No More Learning

Moreover, the growth in the empirical sense of the mere amount of matter is an absurd criterion, since there are tumors and odd for- mations. For instance: a deformed head that is much bigger at one particular side --something which is not considered beneficial, but rather a very negative condition that leads to death. The incorporation of more matter only seems like life to biologists if this contributes to the wellbeing of the organism.
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"The Aristotelian concept of nature is superior from that one used nowadays, for what is essential in the former is the determination of the end as the internal characteristic of the natural object itself" (GP II 173).
The difference between Aristotle and modern biologists consists in that the latter do not think enough on what they are doing; they do not notice how they are thinking.
Aside from what has been said before --which cannot be put into question--, there is a special point in which Teleology cannot be dis- regarded: the reproduction in the animal and vegetal realms is unac- countable if the species at itself does not act as an end and exerts thereby causality. Hegel highlights this: "the species is end" (GP I 381), "the universality or species is the inner" (WL II 435).
One speaks in vulgar zoologies about certain kind of insects whose male dies after the coitus: he leaves his own member and bowels inside the female's genitals. Scientific treatises supply even more dramatic examples. Let us only mention a few. Entomologist Ashley B. Gurney speaks of a particular kind of orthoptera:
A striking sequel to mating occurs frequently in mantids when the female eats the male. There is a popular opinion that mantid males always are eaten, but many escape under natural conditions. But in the close confines of a small cage cannibalism of the male is more common. (EB 21, 607, 1).
Let us understand this correctly: when the male decides to mate, he is almost certainly heading towards his own end. Among animals the individual is not the end; the end is the species; and this happens with real effectiveness, not only on the theorist's minds.
According to the zoologist Justin W. Leonard, in most of the ephemeroptera species, both the male and the female die shortly after mating and safely securing the fertilized eggs (cf. EB 21, 602, 1). This means that, when the couple 'decides' to copulate, what they are decid- ing is to die. In the animal kingdom there is no individual instinct of conservation which can oppose the good and wellbeing of the species. When some atheist thinkers say that we can find some acts of altruism among animals --as in the case of the paternal care of the offspring, which jeopardizes even one's survival--, they forget that, in order to have an alter one needs to have also an ego, something that does not exist among animals. As a matter of fact, among animals the true unity is the species.
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The zoologist George C. Kent tells us the following about the repro- duction of the nematode (some wind of worm): when the ratio between the males and the females of a group is not optimal, then all the indi- viduals will have a sex reversal (cf. EB 26, 684, 1). The same happens with certain species of mollusks and insects. In a word, the individual is not respected: he is in the world for the sake of the species and not vice versa.
In the barnacles --which are, by the way, hermaphrodites-- occurs very often that normal sized individuals do not produce enough sperm; when that occurs, their male offspring are all dwarfs; all the parts of their bodies are stiffen and stingy, with the exception of the testicles (cf. EB 26, 685, 1). Whenever the evolutionist biologists describe --with the particular emphasis that characterizes them-- the selective mecha- nism by means of which only the fittest survive, they provide us with a tautological expression. All that the Darwinist wants to say is this: the fittest for survival survive. In the light of the case of these degenerated barnacles we must say: we are not dealing with the fittest ones for sur- vival, but rather with the fittest that can make survive the species. In the case of bees, "the male lives only briefly, just long enough to mate" (EB 21, 661, 1); males "live only for a short time at a specific time of year" (EB 21, 661, 2). And we find even a more extreme instance among unicellular organisms than that which we mentioned before: the whole male individual transforms itself into a gamete and the rest of his body disappears (cf. EB 26, 656, 2). The materialistic explanation of evolu- tion cannot be tenable, for it is entirely based on an alleged tendency of self-conservation of the individual material bundle. After all, even stones outlast the pass of time. The Darwinian mechanism consists in that the species survives, because the strongest and fittest animals for the individual surviving, are those that have the bigger chances to procreate, while weak and feeble animals are either eliminated or ex- cluded from the possibility of mating. The above mentioned examples demonstrate that this is not the fundamental mechanism of conserva- tion of species. The effective leadership that the species carries through cannot be explained materially.
Let us mention only some few examples of total subordination of the animal individual to the reproduction; this time is about the female. Among certain kinds of water flies (dipteral), reproduction is parthe- nogenetic; the eggs are fertilized and developed inside the mother, and when they are big enough they "escape by destroying the body of their
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mother in a process called paedogenesis" (EB 21, 589, 2). In the so-called ephemeral fly, or ephemoptera, which is fertilized by the male, the de- livery is sheer suicide: the female lets herself fall over the aquatic surface from a considerable height, and with the impact all the fertilized eggs are expelled out of the bowels of the mother, who dies right in the mo- ment when that happens (Cf. EB 21, 602, 2).
Few things are more certain in Biology than the above quoted sen- tence of Hegel: "The species is end" (GP I, 381).
One needs only to read carefully any modern treatise on Biology to see how the very necessity of understanding objectively the phenom- ena makes the treatise writer forget the antiteleological dogma which he had imposed to himself in his methodological statements. A competent physic can bear witness of what I am saying, for his professional sensibil- ity discovers immediately finalistic terms and considerations which do not occur in physics. Niels Bohr says: "Actually, we must recognize that the requirements of objective description, in tendency at least, are ful- filled by the caraceristic complementary way in which arguments based on the full resources of physical and chemical science, and concepts di- rectly referring to the integrity of the organism transcending the scope of these sciences, are practically used in biological research. " (1987, 76)
We could make an anthology with quotes of biologists who only by means of teleological considerations can seize the objects of study. Let us see some cases of this, in particular, the case of N. J. Berrill, an out- standing specialist of sexuality in the animal kingdom:
This division of labor between mating types, male and female, respectively, is nature's way of attaining two ends. These are the bringing together of the gametes so that fusion may take place and the accumulation of reserves so that development of a new organism can be accomplished. The first calls for as many motile cells as possible; the second calls for cells as large as possible. These different requirements are practically impossible to satisfy by a single type of cell. (EB 27, 247, 1)
This paragraph does not need any further commentary.
Another instance of this source is to be found in Baker and Allen, in spite of the fact they affirm that "modern biology is based upon de pre- sumption that the living system's functions can be explained on terms of chemical and physical processes" (1970, 2). However, when they speak of the placental mammals, they say the following:
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The placenta is an extraordinary organ. At the same time is an intestine, a pair of lungs, a kidney, a liver and an endocrine gland. Many substances that go from the mother to the embryo pass through the placenta by active transpor- tation [. . . ] The placenta does not work for the child's wellbeing only. It also secretes hormones which charge the maternal mammary glands to bring them to a condition in which they are capable of secreting milk (ibid. 429).
Each time the treatise writer says this 'works to [. . . ]' he is doing Teleology, and confirming, involuntarily, this thesis of Hegel: "the good, which is by itself an end, is also a principle in the philosophy of nature" (GP I 472).
In regard to the lack of conscience of biologists, Hegel makes a remark that, from the point of view of the epistemologist, is of primal impor- tance: that lack of conscience "remains attached to the determinations of the imagination, such as impulse, instinct, necessity, etcetera, without asking what these determinations are in themselves" (EPW 359 A).
Along the tree concepts mentioned in this text, one must add other two which are closely intertwined with them: pain and pleasure. Without this set of concepts, not only zoologist cannot go any further, but be- haviorism proves incapable of granting a meaning to the principal term of this discipline: reward, gratification and stimulus.
In regard to the case of pain, Hegel remarks: "living things have over the unanimated ones the privilege of pain" (EPW 60 A).
Their already alluded lack of consciousness consists in believing that the above mentioned terms have empirical meaning, when only the re- flection of the subject over himself can grant them meaning. We said before that not even the tendency to eat, that is to say, the impulse or instinct that we call hunger is an empirical data. All the attempts to ascribe meaning to a physical fact which we can perceive by means of the sight and the touch are doomed to failure. For instance, to be- lieve that the meaning of hunger is the act of eating is tantamount to say something stupid, for we can eat without being hungry. The lapse of many hours in which we do not eat is not the meaning either, for those who have carried out diurnal hunger strikes bear witness that the sensation of hunger fades away after some time. And not even a single exterior sign as starvation means hunger because, on the one hand a fat and healthy person can have hunger, and on the other hand, some- one could be starving because he has been beaten up or is simply sick. Besides, not even gastric secretions can be pinpointed as the physical
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meaning of the word hunger: like every gastroenterologist knows, one can segregate an enormous amount of gastric juices due to different worries and anxieties.
I do not believe it is possible to define impulse, instinct, necessity, pain or pleasure doing without the idea of 'end' --let alone to explain the existence of this entities. But precisely the introspective character of such terms brings us back to our point of departure: the concept of life.
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.