What is philosophy? Unamuno, Life 1.4
Unamuno develops further his notion that philosophy is prior to ideas, an instinctual or perceptual sense of the world as a whole, revealed to the individual. You can hear me read this passage <here>.
La filosofía responde a la
necesidad de formarnos una concepción unitaria y total del mundo y
de la vida, y como consecuencia de esa concepción, un sentimiento
que engendre una actitud íntima y hasta una acción. Pero resulta
que ese sentimiento, en vez de ser consecuencia de aquella
concepción, es causa de ella. Nuestra filosofía, esto es, nuestro
modo de comprender o de no comprender el mundo y la vida, brota de
nuestro sentimiento respecto a la vida misma. Y esta, como todo lo
afectivo, tiene raíces subconscientes, inconscientes tal vez.
No suelen ser nuestras ideas
las que nos hacen optimistas o pesimistas, sino que es nuestro
optimismo o nuestro pesimismo, de origen filosófico o patológico
quizá, tanto el uno como el otro, el que hace nuestras ideas.
Philosophy
arises to meet our need for a unified and complete conception of the
world, and of life. We need this conception for its consequence: a
feeling or emotion that
engenders an attitude within us, and eventually perhaps
an
action. But it turns out that
this feeling, rather than being strictly a consequence of our
conception, is actually its cause. Our philosophy—our manner of
understanding or failing to understand the world and life—springs
directly from our feeling about life. This feeling, like every
affect, has subconscious roots, and perhaps unconscious ones.
It is not normally our ideas
that make us optimists or pessimists. Rather it is our optimism or
pessimism, originating wherever it does, with philosophy or pathology
or both, that forms and gives shape to our ideas.