One cannot ask for more
explicit
expressions against any absorption of the human in the divine.
Hegel Was Right_nodrm
?
?
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Infinite and Distinction 151
universal, which by definition is fulfilled in the individual and identi- fies itself with it. This mediocre way out consists in declaring that the universal is not real; but that getaway is blocked by the evident fact that if it is not real it is not universal, because we cannot say that something unreal is realized in the individual.
There is nothing weird about the fact that the spirit is the meaning of the universal. If no empirical or imaginary data is universal, it follows that neither sensibility nor imagination could be the origin of the con- cept of 'universal', and hence the origin of it lies in self-consciousness. But what we know in self-consciousness is the spirit! That is the content of such concept.
By the way, it follows also that the universal and the particular identify themselves, for when the spirit knows itself by means of self- consciousness it knows himself as a self, that is, as individual. This clari- fies the explosive Hegelian thesis according to which judgments can only be true in regard to the spirit; the only thing that the judgment affirms is that the individual is universal:
It must be considered a complete lack of observation the fact that one does not points out in logics that any judgment emitted contains this assessment: "the individual is the universal" [. . . ] It is true that the determinations of individuality and universality, of subject and predicate, are distinguished, but this does not deny the general fact that any judgment declares them identical (EPW, 166A).
The contemporary logicist efforts miss the target completely when they say that the judgment only affirms that the subject is an element of a given set. We pointed out (IV, 1) that a set is not an empirical data and that it does not exist in reality. The only thing the spirit has is concepts, and only in the level of concepts one can give a meaning to every judg- ment. One has to do without the peculiar and the incidental character that the subject or the predicate of the judgment might have. Now, the common meaning to all these judgments is the one that Hegel stresses: the individual is the universal. That is the true form of the judgment: Hegel is right when he says that common logic is not formal enough in spite of its pretensions of being formal.
But let us go back to the infinite, which is our central subject. We have seen that the meaning of infinite is self-consciousness (the self), which is first and foremost self-determination since it is not determined by
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 152 Hegel was right
nature. But we said (III, 7) that self-consciousness and the conscious- ness I have of others feed each other, they make the other exist, and one can truly say that one is the being of the other: "without a thou the self is impossible"(JS 378). The most elemental analysis shows us that the meaning of infinite is self-consciousness, and if self-consciousness is essentially intersubjectivity, the very concept of infinite includes distinc- tion, that is to say, it is not a monistic and/or a pantheistic reality, as rightist and leftist superficial critics naively affirmed.
On this point, one cannot be too radical. As we have seen, one can- not give any other meaning to the word 'distinction' or 'distinct' than that which consists in intersubjectivity. It follows from this that not only the imputations of monism lack meaning completely, but also that this contribution of Hegel is one of the most revolutionary and im- portant ones ever made in the history of philosophy and in science in general (including physics, of course).
4. imputationS
If the leftist counterfeiters would have wanted to respect the rigor that science imposes, they would have put more attention to texts like the following one: "The Enlightment came from France to Germany, but with the difference that nobody dealt so openly with the dogma of such knowledge; they were twisted and turned in order to maintain the apparent respect towards religion, something that is still done now" (WG 916s).
It is clear in this text how genuine is the contempt that Hegel has against the hypocrisies that cover up and dissimulate the true ex- tent and meaning of a philosophical doctrine with the purpose of not offending certain religious instances. Besides, it is a text of Hegel's last intellectual period; it is absurd to suppose that they could impute him with the same charge he holds against them. I do not see how Findlay could possibly hold the following posture: "Though Hegel has veiled his treatment of Religion in much orthodox-sounding language, its out- come is quite clear. Theism in all its form is an imaginative distortion of final truth" (1958, 151). What we have here is this: the prestige and the huge intelligence of Hegel are so imposing that the atheists do not give up their wishes of having him on their side. One can read similar forced co-options in Kaufmann, Luka? cs, Althusser, Marx, Feuerbach, Adorno,
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 153
Koje`ve, Marcuse, Garaudy, etcetera. One does not need to make a big fuzz about this: one only has to distinguish between the publicist and the scientific genre, for the form really has to be subjected to objectivity and to the accuracy of the texts.
Since we mentioned Enlightment, it is worthwhile to read this other passage from Hegel: "Enlightment --that conceit of the abstract in- tellect-- is the fiercest enemy of Philosophy; it hinders that one makes reason patent in the Christian religion; it hinders that Philosophy demonstrates that the testimony of the spirit of truth is placed within religion" (PR III 225).
I do not believe that a careful exegesis could question the sincerity of this declaration of war against Enlightment and in favor of Christianity. If Findlay et al would have said that theism is false and that Hegel was dumb --or, in either case, that he did not see the consequences of his principles-- we would be facing a whole different problem, but to say that Hegel is only pretending is something that cannot be done if one examine texts so aggressive and militant as the last one we quoted.
This other passage says clarifying things in regard of the illuminist pandemic:
That was in the rationalistic, enlightened, and apparently rational religion, but it was nothing else than renouncing to the fundamental teachings of religion, so that everything remained in general and superficial doctrines, such as that there is a God, that a man appeared, Christ, in order to teach de divine commandments and in that sense he appeared as a divine man, et- cetera [. . . ]. A religion that is satisfied with such contents is as insipid as the belonging philosophy [. . . ]. An agreement in which everything is so squat and flattened does not satisfy the depth of religiosity or the depth of the reason that thinks (EGP 292s).
This passage does not need to be commented. Findlay and his fol- lowers lacked the scientific seriousness of the hermeneutic: that is all. There is a point which is closely linked to the subject of our present chapter in which the aforementioned gentlemen would like Hegel to change his mind: Findlay expresses it thus: "Hegel further says that, in his True Infinite, the element of Infinity will absorb and overcome the Finite, but he might equally well have put it the other way round. "
(1958, 164)
We will later see that the divine does not absorb the human; on the
contrary, the former affirms the latter and makes it exist. But Findlay
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 154 Hegel was right
and his henchmen would want Hegel to think that man was the only thing real, and that all the non-sense about the infinite and the divin- ity were absorbed by the human. They probably missed the Hegelian mockery about the Greek religion in their reading of the Phenomenology: "both gods and men did one and the same thing. The earnestness of those divine powers is a ridiculous superfluity, since they are in fact the power or strength of the individuality performing the action. " (PG 508). In contrast to the God of Christianity, Hegel mocks the Greek divinities for not having personality and real individuality: "They are, in true, endowed with the form of individuality, but this is only in imagination and does not really and truly belong to them; the actual self does not have such an abstract moment for its substance and content" (PG 517s). Let us keep into account that these two texts are in the Phenomenology, which insistently isolated unscientifically from the rest of the Hegelian work, by those who forcefully want to suck the divine into the human.
Hegel denounces that the Indian divinities also lack real subjectivity and autonomy in front of the human subject:
In his essential determination Brahma remains the abstract being, the uni- versal, the substance without subjectivity in itself; therefore, it is not concrete, it is not the spirit (just as it happens with the modern philosophers, who determine God as concrete when they call him the essence of the essences). With such content --which is in fact lack of content-- that masculinum (Brahma) is not an individual subject; the personality is in him an empty form, a personification. It is of utmost importance while studying religions to distinguish between the mere personification of a god and a god, some- thing that one can find in every mythology, and the personality, which is by content. Since personification is something superficial, the objective autono- my of the god before the subject collapses. For instance, at the beginning of the Iliad, when Eros or Pallas prevents that Achilles draws his sword, we immediately take that as the subjective feeling of love, as the good sense that makes itself present in Achilles himself (BS 186).
In its parenthesis, this passage denounces those Western men who are incapable of conceiving God as a true subject. What Hegel rejects is a divinity that lacks real autonomy in front of the human subject. What Hegel explicitly and sharply denies is the absorption that Findlay and his followers want to attribute to him.
Furthermore, Hegel accuses of atheism those Western theologians that do not conceive God as spirit.
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They accuse Spinoza of atheism when in fact the intention of Spi- noza is not to deny the existence of God but the existence of the world (acosmism). But this is true: insofar Spinoza dies not conceive God as spirit, he is an atheist in that sense, but many theologians are atheists in that sense too. "Spinozism if far from being atheism in the ordinary sense, but in so far it does not conceive God as spirit, it actually is. Now, in this sense, many atheists are theologians that only call God the omnipotent and supreme being [. . . ]" (GP III, 195), or that reduce Him, as he says in the Encyclopedia, to the "undetermined suprasen- sible" (EPW 73).
When one sees that Hegel even calls the theologians 'athetists', one realizes that the attempts of making him an atheist are only literary attempts which lack seriousness and scientific method. Hegel adds himself expressly to the aphorism "a bad philosophy draws one apart from God [. . . ] and a true philosophy draws one near Him. " (Rph XXIII) He explicitly warns us that "men did not have to wait for philosophy in order to receive the truth and awareness of it. " (PR I 299) While making history of the 3th century of our era, he approves the dictum of Tertullian: "nowadays kids know of God what only the greatest sieges of antiquity knew" (GP II 498).
Against our principle of examining the matters in itself and not the interpretative questions in regard of Hegel's mind, it has been neces- sary to make a brief pause to analyze the latter ones because, if the reader thinks that the author is pretending, all the reference points start shuddering and turn out precarious, and the intellection be- comes impossible. The idiotic accusations of atheism and pantheism have prevented the world from receiving the most profound and true philosophical message that exists. We will demonstrate now that the accusation of pantheism is false, first formally and then in its content. After we have settled some issues, it will be better to leave aside the interpretative pursuit and go to the matter itself.
With the same force with which he criticized the lack of consis- tency and true subjectivity of the mythological gods, Hegel criticizes the lack of consistency and true subjectivity of the human spirit in the non-Christian religions:
"The Parsi place the bodies of the dead exposed to the open air so that the birds would eat them; in so far as the soul goes, they thought that it thins into the universal" (WG 496). "The Indians have also a very gloomy conception, since the last stage is for them the transition to
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 156 Hegel was right
the universal substance" (WG 495). Even in Judaism "the subject does never reach to the consciousness of his autonomy; that is why we do not find among the Jews the faith in the immortality of the soul, since the subject is not existing in and by himself" (WG 457).
In contrast to this, "the Western infinitude and joy of the individual is conformed in such a way that the subject remains in the substance, that it is not debased, that he does not see himself as a slave that de- pends on the substance, destined to annihilation" (EGP 232).
"While in the oriental consciousness, the most important thing lies in the fact that the universal is the truly independent, for us in the Western consciousness the individuality of things and of men is beyond everything" (PR II, I, 128).
In the oriental religions the fundamental situation is that only the true substance as such is what is true and the individual does not have any value at all in himself; he cannot get if while he remains in front of that which is in and by its own; the individual can only have value if he identifies himself with that substance in which he ceases to be an object and fades away into unconsciousness (GP I 140).
To tell the truth, these formal statements of immortality and of true subjectivity point already to the content that decides everything: the only thing on which the accusers of pantheism should focus is if indi- vidual self-consciousness is preserved or not. Every other lucubration ends up confusing spirit with matter:
"The Greeks did not seriously take into account what we call immortality" (A? sth II 572).
On the contrary, according to the Christian conception, "it is the in- dividual, the real subject, in its intern vitality, what has infinite value" (A? sth II 568).
"Plato did not know how to acknowledge or to conciliate with his ideas the willing, the wanting and choosing of the individual" (GP II 129). "One cannot say that Greeks understood death in its essential mean-
ing (A? sth II 571).
According to Hegel, the conception of the Easterners incarnated in
the system of Spinoza reappears in the Western world: "It is the orien- tal conception which is formulated by Spinoza in the Western world for the first time" (GP III 165). And Hegel says the following of that philosophical system:
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What one can reproach to that philosophy is that it conceives God only as substance, not as spirit, not as concrete. The autonomy of the human soul is thereby denied; in the Christian religion every individual is conceived as destined to joy. Here, on the other hand, the individual of the spirit is only a modus, an accident, something which is not substantial (GP III 196).
One cannot ask for more explicit expressions against any absorption of the human in the divine. And they are in the core itself of the Hege- lian system, namely, in the difference between the concept of substance and the concept of spirit. Hegel would have wondered himself about the language one should employ in order to be understood.
5. diStinction
Let us go to the problem itself. Something really simple has happened: those who accuse Hegel of pantheism believe that they can establish a distinction between God and the creature that Hegel cannot establish, but neither they nor Physics --nor common-sensed people, for that matter-- have realized that the only possible meaning of the term dis- tinction is the one presented and defended by Hegel. And the same goes for the words identity and individuality. Fortunately enough --ma- terially constrained by the experiments themselves-- quantum physics has started to question if these expressions have any physical meaning at all. Scientists would have spared themselves an entire century had they read Hegel more carefully.
"According to the concept, the distinction does not have any physi- cal meaning at all" (GP I 206).
"In the sensible things there is no true objective distinction, only in the spiritual" (GP I 315).
"What is not distinguished in thought is not distinguished" (GP III 246).
Everything becomes clearer once we realize that it is impossible to give an empirical meaning to the word distinction or distinct. It follows from this that one obtains the meaning of this concept through self- consciousness. But self-consciousness is intersubjectivity (cfr III, 7), distinction among people. The original meaning must consist in "vital and spiritual relations" (WL I 335).
The most frequent (and funny) thing is to believe that the distinction between two beings consists in that one is 'here' and the other is 'there',
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 158 Hegel was right
believing one can pinpoint them with his own finger. It is ridiculous that whoever talks this way believes he has given an empirical mean- ing to the word distinction.
But so it turns out that Gorbachev and Reagan are not distinct, since they are not in the places pointed out by the finger.
These empirical tricksters would answer: I am not referring exactly to the two places I am pointing at, but to two different places, regard- less of which ones they are.
The reader perceives immediately that what we are given is not an empirical sign but a phrase, and that our definer has failed in his attempt of indicating an empirical data as the meaning of the word distinction. And something even worse has happened: he is saying that being consists in being at two different places. The definiendum reap- pears in the word different, which was what one tried to define in the first place. This dictum pretends to be a manual book that tells us how to find out if there is distinction or not, but in order to be effective the manual book itself requires to be previously understood, and for that to happen the word "distinct" has to have a meaning first, but the whole enterprise had as its very purpose finding that meaning! Con- sequently, we are just like in the beginning, and the allegedly empiric maneuver has proved to be barren.
What such a definer is saying is that the distinction is a visual data, for he supposes that one only needs to opens his eyes to verify it. But if that were so, one could not distinguish two sounds, two smells, two flavors, etcetera. Likewise, the electrons could not be distinct from each other, since they are not visible; and that certainly goes against the intentions of our definer. Needless to say: theologians could not use that distinction in order to say that God and the human spirit are distinct.
Even if we do without the visibility, it is well known in Physics that two electromagnetic fields could be present at the same point of space. According to our definer, these two electromagnetic fields could not be distinct. But in the present context the visibility is decisive, and it is important to notice that the visible limits of a body --its empirical distinction in respect to other bodies, so to speak-- are not reliable data in the natural sciences at all, since the constitutive fields of this body go far beyond the allegedly visible limits of it and even penetrate the zone of space occupied by other bodies. Therefore, the alleged visible distinction cannot be the real distinction by any means.
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But those who try to give an empirical meaning to the word distinct by means of 'here' and 'there' incur even in a bigger mistake. The 'here' is so metaphysical and unempirical as Newton's absolute space and, in fact, as any other space. When someone thinks that he is seeing the space that separates him from the wall before him, what he is seeing is the wall before him, not the space. The space is invisible, and a point within space is even more invisible, for that matter. The 'here' is a point or a region in space; but none of these things are seen. And if someone believes that he can touch the space with his hands, the only thing one can tell him is that he is not touching anything. If our definer pretended to attribute an empirical meaning to the distinction by a 'here' and a 'there', his failure could not be more disastrous.
Besides, if our definer reflects a little, he has to recognize that the idea 'two beings really distinguish themselves' is not the same as the idea 'this being is here and the other being is there'. As Hegel says: "In the here and now as such does not consist the distinction" (GP I 315). Let us make the following question to clarify this: if two beings identify themselves with each other, would they cease to be two bodies? The fact itself that we understand this question implies that being distinct is not the same as being in different places, for we understand the dif- ference between two bodies occupying the same space and two bodies identifying themselves with each other. Even he, who is inclined to respond affirmatively to the question, has to understand it first: this implies that the meanings of 'identifying' and 'being one body' are not the same. Now, this will do: the meaning of distinction supposedly consisted in being at different places, and we have proved that this is not the case.
The same question we made with regard to identity, one should ask it in regard of a 'twofold location'. The question would be: if a body were at two places simultaneously, would it cease to be the same body? The simple fact that the question is intelligible implies that 'being at two different places' does not mean 'being two and not one'. I owe anthro- pologist Leslie White the following information: ". . . it may be remarked that normal children and many primitive peoples find nothing wrong with the notion that a body can be in two different places at the same time" (1964, 279 n. ). This fact will do to demonstrate that the notion itself of being at two different places does not mean two different bodies.
In addition, one should know that the true extent of the experiment of Young and Taylor --to which we will refer later on-- is that terms
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like distinction, individuality and identity do not have any meaning in Physics. An example of this is that an electron can be in two places at the same time. Many physics would want to reject this. They reject exactly what they understand. It follows that the concept of two and not one, that is to say, the concept of distinction, does not mean to be in two places at the same time. Let's repeat with Hegel: "In the here and now as such, it does not consist distinction" (GP I 315)
6. individuaLity
Now, if the concept of distinction does not have an empirical meaning, the concept of individuality and identity do not have it too, for it is obvious that individuality implies that a being is distinct from other beings, and identity implies that a being is not distinct from itself. By some way or another, the concept of distinction enters into the defini- tions of individuality and identity, terms whose meaning is not empiri- cal. And vice versa: the distinction between two beings consists in that they are not identical. If some of these concepts are unempirical, then all of them are. This is precisely relevant in regard to the attempts of defining individuality through the localization in space: the individu- ality of a being does not mean that this being is 'here' and not 'there'.
The physic Bernard d'Espagnat has drawn some systematic observa- tions from Jean Piaget about the epistemological development of babies --conclusions that are undeniable in this sense. To identify the identity and the individuality of an object with certain localization in space is a practical construction that is useful to the kid in order to coordinate his movements and to integrate his early 'vision' of the world'. It is an implicit assumption that the baby makes to orient himself, but this does not have a greater probability than the contrary assumption. "This shows", according to d'Espagnat, "that the idea according to which any macroscopic object necessarily occupies some definite region of space --to the exclusion of other regions-- is not an obvious (and hence unquestionable) truth, but rather an element of the definition, useful in given circumstances, of the word 'object'. " (1976, xx)
Alongside the psychological developments of Piaget, one could recourse to the undeterministc physics of Heisenberg, Bohr and Von Neumann, which fortunately does not find today serious opponents among physics. D'Espagnat affirms:
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. . . the fact that the notion of localized objects is but a construct liberates us from the so-called commonsense view [. . . ] according to which individual macroscopic objects obviously --and therefore necessarily-- exist as indi- viduals independently of ourselves; hence it liberates us from the apparent necessity of considering them as more basic than numbers, logical struc- tures, and so on. (ibid. , xxi)
We have to point out "as individuals" we are not dealing with the existence of material.
Physics could have spared themselves the detour that goes through Heisenberg and Schro? dinger (and Piaget) if they had read the section about the sense-certainty at the beginning of the Phenomenology. The 'here' and the 'now' only manage to denote something individual if we understand them in function of the subject that pronounces this words. They express thus
"our intention" (unsere Meinung), as commentators like Lauer, Mure, Bon- siepen and Heinrich have very well understood. Therefore, to attribute an individuality to the material objects that does not depend on the knowing subject, not only means to draw a gratuitous and empirically unjustifiable stamen like that of absolute space, but is in fact a statement that lacks all sense whatsoever. Hegel says "there is no distinction between the atoms" (GP I 362).
"Spirit is, in a much deeper sense, this one thing" (WL II 121).
Two things are important: the concept of identity and individuality lack empirical meaning, and to predicate both things of material things is a thesis which has no meaning.
Hume already remarked the first point: First, "As to the principle of individuation; we may observe, that the view of any one object is not sufficient to convey the idea of identity [. . . ] On the other hand, a multi- plicity of objects can never convey this idea, however resembling they may be supposed" (Treatise I, IV, ii). The last thing is obvious; the simi- larity is not only identity but negation of identity; in order to be alike, the objects need to be two and not one. But the vision of a sole object does not suffice either to evoke in the mind the idea of identity: this is a very abstract contribution on account of the intellect. If we explain to a farm worker what we want to say, he would agree with us in that the rock we have before is identical to itself and is individual, but he would have not come up with such a round-about idea despite he has been
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 162 Hegel was right
seeing that rock for years. In fact, despite how much time we spend observing an object, none of its colors, forms or visible details denote identity or individuality: "the one cannot be seen, it is an abstractum of thought" (GP I 358).
"The word this expresses precisely that distinguishing and sin- gling out something is a subjective designation, which lacks something outside from itself" (WL I 104).
It is frequent and coarse to believe that the individuality of a macroscopic object consists in its having visible and palpable limits that distinguish it from other objects. But we said that the existence of fields and forces that constitute each body go far beyond such empiri- cal limits. This refutes by itself such a belief. In regard to the identity of a body across the course of time, it is obvious that senses only witness at best that the body is exactly the same. That it is in fact the 'same' than a minute ago. This is something that empirical impressions do not tell us. Selfsameness is an idea tremendously metaphysical idea, a re- fined contribution of which the senses know nothing; an (ungrounded) projection towards the material of the self-sameness of the knowing subject, in which the word selfsameness does have sense.
If the observed body would have ceased to exist, and if in its place an exactly same body started to exist, the testimony of the senses would not vary at all. This demonstrates that the senses do not know anything about identity and individuality.
Besides, what difference would there be between a body that remained the same and a body that was replaced by other? The selfsameness of the material does not have any meaning at all. I am not only saying that our empirical perception would not notice anything; I am saying that it is completely indifferent that the body has been substituted for another, and consequently, I affirm that we are extrapolating a concept to the physical that has only meaning in self-consciousness, intersubjectivity and morals. That matter is a principle of individuation is one of the most foolish things that have ever been said in the history of thought. It was originated in the illusion of the localization that was dispelled above. Karl Rahner, the most intelligent Scholastic of our century, re- jected this impossible doctrine:
"Moreover, identity is given to us, now and in the future, by the iden- tity of the spiritual subject of freedom called soul" (Schriften XII 461s). The macroscopic is apparent. Its origin is the subjectivist peculiarity of our senses. If the material possessed identity and individuality, this
? ? ? ? ? ? ?
universal, which by definition is fulfilled in the individual and identi- fies itself with it. This mediocre way out consists in declaring that the universal is not real; but that getaway is blocked by the evident fact that if it is not real it is not universal, because we cannot say that something unreal is realized in the individual.
There is nothing weird about the fact that the spirit is the meaning of the universal. If no empirical or imaginary data is universal, it follows that neither sensibility nor imagination could be the origin of the con- cept of 'universal', and hence the origin of it lies in self-consciousness. But what we know in self-consciousness is the spirit! That is the content of such concept.
By the way, it follows also that the universal and the particular identify themselves, for when the spirit knows itself by means of self- consciousness it knows himself as a self, that is, as individual. This clari- fies the explosive Hegelian thesis according to which judgments can only be true in regard to the spirit; the only thing that the judgment affirms is that the individual is universal:
It must be considered a complete lack of observation the fact that one does not points out in logics that any judgment emitted contains this assessment: "the individual is the universal" [. . . ] It is true that the determinations of individuality and universality, of subject and predicate, are distinguished, but this does not deny the general fact that any judgment declares them identical (EPW, 166A).
The contemporary logicist efforts miss the target completely when they say that the judgment only affirms that the subject is an element of a given set. We pointed out (IV, 1) that a set is not an empirical data and that it does not exist in reality. The only thing the spirit has is concepts, and only in the level of concepts one can give a meaning to every judg- ment. One has to do without the peculiar and the incidental character that the subject or the predicate of the judgment might have. Now, the common meaning to all these judgments is the one that Hegel stresses: the individual is the universal. That is the true form of the judgment: Hegel is right when he says that common logic is not formal enough in spite of its pretensions of being formal.
But let us go back to the infinite, which is our central subject. We have seen that the meaning of infinite is self-consciousness (the self), which is first and foremost self-determination since it is not determined by
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 152 Hegel was right
nature. But we said (III, 7) that self-consciousness and the conscious- ness I have of others feed each other, they make the other exist, and one can truly say that one is the being of the other: "without a thou the self is impossible"(JS 378). The most elemental analysis shows us that the meaning of infinite is self-consciousness, and if self-consciousness is essentially intersubjectivity, the very concept of infinite includes distinc- tion, that is to say, it is not a monistic and/or a pantheistic reality, as rightist and leftist superficial critics naively affirmed.
On this point, one cannot be too radical. As we have seen, one can- not give any other meaning to the word 'distinction' or 'distinct' than that which consists in intersubjectivity. It follows from this that not only the imputations of monism lack meaning completely, but also that this contribution of Hegel is one of the most revolutionary and im- portant ones ever made in the history of philosophy and in science in general (including physics, of course).
4. imputationS
If the leftist counterfeiters would have wanted to respect the rigor that science imposes, they would have put more attention to texts like the following one: "The Enlightment came from France to Germany, but with the difference that nobody dealt so openly with the dogma of such knowledge; they were twisted and turned in order to maintain the apparent respect towards religion, something that is still done now" (WG 916s).
It is clear in this text how genuine is the contempt that Hegel has against the hypocrisies that cover up and dissimulate the true ex- tent and meaning of a philosophical doctrine with the purpose of not offending certain religious instances. Besides, it is a text of Hegel's last intellectual period; it is absurd to suppose that they could impute him with the same charge he holds against them. I do not see how Findlay could possibly hold the following posture: "Though Hegel has veiled his treatment of Religion in much orthodox-sounding language, its out- come is quite clear. Theism in all its form is an imaginative distortion of final truth" (1958, 151). What we have here is this: the prestige and the huge intelligence of Hegel are so imposing that the atheists do not give up their wishes of having him on their side. One can read similar forced co-options in Kaufmann, Luka? cs, Althusser, Marx, Feuerbach, Adorno,
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 153
Koje`ve, Marcuse, Garaudy, etcetera. One does not need to make a big fuzz about this: one only has to distinguish between the publicist and the scientific genre, for the form really has to be subjected to objectivity and to the accuracy of the texts.
Since we mentioned Enlightment, it is worthwhile to read this other passage from Hegel: "Enlightment --that conceit of the abstract in- tellect-- is the fiercest enemy of Philosophy; it hinders that one makes reason patent in the Christian religion; it hinders that Philosophy demonstrates that the testimony of the spirit of truth is placed within religion" (PR III 225).
I do not believe that a careful exegesis could question the sincerity of this declaration of war against Enlightment and in favor of Christianity. If Findlay et al would have said that theism is false and that Hegel was dumb --or, in either case, that he did not see the consequences of his principles-- we would be facing a whole different problem, but to say that Hegel is only pretending is something that cannot be done if one examine texts so aggressive and militant as the last one we quoted.
This other passage says clarifying things in regard of the illuminist pandemic:
That was in the rationalistic, enlightened, and apparently rational religion, but it was nothing else than renouncing to the fundamental teachings of religion, so that everything remained in general and superficial doctrines, such as that there is a God, that a man appeared, Christ, in order to teach de divine commandments and in that sense he appeared as a divine man, et- cetera [. . . ]. A religion that is satisfied with such contents is as insipid as the belonging philosophy [. . . ]. An agreement in which everything is so squat and flattened does not satisfy the depth of religiosity or the depth of the reason that thinks (EGP 292s).
This passage does not need to be commented. Findlay and his fol- lowers lacked the scientific seriousness of the hermeneutic: that is all. There is a point which is closely linked to the subject of our present chapter in which the aforementioned gentlemen would like Hegel to change his mind: Findlay expresses it thus: "Hegel further says that, in his True Infinite, the element of Infinity will absorb and overcome the Finite, but he might equally well have put it the other way round. "
(1958, 164)
We will later see that the divine does not absorb the human; on the
contrary, the former affirms the latter and makes it exist. But Findlay
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and his henchmen would want Hegel to think that man was the only thing real, and that all the non-sense about the infinite and the divin- ity were absorbed by the human. They probably missed the Hegelian mockery about the Greek religion in their reading of the Phenomenology: "both gods and men did one and the same thing. The earnestness of those divine powers is a ridiculous superfluity, since they are in fact the power or strength of the individuality performing the action. " (PG 508). In contrast to the God of Christianity, Hegel mocks the Greek divinities for not having personality and real individuality: "They are, in true, endowed with the form of individuality, but this is only in imagination and does not really and truly belong to them; the actual self does not have such an abstract moment for its substance and content" (PG 517s). Let us keep into account that these two texts are in the Phenomenology, which insistently isolated unscientifically from the rest of the Hegelian work, by those who forcefully want to suck the divine into the human.
Hegel denounces that the Indian divinities also lack real subjectivity and autonomy in front of the human subject:
In his essential determination Brahma remains the abstract being, the uni- versal, the substance without subjectivity in itself; therefore, it is not concrete, it is not the spirit (just as it happens with the modern philosophers, who determine God as concrete when they call him the essence of the essences). With such content --which is in fact lack of content-- that masculinum (Brahma) is not an individual subject; the personality is in him an empty form, a personification. It is of utmost importance while studying religions to distinguish between the mere personification of a god and a god, some- thing that one can find in every mythology, and the personality, which is by content. Since personification is something superficial, the objective autono- my of the god before the subject collapses. For instance, at the beginning of the Iliad, when Eros or Pallas prevents that Achilles draws his sword, we immediately take that as the subjective feeling of love, as the good sense that makes itself present in Achilles himself (BS 186).
In its parenthesis, this passage denounces those Western men who are incapable of conceiving God as a true subject. What Hegel rejects is a divinity that lacks real autonomy in front of the human subject. What Hegel explicitly and sharply denies is the absorption that Findlay and his followers want to attribute to him.
Furthermore, Hegel accuses of atheism those Western theologians that do not conceive God as spirit.
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They accuse Spinoza of atheism when in fact the intention of Spi- noza is not to deny the existence of God but the existence of the world (acosmism). But this is true: insofar Spinoza dies not conceive God as spirit, he is an atheist in that sense, but many theologians are atheists in that sense too. "Spinozism if far from being atheism in the ordinary sense, but in so far it does not conceive God as spirit, it actually is. Now, in this sense, many atheists are theologians that only call God the omnipotent and supreme being [. . . ]" (GP III, 195), or that reduce Him, as he says in the Encyclopedia, to the "undetermined suprasen- sible" (EPW 73).
When one sees that Hegel even calls the theologians 'athetists', one realizes that the attempts of making him an atheist are only literary attempts which lack seriousness and scientific method. Hegel adds himself expressly to the aphorism "a bad philosophy draws one apart from God [. . . ] and a true philosophy draws one near Him. " (Rph XXIII) He explicitly warns us that "men did not have to wait for philosophy in order to receive the truth and awareness of it. " (PR I 299) While making history of the 3th century of our era, he approves the dictum of Tertullian: "nowadays kids know of God what only the greatest sieges of antiquity knew" (GP II 498).
Against our principle of examining the matters in itself and not the interpretative questions in regard of Hegel's mind, it has been neces- sary to make a brief pause to analyze the latter ones because, if the reader thinks that the author is pretending, all the reference points start shuddering and turn out precarious, and the intellection be- comes impossible. The idiotic accusations of atheism and pantheism have prevented the world from receiving the most profound and true philosophical message that exists. We will demonstrate now that the accusation of pantheism is false, first formally and then in its content. After we have settled some issues, it will be better to leave aside the interpretative pursuit and go to the matter itself.
With the same force with which he criticized the lack of consis- tency and true subjectivity of the mythological gods, Hegel criticizes the lack of consistency and true subjectivity of the human spirit in the non-Christian religions:
"The Parsi place the bodies of the dead exposed to the open air so that the birds would eat them; in so far as the soul goes, they thought that it thins into the universal" (WG 496). "The Indians have also a very gloomy conception, since the last stage is for them the transition to
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 156 Hegel was right
the universal substance" (WG 495). Even in Judaism "the subject does never reach to the consciousness of his autonomy; that is why we do not find among the Jews the faith in the immortality of the soul, since the subject is not existing in and by himself" (WG 457).
In contrast to this, "the Western infinitude and joy of the individual is conformed in such a way that the subject remains in the substance, that it is not debased, that he does not see himself as a slave that de- pends on the substance, destined to annihilation" (EGP 232).
"While in the oriental consciousness, the most important thing lies in the fact that the universal is the truly independent, for us in the Western consciousness the individuality of things and of men is beyond everything" (PR II, I, 128).
In the oriental religions the fundamental situation is that only the true substance as such is what is true and the individual does not have any value at all in himself; he cannot get if while he remains in front of that which is in and by its own; the individual can only have value if he identifies himself with that substance in which he ceases to be an object and fades away into unconsciousness (GP I 140).
To tell the truth, these formal statements of immortality and of true subjectivity point already to the content that decides everything: the only thing on which the accusers of pantheism should focus is if indi- vidual self-consciousness is preserved or not. Every other lucubration ends up confusing spirit with matter:
"The Greeks did not seriously take into account what we call immortality" (A? sth II 572).
On the contrary, according to the Christian conception, "it is the in- dividual, the real subject, in its intern vitality, what has infinite value" (A? sth II 568).
"Plato did not know how to acknowledge or to conciliate with his ideas the willing, the wanting and choosing of the individual" (GP II 129). "One cannot say that Greeks understood death in its essential mean-
ing (A? sth II 571).
According to Hegel, the conception of the Easterners incarnated in
the system of Spinoza reappears in the Western world: "It is the orien- tal conception which is formulated by Spinoza in the Western world for the first time" (GP III 165). And Hegel says the following of that philosophical system:
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 157
What one can reproach to that philosophy is that it conceives God only as substance, not as spirit, not as concrete. The autonomy of the human soul is thereby denied; in the Christian religion every individual is conceived as destined to joy. Here, on the other hand, the individual of the spirit is only a modus, an accident, something which is not substantial (GP III 196).
One cannot ask for more explicit expressions against any absorption of the human in the divine. And they are in the core itself of the Hege- lian system, namely, in the difference between the concept of substance and the concept of spirit. Hegel would have wondered himself about the language one should employ in order to be understood.
5. diStinction
Let us go to the problem itself. Something really simple has happened: those who accuse Hegel of pantheism believe that they can establish a distinction between God and the creature that Hegel cannot establish, but neither they nor Physics --nor common-sensed people, for that matter-- have realized that the only possible meaning of the term dis- tinction is the one presented and defended by Hegel. And the same goes for the words identity and individuality. Fortunately enough --ma- terially constrained by the experiments themselves-- quantum physics has started to question if these expressions have any physical meaning at all. Scientists would have spared themselves an entire century had they read Hegel more carefully.
"According to the concept, the distinction does not have any physi- cal meaning at all" (GP I 206).
"In the sensible things there is no true objective distinction, only in the spiritual" (GP I 315).
"What is not distinguished in thought is not distinguished" (GP III 246).
Everything becomes clearer once we realize that it is impossible to give an empirical meaning to the word distinction or distinct. It follows from this that one obtains the meaning of this concept through self- consciousness. But self-consciousness is intersubjectivity (cfr III, 7), distinction among people. The original meaning must consist in "vital and spiritual relations" (WL I 335).
The most frequent (and funny) thing is to believe that the distinction between two beings consists in that one is 'here' and the other is 'there',
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believing one can pinpoint them with his own finger. It is ridiculous that whoever talks this way believes he has given an empirical mean- ing to the word distinction.
But so it turns out that Gorbachev and Reagan are not distinct, since they are not in the places pointed out by the finger.
These empirical tricksters would answer: I am not referring exactly to the two places I am pointing at, but to two different places, regard- less of which ones they are.
The reader perceives immediately that what we are given is not an empirical sign but a phrase, and that our definer has failed in his attempt of indicating an empirical data as the meaning of the word distinction. And something even worse has happened: he is saying that being consists in being at two different places. The definiendum reap- pears in the word different, which was what one tried to define in the first place. This dictum pretends to be a manual book that tells us how to find out if there is distinction or not, but in order to be effective the manual book itself requires to be previously understood, and for that to happen the word "distinct" has to have a meaning first, but the whole enterprise had as its very purpose finding that meaning! Con- sequently, we are just like in the beginning, and the allegedly empiric maneuver has proved to be barren.
What such a definer is saying is that the distinction is a visual data, for he supposes that one only needs to opens his eyes to verify it. But if that were so, one could not distinguish two sounds, two smells, two flavors, etcetera. Likewise, the electrons could not be distinct from each other, since they are not visible; and that certainly goes against the intentions of our definer. Needless to say: theologians could not use that distinction in order to say that God and the human spirit are distinct.
Even if we do without the visibility, it is well known in Physics that two electromagnetic fields could be present at the same point of space. According to our definer, these two electromagnetic fields could not be distinct. But in the present context the visibility is decisive, and it is important to notice that the visible limits of a body --its empirical distinction in respect to other bodies, so to speak-- are not reliable data in the natural sciences at all, since the constitutive fields of this body go far beyond the allegedly visible limits of it and even penetrate the zone of space occupied by other bodies. Therefore, the alleged visible distinction cannot be the real distinction by any means.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 159
But those who try to give an empirical meaning to the word distinct by means of 'here' and 'there' incur even in a bigger mistake. The 'here' is so metaphysical and unempirical as Newton's absolute space and, in fact, as any other space. When someone thinks that he is seeing the space that separates him from the wall before him, what he is seeing is the wall before him, not the space. The space is invisible, and a point within space is even more invisible, for that matter. The 'here' is a point or a region in space; but none of these things are seen. And if someone believes that he can touch the space with his hands, the only thing one can tell him is that he is not touching anything. If our definer pretended to attribute an empirical meaning to the distinction by a 'here' and a 'there', his failure could not be more disastrous.
Besides, if our definer reflects a little, he has to recognize that the idea 'two beings really distinguish themselves' is not the same as the idea 'this being is here and the other being is there'. As Hegel says: "In the here and now as such does not consist the distinction" (GP I 315). Let us make the following question to clarify this: if two beings identify themselves with each other, would they cease to be two bodies? The fact itself that we understand this question implies that being distinct is not the same as being in different places, for we understand the dif- ference between two bodies occupying the same space and two bodies identifying themselves with each other. Even he, who is inclined to respond affirmatively to the question, has to understand it first: this implies that the meanings of 'identifying' and 'being one body' are not the same. Now, this will do: the meaning of distinction supposedly consisted in being at different places, and we have proved that this is not the case.
The same question we made with regard to identity, one should ask it in regard of a 'twofold location'. The question would be: if a body were at two places simultaneously, would it cease to be the same body? The simple fact that the question is intelligible implies that 'being at two different places' does not mean 'being two and not one'. I owe anthro- pologist Leslie White the following information: ". . . it may be remarked that normal children and many primitive peoples find nothing wrong with the notion that a body can be in two different places at the same time" (1964, 279 n. ). This fact will do to demonstrate that the notion itself of being at two different places does not mean two different bodies.
In addition, one should know that the true extent of the experiment of Young and Taylor --to which we will refer later on-- is that terms
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 160 Hegel was right
like distinction, individuality and identity do not have any meaning in Physics. An example of this is that an electron can be in two places at the same time. Many physics would want to reject this. They reject exactly what they understand. It follows that the concept of two and not one, that is to say, the concept of distinction, does not mean to be in two places at the same time. Let's repeat with Hegel: "In the here and now as such, it does not consist distinction" (GP I 315)
6. individuaLity
Now, if the concept of distinction does not have an empirical meaning, the concept of individuality and identity do not have it too, for it is obvious that individuality implies that a being is distinct from other beings, and identity implies that a being is not distinct from itself. By some way or another, the concept of distinction enters into the defini- tions of individuality and identity, terms whose meaning is not empiri- cal. And vice versa: the distinction between two beings consists in that they are not identical. If some of these concepts are unempirical, then all of them are. This is precisely relevant in regard to the attempts of defining individuality through the localization in space: the individu- ality of a being does not mean that this being is 'here' and not 'there'.
The physic Bernard d'Espagnat has drawn some systematic observa- tions from Jean Piaget about the epistemological development of babies --conclusions that are undeniable in this sense. To identify the identity and the individuality of an object with certain localization in space is a practical construction that is useful to the kid in order to coordinate his movements and to integrate his early 'vision' of the world'. It is an implicit assumption that the baby makes to orient himself, but this does not have a greater probability than the contrary assumption. "This shows", according to d'Espagnat, "that the idea according to which any macroscopic object necessarily occupies some definite region of space --to the exclusion of other regions-- is not an obvious (and hence unquestionable) truth, but rather an element of the definition, useful in given circumstances, of the word 'object'. " (1976, xx)
Alongside the psychological developments of Piaget, one could recourse to the undeterministc physics of Heisenberg, Bohr and Von Neumann, which fortunately does not find today serious opponents among physics. D'Espagnat affirms:
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Infinite and Distinction 161
. . . the fact that the notion of localized objects is but a construct liberates us from the so-called commonsense view [. . . ] according to which individual macroscopic objects obviously --and therefore necessarily-- exist as indi- viduals independently of ourselves; hence it liberates us from the apparent necessity of considering them as more basic than numbers, logical struc- tures, and so on. (ibid. , xxi)
We have to point out "as individuals" we are not dealing with the existence of material.
Physics could have spared themselves the detour that goes through Heisenberg and Schro? dinger (and Piaget) if they had read the section about the sense-certainty at the beginning of the Phenomenology. The 'here' and the 'now' only manage to denote something individual if we understand them in function of the subject that pronounces this words. They express thus
"our intention" (unsere Meinung), as commentators like Lauer, Mure, Bon- siepen and Heinrich have very well understood. Therefore, to attribute an individuality to the material objects that does not depend on the knowing subject, not only means to draw a gratuitous and empirically unjustifiable stamen like that of absolute space, but is in fact a statement that lacks all sense whatsoever. Hegel says "there is no distinction between the atoms" (GP I 362).
"Spirit is, in a much deeper sense, this one thing" (WL II 121).
Two things are important: the concept of identity and individuality lack empirical meaning, and to predicate both things of material things is a thesis which has no meaning.
Hume already remarked the first point: First, "As to the principle of individuation; we may observe, that the view of any one object is not sufficient to convey the idea of identity [. . . ] On the other hand, a multi- plicity of objects can never convey this idea, however resembling they may be supposed" (Treatise I, IV, ii). The last thing is obvious; the simi- larity is not only identity but negation of identity; in order to be alike, the objects need to be two and not one. But the vision of a sole object does not suffice either to evoke in the mind the idea of identity: this is a very abstract contribution on account of the intellect. If we explain to a farm worker what we want to say, he would agree with us in that the rock we have before is identical to itself and is individual, but he would have not come up with such a round-about idea despite he has been
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 162 Hegel was right
seeing that rock for years. In fact, despite how much time we spend observing an object, none of its colors, forms or visible details denote identity or individuality: "the one cannot be seen, it is an abstractum of thought" (GP I 358).
"The word this expresses precisely that distinguishing and sin- gling out something is a subjective designation, which lacks something outside from itself" (WL I 104).
It is frequent and coarse to believe that the individuality of a macroscopic object consists in its having visible and palpable limits that distinguish it from other objects. But we said that the existence of fields and forces that constitute each body go far beyond such empiri- cal limits. This refutes by itself such a belief. In regard to the identity of a body across the course of time, it is obvious that senses only witness at best that the body is exactly the same. That it is in fact the 'same' than a minute ago. This is something that empirical impressions do not tell us. Selfsameness is an idea tremendously metaphysical idea, a re- fined contribution of which the senses know nothing; an (ungrounded) projection towards the material of the self-sameness of the knowing subject, in which the word selfsameness does have sense.
If the observed body would have ceased to exist, and if in its place an exactly same body started to exist, the testimony of the senses would not vary at all. This demonstrates that the senses do not know anything about identity and individuality.
Besides, what difference would there be between a body that remained the same and a body that was replaced by other? The selfsameness of the material does not have any meaning at all. I am not only saying that our empirical perception would not notice anything; I am saying that it is completely indifferent that the body has been substituted for another, and consequently, I affirm that we are extrapolating a concept to the physical that has only meaning in self-consciousness, intersubjectivity and morals. That matter is a principle of individuation is one of the most foolish things that have ever been said in the history of thought. It was originated in the illusion of the localization that was dispelled above. Karl Rahner, the most intelligent Scholastic of our century, re- jected this impossible doctrine:
"Moreover, identity is given to us, now and in the future, by the iden- tity of the spiritual subject of freedom called soul" (Schriften XII 461s). The macroscopic is apparent. Its origin is the subjectivist peculiarity of our senses. If the material possessed identity and individuality, this
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