No More Learning

In order to grasp this thesis we must understand the Hegelian news we just mentioned. First of all, we must realize that there is news and that "our time is a time of birth and a transition to a new period" (PG 15): today we can resist the siege of a genuine artwork by saying that, after all, it is only Art. One must still find out if its message is genuinely compelling due to its truth: "the impression that artworks provoke nowadays is of a more sober kind; what they arouse in us still requires a higher criterion and a different testimony" (A? sth I 48). The moment of scientific exigency has come; that is the teaching of the Phe- nomenology: "It is this coming to be of knowledge or science as such what is described in the Phenomenology of Spirit. " (PG 26)
Because they did not understand this, critics thought that the above mentioned Hegelian thesis of Art foretold the very end of it, at least in the sense that there would not be superior realizations than those of the artists of the Greek Antiquity, the Middle-Ages and the Renaissance. The next paragraph would have sufficed to make them see the truth: "Certainly, we can expect further developments and perfections in the field of arts, but the form of Art is no longer our supreme necessity". (A? sth I 170). Our supreme necessity is truth, and therefore science, for science demonstrates how much truth or falseness there is in some- thing. It has taken entire millenniums of maturing and efforts for humanity to reach a stage of rationality which consists in adopting a
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 18 Hegel was right
conception only if its truth is demonstrated; fortunately enough, we have reached that stage.
Philosophy is not against Art; let us say that loud and clear; the truth of the matter is that the exigency of truth is something much more su- perior and, fortunately again, that it is something we can formulate. There is a possibility that John Hospers may be right:
Art provides the most intense, concentrated, and sharply focused of the experiences available to man. Because of this, art can have an enormous influence on the tenor of a person's life, more influential no doubt than any particular system of morality. (EB 25, 719, 1)
On the other hand, Hospers himself will not deny that today's relativism can stir the foundations of any masterpiece. Even though Jean Valjean perceives the sublime depths of the duty towards his neighbors and fulfills it by sacrificing everything without hesitation, the skeptic would say: "How foolish, honesty is but a prejudice, that conduct is very beautiful but suits Valejan only, each one has his own tastes, one would have to demonstrate that such conduct is better than its contrary and that it is obligatory. " Against relativism the only effective weapon is science, but only science that goes deep down into the depths of truth. On the other hand, due to the intrinsic irratio- nality attached to this conduct, it is unacceptable that one ignores if a worldview is true or false. It is not enough that an intensively beau- tiful conduct overwhelms us; it is not absolute unless it is demonstrat- ed. Hegel says "it is useless; we do not longer kneel before (beauty)" (A? sth I 170)
When there are no reasons, one appeals to feeling. He who proceeds thus must be left speaking alone, since he goes back to the unity of his peculiar- ity, which must remain unaltered. When he appeals to his own feeling, the interrelation with us is broken. On the contrary, with thinking and concepts, we are in the field of universality, rationality, and we have in front the core of the matter; only that can we understand. (PR I 102).
"The antihuman, the animal, consists in remaining with and commu- nicating only by those means" (PG 56). Aristotle had already said it: "If he makes none, it is absurd to seek for an argument against one who has no arguments of his own about anything, in so far as he has
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none; for such a person, in so far as he is such, is really no better than a vegetable" (Metaphysics, IV, 1006a 14).
About the Athenians, which are the esthetical people par excellence, Hegel made two remarks that provide us with great insight, for they precise the attitude of Philosophy towards Art, an attitude embodied by Plato: "that slanting, that Art as such becomes the highest and hence the content loses interest, belongs to the Athenian people. Plato did not banish Art from his Republic: he only prevented that it continued to be god" (WG 639)
It is unacceptable that aesthetics becomes the supreme criterion, for beauty is not a synonym of truth, and to postulate that something is true because of its beauty would lead us to believe in a preestablished harmony which has been proved false by the experience of many cen- turies. For that reason Plato says that "the distinction between Philoso- phy and poetry [ . . . ] is an old quarrel" (Rep 607 B) and his remark becomes even brusquer: according to him, "poems are easy to do for he who does not know reality, for it is phantoms (poiosin), not reali- ties that poets produce" (Rep 599 A). In contrast to the predominant aesthetic criterion of a society, Philosophy acknowledges that every human being is compelled to seek the truth, since rationality is manda- tory to everyone. Probably, to make a genuine poem is not easy, even for him who does not acknowledge the truth, but what matters is the difference clearly expressed by Hegel: "If it was only a matter of stating things, philosophizing would be an easy task" (BS 422). "The philo- sophical method does not allow mere suppositions; what has value in Philosophy must be proved true, that is to say, its necessity has to be displayed" (A? sth I 65).
For that reason, it seems to me that a methodological focus like the following one (which is typical among Hegelian commentators) jeopar- dizes every interpretative pursuit:
The question with which we are faced --and this will be true in all of what follows-- is neither whether Hegel is correct in what he says nor whether his interpreters are justified in what they say of him. Rather the question is one of finding out just what Hegel does say and of determining what impact that can have on our own thinking. (Lauer 1982, 2)
To study a literary work with this method is fine; on the contrary, the only thing that matters in Philosophy is to prove whether the author
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demonstrates or not, i. e. if he is right or not. The impact a work may have on us, "demands still a higher criterion and a different valida- tion" (A? sth I 48). If we do not ponder the rigorousness of the demon- stration while examining a Hegelian thesis, we cannot understand its meaning. Hegel warns us that "the demonstration remains within the statement" (GP II 398). Thus, if we do not get the demonstration, we are not getting the meaning of the argument. The aesthetical approach is probably the origin of the accusations of obscurity raised against Hegel. Surely the source of great diversity existing of the 'interpretations' of his Philosophy lies therein.
Whoever does not read the Science of Logic as a frontal attack against the deficient scientificity of the disciplines so-called sciences does not make an approach to Hegelian Philosophy as a system that pretends to be true; therefore, one approaches it as an 'opinion', as one of the differ- ent worldviews that are exhibited in the history museum for someone to like them. Such an approach is aesthetical, not philosophical. How is it possible that these people beared hopes to understand a philosophi- cal work if they did not read it as such? "The spirit that gives life in a Philosophy needs, in order to be manifested, to be borne by a similar spirit. " (JS 16) Hegel underlines strongly the following fundamental principle:
"The courage of truth, the faith in the power of the spirit, is the first condition of Philosophy". (EGP 5s).
By saying this we walk deep into a territory planted with mines, for this matter does not only regard aesthetics. The aforesaid museal mentality is nowadays an epidemic among promoters of 'culture', a culture which is vague and without contents: culturalism. Other obsta- cles are the civilizatory relativism and anti-westernism, for how is it possible that a Western man pretends to tell the world what is true and what is not? That goes in hand with indigenism. And we could not miss also the political dimension under the guise of pluralism and of tolerance with declamatory indignation against those who pretend to be the "guardians of truth". We will examine each of this '-isms' and their efforts to shut Philosophy's mouth, until we reach at last the enormous blunder that lies at the bottom of the question.
If we start from the principle that truth is unknowable to the human mind, the possibility of any science is annulled; but a contradiction is simultaneously embraced from the beginning, since this principle is taken as a truth, a known truth. We will get back to this point. But if
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we start from the fact that truth is knowable to the human mind, one human mind would have had to be the first one to know it. We do not pos- ses knowledge by nature, and actually, we depend on other human beings to acquire knowledge. This first human mind would have had to belong to some civilization. To say yes, that truth is knowable by reason, without recognizing its factual knowledge by some individual and concrete mind, is to deceive oneself and believe that one deceives the others. But we are not deceived: it is false that whoever thinks this way holds that truth is knowable: "The incredulity that does not deny the general or the general possibility and yet never believes to have it in any particular case does not actually believe in the reality and truth of the matter. " (GP I 500)
To the museal mentality the former philosophies belong to the past; they are things of old times, they do not concern us nowadays, and if they do, it is only out of curiosity or an interest in 'culture'.
Then we have to deal with things that do not belong to us. One gets into the historical as such, does not spare his work and thinks that something has to be done at last in order to survey the thoughts and opinions of others. One tries thus to do without the thing itself, while being oneself outside. One does without the truth and renounces to understand it. (EGP 281)
No philosophical system can renounce to the possibility of such endeavor: every one of them is susceptible of being treated historically. As every living figure it belongs at the same time to the (world of) phenomenon, a Philoso- phy as phenomenon surrenders to the very instance that is capable of trans- forming it into a static opinion and something that belongs in the first place to the past. (JS 15s)
It is a 'collection of mummies', as Hegel says right away. Underlying such collectionism we find the conviction that truth is not knowable, for a true thesis cannot be neutralized as if it did not concern us. If a thesis is true it becomes a bomb that explodes right in the middle of our contemporary world and shakes the foundations of our prevailing convictions.
Whoever studies Philosophy from a 'cultural' point of view,
stands firmly in his indifferent position towards truth and preserves its in- dependence, whether it accepts or rejects opinions, whether it remains indifferent or not; the philosophical systems are to him nothing more that
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opinions, and such accidental things do not do him anything; he does not
know that truth exists. (JS 16)
The first thing to point out is that culture means to 'cultivate', but whoever promotes indifference regarding truth cultivates irrationality, just as he who foments the adoption or the preservation of a worldview because it is pleasant or for any other reason that is not consistent with its trueness.
But the most decisive thing to emphasize is that, with such an approach, one can exactly perceive what is philosophical about phi- losophies. To the best result such a beginner's approach could lead --and this is still dubious-- is to determine what Hegel says, but not why he says it; now, that why is what is philosophical. "Those people see everything in a Philosophy, but they leave aside Philosophy itself" (GP II 380). That which is philosophical is demonstration. "In Philoso- phy, in my Science of Logic, what is done is demonstrating, not exhibiting" (BS 413). The true situation is this: pluralism may seem very tolerant, neither eurocentrist nor partidarian, but the only one forbidden to speak in its international assembly is Philosophy: Pluralism takes Phi- losophy as Literature, depriving it from its sting of truth and, ultimate- ly, suppressing it. Pluralism is deliberately one-armed: Philosophy is forbidden to speak. Truth may be pursued as long as no one ever finds it, in other words, as long as it is never demonstrated and as long as no one ever makes Philosophy.
Aside from this flagrant intolerance, it is necessary to emphasize this on a political level. Pluralism does not want the existence of absolute truths because if they are absolute they are 'imposed', and this seems incompatible with tolerance. But, first, we do not suggest that they are imposed by the government; we address rather one's duty of knowing the truth. Second, the preposition 'one plus one equals two' is an ab- solute truth that imposes itself, and nevertheless that does not seem a violation of tolerance to pluralism. Third, and more importantly, to- lerance itself needs to be grounded; otherwise, the defenders of in- tolerance would have as much reason --or unreasonableness-- as we who defend tolerance; and the only possible groundwork is that every single human has infinite dignity and hence cannot be unwillingly sub- jected to certain convictions or beliefs. However, that every human has infinite dignity is an absolute truth. That being said, how can pluralism reject absolute truths in the name of tolerance?
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Lovers of 'culture', in such a vague and indifferent fashion, believe that any cultural contribution can be added accumulatively in the mind of people or individuals. Since the problem of truth is indifferent to them, they disregard the evident fact that a contribution could entail opposition to another contribution and destroy it. They figure that anything can be added to anything. In reality, it may happen that both things get subtracted. Cultural works frequently inculcate convictions and judgments of value that are incompatible. True culture cannot do without the contents of truth, for that would be a heartless act that em- braces a flagrant contradiction. And this is what is important: to impose contradictions on a mind is not to cultivate it but to demolish it.
That spirit is the absolute and general alienation of reality and thought: pure culture. What one experiences in such a world is a lack of truth of the essences of power and wealth, of their determined concepts, of good and evil, of the noble and the base; all these elements barter each other and each of them is contrary to itself.
(PG 371)
This eclectics are, on the one hand, those general and uncultivated men, in whose minds the most contradictory representations find their place, without ever gathering their thoughts and realizing their contradictori- ness; on the other hand, those cultivated ones who proceed consciously so with the belief of doing the best, taking from each system what is good, as they call it thus they look for a sample of diverse thoughts, in which they sum all the good except coherence in thinking and thereby thinking itself. (GP 431s).
They have thoughts but they do not think; they have them abstractly, pinned down with needles as if they were collectible items, but they do not understand them. When it comes to Philosophy, they miss what is philosophical, for congruency lies in demonstrations, and that is the core of Philosophy.
If we take a closer look to the question, a promotion of 'culture' that does away with truth or falseness cannot speak either of promotion, or of the progress of man, or of the perfectibility of the human being. It may speak of motion, movement, or change; but that remains dubious, for it would go around in circles and there would be no change at all. If one does not know the goal towards which movement strives, one cannot speak either of progress or of change. 'Movement for change', as a popu- lar Mexican slogan went, is something simply ludicrous.
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"In reality, that perfectibility is more or less the same as the mu- tability in general; it does not have a beginning or an end; the best, the most perfect towards which it must strive is completely undetermined" (VG149s). "In those conceptions progress has in general the form of the quantitative [. . . ] one can chit chat endlessly without getting to any determination and stating something qualitative. [. . . ] The quantitative [. . . ] is that which lacks thought. " (VG 150)
Pluralist and unengaged culturalism, in so far it neglects what is philosophical when it peeps into the history of Philosophy and disregards what Philosophy has demonstrated, gives always into the temptation of believing that the history of Philosophy is a chaotic parade of systems, or that each system dismisses and ruins the previous ones. It joyfully infers that it is not worthy to deal with Philosophy. It is unbelievable: it focuses on what is not philosophical and extracts conclusions against Philosophy. But what is demonstrated cannot be contradicted: "Those people see everything in a Philosophy, but they leave aside Philosophy itself" (GP II 380).
For this is usually the language of those who not only justify to themselves their own hatred against Philosophy, but also they take pride in saying that the philosophical systems contradict each other a lot and change so often that it can only be prudent not to deal with them. [. . . ] What has been has been and is in fact transitory are the various attempts of philosophizing without Phi- losophy and of wanting to have a Philosophy without Philosophy (NH 438s).
"Since there are many philosophies they conclude that there is none. " (EGP 272).
Not yet dealing with contents, Hegel responds to them: "In the first place one must say: there is only one Philosophy. This has a formal sense, since each Philosophy is at least Philosophy" (EGP 123)
The aforementioned skeptics disregard the only essential thing: the fact itself of the existence of Philosophy, the historical and consistent wonder in which the human reason, after millenniums of irrationality in the adoption of worldviews, has finally decided to seek, definitively and demonstratively, which of them are truth and which of them are false. "The knowledge of truth", so calls Aristotle, Philosophy (Met II 993b20). In this sense, Philosophy is only one. Philosophers did not exist first and, in order to lunge with prestige their trade, showed up later saying that Philosophy is the profession of finding the truth. No. In
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one moment of history, human reason had to protest against the above mentioned irrationality; and that moment and the corresponding ac- tivity of reason is called Philosophy. The successive linking of systems that there has been is amazing. Of course, 'coffee philosophers' are ex- cluded from the list of genuine seekers of the truth, as well as those who practice a "hazardous philosophizing", as Hegel calls it, by elabo- rating dilettante and rabble-rousing writings, "often is only chit chat and whimsical opinions what they call Philosophy" (EGP 123) "many philosophical writings limit themselves only to the prattling of feelings and opinions" (EPW 14A).
Thousands who deal with trivial things have been forgotten; only one hun- dred names have been preserved. The Mnemosyne of universal history does not confer the unworthy with prestige; just as happens with the deeds of the heroes of the outward history, the only heroes that the history of Philosophy acknowledges are the deeds of the thinking reasons. Those are our object. (EGP 124)
"Philosophizing without a system cannot be scientific" (EPW 14A). In regard of the contents, to show that Philosophy has been one and that it is false that some systems displace the others, constitutes the content of this unmatchable Hegelian work called The History of Philosophy. To put it briefly, without raising a veil of mystery over the question, we must say that each philosophical system employs concepts less abstract and hence better defined than those of former systems; consequently, it sheds light on more problems and with more concretion than what other philosophies did:
The beginning as a beginning is simple i. e. the abstract. What is first is actu- ally the rudimentary, that which has not been developed. The principles of the most ancient Philosophy are therefore completely abstract. The most abstract is the easiest: an acute intelligence finds that quickly. (EGP 279)
"In the history of Philosophy the goal is the development of thought. One takes sides in favor of this. " (EGP 283) As thought develops, the concepts it uses become more capable of depicting reality because they are more concrete. If we take the principles of the different philoso- phies in their original abstraction, they overthrow one another; but if we attend to the reality that they cumbersomely tried to point out, that does not occur:
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Hegel was right
For instance, the atomistic Philosophy adopts the principle according to which the atom is the absolute; the atom is indivisible, the one --in its ulterior determination, the individual, and, even more determined, the subjective. I am also one, one individual; but I am subject and, hence, spirit. Nevertheless, the atom is the being-for-itself completely abstract, the pure one; [. . . ] The spirit is, of course, also one, but is not the one within such abstraction. (EGP 128)
This subject is extremely important. Physics have not even no- ticed that the exact translation of a? tomon to latin is individuum, and, of course, they have not asked themselves what is the original meaning of this word, i. e. what is the origin of this concept. Empirical experience does not show us any atomic reality, for every sensible data is extended and has parts, and hence the origin of this concept cannot be empiri- cal but introspective: what this concept signifies is what we perceive by means of introspection: the spirit. "The atom and the vacuum are not things of experience" (GP I 359). Who knows what Empedocles, Leucippus and Democritus imagined when they used the term atom? However, what matters is not what they imagined but what they said. To be sure, they did not imagine an atom, for the simple reason that the atom is not imaginable; everything that we imagine is extended, and consequently, divisible. They could not have been referring to what they imagined or to what they saw, because an atom is neither imagin- able nor visible. When they said that the absolute was an atom, that is to say, something individual, they had all the reason in the world, and the Philosophy of Plato, Aristotle and Hegel did not displace this the- sis; it only made it more explicit, exact and concrete. Materialism has never been able to define its terms, and hence it has not been able to declare its grounds without incurring in blunt spiritualism.
The works of the history of Philosophy are not commonly read with the exigency of strict rigor, with the exigency of scientificity, as Hegel reads them. One last and brief example of this: we will see in the last part of the present chapter what is nowadays manifest and evident to intelligent scientists and to anyone who reflects a little, namely, that science cannot trust immediate observation, i. e. empirical data. Immediate observation tells us v. g. that earth is still; but nowadays we know that earth travels 30 km per second. Our unbendable sensations tell us that there is an 'up' and a 'down'; but nowadays we know that this sensation does not correspond to any reality at all, for people in
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the Patagonia call up what we call down. And this was the first dis- covery of Philosophy since its birth with the Ionians, the Eleats and the Pythagoreans. As Hegel says about Thales of Miletus: "Here we are introduced into the distancing of what is in our sensible percep- tion, the distancing of that immediate being --a retreating from that" (GP I 203). When the founders of Philosophy affirmed that the only real thing in the world was an underlying element, they were distrust- ing the testimony of sensation, as if sensible data were only apparent: "one needs great nerve of spirit in order to put aside that richness of the being immediate of the natural world and to reduce it instead to a simple substance that keeps itself as such" (GP I 203). For the Eleats it was the "being", the one; for the Pythagoreans it was the numbers; for the Ionians it was some other element. But that is incidental and mar- ginal: the central thesis is the difference of the empirical data, and this has been confirmed, not displaced, by the subsequent development of science.
But let us get back on track. As a matter of fact, the apparent dis- placement of some systems by others in the history of Philosophy was a mere pretext of aestheticist culturalism for not taking Philosophy se- riously. "The only consequent means against reason is not to deal with reason at all" (WL II 369).
The predominance within a society of the aestheticist criterion in the choosing of a worldview is a demagogy foretold by Plato, who accuses poets and orators of being 'adulators' of the people by giving them what they 'like' instead of what they need (cfr. Gorgias 502 B y E, 463A et passim). It is perplexing that a diagnose so certain and profound, masterfully expressed twenty-four centuries ago, whose pertinence is even bigger today than in those times for the reason I will immediately expose, does not hold the attention either of po- litical thinkers, sociologists or intellectuals. The remedy to this is not governmental intervention. Undoubtedly, men in our society, with a certain sense of responsibility, must do something about this, given that the predominance of pleasantness has created an effective and unbendable mechanism of repression --as I mentioned before in re- gard of rebellious, tolerant pluralism. Since only 'pleasant' writings have commercial success, and negotiating editors (who are the majority) only publish what brings them money, the immediate result is that Philosophy is censured. . . unless it becomes Literature. If Philosophy accepts the rules of this game, its message would not convince because
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it demonstrates but because it pleases; it would precisely reinforce the irrationality which it must attack.
Men of letters and their editors blame corny soap-operas and yellow journalism because, in their opinion, both things distort the taste of the public and make it incapable of enjoying good Literature. But they do exactly the same in regard of Philosophy, only that in this case some- thing much more important is at stake: the rationality of man. The repressive artifact shuts its doors: the macabre press and the non-sense of novels can intend to challenge us, if we are smart enough, to hit the mark with the taste of people just exactly as they do.
Furthermore, both Literature and pasquinades can give a political tone to the discussion by saying that hitting the mark with what people want is democracy, while pretending to provide them with what they need --instead of with what they want-- is totalitarism. In a very simi- lar fashion, vulgar Marxism holds that only the people know what they want. Plato was right when he said that in all this there was too much demagogy involved. This allows us to get at last to the bottom of the problem we have discussed so far, and with respect to which, what Hegel and recent Anthropology have to say, acquires the importance of a revelation.
Probably the biggest mistake that has carried the most unlucky and disastrous consequences over the past two centuries is to believe with Rousseau that man is good by nature. I say 'believe' because Rousseau did only not provide any demonstration of such a grandiloquent claim --a claim which is irreconcilable with the Western intellectual tradi- tion-- but practically did not even attempt to provide it. Charron, Buffon and Kolben came before him but they did not have any market echo; it was the first successful Discourse of Rousseau what gave this prejudice the enormous popularity it now holds. It besieges liberals, leftists, and even theologians; nobody dares to say the terribly unpopu- lar truth that man is evil by nature, despite it would do a lot of good to our contemporary world. It is the turn of Philosophy to take some action, not by default, but because originality, popularity, commer- cial success, the mainstream, etcetera, are things of which Philosophy could not care less.
At first, theologians opposed to Rousseau's mistake. But unpopu- larity is an annoying companion. In particular, the unpopularity that blocks missionary enterprises: to say that man is evil by nature implies that one only becomes good by means of true civilization, something
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