Personal immortality. Unamuno, Life 3.10
Unamuno
is not content with mortality. Worse, he is not content with
immortality that does not extend to the individual personality. He
frames this discontent in terms of necessity: for him, to live is to
require some apprehension of personal immortality.
Y
vienen queriendo engañarnos con un engaño de engaños, y nos hablan
de que nada se pierde, de que todo se trasforma, muda y cambia, que
ni se aniquila el menor cachito de materia, ni se desvanece del todo
el menor golpecito de fuerza, ¡y hay quien pretende darnos consuelo
con esto! ¡Pobre consuelo! Ni de mi
materia ni de mi fuerza me inquieto, pues no son mías mientras no
sea yo mismo mío, esto es, eterno. No, no es anegarme en el gran
Todo, en la Materia o en la Fuerza infinitas y eternas o en Dios lo
que anhelo; no es ser poseído por Dios, sino poseerle, hacerme yo
Dios sin dejar de ser el yo que ahora os digo esto. No nos sirven
engañifas de monismo; ¡queremos bulto y no sombra de inmortalidad!
¿Materialismo?
¿Materialismo decís? Sin duda; pero es que nuestro espíritu es
también alguna especie de materia o no es nada. Tiemblo ante la idea
de tener que desgarrarme de mi carne; tiemblo más aún ante la idea
de tener que desgarrarme de todo lo sensible y material, de toda
sustancia. Sí, acaso esto merece el nombre de materialismo y si a
Dios me agarro con mis potencias y mis sentidos todos, es para que Él
me lleve en sus brazos allende la muerte, mirándome con su cielo a
los ojos cuando se me vayan éstos a apagar para siempre. ¿Que me
engaño? ¡No me habléis de engaño y dejadme vivir!
Llaman
también a esto orgullo; «hediondo orgullo» le llamó Leopardi, y
nos preguntan que quiénes somos, viles gusanos de la tierra, para
pretender inmortalidad; ¿en gracia a qué? ¿Para qué? ¿Con qué
derecho? ¿En gracia a qué? —preguntáis—, ¿y en gracia a qué
vivimos? ¿Para qué?, ¿y para qué somos? ¿Con qué derecho?, ¿y
con qué derecho somos? Tan gratuito es existir, como seguir
existiendo siempre. No hablemos de gracia, ni de derecho, ni de para
qué de nuestro anhelo que es un fin en sí, porque perderemos la
razón en un remolino de absurdos. No reclamo derecho ni merecimiento
alguno; es sólo una necesidad, lo necesito para vivir.
Then
they come on wanting to deceive us with the greatest lie of all,
telling us that nothing is lost, that everything transforms itself,
altering and changing so that not even the tiniest bit of matter is
destroyed, nor the most miniscule stroke of energy lost. Woe to any
who would so give us comfort! Poor comfort indeed. I am not worried
about my matter or energy, for they are not mine as long as I am
not: they are not mine until I am eternal. I do not wish to drown
myself in the grand sum of all things—in infinite matter, or
eternal energy, or in God. My desire is not to be possessed by God,
but to possess him, to make myself divine without ceasing to be the
self that now addresses you. The tricks of the monists (†) are no
use to us! We want the substance of immortality, not its shadow.
Materialism?
This is materialism, you say? No doubt it is. But our spirit must
also be some kind of material, something substantial, or it is
nothing. I tremble before the idea of having to abandon my flesh. I
tremble even more at the idea of having to leave behind everything
sensible and substantial, all matter. Perhaps this evinces something
that warrants the title materialism. If I cling to God with
all my power and my senses, my purpose is for him to carry me in his
arms beyond death, looking me in the eyes with his heaven as those
eyes prepare to close forever. I am deceiving myself, you say? Leave
me to live, and do not speak to me of deceit.
This
too they call pride, "obscene pride" in the
formulation of Leopardi, and they ask us who we think we are, vile
worms of the earth, to aspire to immortality. By what grace? To what
end? With what right? "By what grace," you ask, "by
what grace do we live? To what end? Why do we exist? With what
right?" Existence is such a gratuitous thing, as essentially
pointless in itself as existing forever. Let us not speak of grace,
or rights, or reasons cloaking our desire for life that is actually
an end in itself, for thus we shall lose our purpose in a torrent of
nonsense. I claim no right, nor any merit to justify my desire, which
is merely a necessity: I need it in order to live.
---
(†)
Monism (from the Greek μόνος
meaning solitary,
alone, single)
is a broad term referring to any philosophical outlook that attempts
to explain all things in its vision as belonging to the same thing,
in essence. Unamuno disavows it because he does not want immortality that does away with discrete, personal individuals.
Where Democritus, Epicurus, or a Stoic might find immortality in
material nature, matter and energy in abstract terms, he remains
unsatisfied: the immortality he wants is not that of an impersonal
abstraction, which makes him as hostile to materialists as to
idealists like Plato or Saint Augustine, whose approach to
immortality he dismisses here as being
possessed by God
rather than possessing
God as oneself.