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.