No More Learning

One and a half century before, by means of an analysis much more profound and evident in comparison, Hegel had said: "Man achieves what he has to be only by means of culture, by discipline; what man immediately is, is only the possibility of being, that is to say, the pos- sibility of being rational and free, only the destination and duty to be that" (VG 58).
The soul is spirit only through suppression of the natural will and the appetites. This happens by subjugation under the ethical, by getting used to the ethical as a second nature of the individual; that is, in a word, the work of education, of culture. (PR II, II 178).
"The natural is rather what the spirit has to suppress" (GP II 107). "We used to begin the fiction of a natural state, but that is not the state of the spirit, of the rational will, of the animals between themselves. The war of everybody against everybody is the true natural state, as Hobbes very well remarked" (GP II 108). "The nature of man consists in that he is not what he ought to be" (PR III 109).
"The exigency directed to man is not to be as a natural will, not to be as he is by nature" (PR III 107).
Its true nature is to abandon his immediacy and to look at it as a mood of being in which he must not be. Man as an immediate and natural man has to look himself as somebody who is like he must not be. This has been expressed thus: "man is evil by nature" (PR III 106); "evil is no other thing that the penetration-in-itself of the natural being of the spirit" (PG 539).
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And by the way the natural will is not the will as it ought to be, for it must be free, and the will of the appetites is not free. By nature the spirit is not as it ought to be; it can only be that through freedom; this is exposed by saying that will is evil by nature. But only man is to blame in so far as he remains in his naturalness. (PR I 275).
"The fundamental principle is that man is not a natural being as such; he is spirit, not an animal. " (PR, II, I 27)
The principal mistake of Rousseau as well as of civilizatory rela- tivism, indigenism and the eased consciousness of those who earn money pleasing natural 'tastes' fall within what Voltaire expressed in a sharply and incisive judgment:
"On n'a jamais tant employe? d'espirit a? vouloir nous render Be^tes".
This fulminating line is contained in a letter of August 30, 1755, addressed to no other than Rousseau 1964, 1369). The word-game with spirit and be? te is not translatable into English.
Let us not stop to discuss the argument of those who against West- ern culture say that other cultures are closer to nature; they obviously demonstrate the opposite of what they intend. Let us rather consider civilizatory relativism and indigenism on a pure logical and cold level.
It is clear that if one professes an axiological relativism, according to which the word 'valuable' does not have sense, the problem is entirely different. I have refuted this doctrine in my Appeal to Reason. In the present context let us only say that axiological relativism means to hold that a society cannot be more human than what it already is --something which would not be supported by any nation on this earth. Civiliza- tory relativism and indigenism want to be based on the sentiments of people.
If axiological relativism is excluded, whoever says that all cultures are equally valuable does not realize that he is advancing the most implausible thesis one could possibly imagine. It would be a miracle, an authentic wonder, that the diverse human groups, which have de- veloped in cultural processes of the most different kinds and have overcome conditioning factors and obstacles of every different sort af- ter being millenniums by their own, have reached today exactly the same result and degree of humanity. The other logical option would be to accept that the results existing today, obtained by different cultural processes, are differently valuable. But since it is ruled out to under- stand by different the cultures in themselves, this difference has to be
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explained by biological factors, that means race, and so it seems that indigenists are racists, and worst of all, racists with their own people, unless they embrace axiological relativism, which is for them out of the question --unless they choose the absurd and characteristic regionalism typical of little villages, according to which their piece of land is the best one in the world.
By the way, we could understand one indigenism of this sort --but not without a certain smile--, for a priori only one of the existent indigenous cultures could be the most valuable; but that is always said from inside hermetism, any comparison with something beyond their piece of land being forbidden. What is complete non-sense is a recent 'universal in- digenism' which implicitly exhorts each indigenous culture to feel the best of them all. This amounts to free oneself completely from logic and the duty of knowing the truth.
The possibility that each of the cultures of our planet has arrived to the same stage is a 'superastronomical improbability', to use the expres- sion of biologist Manfred Eigen; in plain words, it is something simply impossible. But, mathematically speaking, it is also a superastronomical improbability that two of them have reached equally valuable results. Looking at things with plain objectivity, only one of these cultures can be the most developed in terms of humanity and rationality. I do not know what indigenist spokesmen are so scandalized about.
The indigenous have been the most exploded ones; practical and affective preference for them is not only justified but obligatory; however, only as long as affection does not turn the lights out and pro- duces an ideology that does more against indigenous people than in their benefit.
Every ideology, whose effect is to forbid that a human group in- corporates the most advanced level of authentic humanity and the adequate civilization without which its seed cannot germinate, is an ideology that works against a human group by means of adulation. The worst enemy of people is he who flatters them. He who does that betrays them by saying 'you are fine, keep things going that way'. He deprives them from the shame of being savages, something that would be their salvation. The spoiled yearning for the origins protects semira- tionality by defending it against every 'intrusion' of full rationality. It is irrational to hope that this exiguous and rustic culture, which vegetates at the margins of true and compelling civilization, will gradually reach the best degree of humanity there is now. To begin with, that would
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mean to condemn to a paltry level of humanity future generations of humans that will not see that happen. Besides, even implausibly supposing that this is possible, when that time comes, universal civi- lization would reach new heights of true humanity, from which the culture 'protected by indigenists' will be margined.
By the way I would like to say the following. Superficial leftism has contributed to reinforce the paralyzing Rousseaunian conviction that man is good by nature, because if they blame perverted capitalism for the evils of man, it follows that, if capitalism did not exist, man would be good; when in reality what capitalism has made is to disloyally cul- tivate what man was given by nature, i. e. animality. Besides, at least in Latin-America, it is obvious that the fomented 'class mentality', 'the class sentiment', has been a permit of rusticity and lack of culture, a license for us to be as fool as always. Class mentality should not be confounded with the struggle of classes; without the latter it is impos- sible that the world arrives to justice. The mentality of classes favors shamelessness; the struggle of classes favors communism.
2. Science without dogmatiSm
The time has come, we said with Hegel, in which all these dilettantisms and irrationalities come to an end: the time in which man demands a scientific demonstration in order to adopt a theory or a worldview. From now on science has to be the criterion. "The inner necessity that truth must be science lays in the nature itself of the knowledge, and the satisfactory explanation of it is the exposition of Philosophy itself" (PG 12).
Such an exigency must be taken literally serious; it all depends on it, especially, the understanding of Hegel's message: "one of the weak points of our times is not to be able to deal with greatness, properly speaking, the excess of the exigency of the human spirit, the feeling of being overwhelmed and the coward retreat from the enterprise" (GP II 20).
To start with, science is not belief, it does not accept anything by appealing to authority: "What is true has its root in the spirit itself and belongs to its nature; every authority is thereby denied" (GP II 44). But we would incur in the same mistake if we take by authority the concept of science held by some people who nowadays call themselves
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scientists. First, how could we know if they are true scientists or not? By the public opinion that declares them as such? That would be ac- cepting something by authority, which is unscientific. Second, even though we knew that those persons were scientists, how could we know that the act by which they define science is scientific? We cannot assume that: "First, we cannot make suppositions; this is a big principle which is extremely important" (GP III 128). If we start making suppo- sitions, someone else could make contrary suppositions and all would depend at the end of the day on one's whim --something that is the ne- gation itself of science. If scientists themselves say that the act by which they define science is scientific, we would accept by their authority the scientificity of such act, which is an invalid procedure. Furthermore, we would not know if the second act by which they declare scientific the first one is also scientific, for not all acts of men are scientific. They sometimes speak of baseball, sometimes of politics, sometimes of good wines, etcetera.
We do not need to stop here to say that to accept a university degree as a demonstration of the scientificity of a person would be to accept something by authority. First, we know that there are charlatans with a university degree. Second, we would not determine whether the act by which the university granted him the title was scientific.
There are people who, neglecting that which is unscientific to accept a concept of science by simply saying 'I was told so', are still determined to obtain by those means the concept of science they are going to adopt. It is of utmost importance, both to systematic thinking and to the his- torical moment that the world is going through, to realize that the con- cept of science cannot be obtained a posteriori. It is impossible to obtain it by a generalization or by an induction of the particular acts of science. Scientists and commentators have been reluctant to pay attention to the passage (WL I 23) in which Hegel affirms that determining 'the concept itself of science' is a task of Philosophy. But it is neither arro- gance, nor a wish of Hegel, nor a thing that should happen (i. e. some- thing optional). It is simply a fact. It is always a Philosophy or a pseudo Philosophy in the head of the person who calls something scientific what determines that he does so. Without a previous concept of what scientific is, we could not know which of the innumerable human acts in the world constitute the reduced group of which one would have to extract, by means of generalization, the definition of science. This concept has to exist in our heads before we start the evaluative quest of
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scientific acts or actions; otherwise, we could not know which acts or actions we ought to examine. It is thus a philosophical concept what defines this despite the negligence of some men of science who claim the opposite.
Even though laymen and some scientists have unscientifically ob- tained from others the definition of science, this same definition for- mulated by scientists is a philosophical concept, which has not been obtained by an a posteriori induction. Physics do not define as physics what is scientific; they do this as philosophers. Hypothetically speaking, physics could obtain a posteriori the definition of Physical sciences by generalizing their own actions; but when they speak of science they do not only refer to their science; on the contrary, they refer to science as such, so that if the particular discipline called physics seems to them scientific, it is because it matches the concept of science as such, which was not obtained a posteriori by the observation of the actions of physics, for not all the actions of physics seem to them scientific. Instead, they select which of these actions are scientific by an a priori criterion. A scientist would deceive himself if he believes that he obtains a posteriori from his own individual praxis the concept of science, for neither all of his actions are scientific nor he holds them to be so.
For instance, when someone conceives the idea (which, by the way, is wrong and mistaken as we will see) that only the act of empirical observation is scientific, he would only judge as scientific his own or other's actions which consist in empirical observation; but that idea is of a philosophical kind and has not been obtained by empirical ob- servation.
If all the scientists of the world could gather and settle on a defi- nition of science, they would achieve this by means of philosophical reasons, not by observation of the things which scientists have done so far, for not everything that scientists have done is scientific.
Einstein's claim that "it is easier to denature plutonium than it is to denature the evil spirit of man" (Schilpp II 1970, 655), will seem scientific to some scientists and unscientific to others, depending on the philosophical concept each of them has of science. If it were a matter of making an induction, some would think that this statement should be included in a scientific data-base, but others would disagree. This makes clear that the intended generalization comes in rather late, for the definition of what is scientific does not only preexist; it is a con- dition of possibility for the aimed generalization.
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The same would happen with the thesis of Einstein contained in his letter to Max Born of December 4, 1926: "The [quantum] theory yields much, but it hardly brings us close to the secrets of the Ancient One. In any case, I am convinced that He does not play dice. " (in Jammer 1966, 358, No. 128). 'Some scientists' opinion would be that speaking of God is unsci- entific; others would think the opposite. Acclaimed physic Freeman Dyson states the following: "When Thomas Wright, the discoverer of galaxies, announced his discovery in 1750 in his book An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, he was not afraid to use a theological argument to support an astronomical theory" (1979, 245). That is the same thing Einstein does in the above quotation, and the same that Copernicus, Gali- leo, Kepler, and Newton frequently did.
If some scientists of today think that Einstein is not scientific in saying that, they could be right; but they evidently do not think that in function of a concept of science obtained from what scientists actually do. The a posteriori character of the concept of science is a persistent illusion which has a lack of reflection as its cause.
Arthur Rosenblueth still falls recurrently in this illusion in his book called The Scientific Method, in which he proposes to obtain the concept of science "examining what the scientific treatises may have in com- mon" (1984, 8). It is unbelievable, for Rosenblueth first excludes, having previous conceptions of what science is and what is not, all the parts of the treatises in which descriptions, systematizations, mediations, ex- planations, and predictions appear. For instance, he excludes explana- tions by means of these arguments: "Essentially, to explain something to someone is to provide him with a subjective satisfaction which is only incidental to the purposes of science". Regardless if what he says is true or false, here we have a theory of explanations whose a priori nature is obvious. We also find here a theory which deals with the rela- tion between explanation and the concept itself of science --a concept that Rosenblueth apparently wanted to extract a posteriori from the common elements of scientific treatises.
No less a priori and of philosophical nature is the argument he uses to exclude knowledge as the essential core of science:
The notion of knowledge is subjective and has various meanings. In order to determine the meaning that corresponds to science we may recourse to other criteria or we include them with a word which, ultimately, will be equivalent to the obviously circular statement according to which scientific research pursuits scientific knowledge.
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That the notion of knowledge is subjective is a thesis that Rosenblueth evidently did not read in the treatises he endeavored to examine; the rest of his argument is primarily a discussion on logic, and therefore it is not a posteriori either.
His other arguments are less flawed, but they are all a priori and philosophical. Believing he has extracted this from his analysis on the treatises, he finally draws this conclusion: "we can say that science looks for abstract or theoretical models, which accurately represent the functional relations that exist in nature". Having excluded everything a priori that he did not like, he ends up only with what suits his taste. If one objected him what he reproaches to explanations, namely, that those abstract models only provide a subjective satisfaction (which is incidental and unnecessary to science), the discussion would have to be carried through on a philosophical basis, and there would not be any way to solve the problem, for in the existing scientific treatises we find a posteriori descriptions, measurements, systematizations, and predic- tions, as well as the knowledge and the conviction of knowing reality. For instance, Einstein says: "". . . behind the tireless efforts of the inves- tigator there lurks a stronger, more mysterious drive: it is existence and reality that one wishes to comprehend. " (Schilpp II 1970, 400).
Since only philosophical arguments can determine whether the intention to gain knowledge is essential or inessential to science, the thesis of Hegel proves to be right in the sense that it is Philosophy the one that has to determine what science consists in.
Another thesis comes in hand with the last one; it is a stronger thesis which is logically and scientifically undeniable: Philosophy is science and it is the only sense in which the other disciplines can be called sciences. If their scientificity depends on a philosophical judgment that has to be acknowledged as such; otherwise, to accept such a definition would be an unscientific act. Here one sees how untenable the thought is of those who believe that Hegel's science would be a science of a strange kind different from the other sciences, for these derive their scientificity from the scientificity of Philosophy.
The predictable failure of an a posteriori method to define science is acknowledged by Rosenblueth (although without being aware of it) at the end of his essay when he says: "I have to admit that many men of science would not agree with many of the statements that I have made" (op. cit. 89). If scientists do not agree with him it is because accepting Rosenblueth's concept of science would imply that the disciplines they
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practice are not sciences. This means that Rosenblueth did not include them in the group of treatises he intended to examine in order to see what they have in common; and he did not include them because that would constraint him to an a priori concept of science, which could be either true or false, but that is certainly not to be determined by inspecting scientific treatises.
The case of Rosenblueth is completely typical; all the methodolo- gists, without a single exception, do the same thing: Taylor and Wheel- er, Margenau, D'Abro, Born, Einstein himself, etcetera. Each of them rules out by means of philosophical arguments (either good or bad ones) a lot of what sciences do, and they bear the hope to find out that what they 'really' have to do is what every methodologist ought to do. If someone raised an objection against this practice or against the exclusion of other elements, the argument would have to be of a philo- sophical kind.
It is very important for us to underline this point. One only needs to see how Margenau rules out in his discussion of science the necessity to suppose that nature consists in something else than mere empirical and perceptual data.
Indeed the unsophisticated person who sees no reason to exclude from the nature the tree in front of his house while he himself is away makes tacit metaphysical assumptions which could not stand in the face of Hume's or Berkeley's criticism. Now my personal opinion is that these assumptions are entirely valid and that, therefore, I may just as well include the tree in nature. But I think it important to point out that physics can get along with an interpretation of nature which is not tied to these metaphysical assump- tions. (1978, 97).
In the last text of Einstein we have quoted the exact opposite thesis is backed up. This discussion would really have to be philosophical and, of course, Hume and Berkeley would gladly engage in it. If, according to Margenau, physics can do away with what is actually and imme- diately perceived, the opposite side would state that physics explains with 'forces' many phenomena, even though 'forces' are not empirical data, as Margenau himself recognizes. "Nobody has seen this force of physical attraction, and no one ever will. " (ibid. , 335). The question whether force is empirically perceived falls within the realm of philo- sophical epistemology. Even to find out if two statements of physics
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contradict themselves or not is a logical and philosophical question, which evidently is not resolved by examining a posteriori what scientists do. It is particularly philosophical, as we will see in later chapters, the question whether the militant and antimetaphysical concepts they em- ploy depict reality.
Let us mention one more example of this. After listing concepts such as amplitude, probability, crystal, atom, potential, magnetic field, etcetera, Margenau adds: "These elements are not and can never be part of sensed nature; they serve in fact the purpose of explaining nature. By physical explanation the physicist means nothing more than the es- tablishment of organized relations between constituents of nature and these elements. Every other interpretation, as the search for the Causes of Things, draws in more metaphysics than the minimum we are admit- ting. " (op. cit. , 98) It becomes clear thereby that the concept of science professed by Margenau is determined by philosophical conceptions. How logic or antiscientific is to admit that 'a little bit of metaphysics does not hurt anyone' is something to be determined by Philosophy. Likewise, to determine up to which point an 'organized relation' re- ally constitutes the explanation of something is a problem acutely philosophical, for it is clear that by an 'organized relation' Margenau understands a law (i. e. a preposition) that says whenever we have x, we have y', but if we ask why it thunders when there are black clouds in the sky and someone answers us 'whenever there are black clouds, it thunders', no explanation is given to us at all.
To put it briefly, the methodologists, who allegedly call themselves scientists, intend to obtain a posteriori the concept of science, but first they forget that doing that would be to accept something by authority (an eminently unscientific conduct), and second, they always end up failing in their task. And they could only do so, for without a previous (philo- sophical) concept of what they look for in the world, they could not con- ceive the group of scientific things from which they would extract, by means of generalization, the concept they were supposedly searching.
Rosenblueth discovers that explaining is not a task of science. Mar- genau discovers the opposite. This is an evident proof of the ingenuity of those who believe that the concept of science is attainable by means of induction.
If we stick to what contemporary scientists think, the harvest we collect is extremely contradictory. In each of the following disjunctives underlies two very different definitions of science:
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Hegel was right
1.
2.
3.
4. 5.
6. 7. 8.
9.
10. 11.
12. 13.
Some think that reality is as is it is given to us by empirical data and that science essentially investigates reality. Others think that science deals with phenomena and that it cannot determine whether we know reality as it is.
Some scientists hold that it is unscientific to draw suppositions. Others hold that science has to suppose some things and has to start with a group of conjectures.
Some say that Mathematics is not a science (cfr. Rosenblueth). Others say that it is.
Some say that Logic is not a science. Others assert the opposite. Some affirm that science has first to determine with precision of what it speaks. Others emphatically deny this (cf. Taylor and Wheeler).
Some hold that science is essentially experimentation. Others contradict this.
Some say that the theory of Darwin is not science. Others, spe- cially the most part of the biologists, believe it to be so.
Some believe that it is a task of science to know things. Others judge that the task of science is to predict future events so that we can manipulate phenomena. Here we have a definition of science as knowledge and a definition of science as a technique.
Some vehemently affirm that only what is expressed in quantities is scientific. Others strongly disagree with this.
Some say that psychoanalysis is not a science. Others say that it is. Some affirm that the task of science is to explain phenomena. Others believe that science's only task is to describe and to draw relations between distinct elements.
Some think that historiography is not a science. Others think that it is.
Some think that Sociology is not a science. Others disagree. Et- cetera.
In addition, of course, there is the vulgar conception according to which science consists in collecting empirical data. Evidently, the man in the street has not realized that this conception implies that Mathematics is not a science, something he would not be willing to defend. Besides, he would not pretend to be smarter than Einstein, who explicitly prevented us against the reliability on our senses:
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The discovery and use of scientific reasoning by Galileo was one of the most important achievements in the history of human thought, and marks the real beginning of physics. This discovery taught us that intuitive conclu- sions based on immediate observation are not always to be trusted, for they sometimes lead to mistakes. (1984, 14).
As we have seen before, the discovery that Einstein attributes to Galileo was made twenty-two centuries ago by Philosophy and not by physics. But regardless of this, what is important is that the un- truthfulness of empirical data imposes itself to anyone who reflects a little upon the matter. Empirical data tells us that the sun 'rises' in the morning, but if the earth is the one that spins around the sun, as it will be clearly admitted nowadays, to say that the sun 'raises' is completely false. Empirical data affirms the existence of the surface of the table, on which I write, but nowadays we know that there are no continuous or tangible things, that there is 10,000 times more void space than space filled with matter, and that matter itself varies according to the move- ments of its electrons. Surfaces do not exist. Empirical data provides testimony of the stillness of the lamp, but nowadays we know that the lamp and the house in which it is are traveling at a speed rate of 30 km per second. It would be ludicrous and false to reply that we dis- tort empirical data appealing to other empirical data. Such an opponent would demand a justification for our relying on other sensible data since we were previously deceived by them. Evidently, it does not de- pend on sensible data whether we rely on something, for both things are equally attached to the senses.
As Einstein says, scientific thought has taught us to distrust imme- diate data.