Origins of tragedy. Unamuno, Life 2.1
Unamuno
here begins to lay out his perspective on tragedy as the essential
human condition. The tragedy of life, for him, is that it can only
exist in constant dialogue with this other thing called death, its
inseparable dance-partner. Health, from this perspective, might just
be a well-managed disease. Progress is motion down a path taking us
inevitably to the grave. No need to hurry! And every step forward is
bittersweet. You can hear the Spanish <here>.
Acaso
las reflexiones que vengo haciendo puedan parecer a alguien de un
cierto carácter morboso. ¿Morboso? ¿Pero qué es eso de la
enfermedad? ¿Qué es la salud? Y acaso la enfermedad misma sea la
condición esencial de lo que llamamos progreso, y el progreso mismo
una enfermedad.
¿Quién
no conoce la mítica tragedia del Paraíso? Vivían en él nuestros
primeros padres en estado de perfecta salud y de perfecta inocencia,
y Yavé les permitía comer del árbol de la vida, y había creado
todo para ellos; pero les prohibió probar del fruto del árbol de la
ciencia del bien y del mal. Pero ellos, tentados por la serpiente,
modelo de prudencia para el Cristo, probaron de la fruta del árbol
de la ciencia del bien y del mal, y quedaron sujetos a las
enfermedades todas y a la que es corona y acabamiento de ellas, la
muerte, y al trabajo y al progreso. Porque el progreso arranca, según
esta leyenda, del pecado original. Y así fue cómo la curiosidad de
la mujer, de Eva, de la más presa a las necesidades orgánicas y de
conservación, fue la que trajo la caída y con la caída la
redención, la que nos puso en el camino de Dios, de llegar a Él y
ser en Él.
¿Queréis
una versión de nuestro origen? Sea. Según ella, no es en rigor el
hombre, sino una especie de gorila, orangután, chimpancé o cosa
así, hidrocéfalo o algo parecido. Un mono antropoide tuvo una vez
un hijo enfermo, desde el punto de vista estrictamente animal o
zoológico, enfermo, verdaderamente enfermo, y esa enfermedad
resultó, además de una flaqueza, una ventaja para la lucha por la
persistencia. Acabó por ponerse derecho el único mamífero
vertical: el hombre. La posición erecta le libertó las manos de
tener que apoyarse en ellas para andar, y pudo oponerse el pulgar a
los otros cuatro dedos, y escoger objetos y fabricarse utensilios, y
son las manos, como es sabido, grandes fraguadoras de inteligencia. Y
esa misma posición le puso pulmones, tráquea, laringe y boca en
aptitud de poder articular lenguaje, y la palabra es inteligencia. Y
esa posición también, haciendo que la cabeza pese verticalmente
sobre el tronco, permitió un mayor peso y desarrollo de aquella, en
que el pensamiento se asienta. Pero necesitando para esto unos huesos
de la pelvis más resistentes y recios que en las especies cuyo
tronco y cabeza descansan sobre las cuatro extremidades, la mujer, la
autora de la caída, según el Génesis, tuvo que dar salida en el
parto a una criatura de mayor cabeza por entre unos huesos más
duros. Y Yavé la condenó, por haber pecado, a parir con dolor sus
hijos.
El
gorila, el chimpancé, el orangután y sus congéneres deben de
considerar como un pobre animal enfermo al hombre, que hasta almacena
sus muertos. ¿Para qué?
Y
esa enfermedad primera y las enfermedades todas que le siguen, ¿no
son acaso el capital elemento del progreso? La artritis, pongamos por
caso, inficiona la sangre, introduce en ella cenizas, escurrajas de
una imperfecta combustión orgánica; pero esta impureza misma, ¿no
hace por ventura más excitante a esa sangre? ¿No provocará acaso
esa sangre impura, y precisamente por serlo, a una más aguda
celebración? El agua químicamente pura es impotable. Y la sangre
fisiológicamente pura, ¿no es acaso también inapta para el cerebro
del mamífero vertical que tiene que vivir del pensamiento?
Perhaps
the thoughts I am pursuing may seem a little morbid to some folks.
Morbid? That raises the question of morbidity, of illness. It is
possible that illness is an essential part of that which we call
progress, and even that progress itself is an illness.
Who
doesn't know the tragic myth of Paradise? Our first parents lived
there, in a state of perfect health and innocence. Yahweh permitted
them to eat from the tree of life, and had created everything for
them. But he forbade that they partake of the fruit of the knowledge
of good and evil. Still, when tempted by the serpent, Christ's model
of prudence (†), they partook of the forbidden fruit and became
subject to every illness—including the crown and culmination of
them all, death—and to work, and to progress. For progress begins,
according to this legend, from original sin. And thus it was that the
curiosity of the woman, Eve, who was nearest to biological necessity
and conservation, became the cause of the fall, and with it the
redemption that has placed us in the way of God, where we walk to
attain him and find our being in him.
Would
you like to hear a different story of our origin (‡)? So be it. In
this one, we begin not with a man, strictly speaking, but with some
kind of gorilla, orangutan, chimpanzee, or similar thing—a primate
with a large brain. This primate had a sick child—sick in the
strictly animal or zoological sense, meaning that it was weak and
debilitated. The frailty of this child, its illness, became also an
advantage in its struggle to survive, an incentive to overcome. It
ultimately succeeded in putting itself upright, becoming the only
vertical mammal: man. Being erect freed its hands from being feet,
allowing it to oppose its thumb to the other four digits, meaning
that it could take hold of objects and make tools. Even now, as we
know, the hands are great sources of intelligence. Standing erect
also put its lungs, trachea, larynx, and mouth in position to
articulate speech, and the spoken word is intelligence. Another
benefit from this posture: it allowed the head to rest vertically on
the trunk, where it could grow larger and develop the capacity for
thought that it has. But upright posture demands harder and tougher
bones in the pelvis than quadrupeds have, and so woman, the author of
the fall according to Genesis, had to give birth to a larger-headed
creature through harder bones. Yahweh condemned her, for her sin, to
give birth to her children in pain.
The
gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orangutan, and their kin must consider
man a poor, sick animal. Our illness is so grave that we even go so
far as to put our dead into storage. Why?
This
first illness, and all those that follow it, are they not perhaps the
chief element of progress? Let us consider arthritis, for example. It
infects the blood, introducing impurities into it, the dregs of an
unfinished organic process (⸸). But doesn't this impurity cause the
blood to be more active, more alive? Will not this impure blood,
precisely because of its impurity, become the occasion for a more
acute expression of the celebration we call life? Chemically pure
water is undrinkable. What about physiologically pure blood? Would it
not perhaps also prove useless to the brain of the vertical mammal
that must live by thought?
---
(†)
Christ tells his disciples to be wise as serpents (φρόνιμοι
ὡς οἱ ὄφεις) and harmless as doves as part of the
apostolic charge in the Gospel of Matthew (10.16). The rest of
Unamuno's story comes from Genesis 2-3.
(‡)
With the exception of the very end, where he returns to the Bible to
illustrate the tragedy of birth, Unamuno draws this story largely
from ancient Greek sources (like Aristotle, On the Parts of
Animals 4.10, and Plato, Protagoras 320d-322e),
lightly touched up to emphasize their consonance with Darwinism.
(⸸)
Arthritis is Greek for disease
of the joints. It
is a symptom of many different medical pathologies, most of which
involve some chronic activation of the human immune system that ends
up hurting the joints via processes we layfolk might
call inflammation.
Unamuno's point, which does hold, is that our biology requires such
processes—that
we cannot heal ourselves effectively by disabling, destroying, or
otherwise absolutely denying them. Just as we cannot survive drinking
water without electrolytes, which will poison us, so he guesses we
must have something wrong with
our blood, our joints, and certainly our thoughts, if we are going to
be alive. Like Seneca, he might say that happiness and sadness can
be words to describe the same things.