No More Learning

"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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content that we call self-consciousness. The objectors believe that, in the act of self-consciousness, the rock called the 'self' is perceived but it doesn't perceive; this is why I say that they imagine a material self, because this self cannot know: it can only be known. They do not seem to understand that self-consciousness implies, by definition, a perfect identity between the object known and the knower: it implies the abso- lute purity in which knowing is the same as being known.
It would be useless, of course, that they called immaterial that 'some- thing else' which they posit. We saw that it would be circular and hence null and void to define the material in terms of the immaterial, that is to say, to define the immaterial as the negation of the material. In order to define the immaterial, it is necessary to refer to the spirit and to deny the other. Consequently, the spirit has to be understood directly. But we also saw that the only possible meaning of spirit is the acts of will and reason. Therefore, if this 'something else' is immaterial, it has to consist in the acts of willing and thinking, and hence cannot be something different from will and reason.
If they contend that we do not understand the difference between ens quod and ens quo, I respond to them that neither do they, because the thing they refer to is only Latin gibberish. Leaving aside verbal curtains of smoke, what matters is to know if the spirit really distinguishes itself from its acts. If it can be distinguished, nobody can point out what does it consist of without reducing it to something material, despite they call it immaterial.
But let us give a closer look to the epistemological root of the problem. Fortunately enough, half of the journey is already past be- hind us, for those who despise the concept of substance and those who have a more positive image of it accept that the meaning of the con- cept is not empirical. All we perceive with our senses are accidents of the substance, not the substance itself. Hence, the origin of this con- cept is not sensation but self-consciousness or, if one prefers to say this otherwise, introspection. Now, all introspection is an act of introspec- tion; all self-consciousness is an act of self-consciousness. Our objectors cannot refer to a concept of substance without act, because they have never perceived a substance without act, and only in such a perception could that subject have had its origin. The concept of a substance that is radically different from its accidents does not exist. They do not have the concept of a substance which does not consist in some acting. By the mere fact of perceiving the substance they have perceived it in act.
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Such an act is the true substance. They have an image --a very blurry one, indeed--, because, if possible, they would strip it off from all de- terminations, since every determination would be an accident. And who knows? Perhaps they imagine a white mass in order to take all the color away, or perhaps they imagine it without form, since all form would be an accident. But, evidently, it must be extended; or else, it would not be imaginable. And from this follows that what they imagine is not spirit! In addition, the substance would not differ from the accident, since extension is an accident, and, let us not forget, whiteness is an accident too.
We have just expressed what is decisive: the act itself of the spirit is the true substance.
Substance is commonly defined as that which exists in itself and not in something else. Now, one cannot understand how something can exist in itself if such thing does not give to itself the determinations of its existence --and that is self-determination, the definition of spirit, "for the essence of freedom consists in being by means of itself what it is" (A? sth I 468). If its true realization is not spirit, the word substance does not have any meaning at all.
In considering that the spirit and the concept are exactly the same thing, Hegel expresses thus a decisive point: "The concept is the truth of the substance" (WL II 214). We pointed out before that when Hegel says that a notion is the truth of another notion, what he is really trying to say is that the latter only becomes intelligible in the former. By the way, this is the key to The Science of Logic: all the determinations that are studied in the first two books --among which, we find the concept of substance--, have their truth in the spirit or the concept, which is the object of study of the third book. Only if the realization of those determinations is the spirit itself, they become intelligible; otherwise, they cannot be understood.
"Subjectivity is even the absolute form and the existing reality of substance. " (Rph 152); "this infinite reflection in itself [. . . ] is the pleni- tude of the substance. But this plenitude is not the substance itself, but rather something superior: the concept, the being. " (WL II 216).
As such, substance and accident are correlative terms. It is impossible to understand one without the other in the definition, for the accident is commonly conceived as that which finds its existence in a substance. In addition, the etymology of substance entails essentially something that is underneath the accidents. It is a very vulgar and coarse spatial
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conception that which speaks in terms of 'upside' and 'down'. It is evi- dent that one would have to reject it, but even assuming it we could argue that, if the notions of substance and accident imply one another, the word accident turns out to be very deceptive because it denotes something that is accessorial, but we know that the substance cannot exist without the accidents and hence the accidents are not accessorial. "The substance is the totality of the accidents" (EPW 151), "the substance is the necessity of its accidents" (NH 21). Now, this only comes about fully in the spirit, for the spirit is a substance that consists in its very acts of will and thought. The spirit is precisely a substance whose ac- cidents are not accidental.
"This movement of accidentality is the actuality of the substance as a peaceful producing itself [. . . ] and the accidentality is the substance itself (WL II 186). "
"Only the whole has reality as such" (PG 476); therefore, substance and accident, imagined as distinct beings, turn out to be two abstrac- tions carried out by the abstract intellect in its pursuit of immobilizing reality in order to supposedly understand it better. "To distinguish be- tween the simple identity of being and the movement of the accidents in the substance is a way of sheer appearances. The first thing is the uninformed substance of imagination [. . . ] which has no truth at all" (WL II 186s).
5. on the method
We cannot postpone any longer a fundamental reflection upon the method which we have followed, for the way by which we have given meaning to 'being' and 'substance' exemplifies, paradigmatically, the way all concepts receive their meaning. Our second chapter showed that it is impossible to grant an empirical origin to the meanings in the mind. On the contrary, a search for those meanings always leads back to the knowing subject and the spirit. Hegel says: "We cannot be satisfied with the empirical way; we should rather posit the ulterior question, how does the spirit arrive to the content, that is to say, the spirit as such, we or the individuals or the peoples? " (VG 53). It is not enough to know that the meanings have their origin in the knowing subject himself. It is still necessary to clarify how the subject shapes and con- stitutes each of them.
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In order to answer that question, Hegel turns to Kant's enduring contribution of the first Critique: without the 'I think' there cannot be consciousness of the object and without self-consciousness there cannot be consciousness.
Hegel says:
One of the profoundest and most certain intuitions that are found in the Critique of Pure Reason is to discover that the unity in which the essence itself of the concept consists is the original synthetic unity of apperception; that is the unity of the 'I think', the unity of self-consciousness. [. . . ] Object, Kant says there, is that in which the concept of the multiple from the given sensible intuition is unified" Therefore, this unity of consciousness is the only one that refers the representations to an object, and hence makes them have the validity of an object, something on which even the possibility of the intellect depends (WL II 221).
In other words: phenomenologically speaking, there cannot be any object without subject; it is impossible that the multiple, intrinsically chaotic and incoherent empirical impressions are unified in the making up of an object if there is no self or an 'I think' before whom and for whom the impressions make up an object.
An object is that which is independent from the self. But notice the following: in order that the expression 'independent from the self' has meaning, it is necessary that the term 'self' has already a meaning.
Hegel also expresses this idea in his own terms:
The truth of consciousness is self-consciousness, and the second is the ex- planation of the first, so that in the facts each consciousness or perceiving of other object is self-consciousness: I know about the object insofar it is my object (it is a representation of mine), therefore, I know about myself in that (EPW 424).
Kant's ground-breaking discovery is true and has an unmatchable value but it is still incomplete. According to Kant, it is necessary that the 'I think' accompanies our awareness of the object; it is necessary that self-consciousness accompanies consciousness; otherwise, the latter could not exist. But Hegel makes this sharp observation: "The I must 'accompany' it; what a barbaric expression" (GP III 343).
Hegel was right. What can that companionship or juxtaposition could possibly mean? A profound analysis shows that consciousness-of-the-
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object and self-consciousness do not simply go hand in hand. Undoubted- ly, Kant was right in saying that, without self-consciousness, the concept by which we gain awareness of the object cannot exist, but both things constitute an inseparable unity. They do not accompany one another; but rather, they make up one and the same experience. "I know about my ob- ject and I know about myself; these two things are not separable" (VG 54).
If they are not separable, something logically follows from this: "The thoughts and representations that I make mine are given the content of that which I am myself" (PR I 22).
The content of the concepts by which I gain awareness of the ob- jects has to be the same content of self-consciousness. This is exactly what happened to us with the concepts of being and substance. And the same must go for all the rest of the concepts.
If the meaning of the concepts cannot be an empirical data, the meaning must lie in the subject. But if the awareness of the object is inseparable from self-consciousness, the content of the former has to be the same as that of the latter. "The truth of consciousness is self- consciousness" (EPW 424). We could have demonstrated this at the beginning of this chapter by recurring to Kant's indisputable contribu- tion, but without some examples it would have been quite difficult to understand. "The knower [. . . ] hast the concept of the essentiality of the objective world entirely" (WL II 438); "we are, as a self, the base of all our determinations. Insofar the object is thought, it receives the form of thinking and transforms itself into a thought object. It is equaled self, that is to say, it is thought" (NH 164).
If it is not equaled to the self, it cannot be understood. That the true of consciousness is self-consciousness means that only the second is understood.
"Reason is the supreme unification of consciousness and self- consciousness, that is to say, of the knowledge of an object and the knowledge of itself. It is the certainty that its determinations are objec- tive determinations of the essence of things as they are in our thoughts. It is, in one and the same thinking, with all the power of the certainty of itself, subjectivity, as being or objectivity" (NH 122).
We will get back to this later. However, it is important to say here that the abstract intellect --in contrast to reason-- considers these two things separately, and hence it cannot understand.
"Abstractions of the intellect are not ideas; the idea contains essen- tially the point of unity of subjectivity" (WG 588).
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"The objectivity hast the object in the concept, and this is the unity of self-consciousness, to which the object is incorporated; therefore, its objectivity, that is to say, the concept, is nothing else than the nature of self-consciousness, it has no more elements or determinations than the self itself" (WL II 222).
In that sense "the intelligence is acknowledging" (EPW 465), and if the intelligence does not recognize itself in the object, it would not understand anything. Because of this, Hegel says that the reason of sci- entists and rationalists --which believes that its only activity consists in observing the phenomena-- deludes itself completely about what it is and does.
As observing consciousness reasons addresses things, truly believing as if they were empirical things opposed to the self, but what it really does con- tradicts such a belief, for it knows things, it transforms sensibility of them in concepts, that is to say, in a being which is simultaneously a self (PG 184).
"To know things means precisely to eliminate what is alien and bi- zarre in consciousness, and thus it is a return of subjectivity towards itself" (WG 730).
The content of all concepts must consist in '"vital and spiritual situa- tions" (WL I 335), for that is the content of self-consciousness and the self. We have just demonstrated this in regard of the concept of being: in what could the act of existing consist of if not in the act and movement of self-realization, in giving oneself determinations and in creating from nothing new experiences? According to Tomas Aquinas, the self is act. And the same goes for the substance: one cannot understand in what sense something can exist in itself other than in giving determinations to itself. Analogously, the meanings of force, cause, infinite, identity, and distinction are also spiritual and vital. One could contend this abso- lutely central thesis of Hegel only if one is able to provide an empirical meaning to those concepts, but we will see that such thing is impossible.
In order to complete our study of the substance, let us quickly draw our attention to the fact that those who deny the existence of the soul are being deluded by a concept of substance that lacks all kind of mean- ing: we made clear already that such 'something else' imagined by the substantialists objectors would be matter and not spirit. A good exam- ple of the negation of the spirit based on the void concept of substance is provided to us by anthropologist Alfred Kroeber:
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