Reason the destroyer. Unamuno, Life 5.2
Unamuno
develops further his take on reason. Reason is a tool for
deconstructing or analysing contingent experience; it does not
recognize premises beyond analysis, incapable of construction. Its
pure and natural tendency is thus toward dissolution, disintegration,
and eventually death.
Lo
que llamamos alma no
es nada más que un término para designar la conciencia individual
en su integridad y su persistencia; y que ella cambia, y que lo mismo
que se integra se desintegra, es cosa evidente. Para Aristóteles era
la forma sustancial del cuerpo, la entelequia, pero no una sustancia.
Y más de un moderno la ha llamado un epifenómeno, término absurdo.
Basta llamarla fenómeno.
El
racionalismo, y por éste entiendo la doctrina que no se atiene sino
a la razón, a la verdad objetiva, es forzosamente materialista. Y no
se me escandalicen los idealistas. Es menester ponerlo todo en claro,
y la verdad es que eso que llamamos materialismo no quiere decir para
nosotros otra cosa que la doctrina que niega la inmortalidad del alma
individual, la persistencia de la conciencia personal después de la
muerte.
En
otro sentido cabe decir que como no sabemos más lo que sea la
materia que el espíritu, y como eso de la materia no es para
nosotros más que una idea, el materialismo es idealismo. De hecho y
para nuestro problema —el más vital, el único de veras vital—,
lo mismo da decir que todo es materia, como que es todo idea, o todo
fuerza, o lo que se quiera. Todo sistema monístico se nos aparecerá
siempre materialista. Sólo salvan la inmortalidad del alma los
sistemas dualistas, los que enseñan que la conciencia humana es algo
sustancialmente distinto y diferente de las demás manifestaciones
fenoménicas. Y la razón es naturalmente monista. Porque es obra de
la razón comprender y explicar el universo, y para comprenderlo y
explicarlo, para nada hace falta el alma como sustancia imperecedera.
Para explicarnos y comprender la vida anímica, para la psicología,
no es menester la hipótesis del alma. La que en un tiempo llamaban
psicología racional, por oposición a la llamada empírica, ni es
psicología, sino metafísica, y muy turbia, y no es racional, sino
profundamente irracional, o más bien contrarracional.
La
doctrina pretendida racional de la sustancialidad del alma y de su
espiritualidad, con todo el aparato que la acompaña, no nació sino
de que los hombres sentían la necesidad de apoyar en razón su
incontrastable anhelo de inmortalidad y la creencia a éste
subsiguiente. Todas las sofisterías que tienden a probar que el alma
es sustancia simple e incorruptible, proceden de ese origen. Es más
aún, el concepto mismo de sustancia, tal como lo dejó asentado y
definido la escolástica, ese concepto que no resiste la crítica, es
un concepto teológico enderezado a apoyar la fe en la inmortalidad
del alma.
Soul
is just a word for designating the individual consciousness that has integrity and persistence. The fact that this consciousness changes, integrating
and disintegrating over time, is evident. For Aristotle, it is the
substantial form of the body, its entelechy or expression, but
not any substance per se. More than one modern has called it an
epiphenomenon—absurd
term, as it is enough to call it simply a phenomenon.
Rationalism,
by which I mean doctrine that hews strictly to reason and nothing
else, aiming only at objective truth, is necessarily materialist.
Here I must beg the idealists to check their wrath. We must make
everything clear, and the truth is that what we call materialism
is simply doctrine that denies
the immortality of the individual soul, refusing
to grant the persistence of personal consciousness after death.
Taking
a different tack, we might say that as our concept of matter is as
incomplete and ignorant as any knowledge we have of spirit, so matter
becomes for us essentially just another idea, and our materialism is
simply idealism. In terms of our problem here—the
only truly vital problem, as we have recognized—it
is all the same whether everything be matter,
or idea,
or force,
or whatever anyone wants to posit. Every system unified around one
single concept will appear
materialist to us. Only systems that recognize two principles manage to save
the immortality of the soul, teaching that human consciousness is
something substantially distinct and different from other phenomena,
other material expressions. But reason is not like this: she is naturally unified, aiming for just one principle. Her purpose is to comprehend and explain the universe, an end
whose achievement has absolutely no need of a soul at once
imperishable and substantial. To explain and understand the life of
the conscious mind: this is the rational task of psychology, and it has no
need to posit any soul either. What they used to call rational
psychology,
in opposition to empirical,
is not properly psychology at all: it is actually a very confused
kind of metaphysics, profoundly irrational—or even better,
antirational (†).
Allegedly
rational doctrines affirming the substance and spirituality of the
soul, with all that accompanies such things, arise historically from
the fact that human beings feel a
need to provide rational support to their inconquerable desire for
immortality, and to
the belief that follows this desire.
Every neat sophistry trying to prove that soul is a simple and
incorruptible substance proceeds from this origin. We can go even
further than this. The very concept of substance established and
defined by scholastic philosophy—which
uses this concept to designate what lies beyond the scope of rational
judgment (‡)—is
a theological construct crafted to sustain faith in the immortality
of the soul.
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(†) Medieval Western approaches to the soul, mind, or consciousness (psyche
in
Greek) yield two competing traditions, Unamuno says, which scholars know as (i) rational psychology and (ii) empirical psychology.
Rational
psychology posits that there are things we can know a
priori,
without investigation or proof:
these are the premises from which to begin any critical analysis.
Empirical psychology says that
our only source of knowledge is experience, which relates all things
contingently from premises that are always subject to rational
scrutiny (and deconstruction, a Latin way of expressing what Greeks
call analysis).
There is thus no fixed foundation for all investigation. Unamuno's
point here is that reason is actually on the side of the empiricists,
not the
so-called
rationalists, as it
is properly a tool for taking things apart. Positing
premises beyond rational scrutiny—as rationalists do—is
antirational, he thinks, contravening the natural tendency of reason
to deconstruct all that it conceives.
(‡)
Medieval philosophy inherited from antiquity the attempt to resolve
the universe into an expression of some basic underlying thing or
things. Moderns still speak of elements
more or less the same way some of their predecessors did of essence
(οὐσία,
essentia)
or
substance
(substantia).
As the destruction of an individual material
object
fails to justify the idea that matter or substance is destroyed per
se, so some would say that the death of an individual consciousness
fails to justify the idea that soul is mortal. Unamuno
finds this specious.