Reason, the enemy of Life. Unamuno, Life 5.10

Our reason is hostile to every lack of clear boundaries, which makes it an enemy to life, whose historical expression is one that escapes all boundaries we can recognize or create. Life has boundaries, of course, but they are not limits we control (or understand, with our reason).

Y si la creencia en la inmortalidad del alma no ha podido hallar comprobación empírica racional, tampoco le satisface el panteísmo. Decir que todo es Dios, y que al morir volvemos a Dios, mejor dicho, seguimos en Él, nada vale a nuestro anhelo; pues si es así, antes de nacer, en Dios estábamos, y si volvemos al morir adonde antes de nacer estábamos, el alma humana, la conciencia individual, es perecedera. Y como sabemos muy bien que Dios, el Dios personal y consciente del monoteísmo cristiano, no es sino el productor, y sobre todo, el garantizador de nuestra inmortalidad, de aquí que se dice, y se dice muy bien, que el panteísmo no es sino un ateísmo disfrazado. Y yo creo que sin disfrazar. Y tenían razón los que llamaron ateo a Spinoza, cuyo panteísmo es el más lógico, el más racional. Ni salva al anhelo de inmortalidad, sino que lo disuelve y hunde, el agnosticismo o doctrina de lo inconocible, que cuando ha querido dejar a salvo los sentimientos religiosos ha procedido siempre con la más refinada hipocresía. Toda la Primera Parte, y sobre todo, su capítulo V, el titulado «Reconciliación» —entre la razón y la fe, o la religión y la ciencia se entiende— de los Primeros Principios de Spencer es un modelo, a la vez que de superficialidad filosófica y de insinceridad religiosa, del más refinado cant británico. Lo inconocible, si es algo más que lo meramente desconocido hasta hoy, no es sino un concepto puramente negativo, un concepto de límite. Y sobre eso no se edifica sentimiento ninguno.

La ciencia de la religión, por otra parte, de la religión como fenómeno psíquico individual y social sin entrar en la validez objetiva trascendente de las afirmaciones religiosas, es una ciencia que, al explicar el origen de la fe en que el alma es algo que puede vivir separado del cuerpo, ha destruído la racionalidad de esta creencia. Por más que el hombre religioso repita con Schleiermacher: «la ciencia no puede enseñarte nada, aprenda ella de ti», por dentro le queda otra.

Por cualquier lado que la cosa se mire, siempre resulta que la razón se pone enfrente de ese nuestro anhelo de inmortalidad personal, y nos le contradice. Y es que en rigor la razón es enemiga de la vida.

If belief in the immortality of the soul has failed to find empirical justification that reason must respect, so has pantheism. Saying that everything is God, and that we return to God upon dying—or more accurately, that we continue in him—does nothing to sate our real desire. For if it is true, then before our birth we were in God, and when we return after death to our prenatal point of origin, the human soul, our individual consciousness, is revealed to be perishable. And as we know very well that God, the personal and knowing God of Christian monotheism, is the creator and above all else the guardian of our immortality, so it becomes clear that pantheism is merely atheism in disguise. And not much of a disguise, at that! They were right to call Spinoza an atheist: his pantheism is the most logical, the most rational. Nor does agnosticism, the doctrine of the unknowable, save our desire for immortality, opting instead to dissolve and drown it: when it wishes to leave religious sentiments intact, it always approaches them with the most refined hypocrisy. All the first part of Spencer's First Principles (especially chapter 5, entitled 'Reconciliation' because it tries to join faith, religion, and science) is a model of the most exquisite British cant, combining superficial philosophy with religious insincerity (†). The unknowable, if it is anything more than just what we haven't noticed until today, is essentially a negative concept, a concept of limit. On this no positive sentiment is to be erected.

The scientific or sociological approach to religion, on the other hand, takes religion as a phenomenon of the individual and social psyche without engaging the question of whether religious affirmations achieve any objective, transcendent validity. By tracing the origin of faith back to the axiom that the soul is something that can live separate from the body, this science has destroyed the rationality of believing in the soul. No matter how much a religious man repeats the mantra of Schleiermacher—"Science cannot teach you anything: let her learn from you instead" (‡)—the message he carries within remains very different.

Whatever perspective we take, always we see that reason opposes our desire for personal immortality, contradicting it explicitly. Seen closely, with rigor, reason is an enemy to life.

---

(†) Herbert Spencer (1820-1903 CE) was born into a family of religious and social dissenters: his father was a Methodist, then a Quaker, and ran a progressive primary school in Derby, England, while serving as secretary to the Derby Philosophical Society, founded in 1783 by Erastus Darwin (grandfather of the famous Charles). With relatively little by way of formal education, Spencer began working as a civil engineer while writing for provincial journals. Eventually, he published books and was able to live from writing. His work sought to articulate a rational basis for all human culture, which he thought could be deduced from natural laws of universal validity, whose historical expression would appear inevitably as progress (i.e. movement or evolution from the bad to the good, the better to the best). He is best known by his summary, and subsequent misapplication, of Darwin's idea of natural selection, which he understood as the survival of the fittest. In Spencer's formulation, the idea that organisms adapt to local circumstances over time became an assertion that human organisms and culture must always evolve such that today's constitute an improvement upon yesterday's. In simple terms, he represented an historically naive line of reasoning which saw nature inevitably producing the best people, practicing the best culture, which would of course be universal and rationally accessible. The history of the twentieth century is probably his best refutation, though utopian experiments also failed within his own time, and he became more conservative and tentative in old age.

(‡) Friederich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was born into a family of pastors, and pursued the family career from a secular angle, attempting to reconcile the Moravian faith of his ancestors with the secular culture of the Enlightenment. As a pastor and then a professor of theology, he articulated a vision of religion notable for its particularity. His religion is personal and intimate: an individual regarding the cosmos, without dogma or ritual being requisite in any absolute or essential way.