Know thyself. Unamuno, Life 2.2
Unamuno distinguishes the human lust for knowledge from the animal absorption of necessary information. Animals—and people too, he says—naturally know what they need, recognizing their circumstances and responding appropriately. But this is not enough for people. We go beyond this, wanting to know not just how to survive, what to do here and now, but everything. To him this looks like an attribute that is both glorious and disastrous—as the Greeks would say, tragic. Our lust for constant reflection on everything might easily be framed in terms of disease, rather than health. It worries us, wears on us, breaks and beats and drives us. Is that healthy? <Spanish>.
La historia de la Medicina, por otra parte, nos enseña que no consiste tanto el progreso en expulsar de nosotros los gérmenes de las enfermedades, o más bien las enfermedades mismas, cuanto en acomodarlas a nuestro organismo, enriqueciéndolo tal vez, en macerarlas en nuestra sangre. ¿Qué otra cosa significan la vacunación y los sueros todos, qué otra cosa la inmunización por el transcurso del tiempo?
Si eso de la salud no fuera una categoría abstracta, algo que en rigor no se da, podríamos decir que un hombre perfectamente sano no sería ya un hombre, sino un animal irracional. Irracional por falta de enfermedad alguna que encendiera su razón. Y es una verdadera enfermedad, y trágica, la que nos da el apetito de conocer por gusto del conocimiento mismo, por el deleite de probar de la fruta del árbol de la ciencia del bien y del mal.
Πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει. «Todos los hombres se empeñan por naturaleza en conocer». Así empieza Aristóteles su Metafísica, y desde entonces se ha repetido miles de veces que la curiosidad o deseo de saber, lo que, según el Génesis, llevó a nuestra primer madre al pecado, es el origen de la ciencia.
Mas es menester distinguir aquí entre el deseo o apetito de conocer, aparentemente y a primera vista, por amor al conocimiento mismo, entre el ansia de probar del fruto del árbol de la ciencia, y la necesidad de conocer para vivir. Esto último, que nos da el conocimiento directo e inmediato, y que en cierto sentido, si no pareciese paradójico, podría llamarse conocimiento inconsciente, es común al hombre con los animales, mientras lo que nos distingue de estos es el conocimiento reflexivo, el conocer del conocer mismo.
The history of medicine, for its part, teaches us that progress is less about expelling the causes of diseases, or eradicating diseases, than about accommodating them to our body, enriching it by introducing them into our blood. What else are we to gather from vaccination and all the serums injected into us, from immunization that arises with the passage of time?
If health were not an abstract category, something which in rigorous terms cannot exist, we might say that a perfectly healthy man would not be human anymore—that he would have become an irrational animal. Irrational because he would lack any sickness to kindle his reason. And it is truly a tragic illness that drives us to hunger and thirst after knowledge for its own sake, for the pure pleasure of trying the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.
“All men strive naturally for knowledge.” Thus Aristotle begins his Metaphysics (980a Bekker), and from then on it has been repeated a thousand times that curiosity, or the desire to know—the very thing which, according to Genesis, introduced our first mother to sin—is the origin of science.
Here it becomes necessary to distinguish between desire or appetite for knowledge that is unlimited, that lusts after knowledge for its own sake, without prompting—a burning anxiety to taste the fruit of the tree of science—and the fact that some knowledge is necessary to life. Knowing what we need to survive—the kind of knowledge that is direct and immediate, that we might even call in some sense unconscious, if it did not seem too paradoxical—is something we have in common with animals. What distinguishes us from them is reflective knowledge, the knowledge that knows itself.