behavior. We should not forget that the entire behaviorism originated in the observation of that very fact as some kind of paradigmatic behaviorism. To be sure, behaviorism could try to escape from that reductio ad absurdum by de- creeing that we are dealing with a behavior when we consider the en- tire organism as a whole, but the salivary secretion is evidently not a movement of the organism as a whole. Furthermore, there would not be any conduct at all, since not even eating is a movement of the organ- ism as a whole; my Saint Bernard dog i. e. does not rise from his place to eat when I bring near him his plate; during his meal, most of his body continues exactly as it was before.
Each and every one of the above mentioned alternatives means the fall of behaviorism, unless it relinquishes the thesis of behavior as a physical movement. But then behavior is an introspective concept, and that would also mean the fall of this theory.
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We have not talked about the word stimulus. It is obvious that this word is meaningless if does not refer to different impulses or instincts, or needs, or to pleasures or pains, being all of them metaphysic entities.
In order to avoid the proper meaning of the term stimulus, behav- iorism would have to arbitrarily decree that 'stimulus is every empiri- cal fact that explains the existence of a behavior', for the epistemological status of behaviorism is eminently explanatory. Its primary intention is to formulate laws (cf. v. 4). Let us not bring into consideration what we said before in regard of unempirical terms like 'always' or 'every', without which no law can be formulated. The sole reflection upon the matter would show how frustrated their attempts are. What is specifi- cally important to point out is that without the consideration of an inte- rior impulse or a pleasure, the definition of stimulus above mentioned would not explain the existence of a given conduct nor make it exists. We are not witnessing a behavior when we apply the same stimulus to a brick. Therefore, the stimulus taken alone does not make that behavior exist. Something more is required in the body we are observing: some instinct, necessity or pain: all those things are mental. In spite of the arbitrary recourses it employs, this arbitrary definition cannot avoid the internal.
To make matters worse, behaviorists themselves cannot deny that be- havior can occur without the stimulus whose effectiveness they study. It is very well known, for instance, that the movements of the mouth of an infant or a chimpanzee who want milk while asleep are a behavior without the belonging stimulus.