No More Learning

The reflection we just made is so obvious that, putting things the other way around, the measurement could seem to be more like a des- perate attempt to avoid the empirical data, something very similar to the absolute space of Newton. Naturally, this attempt fails. Meditionists would tell us that 'objective' longitude can be inferred with all accu- racy if we investigate the distance and angle at which we observe them, and thus we can do away with the innumerable optical appearances. But they forget that this distance is also a longitude, and that, in order to measure it 'objectively', one would need again to find out at which distance are we looking at it, and things would go on like this in indefi- nitum. It follows that the so-called objective longitude is not inferable.
And let us not forget the fact that the aimed objectivity would be to put everything in meters, but, what does 'meter' mean? If the meter of Paris, at once with all the other bodies, was ten thousand times bigger or smaller, we would not notice anything and there would be no dif- ference. One may then ask himself: what does the aimed 'objectivity' consist in?
Both the empiricity and the objectivity of the measurable are a de- ceit; and that is the reason of existance of the meditionist thesis.
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Let us examine now what it formally says: only what is measurable exists. In its excluding sense, this can be formulated the following way: 'there is no thing that is not measurable'. This thesis is the most typi- cal example of propositions which are essentially indemonstrable and hence unscientific, for its corroboration would suppose to cover inch by inch the universe, across past, present and future, in order to prove that there is no single object which is not measurable. In its assertive sense, 'all what is measurable exists', is an affirmative universal propo- sition, which only needs a singular negative case in order to be proven wrong. Now, that case exists, and we have seen it: the surface. If there is one thing that is easily measurable that thing is a surface; one mul- tiplies the base by the height and one ends up having the results in square meters. However, contemporary physics know well that sur- faces do not exist; subatomic particles, reduced to wave packets, do not have surfaces. Consequently, meditionism is false both in its including and its assertive sense.
What the meditionists really mean is that they refer to the mea- surable based on an arbitrary decision. But well, even that is false. Evidently, it is not the same to them to have four units of time than four units of mass. What are measurable are the four units, and in that there is no difference. The difference is that in the former case we deal with time and in the latter with mass. That difference is not measurable but intelligible, and yet it is a difference of utmost importance to them. Therefore, it is false that they rely on what is measurable.
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The Subject
? ? We will expose in this chapter, three characterizations of the subject. The second will simply be a deeper analysis of the first one (which is the most decisive one), and the third will make explicit what was contained in the former two. In fact, the definition of the subject is one and only, but one cannot say everything with a single catch of breath.
Once we provide the two first characterizations, we will answer two apparent objections, one that is based on the concept of substance and another based on the concept of time, both which will be useful for us in order to weigh up the whole dimension of what we exposed. Likewise, with the same purpose, once we provide the third characterization, we will analyze three objections, one based on causality, another based on the ideas of natural and physical law, and another one still, based on the idea of necessity.
1. concept
Here is the biggest discovery that man has ever made in his entire his- tory: spirit is thought.
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We do not say that the spirit has thoughts, as if the spirit consisted in one thing and had accidentally thoughts, or as if it were a non-thinking substratum, consisting in who-knows-what which was suddenly struck by thoughts. Neither have we meant to say that the spirit consists in its capacity or power of having thoughts. What is absolutely decisive is to realize that spirit consists in 'realizing' things, in being aware, and in thinking. Spirit is nothing aside from its own experiences.
Spirit consists in that ethereal and ideal thing which the idiots call 'mere ideas'. A couple whose love is not reduced to sex knows well that their reciprocal exchange of experiences, their communion, their marvel- ous mutual understanding and human flourishment are 'pure ideas'; but for this couple all of that is more real than the floor and the walls that surround them. That precisely is the spirit. Materialists are not mistaken when they say that the spirit is mere ideas; they are mistaken in saying that the matter to which they refer is more real than those ideas. The mere fact that they cannot define matter without the spirit demonstrates which of these two things is more real. In general, the objection against the thin- ness of the consistence of the spirit would only have strength if the objec- tors could indicate, independently from the spirit, what are they speaking about when they say matter. But we have seen that they cannot do this.
This unmatchable discovery was made by Aristotle: "being is to be- come aware or to think" (Eth. Nic. IX, iX, 9); "the mind is nothing before it thinks" (De anima 429b 32), "it has no actual existence before thinking" (ibid. 429a 24)
Also Descartes, independently from Aristotle, made this discovery. Hegel summarizes it thus: "his principle was: cogito, ergo sum, which cannot be understood as a syllogism in which the ergo denoted the con- sequence of the premises. It means rather: thinking and being are the same; it is a principle that is still valid today" (WG 915).
One must notice that, in fact, Descartes explicitly denies that his ergo indicates a deduction or an inference, for those operations would sup- pose premises. Hence, as Hegel correctly interprets it, Descartes can only be referring to the identity of thought and being.
But it was Hegel who demonstrated the truth of this discovery, and who gave it its authentic dimension in the formulations we are about to examine --the expression we have given it up to this moment, is still too poor--; Hegel was the first one to realize the importance of this for the sciences, because only on the grounds of this discovery it is possible to give meaning to words.
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"The first thing one has to do with the concept is to stop believing that the concept is something we have, something we do within us [. . . ] What we call soul is the concept; the concept as such becomes existing and it is spirit and consciousness" (PR I 220).
"What we call soul, what we call self, is the concept itself in its exis- tence (A? sth I 175).
"The concept, insofar it reaches an existence which is free in itself, does not consist in any other thing that in the self itself and in pure self- consciousness. To be sure, I have concepts, determined concepts, but the self is the pure concept itself that has reached existence as concept" (WL II 220).
This is essential: if ideas and concepts are not to be identified with nothingness (something which would be utterly absurd), if some reality should be undoubtedly granted to them, then ideas and concepts must necessarily be identical with the reality itself of the spirit; otherwise, it would be impossible for the self to be aware of them. It would be im- possible for the self to think if thinking itself (the ideas) was not iden- tified with the self. If, in the operation of understanding, the self was not identified with the concept, the former would need within itself another concept to understand the former concept, but then the first concept would be superfluous. "Self-consciousness is the category that becomes itself conscious" (PG 284).
If we remained in the mere imaginary representation of the self --as imagined by our ordinary conceptions--, it is a simple thing which is also called a soul, to which the concept is added as if it were a possession or a property. This imaginative representation that refuses to understand the self and the concept cannot be useful in order to make easy or possible the intellection of the concept (WL II 222s).
"In rational psychology, which is an abstract metaphysics, the soul is considered not as spirit but as a merely immediate being, as a soulthing. " (WL I 220)
That thing which spiritualists called the soul, insofar it did not con- sist in the activity itself of thinking and understanding, was not spirit: it was a bizarre species of matter they had the whim to call immaterial. They could not define it, they did not have the concept of it, and they only imagined it. Accordingly, it was extended, for only the extended is imaginable and hence was not spirit. For that reason Hegel says that
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they refuse to understand and remain only in the imagination. The mo- ment one says that he understands (and is not imagining things) is the moment he knows that the spirit consists precisely in that.
"The concept of self, as the act by which the thinking itself becomes an object for itself, and the object as the one self, are absolutely the same; without that act the self is nothing. " (GP III 427)
A substance without act or before the act, which consisted in some- thing different than the act itself of understanding, would be what is vulgarly called matter and would not be spirit.
"The spirit is that; not being immediately, but only as an object to itself" (PR III 14).
Definitively, the spirit is not immediate; it does not exist in the way of immediacy. Natural things are immediate; they remain in the immediate being. However, the spirit only exists in so far it suppresses its immediate be- ing. If it only is, then it is not spirit; for its being consists precisely in being mediated to itself as a spirit which is for itself. The stone is immediate, com- pleted. (PR I 70).
"I exist as a spirit insofar I have knowledge of me" (GP I 51).
"The spirit is not natural; it is only that which it knows how to do" (GP II 494).
"The spirit itself is only this perceiving of itself" (GP III 193).
"The spirit is nothing else but a producing that becomes an object for itself" (GP III 427).
"The spirit is having oneself as an object" (PR I 65). "If we do with- out thought, the soul does not longer exist" (GP II 48).
"Self means simply to think. If I say: I think, this is a tautology. The self is perfectly simple. Thinking is the way I am, and this is always so (NH 164). "
"The child is only spirit in itself; he is not a fulfilled spirit; he is not real as spirit; it only has capacity, the potentiality of being spirit, of becoming real as spirit" (PR III 204).
"Although the embryo is in itself human, he is not a man to himself; to himself he would only be once he has a formed reason that makes itself what it itself is; only then there is man" (PG 22).
Let us draw our attention to that which Hegel notices:
"If this has seem new in recent times; that has its cause in the igno- rance of the concept of Aristotle" (GP II 158).
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It is one of the most impressive and sad facts of the history of thought that rational psychology (which is an abstract metaphysics), despite of proclaiming itself as a discipline which followed Aristotle, had let escape, in fact, the most important discovery made by the Greek phi- losopher. This false Aristotelism accepted (without understanding it) the notion of pure act in its application to the divine spirit, but not in regard to the human spirit. The discussion is not about a particular ap- plication, but rather about knowing what the spirit is in itself: "there are neither two kinds of reason nor two kinds of spirit" (PR I 43).
Both the human spirit and the divine spirit are spirit. What we want to know is what does being a spirit consists of. In what was a clear mis- understanding of the problem, scholastic and rationalist philosophers believed they could define the generic notion by means of a negative route: the immaterial. But we saw that it is impossible to define the material, except as the "other than the spirit", that is to say, as negation of the spiritual in terms of the spiritual. What is first understood is the spirit; if not, nothing is understood: "For the subject is that which has meaning by itself and which explains itself "(A? sth I 435).
In order to distinguish between the divine and the human spirit, scholastic philosophers and the followers of Wolff would first need to define spirit as such and for that purpose they turned to matter, but in order to define matter one needs to define spirit as such. The circularity is manifest, and there is no way out of this predicament. In one word, they did defined nothing.
"If we think the spirit as immediate, simple, quiet, it is not spirit; the spirit is essentially this: being in activity. Furthermore: the spirit is the activity of manifesting itself" (PR I 65).
"To such a degree this is its substance itself that we cannot speak of it as an invariable subject that makes or operates this or that, as if the activity was fortuitous and some kind of situation outside of which the spirit had consistency; its activity is rather its substantiality, the activity is its being" (BS 528).
"That movement itself is the self" (PG 22).
Scholastic philosophers did not understand that act means acting, moving, making, operating, effectuating. They thought that act meant feature, characteristic, quality, determination (a 'perfection', so they called it). But the spirit is the act itself of manifesting itself, the act of making an object of itself: "the spirit itself is nothing else but this per- ceiving itself" (GP I 93).
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It is not that the spirit exists first and then becomes aware of itself. In what could the existence of the spirit lie if it were not in taking con- sciousness of itself? This 'awareness' constitutes precisely the species of reality that is the being of the spirit, the peculiar kind of reality called spirit. If we have used in the previous chapter the term introspection in its vulgar sense, here we will not employ metaphors anymore. What we are dealing with is the pure act called consciousness.
2. SeLf-determination
Another way to express what we have been saying is this: the spirit determines itself. If the very same act of understanding and knowing are equal in it, and that act is carried out by itself, then the spirit gives itself the being. We already said with Hegel: "The spirit is not natural; it is only what it has made of itself" (GP II 494).
If spirit is not determined by itself, it is not spirit but other thing; for the spirit is not immediate, it does not exists in the mode of being of immediacy; it essentially consists in being mediated by itself.
It is not that something first exists which will later be perceived. That something would be the self, for no one can hold that the spirit exists without a self; but the self consists precisely in perceiving itself. It would be absurd to say that the self exists before the act of perceiv- ing. "The spirit exists only as its own result" (VG 58), since the spirit "is only this perceiving of itself" (GP I 93).
"To produce itself, to make an object to itself, to know itself --those are the things the spirit cares about. The natural things are not for themselves; that is why they are not free" (VG 55).
When Marx, as a materialist, greeted joyfully the Hegelian theory according to which man makes himself, he did not notice that Hegel posed the pure essence of the spirit in contrast to everything material, something, and he does this exactly in the sense in which the material cannot make itself: self-determination (or, if one prefers, free will). We will get back to this point in a different context, but for now it is obvi- ous that in order that self-consciousness exists there must be an inter- pellation from another self which has been self-conscious since always. "The Greeks did not have the idea according to which man was made to the image of God" (WG 577). "That the spirit is that which it makes itself being constitutes only one side of the subject" (WG 577).
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This is what now occupies us. If the being of the spirit is the same act of understanding, the spirit makes its being, and hence the best defini- tion of spirit is self-determination. In our previous chapter we saw that the only possible definition of 'object' and 'body' is what is not deter- mined by itself. "The only determination of the spirit, in which all the other ones are contained in its freedom" (NH 58).
[. . . ] freedom is the substance of the spirit. It is absolutely clear to everyone that the spirit, aside from other properties, posses freedom as well; but phi- losophy teaches us that every property of the spirit has consistency only through freedom; every one of them is only a means to freedom; every one of them looks for it and produces it. This is the knowledge of speculative philosophy: that freedom is the only true thing of spirit (VG 55).
The highest determination that thought can find is free will. Every other principles such as happiness or the welfare of the State are undetermined to a greater or a lesser extent; on the other hand, free will is determined by itself, for it is no other thing that determining itself (WG 920).
What these three texts express is something extraordinarily impor- tant which is in itself obvious: there is nothing more intelligible than self-determination. It follows from this that all the contents of the different concepts derive their intelligibility from self-determination. In other words, only in function of self-determination, which is the essence of the spirit, it is possible to give meaning to the concepts.
That self-determination is the best definition of spirit was something that Plato already said: "What is the definition of that being that we call soul? Do we have any better one than the one we just mentioned: the movement capable of moving itself? (Laws, X 896A). Evidently, Plato was also aware that such content is also the most intelligible one.
It is noteworthy that for Kant, in spite of all his skepticisms, this content is also the most intelligible one:
Since its reality has been demonstrated by an apodictic command of practi- cal reason, the concept of freedom constitutes the touchstone of all the edifice of a system of pure and even speculative reason; and all the other concepts (namely, God and immortality), which as mere ideas do not have any secure grounds within speculative reason, are added to the concept of freedom and by means of it obtain consistency and objective reality, that is to say, the pos- sibility of them is proved by means of the fact that freedom is real (KPV 4s).
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To the two characterizations of spirit we have given --namely, that spirit is concept and self-determination-- we will add later a third one: interpersonality. But first we need to take a look at two extremely im- portant concepts from which, apparently, two objections rise against what we have said: the concept of substance and the concept of time. The purpose of examining them will not only be to dispel objections; on the contrary, we will examine them in order to see that self-determi- nation not only is more intelligible than those concepts, but also that it constitutes the only way in which we can give meaning to both.
3. being
First, we must see this in regard to the concept of being. There cannot be any better preparation for our analysis of the concept of substance. Traditionally, one affirms that the substance is that what truly is.
To believe that 'everybody understands' what the word reality means is an illusion that was dispelled in our second chapter, insofar 'under- stands' means to consciously have the concept. Perhaps the cause of this illusion was that some thought that being is an empirical data, and hence that it was enough to point with the finger at some empirical fact to give meaning to 'being' and 'reality'. But we have demonstrated that the senses do not seize being as such, and that it is not possible to define reality as the empirical.
Nevertheless, the other cause of the aforementioned illusion has been, without any question, in order to figure it, it is enough to de- fine being as 'that which is distinct from nothing'. This is a very simi- lar mistake to that in which the Scholastic philosophers incurred by defining the spirit as 'what is distinct from the material'. The most elementary reflection makes us see that, if we define being in function of nothingness, the definiendum does not have any content proper of being but only the characteristic content of nothingness, and conse- quently, against our intentions, we would be conceiving and identi- fying being with nothingness. Despite how much we add negation ('distinct from. . . ') to nothingness, all the content is negative. We are not seizing the being, for if there is something positive, that thing is the being.
That is precisely what happened to Parmenides. And all the scien- tists and almost all the philosophers that followed his path.
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Evidently, there is nothing more immutable than nothingness. This is the reason why Parmenides said that the being is immutable.
Evidently, nothingness does not increase or decrease. That is the rea- son why Parmenides said that being does not increase or decrease.
Out of this apocalyptic confusion between being and nothingness ? which Hegel mocks at the beginning of the Science of Logic explicitly referring to Parmenides in the first note-- sprung the physical law of the conservation of matter, a law according to which the quantity of matter in the universe does not increase or decrease. It is obvious that the physics are incapable of defining matter; they do not understand anything when they use that word; but when there is no content in the mind and there is a total lack of determination, the content is null. That is exactly what happened to Parmenides and all who thought that being can be defined in function of nothingness.
About that apparent being Hegel rightly says that "nobody can tell what it is" (WL II 241).
They justify themselves by arguing that it is a simple and primitive notion; but such a statement does not add any content to it; we remain thereby in nothingness.
"According to those so-called authors, unity, reality and alike de- terminations are simple concepts, only because logicians could not dis- cover their content and were satisfied only by having a clear concept of them, that is to say, no concept at all" (WL II 255).
Although they use other words as the grammatical subjects of their propositions, all what the principle of Parmenides and the principle of conservation are saying is a tautology: nothingness is immutable; nothingness does not decrease or increase. Since they are not able to define the verb which they place as a grammatical subject, since the only thing they speak about is lack of content, it follows that the subject is nothingness.
In our understanding, the impossibility of defining being in function of nothingness should be obvious. It should be manifest that every- thing that has content cannot be defined in function of what lacks all content. Our second chapter showed that the meaning of being cannot be an empirical data. Thus the origin of that concept could not have been sensation. Therefore, this conduct could have only been obtained by self- consciousness. But by self-consciousness what we discover is self-deter- mination or, following the marvelous Platonic formulation, "movement (that) is capable of moving itself". Far from being immutable, being
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is movement; continuous novelty, continuous production of new de- terminations. In what could the act of existing consist if not in a move- ment of self-fulfillment and of giving oneself determinations?
When we predicate being of other things, we do this in a diminished and derived way. The true being is to determine oneself. As we have seen, things other than this can only be defined as "the other of the spirit". That is the reason why Hegel says that the truth of being and nothingness is werden, to become, to turn into, the movement, the pro- cess and the action of determining oneself and of acquiring determina- tions. The only intelligible content lies therein: this is what Hegel means when he says that a certain concept is the truth of another concept.
Neither Parmenides nor the principle of conservation of the physics speaks of reality, but only of an abstraction of which they have de- prived all content. The content of the word reality is change itself, to create incessantly new determinations; whoever does not refer to that content cannot use the word reality, for not even he knows what he is talking about.
4. SubStance
Let us examine now the substantialist objection that, apparently, can be raised against the two characterizations of spirit we have made.
To be sure, we will not examine the irreflective objection of those who, having accepted that God is pure act, figure that the immortality of the human spirit could be jeopardized if the spirit itself did not con- sist of a permanent substratum which is independent from its multiple acts of thought and will. If being pure act as God does not entail that danger, the same goes in the case of man.
This 'something else' that the substantialist theory desires is, without question, the self. They think it is obvious that the self remains identi- cal through all the changing determinations. But, evidently, a mistake lies in here, because the self consists precisely in the act of perceiving oneself; it is even tautological to say that the self does not exist inde- pendently from the act of self-perception. The self is something purely ideal, whose reality consists in being perceived. It is here where imagi- nation plays tricks with the objectors' minds: they imagine that the self is some kind of material rock that remains unaltered through several acts of will and thought. But the self is something purely ideal, a mental
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