No More Learning

I insist on this point: quoting Rousseau is a confrontation test and a cross-examination. Such means proves to be effective because it refutes his principal thesis.
The proverbial optimism of the Greek culture in regard to man --a culture one would never say was biased by Christianity-- can provide us with another indisputable testimony. Hegel says of that culture the following:
it originally contains joy and harmony. The Christian religion is not as joy- ful as this one; rather, it provokes the lack of joy; it begins with pain; it
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wakens one up and tears apart the natural unity of the spirit, it destroys natural peace. Here we have an original sin: man is evil in his origin; there- fore, in the more internal realm, he is something negative in regard to him- self (PR I 23).
I quoted Einstein and Freud before because they were very reluc- tant with Christianity. Now I will quote Plato, a true exponent of the optimistic Greek culture, in which the Christian influx is automatical- ly ruled out. One should not believe that natural evilness is a Christian invention. It is the ascertainment of a fact whose importance cannot be neglected anymore by true science. We read the following in the book X of the Republic: "This description has carried us too far, but the point we have to notice is this, that in fact there exists in every one of us, even in some reputed must respectable, a terrible, fierce and lawless brood of desires, which it seems are revealed in our sleep" (Republic, IX 572 B)
Aristotle, another key figure of Greek culture, who possesses the same intellectual honesty as Plato, expressively warns against "the evil that exists in each and every one of men" (Politics 1319 a 1).
The most ancient testimonial of this fact dates back to the tenth cen- tury before Christ. It is contained in the first book of the Bible: Genesis 2, 4b; 3, 24. Hegel devoted many pages to analyze this passage and we can only do the same. First, because its depth is bigger than that of all the other testimonies we have seen before. Second, because, even though this narration originated the Christian thesis with which we are dealing, it has been and continues to be completely misinterpreted by systematic theology, as we already said in our first chapter. In this context, it is important to say that the specialization in theology does not correspond at all to the specialization in Biblical sciences, nor is it a good preparation for their study because it commonly predisposes one to read certain theses of systematic theology in Biblical passages that state other kind of things.
The first thing that our public --Christian and non-Christians-- should know about the passage we referred to above is that it does not speak of an individual man called Adam. All the modern exegetists and translators know this. I cannot explain myself why the Churches refrain from telling this explicitly to the wider audience. As Hegel mar- velously interpreted it-- before the exegetical science had done it--, the passage does not speak of an individual man, but of all man.
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Hegel says: "the expression 'first man' is tantamount to say 'man as such', not someone individual, fortuitous, or someone among many" (PR III 127).
"Therefore, we could say: it is the eternal history of the freedom of man the fact that he awakes from the slumber he is in during his first years and gets to the light of awareness, more precisely and in absolute terms, the fact that good and evil start to exist for him" (PR II, I 32).
The Hebrew expression ha^'a^da^m with the article means: 'the man'. On the contrary, the expression a^da^m without the article means a proper name like John or Robert. A similar case is found in our language in names like pearl or Pearl, rose and Rose, etcetera. That difference in Hebrew --which is expressed by the article-- is the one we express by the capital letters. Now, in our passage we never find the expression ha^ a^da^m. It follows that the author wants to say something about man, about every man, about the initial processes that we all go through as human beings. This is of course some powerful evidence, something that really makes a great noise. If we analyze this with a rigorous meth- od, we will see that it is not a sin committed by some other person, something hereditary or something that God attributes to everybody for unknown reasons. The Biblical story does not speak of a personal individual but of all men. J. Blinzer, a Catholic who is not a scientific exegetist, shows this: "We do not find anywhere some determined statement which says that the first of the first father was transmitted to their descendents" (LTK III 965).
The worst thing of all is not the mistaken interpretation that sys- tematic theology has made, but the fact that this distraction has hin- dered people from understanding what the Biblical author has to say about all men. He makes two affirmations of such depth that not even the exegetists have acknowledged it; they say they are as busy as they were before in dissipating the mistakes of dogmatic theology.
First, the author, who is called the Yahwist by the exegetists, says that man makes himself, that he does not come to be a man but only by means of his own deeds and activities.
One should notice that, in order to know this, the Yahwist did not need any special revelation whatsoever: he only needed to think -- just like Aristotle did six centuries afterwards-- upon the fact that "the mind is nothing before it thinks" (De anima 429b 32), "it does not have actual existence before thinking" (ibid. 429a 24).
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Where does the Yahwist say that man becomes by his own work to be man? In Genesis 3, 5 and 3, 22.
Furthermore, the priestly narrative of the same fact (1, 1-2, 4a) is much more abstract. It tells us that God make man in his image but he does not tell us how. That led the readers to think that God made man with the same deficient characteristics he nowadays has. The last complier or priestly writer wanted by all means to avoid that kind of interpretation; for that purpose, he simply juxtaposed the narrative of the Genesis, 2, 4b- 3, 24, which was written precisely with the intention of correcting and refuting the widespread idea according to which man was made by God as he is today; savage, egoist, etcetera.
It is not the case that the Yahwist author knew or had before him the priestly narrative that has come down to us. Although it was written at a later time, what cannot be denied is that Genesis 1, 1-2, 4a contains that creational conception which was tremendously wide spread, even if it was written in a latter period. Modern investigators are positive in saying that these ancient beliefs were not only part of an oral tradition but of a written tradition as well. They hold that the priestly writer remade some ancient document in which we have variants like 'God made' instead of 'God said', the latter being now a monotonous repeti- tion that characterizes many rituals. Much more likely, the ancient writ- ings did not set in a time sequence the creational activity of God within seven days. That was rather a major concern for the priestly writer, who had to justify the sabbatical rest by saying that God himself rested in the seventh day.
We can appreciate both in the final compiler and the Yahwist the intention of changing that original conception of the Creation. Many particular features reveal that purpose. For instance, according to the priestly narrative, God made the animals before man (Genesis 1, 24-25). The Yahwist narrative, on the contrary, with a highly interesting etio- logical purpose, says that the creation of the animals came after the creation of man. Likewise, according to the priestly narrative, God cre- ated woman and man simultaneously (Ge? nesis 1,27); while the Yahwist narrative says " the man said: this one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" (Genesis 2, 23), taking the creation of the animals as an intermediate stage. God did not obtain the material from the ground but from the body of man himself.
If the intention of the Yahwist --as all modern exegetists recognize-- is to amend the archaic conception which came down to us through
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the priestly narrative, it becomes obvious that the 'resemblance with God', which makes man to be what he is, does not exist from the very beginning as the priestly narrative suggests (Genesis 1, 26-27), but only after man knows good and evil: "Then Yahweh God said, 'Now that the man has become like one of us in knowing good from the evil" (Genesis 3, 22).
Before he ate from "the tree of knowledge of good and evil" (Genesis 2, 17), that means to say, when he came out from the very hands of God, he was not yet a man. He was simply a 'living being', an expression that the whole Bible employs to denote animals. The Yahwist says with great accuracy about this very first moment: "Yahweh God shaped man from the soil of the ground and blew the breath of life into his nostrils, and man became a living being" (Genesis 2, 7) --a passage which is in clear contrast with "now that the man has become like one of us" (Genesis 3, 22).
This expression 'living soul' is employed in the entire Bible in rela- tion to animals, just as it can be seen in the same priestly narrative a few passages before (Genesis 1, 20). The examples of this are innumerable. The Ecclesiastes explicitly says that, in having a living soul, man is no different than the animals: "they have all one breath" (Ecclesiastes 3:19).
According to the Yahwist, in order to become truly a man --in other words, in order to resemble God-- man must exercise his own activity and decision in regard to good and evil. In fact, we saw (III, 7) that conscience is the cause of self-consciousness, and that being a man is to have self-consciousness (III, 1). To interiorize the moral imperative has the effect upon man of giving rise to a self which is made account- able for his actions by the preexisting intersubjectivity around him that makes him responsible. The response to that self --whether it is positive or negative-- is the act by which man makes himself. As we have said before, the Yahwist only needed to reflect by himself upon the difference between humans and animals in order to discover that. We cannot project upon the first moment a kind of being different to that which we confirmed now as its characteristic way of existing and being. Hegel comments thus the narrative of the Genesis:
"What is opposed to believe that what is conceptually the man could be previously present as actual existence? That is opposed to the very nature of the spirit. The spirit is only that what he makes himself being" (PR II, I 28n). "The fundamental teaching is this: man is not a natural entity as such, he is not an animal, but a spirit" (PR II, I 27).
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It is astounding that Hegel suspected directly the bottom of the Yahwist's thought, while modern exegetists can barely grasp it. The ones who approached themselves more to the thought of the Yahwist were Stoebe and Gunkel. Stoebe remarks: "In fact, man becomes like God by distinguishing between good and evil and imbedding his life with autonomy" (1953, 397s). Gunkel, on his part, said accurately: "The awakening of reason occurred with a sin against Yahweh" (1966, 31) If both commentators had remembered something that they already knew and affirmed in other contexts, namely, that this story speaks of 'man', of every man and not of any particular individual, they would have come to understand that the strong point of the Yahwist teaching is that every man becomes man by means of an act of his own. To be sure, this happens under the moral exigency that Yahweh addresses to him. According to the Yahwist, the thesis of the ancient text is still true, in the sense that it was God who made man in his image, since all the self-determination of man depended on the fact that God ad- dressed an imperative to him; but resembling God is something that man does by means of his own activity and not something that occurs passively .
To be sure, one would be misinterpreting the genre of the texts if one raised the objection that man could speak before he ate from the tree and hence was already a man. The snake, which was also an animal, spoke as well and was not a man: Genesis 3, 1-5. Even with certain sar- casm against the lucubrations of the theologians, it is nowhere stated that the snake was the demon. On the contrary, the Yahwist warns explicitly that "the snake was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made" (Genesis 3, 1). And certainly it is not a punishment to the devil to eat dust and crawl upon the ground (3, 14). His punishment is certainly not of that kind.
The literary genre that the Yawhist decided to employ here is the myth, which was the most widespread literary genre in other cultures to explain the origin of the world (v. g. The Epic of Gilgamesh). Now, if one picks up that genre, as Hegel says: "the inconsistencies are un- avoidable" (PR II, I 30). Another inconsistency: the marriage of Cain (Genesis 4, 17) with a woman nobody knows anything about. Further- more, what is said in Genesis 2, 17 is barely understandable to man ("for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die"), namely, the meaning of the verb 'to die', for he had never seen anybody die. The examples are endless.
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If the speculative, the true, is exposed in sensible figures under the guise of events, there will always be certain traces of inconsistency. That is what happens to Plato when he speaks of the ideas by means of images: inad- equate situations may always show up when that occurs. (PR II, II 85).
Let us summarize what we have said: the Yahwist speaks of all men. He wants to elucidate the process by means of which every man becomes a man, and the key to that process is an act in which one de- cides between good and evil.
The next statement is as strong as the previous one: this first act, by means of which every man comes to the use of reason, is always a sin. Few things have been said that can be compared to the honesty of analysis of such thesis formulated more than thirty centuries ago. Traditional theology has not had the guts to accept that teaching of the Bible: every human being begins with an act of egoism. It preferred to reduce original sin to a curious anecdote that occurred long time be- fore, and made up a series of juridical terms in order to say that the act
of that first person can be attributed to all people.
I do not know why one could doubt that the thesis of the narra-
tive we are now dealing with is the one we have appointed, since the Yahwist himself says that "the desires of man's heart are evil from his youth" (Genesis 8, 21).
Another relevant passage is this one: "And God saw that the wick- edness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" (Genesis 6, 5). In order to understand the writings of the Yahwist, that thesis if of primal importance, because it makes one feel that Yahweh must necessarily intervene in human history in order to change things, as can be seen in Genesis 12, 3; 18, 19.
Everybody sins when he or she comes to the use of reason; it is not the case that everybody inherited some strange sin that is alien to us. The thesis was newly formulated by the author of the book of Kings: "there is no man that sinneth not" (1 Kings 8, 46). And the Salmist says something that echoes that passage: "And enter not into judgment with thy servant: for in thy sight shall no man living be justi- fied" (Psalms, 143, 2). We read the same in Proverbs: "Who can say, I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin? " (Proverbs 20, 9) In
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the book of Job, one can sufficiently corroborate the thesis that every man and woman commits sin: 4, 17; 14, 4; 15, 14.
Whenever theologians wield innumerable Pauline texts in order to say that sin is hereditary --in clear opposition to the teaching that sin is an act committed by each individual man-- the first thing one must answer them is that they are defending the thought of Paul, not that of the Yahwist. Not only is it very dubious that Paul understood the Yahwist correctly, but it is evident that Paul, influenced by certain Jewish decadence, read a proper name where the Yahwist clearly says 'man'. As the eminent Biblical authority Claus Westermann suggests, Paul depends on the apocryphal fourth book of Ezra that says "Adam, what have you done! When you sinneth, your fall did not only befall upon you but upon us too, your descendants" (4 Ezra 7 118). Wester- mann clearly remarks that the doctrine of Paul cannot be grounded on Genesis 2-3. It is important to notice that the name of Adam is not even pronounced once by Christ; the conception of Paul cannot be based on the authority of Christ.
But this second point is even stronger: in the same passage (Rom. 5) that theologians refer to, Paul explicitly says: "for that all have sinned" (Romans 5, 12d). Neither Pauline exegetists --either leftists or rightists-- nor experts in the Greek language would tolerate nowadays that the expression ef'ho is translated "in which". It is an explanatory or causal conjunction which means 'because'. We need only to refer to the Catholics Zerwick and Juss, and to the Protestants Zerwick and Kuss. In a like manner, they all energetically reject that one interprets the aorist he? marton as 'sinful state', because in reality it means act: 'to have sinned'. It is equivocal that, according to Paul, every man commits an actual sin, something which was carefully exposed in the precedent chapters of the same letter, since when Paul says "for we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin" (Romans 3, 9), the only thing he has demonstrated --by means of description-- are multiple concrete sins of envies, injustices, homicides, arrogances, ambitions, etcetera. (Cfr. 1, 28-32)
If we distinguish, according to the theological terminology, between the original originating sin (which according to the Yahwist does not exist) and the original originated sin (which would be the effect of the former), what Paul says is incoherent. According to him, the original originated sin consists in the sins that all men actually commit. It follows that no one can understand what Paul says without acknowledging
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that every man commits sin by himself. A thing of which God would be the only guilty one cannot be attributed to us. The truth is --as Hegel neatly understood in the Yahwist narrative-- that "the natural man is egoist [. . . ] the naturality of the will is the egoism of the will" (PR III 115s).
"The essential content is that evil as such has its foundation in the spirit, neither in an action that happened once nor in an external natu- rality common to everybody" (EGP 289).
"The content is this: by nature man is not what he ought to be. He must be spirit, but the natural being is not spirit" (PR III 106).
"The evil is no other thing that the deepen-in-itself of the natural be- ing of the spirit" (PG 539).
"To the extent that man wants the natural, this not purely natural but the negative against good" (Rph 139Z).
"Therefore, man is evil both by himself or by his nature, as well as through his reflection itself " (Rph 139A).
What the empty fantasy imagines, namely, that the first condition of man was the state of innocence, is the state of naturality, and of animality. [. . . ] Innocence means not to have will. True, one is not evil in this state, but because of that one is not good either. The natural things, the animals, are all good; but the way they are good does not correspond to man. Man must be good with his will (PR III 115).
Because of what we have said, it would be an atrocious superfici- ality to confuse the Yahwist theses of the voluntariness of being with the Pelagian heresy. What the Pelagians defended was the innocence of man. Here, on the other hand, what is affirmed is that "such state of innocence, such heavenly state, belongs to animals. Paradise is a park in which only animals can remain, not men" (WG 728).
"Innocent is, therefore, the inaction of being a stone, not even being a child" (PG 334).
As superficial as the other thesis is to believe that the natural evil- ness of man is irremediable on the grounds of the Yahvist narration; the whole rest of that narrative speaks of the cure, as one can already see in Genesis 12, 3; 18, 19. As for Hegel, the next parts of our present chapter deal exclusively with that remedy. Furthermore, the volun- tariness of the human evilness is in a way a manner of saying that it is curable.
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On the contrary, what makes this evilness incurable is not recogniz- ing its existence. The romanticism which prevails today about children and the savage man consist in that systematic blindness:
According to that opinion, what makes man being what he ought not to be can have only be produced due to external contingencies or due to his inability of not consummating his natural skills, that is to say, the lack of opportunity in the free development of them. That is the hollow opinion of the pedagogy of our time, which, on the one hand, feeds and produces conceit, and on the other hand, does not search thoroughly, does not scru- tinize in the depth of man, and hence does not produce any depth whatso- ever, but moves rather in empty circles of self-indulgence and decadence (PR III 103).
It is absolutely distressing to see how these hollow opinions con- tinue to prevail in spite of the accuracy with which Hegel denounced them and their disastrous consequences. The future of mankind is at stake, and we cannot continue to irresponsibly caress romantic and groundless apriorisms about the naturality of man! Especially now that we know we come from the animals.
Curiously enough, twenty two years after the death of Rousseau, the French found in the forest of Aveyron an unequivocal specimen of the natural man, a knave who was fourteen years old and who had not been modified either by society or by culture. Unlike other 'wolf- children' about which many stupid and unverifiable things are sill said all around the globe, Victor --as his unsuccessful educator, the acclaimed scientist Jean-Marc Itard-- was the object of systematic ob- servation by many of the best naturalists of the world of those times, naturalists whose documented testimonies have come down to us and have been recently compiled with the rigor of modern scholarship by the American investigator Harlan Lane. Before going to what really matters to us, let us make, out of curiosity, a selective extract of the observations that were drawn those days:
Man's debt to nurture proved heavy indeed, even for the most elementary sensory discriminations, reflexes, and drives: the boy was indifferent to temperature and rejected clothing even in the coldest weather; he would put his hand in a fire; his eyes did not fixate; he reached alike for painted objects, objects in relief, and the image of objects reflected in a mirror; he did not sneeze, even with snuff, nor did he weep; he did not respond to
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loud voices; he did not recognize edible food by sight, but by smell; he preferred uncooked food and had no taste for sweets or hard drink; he had no emotional ties, no sexual expression, no speech; he had a peculiar gait and would occasionally run on all fours (1979, 101); ". . . fetid odors had no disagreeable effect on him. " (126)
Let us address the question that directly concerns us. These are the words of Itard: ". . . the emotional faculties, equally slow in emerg- ing from their long torpor, are subordinated to a profound egoism" (ibid. 161).
Another acclaimed naturalist, J. J. Virey, who also studied Victor carefully in the year 1800, wrote the following lines:
It is astonishing how thoroughly this one idea absorbs him completely; he is always looking for something to eat, and he eats a lot [. . . ] is indeed fat. We might say that his mind is in his stomach; it is his life center. [. . . ] I am embarrassed to find natural man such an egoist; but I must report matters as they appeared to me. (ibid. 39)
In 1800, Virey also wrote: "His caretaker has never seen him show any sign of pity. " (ibid. 43)
I wanted to know if this child of nature would be content with his share if I put him with another person and gave them each an equal proportion of the same food - if he would respect that of his neighbor as property not belong- ing to him. But nothing of the sort transpired (ibid. 43).
The same thing is observed by Itard on the same date: ". . . he loves no one; he is attached to no one; and if he shows some preference for his caretaker, it is an expression of need and not the sentiment of grati- tude. " (Ibid. 39)
A refutation of Rousseau appeared few years after he launched to the world his prejudice in regard to natural goodness. As Hegel says, the "natural man is an egoist" (PR III 115).
By the way, we should notice that, against the Yahwist teaching that man tends to evil since his childhood, someone will probably try to entangle the facts and quote Mathew: "Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven" (Mathew, 18, 3). But that was not the original formulation of Christ. The original sentence is the one we find in Mark
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"Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein" (Mark 10, 15). The first text clearly denotes a posterior reflection of the community or of Mathew himself: in order to receive the Kingdom of Heavens as children we must become chil- dren. But that was not the idea. The idea was to receive the Kingdom as children receive things, that is to say, as the children from the villages received Jesus when he went there to announce the Kingdom: recep- tive, without prejudiced nor preformed ideas, capable of hearing some- thing truly new, with time availability, ready to follow up, leaving all other tasks aside. The original text speaks of the way of receiving, not of the way of being of children. Every specialist in the synoptic gospels knows that Mathew and Luke had before their eyes the text of Mark; in this case Luke (18, 17) preserved intact the formulation of Mark; the one that changed it was Mathew, and unfortunately, he wiped out the principal verb: to receive.
Some Bible scholars deny the historical authenticity of such phrase, let alone the formulation of Mathew. But they all agree on something: namely, that it does not speak at all about the innocence of children. For example Eduard Schweizer: "It is not about their purity or impurity" (1967, 117). And Walter Grundmann says: "Jesus does not presuppose a state of innocence in children" (1968, 207). On his part, D. E. Nine- ham says: "The point of comparison is not so much the innocence and humility [or obedience] of children" (1964, 268). Furthermore, C. E. B. Cranfield even attacks that interpretation: "To think of any subjective qualities of children here is to turn faith into a work. " (1966, 324) We could make this list much larger.
It is irresponsible to affirm the illusion about natural goodness, es- pecially now that we know that men come from the animals. Unlike in Hegel's time, today it is necessary to make focus on the biological aspect of our subject.
It may be convenient to start discussing with a great modern cham- pion of all natural will, a convinced denier of the original sin, and, to a certain point, a biological expert: Abraham H. Maslow. In his book about motivation and personality, he dedicated the ninth chapter to hold that destructivity is not instinctive in man. For that purpose, how- ever, he argues that the zoological beasts, which are apparently the most aggressive ones, do not attack motivated by pleasure but only to obtain food or defend themselves. However, he unwillingly says the following:
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