Begging the question. Unamuno, Life 5.5
Unamuno
offers a rational critique of arguments attempting to separate the
soul from matter, specifically the human body of flesh and bone that makes our personal thought possible.
Es
lo corriente que en los libros de psicología espiritualista, al
tratarse de la existencia del alma como sustancia simple y separable
del cuerpo, se empiece con una fórmula por este estilo: Hay en mí
un principio que piensa, quiere y siente ... Lo cual implica una
petición de principio. Porque no es una verdad inmediata, ni mucho
menos, el que haya en mí tal principio; la verdad inmediata es que
pienso, quiero y siento yo. Y yo, el yo que piensa, quiere y siente,
es inmediatamente mi cuerpo vivo con los estados de conciencia que
soporta. Es mi cuerpo vivo el que piensa, quiere y siente. ¿Cómo?
Como sea.
Y
pasan luego a querer fijar la sustancialidad del alma, hipostasiando
los estados de conciencia, y empiezan porque esa sustancia tiene que
ser simple, es decir, por oponer, al modo del dualismo cartesiano, el
pensamiento a la extensión. Y como ha sido nuestro Balmes uno de los
espiritualistas que han dado forma más concisa y clara al argumento
de la simplicidad del alma, voy a tomarlo de él tal y como lo expone
en el cap. II de la Psicología de su
Curso
de Filosofía Elemental.
«El
alma humana es simple» dice y añade: «Es simple lo que carece de
partes, y el alma no las tiene. Supóngase que hay en ella las partes
A, B, C; pregunto: ¿Dónde reside el pensamiento? Si sólo en A,
están de más B y C; y, por consiguiente, el sujeto simple A será
el alma. Si el pensamiento reside en A, B y C, resalta el pensamiento
dividido en partes, lo que es absurdo. ¿Qué serán una percepción,
una comparación, un juicio, un raciocinio, distribuídos en tres
sujetos?»
Más
evidente petición de principio no cabe. Empieza por darse como
evidente que el todo, como todo, no puede juzgar. Prosigue Balmes:
«La unidad de conciencia se opone a la división del alma: cuando
pensamos, hay un sujeto que sabe todo lo que piensa, y esto es
imposible atribuyéndole partes.
Del
pensamiento que está en la A, nada sabrán B ni C, y recíprocamente;
luego no habrá
una
conciencia
de todo el pensamiento;
cada
parte tendrá su conciencia especial, y dentro de nosotros habrá
tantos seres pensantes cuantas sean las partes».
Sigue
la petición de principio; supónese, porque sí, sin prueba alguna,
que un todo como todo no puede percibir unitariamente. Y luego Balmes
pasa a preguntar si esas partes A, B, C son simples o compuestas, y
repite al argumento hasta venir a parar a que el sujeto pensante
tiene que ser una parte que no sea todo, esto es, simple. El
argumento se basa, como se ve, en la unidad de apercepción y de
juicio. Y luego trata de refutar el supuesto de apelar a una
comunicación de las partes entre sí.
Balmes,
y con él los espiritualistas
a
priori
que
tratan de racionalizar la fe en la inmortalidad del alma, dejan de
lado la única explicación racional: la de que la apercepción y el
juicio son una resultante, la de que son las percepciones o las ideas
mismas componentes las que se concuerdan. Empiezan por suponer algo
fuera y distinto de los estados de conciencia que no es el cuerpo
vivo que los soporta, algo que no soy yo, sino que está en mí.
Contemporary
books of spiritualizing psychology, when they treat the soul as a
simple substance separable from the body, begin with a formula like
this: There is in me a principle that thinks, desires, and feels
... This is begging the question, as it is not immediately or
even remotely true that such a principle exists within me. The
immediate truth is simply that I am thinking, desiring, and
feeling. The ego that is myself in this immediate moment, as I think,
desire, and feel, is my living body, with all the states of
consciousness that it carries. My live body is the thing that thinks,
desires, and feels. How so? However it may be.
After
asserting the existence of
the soul these books
go
on to fix its substantiality, reifying the states of our
consciousness. They begin this process by opposing thought to matter,
in the style of Descartes, because they insist
on making soul a simple substance, uncompounded and elemental. As our
own Balmes (†)
has provided a most concise and clear version of this sort of
spiritualizing argument, I shall take it from him and present it
here, as set forth in the second chapter on Psychology in his Course
of Elementary Philosophy. "The
human soul is simple," Balmes says. "A simple thing lacks
parts, and the soul has none. Suppose that it did have parts, which
we can refer to here as A, B,
and C. I have a question: Where in the soul does thought reside? If
it lives only in A, then B and C are superfluous. Thus, the simple
subject A becomes the soul. If thought resides in A, B, and C, then
their partition means that it too is parted, broken up into pieces of
itself, which is absurd. Where would we find integrity in a
perception, comparison, judgment, or argument distributed among three
separate parts?" So
blatantly he begs the question! Beginning his argument on the premise
that a compounded whole is incapable of rendering judgment. Balmes
continues: "The
unity of our consciousness opposes any division in the soul. When we
think, there is in us one subject who knows all that is thought, and
this is impossible if we attribute parts to our faculty for thinking.
If we assume partition in the soul, parts B and C will have no idea
what is going on in part A, and vice versa. The outcome of such an
arrangement would not be any singular consciousness comprehending all
our thought. Instead, each part would have its own special
consciousness, separate from the others, and we would contain within
ourselves as many different thinking individuals as the number of
parts in our soul." Still begging the question! We are to
suppose, without any proof at all, that no compounded whole is
capable of unified or unitary perception. Balmes' next move is to
inquire whether parts A, B, and C are simple or compound, and he
repeats the argument above, concluding it with the observation that a
thinking subject must be a part that does not belong to any larger
whole, i.e. that it must be simple. The foundation of his argument,
as you can see, is the unity of our perception and judgment. He then
goes on to attempt a refutation of the notion that unified
expressions might arise from a soul with parts that communicate among
themselves.
Like
all the committed spiritualizers who attempt to rationalize faith in
the soul's immortality without questioning their premises, Balmes
leaves out the only rational explanation of the phenomena he
discusses: that perception and judgment are acts constitutive of
themselves, that our observations and ideas are capable of
influencing one another directly, as parts of one whole, without any
external mediation. These spiritualizers begin by supposing the
existence of something outside and distant from our states of
consciousness which is not our living body, the thing that actually
supports those states. They want me to become the expression of
something that is not myself, of something foreign that occupies me.
---
(†)
Jaime Luciano Balmes y Urpiá
(1810-1848) was a Catholic priest from Catalonia, known for his
unique approach to philosophy and Catholic apologetics. He saw his
own thought as resting upon three pillars: (i) Cartesian
consciousness (cogito ergo sum:
I think therefore I am); (ii) non-contradiction (a thing cannot be at
once X and not-X); and (iii) the intellectual instinct (we know that
truth exists, and perceive correspondence between the world and our
perception of it). After
producing two seminal books, one called Fundamental
Philosophy and the other the
Course of Elementary Philosophy referenced
here by Unamuno, he died of tuberculosis in his hometown of Vic.
The argument he uses in the passage quoted is quite similar to one used by ancient
Buddhists to demonstrate the ubiquity of mind (is my
thought confined to one part of my body? no, as I can lose parts and
still think: so, when I am no longer aware of thinking, thought goes
on; it must come to me from somewhere beyond myself).
Unamuno opposes all these arguments with the observation that thought
presents itself to us as the personal expression of a material body
that is mortal, that appears to gain and lose its powers of thinking
as it comes to life and then dies.