Reason is always contingent. Unamuno, Life 5.12
Reason
is fundamentally incapable of any comprehensive analysis of the
world. To do her work, she must operate from premises whose ultimate
standing is contingent (beyond her ability to project or control in
any stable form). This means that she cannot see or manage the entire
horizon upon which life occurs. That horizon is necessarily too much
for her. Life is beyond computation, though as human beings we must
perceive and express it with computative means (perception and
expression, form and thought, word and argument, that become
rational). The cause of our obsession with reason: we want to see the
horizon of life, and reason is our largest window (and perhaps the
only window, if we admit perception as form and thought as word). We
must keep checking that window, because one view from it is never
enough to show all the horizon.
No
hay sino leer el terrible
Parménides
de Platón, y
llegar a su conclusión trágica de que «el uno existe y no existe,
y él y todo lo otro existen y no existen,
aparecen y no
aparecen en relación a sí mismos, y unos a otros». Todo lo vital
es irracional, y todo lo racional es anti-vital, porque la razón es
esencialmente escéptica.
Lo
racional, en efecto, no es sino lo relacional; la razón se limita a
relacionar elementos irracionales. Las matemáticas son la única
ciencia perfecta en cuanto suman, restan, multiplican y dividen
números, pero no cosas reales y de bulto; en cuanto es la más
formal de las ciencias. ¿Quién es capaz de extraer la raíz cúbica
de este fresno?
Y,
sin embargo, necesitamos de la lógica, de este poder terrible, para
trasmitir pensamientos y percepciones y hasta para pensar y percibir,
porque pensamos con palabras, percibimos con formas. Pensar es hablar
uno consigo mismo, y el habla es social, y sociales son el
pensamiento y la lógica. Pero ¿no tienen acaso un contenido, una
materia individual, intrasmisible e intraducible? ¿Y no está aquí
su fuerza?
There
is no avoiding the terrible Parmenides of
Plato, with its tragic conclusion: "Unity exists, and does not
exist. It and all other things are and are not, appear and disappear,
in relation to themselves and to one another" (†).
Every vital thing is irrational, and all that is rational is
anti-vital, because reason herself is essentially skeptical.
What
is rational is effectively relational, contingent. Reason is
inevitably limited to relating irrational elements. Mathematics are
the only perfect science inasmuch as they sum, subtract, multiply,
and divide numbers, but they cannot compute real things, material
things, directly. Their
science is most formal of all, measuring its objects precisely. But
who can take the cubic root of this ash tree?
And
yet we still require logic, this terrible power, to translate our
thoughts and perceptions, and even to think and perceive—for
we think with words, and perceive with forms. Thinking is talking
with oneself. Talking is a social event, and so thought and logic are
social things. But don't they always carry some content that is
individual, some matter whose particularity escapes transmission and
translation? Is this not the real source of their power?
---
(†)
The text Unamuno translates is from the very end of the dialogue written by Plato, in
which the sage Parmenides demonstrates his method for parsing
reality: Εἰρήσθω τοίνυν τοῦτό τε καὶ ὅτι,
ὡς ἔοικεν, ἓν εἴτ’ ἔστιν εἴτε μὴ
ἔστιν, αὐτό τε καὶ τἆλλα καὶ πρὸς
αὑτὰ καὶ πρὸς ἄλληλα πάντα πάντως
ἐστί τε καὶ οὐκ ἔστι καὶ φαίνεταί τε
καὶ οὐ φαίνεται (166c).