Varieties of personal experience. Unamuno, Life 1.9
Philosophy for Unamuno is more about how than what. Kant and Butler share many things, physical and metaphysical, but they are not the same person. They navigate differently, and that is what matters most to Unamuno. He does not say that one must be wrong or the other right, or that the primary point of comparing them is to chart the best universal map of the metaphysical worlds they explored (as though these were static rather than dynamic). Each offers notes from a different journey, notes whose signal value to us depends upon our own journey. How do we travel through life? You can hear this passage <here>.
Otro hombre, el hombre José Butler, obispo anglicano, qué vivió a principios del siglo XVIII, y de quien dice el cardenal católico Newman que es el hombre más grande de la Iglesia anglicana, al foral del capítulo primero de su gran obra sobre la analogía de la religión (The Analogy of Religion), capítulo que trata de la vida futura, escribió estas pequeñas palabras: «Esta credibilidad en una vida futura, sobre lo que tanto aquí se ha insistido, por poco que satisfaga nuestra curiosidad, parece responder a los propósitos todos de la religión tanto como respondería una prueba demostrativa. En realidad, una prueba, aun demostrativa, de una vida futura, no sería una prueba de religión. Porque el que hayamos de vivir después de la muerte es cosa que se compadece tan bien con el ateísmo, y que puede ser por este tan tomada en cuenta como el que ahora estamos vivos, y nada puede ser, por lo tanto, más absurdo que argüir del ateísmo que no puede haber estado futuro.»
El hombre Butler, cuyas obras acaso conociera el hombre Kant, quería salvar la fe en la inmortalidad del alma, y para ello la hizo independiente de la fe en Dios. El capítulo primero de su Analogía trata, como os digo, de la vida futura, y el segundo del gobierno de Dios por premios y castigos. Y es que, en el fondo, el buen obispo anglicano deduce la existencia de Dios de la inmortalidad del alma. Y como el buen obispo anglicano partió de aquí, no tuvo que dar el salto que a fines de su mismo siglo tuvo que dar el buen filósofo luterano. Era un hombre el obispo Butler, y era otro hombre el profesor Kant.
Another man was Joseph Butler (†), an Anglican bishop who lived at the beginning of the eighteenth century, whom the Catholic cardinal Newman marked as the greatest man in the Anglican church. At the commencement of the first chapter of his great work on The Analogy of Religion, a chapter that discusses the afterlife, he wrote these few words: “The credibility of an afterlife, upon which so much insistence has been made here to so little effect upon our curiosity, seems to function with regard to religion in the manner of a demonstrative proof. In truth, proof of an afterlife, even if it were demonstrative, would not be proof of religion. For whatever life remains to us beyond death is as amenable to atheism as the life we lead now, and thus there can be nothing more absurd than to argue from atheism that there can be no future state.”
The man Butler, whose works the man Kant may have known, wished to preserve faith in the immortality of the soul, and to that end he made it independent of faith in God. The first chapter of his Analogy discusses the afterlife, as I said, and the second treats the government of God by rewards and punishments. At the end of this preamble, Butler deduces the existence of God from the immortality of the soul (‡). And so, as the Anglican bishop commenced his journey from this position, he never had to make the leap required of the Lutheran philosopher. Butler was one man, and Kant another.
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(†) Like many philosophers and churchmen, Joseph Butler (1692-1752) was born into a family in trade: in his case, his father sold linen in the town of Wantage, then part of Berkshire county in England. He completed his primary education at the dissenting academy of Samuel Jones, but decided ultimately to enter the Church of England, matriculating at Oriel College, Oxford. After graduating, he had a distinguished ecclesiastical career that led ultimately to his becoming bishop of Bristol (1738) and Clerk of the Closet to king George II (1746). He left us several sermons and his most famous work, the book Unamuno cites.
(‡) Unamuno refers to Analogy i.6, toward the end of Butler's treatment of 'natural religion' as opposed to 'revealed': "We indeed ascribe to God a necessary existence, uncaused by any agent. For we find within ourselves the idea of infinity, i.e. immensity and eternity, impossible, even in imagination, to be removed out of being. We seem to discern intuitively, that there must, and cannot but be, something, external to ourselves, answering this idea, or the archetype of it. Hence, (for this abstract, as much as any other, implies a concrete) we conclude, that there is, and cannot but be, an infinite and immense eternal being, existing prior to all design contributing to his existence, and exclusive of it. From the scantiness of language, a manner of speaking has been introduced; that necessity is the foundation, the reason, the account of the existence of God. But it is not alleged, nor can it be at all intended, that every thing exists as it does, by this kind of necessity: a necessity antecedent in nature to design: it cannot, I say, be meant that every thing exists as it does, by this kind of necessity, upon several accounts; and particularly because it is admitted, that design, in the actions of men, contributes to many alterations in nature. If any deny this, I shall not pretend to reason with them."