No More Learning

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Not that this content is entirely new, but anybody that has certain hon- esty of analysis knows that there is pleasure in the act of carrying out an act of revenge and that deeds performed with rage are self-reinforcing. The first thing to say is that the above mentioned experiments cannot be denied or neglected. Second, and more important, they demonstrate that our in itself pleasant, gratuitous aggressiveness is not the product of culture or education, those universal villains to which romanticism attributes all possible evil in order to remain with the reveries of the natural goodness of man. No. Cruelty is something inherited from the animals, it is a natural element of man; and man becomes man in- sofar and to the degree that he abandons naturality. Man is an animal while he remains natural. Insofar he is a man, man has no nature.
To top it all, scientists have been able to discern between the vascular and hormonal changes that come along with pleasure and the vascu- lar and hormonal changes that come along suffering and anxiety: one has found the presence of the first in the moments of rage and resent- ment. This kind of reaction have confirmed this: fury and aggression unconsciously trigger typical movements towards the object, while the unpleasant experience triggers typical movements in which one grows apart.
To summarize what we have said, let us repeat with Hegel: "The evil is no other thing that the deepen-in-itself of the natural being of the spirit" (PG 539).
In order to go further with our exposition, we need to detonate once and for all the Hegelian bomb: "Everything that man is, he owes it to the State; only there he has his essence" (VG 111).
The State, as we will demonstrate later on, consists only in the set of rights and duties which bind man. Now, we have seen (III, 7) that self- consciousness can only be produced by the ethical demands that others address to me and which are called duties; but that which distinguishes man from animals, that which makes him truly a man, is self-awareness. This why Hegel says that everything that man is he owes it to the State. Hegel was the first one to understand in the modernity that the Aristote- lian expression zoon politiko? n is the definition of man. What has hindered the most that one understands Hegel is the chimerical belief that man is good by nature. Only the State, only a set of rights and duties, makes him good; for only the State pulls him off from animality.
In a like way, we showed that (V, 1), if man follows nature, he is not free. When the path of behavior is not determined by the self but by
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an arbitrary impulse, the kind of action we are dealing with is heter- onomous: no one can speak there of freedom. It follows that the set of duties and rights is what makes man free. With the first ethical answer man begins to be free; he begins to be good and, consequently, he be- gins to be a man. "The natural want [. . . ] is worse that the bad want" (Rph, Notiz zu 139 A). "What is morally evil is the worst; it that which absolutely ought not to be; however, nature is even worse" (ibid. ).
Even the most primitive State or polis contains the roles and expec- tation which make man a man by granting him responsibility --not killing, honesty, respect for the others' existence, etcetera. This is what is essential to the State: a set of duties and rights.
"One renounces to the particularity of will in those uncouth statal situations" (VG 113).
"To be sure, one can verify the existence of many situations of sav- ageness, but [. . . ] despite how ignorant these situations are, they are bound to institutions which, as one says, limit freedom" (VG 116).
"The substantial of ethical relationships [. . . ] is already present in an uncultivated society" (PR I 158).
In this context --as we have said before-- the most unlikely ally we can count on is Rousseau himself: "Good social institutions are those that know best how to denature man" (Emile, I).
Man is not free by nature: this Hegelian thesis, which only makes explicit what we have demonstrated (V, 1) is undoubtedly one of the most important truths both in political philosophy and anthropology. Neither liberals nor leftists seem capable to understand it. The truth is that neither liberalism nor communism can define freedom.
If man is not free by nature, then saying that duties 'limit' freedom is absurd. That is the context of Hegels phrases (VG 116), as they say in German sogenannt.
"Duty is not the limitation of freedom, but only the abstraction of it, that means to say, the lack of freedom (Rph 149 Z).
"In duty man frees himself for true freedom" (Rph 149).
"As ethicity, true freedom consists in that the will does not have as an end, subjective and selfish contents, but rather universal content (EPW 469 A).
"Merely natural will is in itself violence against the idea of freedom in itself, which one must protect against uncultivated will" (Rph 93). "As a matter of fact, every law that is truly a law is a freedom, since it contains a rational determination of the objective spirit and hence the
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content of freedom. On the contrary, it is now very common to say that everyone must limit their freedom in relation to the freedom of others, and that the State is that situation of reciprocal limitation, and that the laws are limitations. In such imaginations one conceives truth as a ca- price or a whim" (EPW 539 A).
But the ambiguity of Rousseau begins soon. Man is free, that is the sub- stantial nature of man; and it is not only suppressed by the State for the first time, but in fact is constituted for the very first time within it. The freedom of nature, the aptitude for freedom, is not true freedom; for only the State is the realization of freedom (GP III 307).
"In reality this limitation is the condition of liberation; society and State are rather those situations in which freedom becomes true" (VG 118). As we said before (v, 1), every mistake in this regard has its origin in believing that freedom is something negative, that is to say, lack of something. It is very easy for the natural man to possess from the beginning something which consists in nothing. Aside from the fact that such conception does not define truth and hence does not know what it is speaking about, the absurd that immediately follows from it is that stones would also be free. Natural goodness has a similar ori- gin: if goodness consisted in the lack of something, it follows then that man has it by nature, for one does not need to put many endeavors in obtaining nothingness. That is the origin of Rousseau's apocalyptic cra- ziness: he understands the natural man as a solitary animal, and hence he does not harm anybody, for the sole and simple reason that there is no one around him, and in that sense this man is good: a goodness that consists in a negation or in nothingness. Obviously, Rousseau never un- derstood that intersubjectivity is the only thing which can make a man exist and that a 'solitary man' is a contradictio in terminis. Besides, with
that criterion, even rocks would be morally good.
"In the State freedom is realized positively and is in itself objective.
However, this should not be understood as if the subjective will of the subject came to its realization and enjoyment by means of the general will, in other words, as if the former was a means for the latter. The State is not a coming together of man in which the freedom of all indi- viduals ought to be limited. We would be conceiving freedom as some- thing merely negative if we imagine that each subject limits its freedom with other subjects, so that this common limitation, this common
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'getting in the way' of the others, left everyone with a place in which he could let go. As a matter of fact, only Law, ethicity and the State are the positive realization and achievement of freedom. To be sure, the arbitrari- ness of the individuals is not freedom. What is limited is a freedom that consists of caprice and that has nothing to do with particularities and necessities" (VG 111). (The italics are mine).
What the State and duty must limit is animality and "deepen- in-itself of the natural being", which is not freedom but naturality. The conception we have criticized would need to affirm the absurdity that loving the neighbor is a limitation of oneself, when in fact loving the neighbor is to identify oneself with the others. Nature is not freedom. Freedom is something extremely positive which implies breaking out from the natural, for no natural thing is free.
2. happineSS?
It is amazing that neither Philosophy nor Theology have noticed that the thesis which states that the end of man is happiness is a huge im- morality. If this thesis was correct, all my neighbors would be only a means and nothing else in order to obtain my final happiness --God would be a mere means for that purpose as well. It seems al- most impossible that such a terribly perverse thesis, in spite of being denounced by Hegel with perfect clarity more than a century and a half ago, is nowadays held --implicitly or explicitly-- in politics and even in Theology.
As a means of introduction, let us address the relation between this thesis and our previous theme.
It is obvious that the romanticism of men of letters and poets, in or- der to make beautiful their bucolic descriptions, had to suppose a priori that the natural man was happy. It is what Hegel calls "the frivolous dream of natural happiness" (EPW 475 A).
This apriorism is evident in Rousseau: "Every man wants to be happy, but in order to become happy he must begin by knowing what happi- ness is. The happiness of natural man is as simple as his life: it consists in the absence of pain. Health, freedom, the necessaries of life are its elements" (Emile, III).
Just like goodness and freedom consist in a not -- in a lack and ab- sence of something--, so happiness consists in a 'not suffering'. A thing
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that does not consist of anything is something easy for the natural man to possess from the very beginning.
By idealizing the natural life, romanticism did not realize that those who are civilized are the ones who positively enjoy the fields, the woods, the mountains and the sea. The beauty of it all would be nothing but a mystery to the 'natural man'. Moreover, like Norbert Elias has pointed out, "for the primitive men the natural space is to a larger degree a danger zone; it is full of perils that the civilized man does not know any more of" (1977 II, 405). In order to enjoy natural beauties, one demands the pacification of the environment and the affectivity which are intro- duced by civilization; one demands that forests and fields are no longer the place where men and animals hunt each other. But still today, in our pacified countries, it is by no means true that the uncultivated man is more capable of enjoying the natural beauties than the cultivated one. Hegel says:
"Granted: the savage man does not know any huge amount of pain and unhappiness; that is, something merely negative; freedom, how- ever, must be essentially affirmative. Only the benefits of supreme consciousness are the benefits of the affirmative freedom. " (WG 775)
The observation that the English novelist Willkie Collins made in the middle of the nineteenth century is extremely accurate:
Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature. As children, we none of us possess it. No uninstructed man or woman possesses it. Those whose lives are most exclusively passed amid the ever-changing wonders of sea and land are also those who are most universally insensible to every aspect of Nature not directly associated with the human interest of their calling. Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civi- lized accomplishments which we all learn as an Art; and, more, that very capacity is rarely practiced by any of us except when our minds are most indolent and most unoccupied (The Woman in White I, viii).
Without referring to the enjoyment of natural beauties, the Cyrenaics of the fourth and fifth centuries B. C. --a philosophical school whose stron- gest point of focus was happiness-- stated that only culture and reflection make man capable for joy. Hegel summarizes Aristippus's philosophy thus: the principle of fruition "embraces the feature that culture of spirit and thought is an ineludible condition to achieve delight" (GP I 541).
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Natural happiness seems to be something impossible. It is with all certainty a dogmatic and superficial apriorism.
Because it is clear that happiness cannot be defined as something negative, like a lack of something, e. g. like absence of suffering; for then, the stones would be happy.
If what they mean to say is that absence of suffering is the mere con- dition for happiness, one could agree with that, but it is obvious that we still need a definition of happiness.
In spite of what Rousseau says, health and minimal material goods are evidently not enough, because there are people who are perfectly healthy and have all the things in the world and yet are tremen- dously unhappy.
Perhaps Rousseau would say that those are mere ideas. But one could reply the following: first, that happiness and unhappiness are precisely ideas, and hence health and minimal material goods would become, again, a simple condition and we would still lack a definition of happiness. Second, if unhappiness is a mere idea, Rousseau would be obviously supposing that the natural man is happy because he does not have ideas. He holds a conception of happiness which consists in the mere absence of something. A tree that is healthy and does not need anything would have to be considered happy. In short, the Rous- seaunian definition is untenable.
Fortunately, Rousseau adds after the above quoted text: "Another thing is the happiness of the moral man, but we will not speak about it here". More fortunately, many years afterwards and having changed his mind in his Political Fragments, Rousseau was finally able to recog- nize this: "But the meaning of the term happiness, which is much un- determined among individuals, is even to a greater extent so among the nations" (1964. 509).
This is precisely the problem: men of letters and politicians --and even theologians and philosophers-- have induced mankind to chase eagerly an ideal which nobody knows anything from.
"Happiness is the only imaginary and abstract universality of a content which simply must be" (EPW. 480).
". . . the whim which in happiness gives or not himself a goal" (ibid. ).
It is an imaginary configuration whose only content is the unreach- able. It seems to be a goal, but since it lacks content it isn't one at all. Regardless of the harshness of the example, we could say that the whole situation is like putting a carrot in the end of some stick so that
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some animal chases it. Except for the fact that the carrot is something concrete, while happiness does not have content. It is, by definition, the processus in indefinitum.
It would be very simple to say that happiness is the satisfaction of impulses. But, in the first place, some impulses contradict each other. Thus the satisfaction of one inclination is the dissatisfaction of an- other. It would not be enough to satisfy only one of them, for the distinction between happy and unhappy men would disappear and the concept in question would lose all cognitive value, since man are always satisfying some impulse, despite how mundane it may be.
In the second place, there are killer impulses too, or at least, incli- nations that are harmful to the others; therefore, one cannot say that the end of man is the satisfaction of impulses. In this context, there is no difference here between natural and acquired impulses; the fact is that they are there. If one answers that one must distinguish between different kind of impulses, then the definition we are dealing with proves to be inefficient, for all impulse demands satisfaction, and the criterion to discern between impulses would be based in the fact that they are impulses; one needs as a higher criterion and a new content that are not provided by this definition. Therefore, the previous definition re- mains undetermined. Besides, let us not forget that there are impulses which are harmful to the subject and hence the satisfaction of them cannot be the definition of happiness.
In the third place, experimental psychology nowadays has demon- strated that our most decisive impulses are acquired; they have their origin in education, social influence and culture. Now, this makes of the expression 'satisfaction of impulses' a completely undetermined term, because education and social influence can create all kind of im- pulses, which can be contradictory and incompatible. But if the term in question does not have any determined content, it does not work as a definition. In order to reinforce this third point we will discuss in short the thesis of psychologist Judson B. Brown.
The impression that the definition we have criticized leaves is that we need to satisfy only those impulses which aim at happiness. But if that is so, then the tautology and the lack of content therein become evident, for it turns out that happiness is the satisfaction of the impulse towards happiness. There can be no more lack of content than in an expression which only in appearance defines things. Hegel was right: "happiness is the undetermined" (PR II, II 228).
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Let us now present an historic argument of appreciable forcefulness about the intrinsic indetermination of eudemonism: Epicurus, the most acclaimed specialist in the pursuit of the pleasant, arrives to the same 'ideal' of behavior that Stoicism, whose asceticism and contempt against the pleasant are paradigmatic. This fact is not fortuitous: who talks about happiness imagines something 'pleasant', but precisely the 'pleasant' lacks content and is undetermined: "one can understand by 'pleasant' anything" (GP I 539). The result is that "in Epicurus, the wise man is described with the same characteristics, negatives by the way, that in the stoics" (GP II 325). "The systems of that time, Stoicism, Epicureism and skepticism, although opposed to each other, lead at the end of the day to the same, namely, to make the spirit indifferent with respect to everything that reality has to offer" (WG 718).
The logical process of Epicurus is not fortuitous. It places from the very beginning pleasure and contentment as the end of men; but it realistically understands two things that make of that very criteri- on something thwarted and equivocal. First, not only the corporeal produces pleasure, but culture and intelligence too, as Aristippus af- firmed. Furthermore, culture and intelligence provide more pleasure than the corporeal and are a condition sine qua non of true joy. Second: the negative, the absence of pain and nuisance, must be considered as an element of happiness it and may be the true constitutive of it. The pursuit of pleasure is not a univocal compass that we could follow to the end, because that pursuit is always interrupted by the avoidance of the unpleasant.
And the worst is that, when both considerations are carried out, the criterion falls apart completely, because there are displeasures of the soul --e. g. fear, anxiety and concern --that probably hinder one more than the displeasures of the body. If we add remorse --which necessarily must be added, because it is a psychological fact, despite what the im- moralist says about it is objective validity--, the eudemonist criterion becomes something ludicrous, because when morals steps in joy has ceased to be the norm. The hedonistic logic, the consequent pursuit of happiness, is what makes that Epicurus prefer tranquility, the ataraxia, which is very similar to nirvana and nothingness. What started as an easy pursuit of pleasure ends up being a rigid discipline of affections and passions that preserves imperturbability. One could not come up with a better demonstration of the vacuity of the pseudoconcept of happiness.
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By other way, the cyrenaic Hegesias arrived at that negative and ataraxic result before Epicurus did. He proceeded thus: It is necessary to choose between complete situations, not between an aspect of a situation and an aspect of other situation; the real is not the pleasure that a man feels in a given moment, but all what that man feels in that moment, because it is possible that he experiences displeasure with regard to some other thing. Now, a completely happy situation does not exist. How could we know if the welfare of a dead man with no anxieties or troubles is superior to that of a living man who experiences some sort of pleasures? Why do we prefer to be alive? The disciples of Hegesias started to commit suicide and the authorities were forced to forbid him to teach.
Hegel comments this very well:
The body, says Hegesias, is distressed by several ailments and the soul suffers with it; this is why it is indifferent to choose between life and death. As such, Hegesias says, nothing is pleasant or unpleasant; it is futile to pro- claim the liking as the normative; because, on the contrary, it is the null what does not have any determination in itself; it is negation of objective determination (GP I 548).
The refutation of eudemonism is not only the question: what is that thing called happiness? There is a question that goes even deeper: who said that happiness is what man wants the most?
As Victor Hugo very well remarked: "The reflective spirits use this expression very little: the happy and the unhappy ones" (Les Miserables IV, VII, i). In this regard, we find a very eloquent of Rousseau in his Political Fragments: "Hurry to abandon the laws, for they only are use- ful to make you happy" (1964, 556).
And in the Emile we read: "They say we are indifferent to everything but self-interest; yet we find our consolation in our sufferings in the charms of friendship and humanity, and even in our pleasures we should be too lonely and miserable if we had no one to share them with us. " (Book IV)
"One says that one contributes to the common good by one ? s own interest. Where does the idea come from according to which the just contributes against his own interest? How can one die looking for his own benefit? " (ibid).
There is a very widespread dogmatism --whose purpose is, un- doubtedly, to justify one's own selfishness-- that says that in the last
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instance the only thing that motivates man is self-interest. First, this dogma does not say anything, because it cannot provide the expres- sion 'self-interest' with a meaning whatsoever. Second, and more im- portant, this dogmatism refutes itself when it is asked: how can one die in self-interest? How can one find satisfaction with acts which are completely disinterested? They can only juggle with words when they try to answer that. They end up recognizing, implicitly or explicitly, that man is capable of acting without pursuing his own interest. To say that one takes benefit from not taking benefit is only a game of words which does not respect the principle of contradiction.
In order to talk about of 'impulse' towards one's own benefit, the mentioned dogma needs to focus on introspection, because no impulse can be called an empirical data, not even hungriness. But if we rely on introspection, we find there other motives besides self-interest, which is enough to refute this dogma, for according to it the only thing that moves us is self-interest.
Morals and my neighbors are ends in themselves. Those moralists who believe that morals are a means to obtain the final happiness have not read Kant, let alone Hegel. They have not come to realize the difference between a categorical and a hypothetical imperative. And they do not know anything about God.
About the human plenitude involved in the truly moral act Hegel makes the most important and precise observation: "This happiness, in contrast with the other one, could be called real happiness, but in that very moment happiness becomes an inadequate expression [. . . ] it is a reality that becomes deformed if one calls it happiness" (GP II 288s).
"To direct oneself towards happiness and spiritual joy, to chitchat about the wonders and delights of science and art, is something fu- tile; for the very thing that occupies oneself there does not have the form of pleasure; in other words, that entire conception is suppressed" (GP II 289).
"All that empty speech is left behind and loses all interest. The true spirit consists in dealing with the thing in itself, with something that is in itself universal and not a means for pleasure, that is to say, not as if it were the constant reflection of the relation with oneself as individual" (GP II 289).
The last three texts are the key to the whole issue. It is complete- ly false that in the genuine moral act --and even the activities that are not as elevated as that one, such as the scientific quests and the
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creation of art-- one is relating to oneself as individual; the pleasure is experience of the individual as such. About the true morals we will talk later.
The above mentioned dogmatism does not need to verify if in a very specific case the motive was self-interest or not; that dogmatism believes to know everything and does not need to verify what it says. It is one of those pampered theses which need no contact whatsoever with reality and, consequently, cannot refute anything at all. Whether things are A or not-A is indifferent to them.
Another example would be the thesis that the only motive of man is the desire of self-sacrifice or of mortifying himself. In light of the bacchanals and bons vivants, it would be enough to say that men adopt such conducts even going against their own liking and inclinations, and they pretend to feel joy so that the triumph over themselves be- comes of a more sophisticated nature. As in the case we are dealing with, this second apriorism acts stubbornly despite what reality may say. It is simply a mental toy, not a real knowledge.
In order to refute the second apriorism above mentioned, the eude- monists would need to use the introspection, a recourse in which we would certainly find some hedonistic impulses. But they are lost; the introspection also refutes them, because it testifies that there can be in men other motives different than self-interest; for instance, the presence of the moral imperative.
To be sure, there is satisfaction in universal history, but that is not what is called happiness, for it is the happiness that goes beyond particular in- terests. The ends that have real value in universal history need to be kept firmly by means of strong will and energy. The relevant individuals in uni- versal history --who pursuit such ends-- were rewarded, it is true, but to be happy was not what they wanted (VG 92s).
Delight is something secondary, concomitant to the fact. When the substan- tial is realized, delight is added to the extent in which the work is perceived to be the work of the subject. Who sets out on the quest of delight, only looks for oneself in the accidental. Who cares of great works and interests, only looks for the realization of the thing in itself.