Ego as personal integrity. Unamuno, Life 1.11
Unamuno believes in the self, the ego, as having actual coherence (not rational coherence, necessarily: remember that he disagreed already with Hegel). He is not a Buddhist, but a Catholic. You can hear this passage <here>.
Y el hombre, esta cosa, ¿es una cosa? Por absurda que parezca la pregunta, hay quienes se la han propuesto. Anduvo no ha mucho por el mundo una cierta doctrina que llamábamos positivismo, que hizo muy bien y mucho mal. Y entre otros males que hizo, fue el de traernos un género tal de análisis que los hechos se pulverizaban con él, reduciéndose a polvo de hechos. Los más de los que el positivismo llamaba hechos, no eran sino fragmentos de hechos. En psicología su acción fue deletérea. Hasta hubo escolásticos metidos a literatos—no digo filósofos metidos a poetas, porque poeta y filósofo son hermanos gemelos, si es que no la misma cosa—que llevaron el análisis psicológico positivista a la novela y al drama, donde hay que poner en pie hombres concretos, de carne y hueso, y en fuerza de estados de conciencia las conciencias desaparecieron. Les sucedió lo que dicen sucede con frecuencia al examinar y ensayar ciertos complicados compuestos químicos orgánicos, vivos, y es que los reactivos destruyen el cuerpo mismo que se trata de examinar, y lo que obtenemos son no más que productos de su composición.
Partiendo del hecho evidente de que por nuestra conciencia desfilan estados contradictorios entre sí, llegaron a no ver claro la conciencia, el yo. Preguntarle a uno por su yo, es como preguntarle por su cuerpo. Y cuenta que al hablar del yo, hablo del yo concreto y personal; no del yo de Fichte, sino de Fichte mismo, del hombre Fichte.
This thing, man—is it really a thing? As ridiculous as the question seems, some have proposed it. Not long ago there stalked through the world a doctrine known as positivism: it did very well, but to quite ill effect. Among its crimes was the introduction of a form of analysis that smashes deeds, reducing them to dust. Most of what positivism calls deeds are merely shattered fragments of deeds. In psychology its impact was disastrous. Eventually, it got to the point that pedants were turning into literati—I do not say that philosophers were turning into poets, because poet and philosopher are twins, if not the same thing. These pedants took positivist psychological analysis to the novel, and to drama, where we need actual people, human beings of flesh and bone, and by dissecting states of consciousness they did away with conscience. What happened to consciousness here was very similar to that which occurs when we seek to examine and test certain complex chemical compounds present organically inside a living creature: the reagents destroy the body we are trying to examine, and what we obtain from the process are just byproducts of the body's original composition.
Setting forth from the evident fact that mutually contradictory states arise from our consciousness, they became incapable of seeing that consciousness clearly—they lost sight of the ego. Asking a person about his ego is like asking him about his body. Please note that when I ask about the ego, I refer to the actual and personal ego—not the abstract Ich of Fichte, but Fichte himself: the man Fichte (†).
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(†) Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) was yet another son of tradesmen (in his case, a ribbon-weaver) who turned to theology, and thence in time to philosophy. Marked early for his remarkable memory, he was supported through primary school and four years of university work (at Jena and Leipzig) by a magnate from his hometown of Rammenau, the Freiherr von Militz. The death of his patron left Fichte poor and without a degree, but like others he turned to tutoring and eventually found his way into the ranks of the contemporary German academy, becoming a minor celebrity when he published a pamphlet some suspected of coming from Kant (who read it and approved, initially, though eventually he appears to have regarded Fichte as a foe). Fichte's philosophy, expressed in a rhetorical style that many find opaque, amounts to an attempt to conceive the world as entirely subjective, a projection or simulation of human ego whose access to objective reality, what Kant had indicated with the phrase das Ding an sich, is nil.