No More Learning

The explanation is very generous: it postulates itself as explicative of an entity that cannot be seen, since that what can be seen is the phe- nomenon that is intended to be explained, and when someone asks for the definition of that entity in order to know what it is, then he is given the answer that nobody knows it. So, how can we understand
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what they are talking about if either sensibility or reason does no tell us? And what is the explicative capacity from a verbal maneuver that advances as an explanation an entity from which no one knows what it consist of?
This is why Hegel holds that, in balance, the only content that presents itself is the content from the phenomenon to be explained, since physicists are not capable of giving content to the entity called strength or force. With irony, Hegel calls these entities "determinations of reflection": not only because they are breed by the reflection of the abstract intellect that goes beyond what is observable, but because they are in themselves mere reflection or reflex of the phenomenon to be explained; they have exactly the same content; they are the "tranquil mimicry of the existing world of phenomena" (WL II 127). Whoever takes as valid such explanations, "wants to see doubled the same deter- mination that is the content"(WL II 78).
It is not very flattering that the human mind has ever taken as a valid explanation any supposed entity whose proposers do not know how to define: "ordinarily, one says that we do not know the nature of force" (NH 156). One openly acknowledges that what we perceive are the effects of the force, that is to say, the phenomenon that is intended to be explained, but not the strength itself; this one remains as something unknown.
It is frequent to say that the nature of force itself is unknown to us and can only be known in its manifestation. [. . . ]. The content's determination of force is precisely the same as that of the manifestation. Consequently, the explanation of a phenomenon by means of strength is a hollow tautology (EPW. 136 A).
The really incredible circularity of this entire explanatory maneuver reveals itself in the first law of Newton called the principle of inertia. On the one hand, one defines an inertial system as that in which no forces intervene. On the other hand, force is defined as something that does not intervene in an inertial system. It speaks badly about the hu- man mind that it formerly allowed these kinds of explanations.
And this is how Taylor and Wheeler keep speaking:
To understand the nature of the concept, 'force', try to imagine how one could get along without it! Force is most obviously needed to explain why
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a particle speeds up or slows down. A test particle, subject to no forces, is defined precisely by the fact that it does not speed up or slow down (1966, 101).
Let us clarify that. Strength is defined as something that explains that a particle modifies its speed. But a 'particle whose speed is not modified' is defined as a particle that is not subjected to forces. The emptiness and circularity of such lucubrations is manifest.
Of course, the attempt to define force as the product from the mass by the acceleration is equally circular and null, because it has been already stated that mass is defined as the resistance that an object opposes to the application of a certain force. Look how the Encyclopedia Britannica defines mass: ". . . the resistance that a body of matter offers to a change in its speed or position upon the application of a force. The greater the mass of a body, the smaller the change produced by an applied force. " (EB 7, 915, 2). In fact, the mass is the quantifica- tion of the inertia, the quantitive measure of inertia, so that the defini- tory circularity between mass and strength is exactly the same that the one indicated between inertia and force: inertia is defined as a state in which no forces intervene, and force is defined as something that does not intervene in inertial states.
It is interesting to notice that the first law of Newton --the whole foundation of Physics- is one of the most metaphysic constructions ever formulated. It speaks about resting objects, but there has never been a resting object, since we know that lamp located over my table is travelling along with our entire planet and with ourselves at a speed of thirty km per second. It speaks about rectilinear movement but every movement we know are elliptic or parabolic orbits, and if something like a rectilinear movement existed, we would have no way of proving that it is indeed so, since the ruler or stick with which we would compare it is not evidently straight, and in order to verify that it is straight we would use another stick whose straightness is also unknown to us, and so on in indefinitum. Newton's defenders would say that we are dealing with relative rest and relative movement, e. g. everything is relative to the objects of the surroundings; but with such a statement they definitely ruin the law, because if there are any objects in our surroundings, they exert the attraction or repulsion strengths upon an object about which the law refers, and this law cannot speak about an object upon which no forces are exerted.
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In fact, Newton thought in absolute movement and in absolute rest, assuming the myth of absolute space. But we already said (II, 1) with Hegel that it is not possible to speak about rest or movement, "since the movement is necessarily [directed] towards some place" (GP II 193). And that was in fact one of Einstein's first considerations: "Does it make any sense to speak about a movement which we consider to be unique in the universe? No, because one considers that an object is in motion when it changes position with respect to another one" (1984, 182). We must say the same about rest: An object is considered to be at rest when it does not change position with respect to other objects. That is why Hegel says that Newton's first law is "an empty mental monster" (GP II, 193).
That first law tells us that there is a pair of phenomena that need no explanation: rest and uniform rectilinear movement. But these two phenomena do not exist! It can only be brilliant that they tell us that no explanation is needed for everything that does not exist!
The circularity and the absolute uselessness of the first law trans- forms the pseudo-concept of force into something absolutely circular and uselessness, because only that law could give any meaning to the word force.
Undoubtedly, the general omission of a genuine definition of strength has been present: it is the delusion that we have already denounced many times: one believes that a meaning can be provided to "force" by only pointing out to some empirical data. In the combat to this de- ceit, Einstein's contribution has proved to be particularly valuable. It is true, however, that the decisive and scientific warning had already been stated by Hegel a century before: "Force [. . . ] is not something perceptible; therefore, empiricists surrender themselves to such de- terminations in an uncritical and unconscious way" (GP III, 84). But Einstein managed to reach the wide public, or at least, the public who fears Philosophy but not Physics. Einstein ? s argumentation proves one out of two issues which for our practical effects are equivalent: either that force is not empirical data, or that the empirical data that some call force does not correspond in the physical world to any reality
It would have been enough to indicate that the experience of effort is introspective; therefore, it is not empirical, since one understands by empirical what one perceives by means by some of the external five senses.
Besides, it would also have been enough to indicate that one under- stands by 'force' the 'capacity' of producing certain effects, that means
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to say, the power of causing certain manifestations. But we have already stated (III, 9) that a power is not an empirical data. Capacity means that something can produce certain effects, but sensibility witnesses, at best, that things are, but not that they can. If we want, we will infer that they can, but this demonstrates that a power is not an empirical data, for it needs to be inferred. Therefore, the only capacity and power that we actually perceive is the self-determination of spirit: its real capacity of producing determinations that did not previously exist. We will get back to this point. We will return to this point, because the causality concept had imposed the same result to us: Whoever wants to explain what the 'becoming' of something new in the world is, cannot do with- out the only cause that makes exists what did not exist before. It actu- ally does not do without anything: the proof thereof is that the concept of force is explanatory to us --a concept that stems not from empirical data but from self-consciousness.
The first of these two observations --which would have been enough to prove the others wrong-- had already been made by the most rea- sonable physicists. Max Born affirms this: "The fundamental concept of statics is force. It is derived from the subjective feeling of exertion experienced when we perform work with our bodies" (1962, 14). And Eddington completes:
The primary conception of force is associated with the muscular sensation felt when we make an effort to cause or prevent the motion of matter. Simi- lar effects on the motion of matter can be caused by non-living agency, and these also are regarded as due to forces (1978, 57; orig. 1920).
Neither Born nor Eddington seems to ponder on the fact that attribut- ing effort to material things is animism and primitive mentality. Now, the only content that these two authors are indicating as the meaning of force is precisely effort. This is the reason why the Leibnizian critic of Newtonian strengths mentioned the 'hidden qualities'.
One must have in mind that when Margenau affirms that "No- body has seen this force of physical attraction, and no one ever will. " (1978, 335), he is properly saying something that any reflexive person could deny: by definition, what is seen are the effects of force, while force itself cannot be seen. And what is said about seeing must be said about touching too: the tactile sensation itself is the effect from the force one assumes to exist; force is conceived as the capacity to produce these
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effects, and the capacity cannot be touched. No physical force is em- pirical data. It is a mental construction that we imaginarily project on the physical world, for which it is required that the content of the projected concept is extracted from somewhere else.
Inferring that physical strength actually exists is another thing. Following Einstein, however, we must warn everybody that such inference is illegitimate. The syllogism should contain a universal affir- mative premise, easily refutable by a single negative case. The premise would have to say: 'Every time there is impression of force, force exists'. In order to refute this, one only needs to bring up the experience that everybody has had in the train station while waiting for our train to start moving: if the train that is next to us starts to move and we see that through the window, we have the impression that we are moved by a force of acceleration which actually does not exist. A single case like this is enough to prove that perception about a physical force is a subjective impression provoked by the peculiar manner in which are our anatomic organs constituted and to their physiology.
Curiously enough, the experiments prove that the sensation we have of the force of gravity is highly unreliable. The experimental psycholo- gists and physiologists have achieved to tackle a man just by making him see things. With his two feet well set on the ground, this man is shown by means of a cinematograph what our eyes see when the car in which we drive stops violently or makes an abrupt turn. This man feels the force that impulses towards the right, and his muscles, in order to keep the equilibrium, apply all their effort to the left, and when that happens our man falls down to that side. The force that he felt did not exist. Again: there is the sensation of force, but there are no forces. The alleged premise is simply false.
One should take into account that in the sensation of angular, rota- tional or gravitational momentum, the correspondent organs are certain ear parts called bony labyrinth and vestibule, with expansions called the saccule and the utricule. The labyrinth is composed by three semi- circular canals whose planes lie approximately perpendicular to each other. All this interconnected forms a cavity that is filled with a liquid called endolymph and the cavity is covered with hair cells that have nerve terminals on their base which transmit electrical signals to the brain in function of the movement of the endolymph, a phenomenon that occurs when the body accelerates or stops completely. As a matter of fact, perceiving static pressure or gravity is a task of the the saccule
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and the utricle, whose hair cells are covered with a jelly like liquid in which little calcium granules float; these granules apply pressure to the hair cells. But we must state three very important things about this organ:
1) The information transmitted by this entire organ is proprioceptive, not exteroceptive like the one that is transmitted from the Cochlea, since the eardrum perceives the vibrations from the surrounding sonorous environment, not the vibrations of vellum hair within the organism.
2) The entire system is connected with the reflex centre which governs the eyes, the neck and the extremities. This is what explains the experiment of tackling down a man by visual data.
3) There are several tricks in order to make this organ work without the existence of the forces that he forces himself to believe that exist, e. g.
with electrical energy, with chemical substances, drugs, and even with hot and cold water, since temperature changes make the endo- lymph circulate and put more pressure to the granules.
The thesis according to which there are forces in the physical world would have to be based on other reasons. To affirm that they exist because 'we feel them' is not a good argument, because, obviously, we feel them sometimes despite they do not exist. Such an argument would be as unscientific as saying that there are surfaces because we feel them; in physics this argument in favor of surfaces has never been acceptable.
A different argument would be to pledge that the existence of forces in the physical world is required to explain the phenomena. But Hegel attacks this brutally as we have seen. Who can accept as explanatory an entity nobody knows what does it consist about? It would be useless, of course, an exit like the following one: We know that there is a force, even though we do not know what it is like. That is tantamount to say: We know that blictiri exist but we do not know what blictiri is. It is obvious that there is no trace of knowledge in any of these intellectual whims. It is impossible to know if there is or not an X, when that X is not given any content.
And if no content is given to the word 'force', the only content that is present is that of the phenomenon we wanted to explain. And this is a mirror game: they provide us as explanation the same fact of which we demanded an explanation: "properly speaking, there is no concrete
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content in the category of force" (VG 114). And if someone pretends to indicate any empirical data as a content we can reply what Hegel already said: "force [. . . ] is not something perceptible" (GP III 84).
4. expLanatory factorS
Now, the concept of force is paradigmatic. It would be a mistake to believe that Hegel's attack is invalid because physics have substituted the concept of force by the concept of field, energy, mass, momentum, conservation, probability and law.
In first place, as we demonstrated, atomic and molecular physics still employs force carelessly. And in the second place, that is what is penetrating of the Hegelian analysis: all concepts of reflection (Reflex- ionsbestimmungen), which are supposedly explanatory, have the same content, or more precisely speaking, the lack of content that the con- cept of force has.
One only needs to mention what says Hegel about the last concept we mentioned in our list, namely, the concept of law, which is by the way the decisive concept in physics as in the other natural sciences, so that his critic concerns to all of these disciplines: "forces have exactly the same form as law" (PG 119); "both have the same content" (ibid); "the explanation includes the law in the force, as in the essence of the law" (ibid. ).
It is very important to understand what has just been told to us. Whoever advances a law as an explanation of a certain phenomenon does not evidently mean that a mental operation called judgment --for the law is a judgment with a subject, a verb and a predicate-- suffices to produce a real phenomenon whose existence needs to be explained. And obviously it does not mean either that a certain set of words, which would be the expression of the law in mere sounds and ink- would suffice to produce the real phenomenon in question. On the contrary, what the person that advances a law as the explanation of an observed phenomenon wants to indicate is that something real is in- tertwined with the empirical facts and that, without being itself an em- pirical data, is capable of producing the empirical effects in which the phenomenon consists. That the law is not an empirical data has already been expressed (III, 9): the law contains an 'all' or an 'always' and it is impossible to observe those contents by empirical means. Nobody
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knows exactly what it signifies, and yet nobody doubts that it exists and produces empirical effects. And those are the same characteristics of force according to our study: a real entity that is behind of phenomena, that is not observable in itself; an entity of which no one knows what it consists of and yet has the capacity of producing phenomena and explaining them.
This is why the Hegelian critique against force is also valid against the law and other allegedly explanatory factors: as explanation of a certain phenomenon we are given an entity whose only definition is to be explanation of the phenomenon.
We pointed out that, in order to avoid such critique, it would be useless to pretend that the law is not explanatory but only descriptive. A proposition that says 'always' or 'all' cannot be descriptive. Not a single verifiable fact can be described with those words. Now, in order to scientifically and justifiably advance a thesis, this thesis has to be an object of experience or something that is necessary for the object of experience to exists, that means to say, a factor that explains the exis- tence of the phenomenon; otherwise, what one affirms is nothing more than a whim, an irrationality that has nothing to do with the work of science.
This dilemma is indispensable to understand the systematization of concepts started by The Science of Logic. The book of being deals with the concepts which are supposedly immediate or descriptive: we have seen quality, quantity, continuity, discretion, intensive, extensive, limit, finite, and being itself. Hegel proves that the alleged immediacy is merely imaginary, that all are mediated and lack of meaning if the mind does not go the next step forward. The book of the essence deals with the concepts supposedly explanatory, mediated determinations or reflections which do not have their origin in observation. One dem- onstrates there too that they do not explain anything and that they lack meaning if they do not reach the spirit (the concept), which is the sub- ject of the third book.
As a guide we could have these two sentences: "Truth is the essence of being" (WL II 3). "The truth of being and essence is the concept" (EPW 159)
It could seem that the object of essence is outdated since no science speaks nowadays of essences. But that is only a superficial consideration. The first thing that a scientist does, consciously or unconsciously, when he deals with a baroque set of empirical impressions, is to precise what
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are those impressions about, that is to say, he tries to determine what kind of object or fact lays before him. In other words, what he must do is to determine the essential. It is the Kantian problem of subsumtion. The essence is the universal concept under which we subsume the phe- nomenon: Is it a rock? Is it a tribunal? Is it a circus? Is it a book? Is it a joke? Is it a promise? Is it a requisite? Is it a whim? Is it a wedding? Is it a landscape? Is it a nightingale? Is it a speech? Everything depends on this essential discernment which, by the way, is closely related to the theory of Gestalt, but it is not reduced to the visual, since it com- prises all things intellectual and human. We had already quoted this text: "It happens as always that one alludes or mentions a perception or an experience; so soon man has spoken there is a concept there, there is no way of making it aside, it reappears in the mind as a clear sign of universality and truth, since it is precisely the essential" (GP I 336). The word essence is maybe obsolete, but the concept of essence, it doesn't.
Now, "the essence is determined itself as explanation (Grund)" (WL II 63). This is why Hegel arranged the supposedly explanatory under the captaincy of essence. By definition, the essence of a body explains why the body is like it is. That would be tantamount to explain the most important thing, but evidently, that does not happen here.
When I say that what I have in front of me is a tree, I explain the multiple and varied empirical impressions that are coming to my senses. I do not only orient myself in the middle of a chaotic parade of sensations. Impressions are what they are because what I have be- fore me is a tree.
Therefore, the affirmation according to which being and essence complement each other has two senses. First, this affirmation means that we cannot describe without explaining; the crucial thesis that entirely refutes those who believe science must be reduced to descriptions. In order to describe we need to use some universal concept, and since this concept tries to grab the essence, one infers that it must have an explanatory purpose. Second, the truth of being is the essence because (cf. Zubiri) the essence is in the being itself making it being what it is, so that other aspects or non-essential details are expendable and irrelevant: they are mere appearances.
But this is only a mirror game according to Hegel. Just as in the case of force and law, so the essence is presented to us as an entity that lies beyond the phenomena and explains them, but it is an entity that nobody is able to explain. It offers itself as the explanation of the phenomenon,
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but its only definition is to be the explanation of the phenomenon. This identity between essence and phenomenon has been commented at length, as if it were a thesis that Hegel defended as a part of his system; in reality, that very identity is what Hegel criticizes in the concept of essence in order to reject it.
Hegel rejects every allegedly explanatory concept because the only true explanation of the world is the spirit. We immediately see how this critique is valid against all the above mentioned concepts: field, energy, etcetera. But we need first to examine more closely an interpretative question. Commentators did not perceive that the book of essence is that of the allegedly explanatory concepts; they missed the fact that this book is divided in three parts: essence, phenomenon and reality. The union of the essence and the phenomenon is reality, as synthesis of the thesis and the antithesis, so that all this movement constitutes reality; it explains it in the mind of those who believe in the above men- tioned explanatory concepts. In addition, everything leads us to the most explanatory concept we can think of, which is no other than that of cause, and whose critique we have made in our third chapter.
We already said why Hegel named that entire treatise under the name of essence. As the encyclopedic summary tells us, the essence "is, essen- tially, explanation (Grund)" (EPW 121 A). And the treatise itself tells us: "the essence determines itself as explanation (Grund)" (WL II 63). But a simple glance to the concepts there contained is enough to persuade us that they are only allegedly explanatory concepts. 'Form' and 'mat- ter' since they were coined by Aristotle, have had no other purpose than explaining facts. The conditions in which the existence of a being depends, contribute also to the explanation of that existence. The prop- erties of a being explain why such being operates as it does and how it is in fact constituted. The principles of identity and (no) contradic- tion evidently want to explain why things are this way and cannot be otherwise.
The category whole-parts: certain being is like it is because it is constituted by certain parts, or because it forms part of a certain whole. An attempt to explain its existence was to evaluate a being in terms of 'possible and 'necessary'. And let us not speak about categories like force, substance and Grund.
The substantive Grund and the verb begru? nden need to be succinctly clarified. The term 'explanation' has two different usages that depend on the nature of the grammatical subject (if it is a person or a thing).
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For instance, one person explains certain fact by indicating its causes; but we also say that the cause explains the existence of the effect. The German verb begru? nden has also these two usages. The substantive Grund, in its material meaning, means a ground, a fundament, or a ba- sis. In theory, begru? nden would mean to lay the foundations of some- thing, but in its scientific meaning Grund is a real entity by means of which one explains the existence of an entity or an event. In regard to that meaning, one would have to translate Grund as 'explanatory fac- tor', but we also say that the cause as real entity is the 'explanation' of the effect. This is how we have translated Grund in the previous pages, because 'laying the foundations' would be only a metaphori- cal language that is not pertinent to the question. That we are loyal to Hegel's thought is confirmed by the titles of the two annotations of the section called the "The Determined Grund"; in both of which the word Erkla? rung --which means explanation-- appears. Besides, this is corroborated by the fact that all the systematization effectuated by The Science of Logic would lack if the second book did not thematize the explanatory concepts, in contrast to the first book which thema- tizes the allegedly descriptive ones. Without this dilemma the whole work lacks its sting of truth.
But let us deal now with the modern explanatory concepts.
We lay aside the imaginative figurations, which can be varied. The figurative imagination, of field definition, in physics has the same con- tent --or lack of content-- that the definition of force: an entity that is not empirical in itself, that means to say, that is beyond or underneath the physical manifestations, and whose only characteristic is the ca- pacity of producing this empirically perceptible manifestations. What we see are the metal arrows that are orientated towards the poles, but in moment at all do we see the field itself. One even calls it a 'field of force'; one conceives it as an aggregate of forces. D'Abro says some- thing very illustrative in regard to gravitational fields:
For instance, the force of attraction exerted by the sun on a planet varies with the position of the planet. Let us observe that the gravitational force is disclosed only through the behaviour of the planet; nevertheless, we may reason as though a force were still in existence at each point of space around the sun even in the absence of any planet. We are thus led to conceive of a region of space at each point of which a force is present. The aggregate of such forces is called a field of force. (1952, 215). (The italics are mine)
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