Reason won't grant immortality. Unamuno, Life 5.9
Unamuno
recounts the history of modern attempts to argue rationally for the
soul's immortality, starting with the Renaissance and its aftermath.
He finds the humanist reading of Aristotle more convincingly rational
than the scholastic, when it comes to the soul's mortality, and
dismisses nineteenth-century spiritualism (which argued that souls
might be immortal because we observe them communicating with mediums,
psychics, and others, in various circumstances we can observe).
A
partir del Renacimiento y la restitución del pensamiento puramente
racional y emancipado de toda teología, la doctrina de la mortalidad
del alma se restableció con Alejandro Afrodisiense, Pedro Pomponazzi
y otros. Y en rigor, poco o nada puede agregarse a cuanto Pomponazzi
dejó escrito en su
Tractatus
de inmortalitate animae.
Esa es la razón, y es
inútil darle vueltas.
No
ha faltado, sin embargo, quienes hayan tratado de apoyar
empíricamente la fe en la inmortalidad del alma, y ahí está la
obra de Frederic W. H. Myers sobre la personalidad humana y su
sobrevivencia a la muerte corporal:
Human
personality and its survival of bodily death.
Nadie se ha acercado
con más ansia que yo a los dos gruesos volúmenes de esta obra, en
que el que fué alma de la Sociedad de Investigaciones
psíquicas—Society
for Psychical Research—ha
resumido el formidable material de datos, sobre todo género de
corazonadas, apariciones de muertos, fenómenos de sueño, telepatía,
hipnotismo, automatismo sensorial, éxtasis y todo lo que constituye
el arsenal espiritista. Entré en su lectura, no sólo sin la
prevención de antemano que a tales investigaciones guardan los
hombres de ciencia, sino hasta prevenido favorablemente, como quien
va a buscar confirmación a sus más íntimos anhelos; pero por esto
la decepción fué mayor. A pesar del aparato de crítica, todo eso
en nada se diferencia de las milagrerías medievales. Hay en el fondo
un error de método, de lógica.
Ever
since the Renaissance and the restoration of thought that is purely
rational, emancipated of all theology, the doctrine of the soul's
mortality has resumed its old position of dominance, taken in
antiquity by Alexander of Aphrodisias (†) and fortified more
recently by Pietro Pomponazzi (‡), as well as others. In terms of
rigor, there is really nothing left to add to what Pomponazzi left us
written in his Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul. In
his take we find reason herself, and it is useless to fight against
her.
Still,
some have sought to support faith in the immortality of the soul with
empirical observation. Here we find the work of Frederic W. H. Myers
(*) on Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death.
Nobody has approached the two thick volumes of this work with more
anxiety than I. In them, that which was the soul of the Society for
Psychical Research has taken the shape of a formidable collection of
facts: episodes of spontaneous premonition, apparitions of the dead,
strange dreams, telepathy, hypnotism, involuntary seizures,
ecstasies, and the entire spiritualist arsenal. I began reading
without any of the prejudice men of science are accustomed to keep
against such investigations; indeed, I was favorably disposed, as one
looking to confirm his most intimate desires. But this only made my
disappointment worse. Despite coming equipped with a critical
apparatus, the project holds nothing that you couldn't find in
medieval accounts of miracles. There is an error of method, of logic,
in its most basic conception.
---
(†)
Alexander (fl. second century CE) was a philosopher in the
Peripatetic tradition, hailing originally from the city of
Aphrodisias in Caria, whence he came in time to Athens, where he
became head of the Lyceum. He left behind various writings, mostly
commentaries on Aristotle, and produced a strong Peripatetic argument
for the mortality of the soul.
(‡)
Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525 CE) studied medicine at the University
of Padua, becoming first a doctor and then a natural philosopher.
When the War of the Holy League interrupted the life of Padua in
1509, he went to the University of Ferrara, where he taught on
Aristotle, and finally in 1512 to the University of Bologna, where he
stayed and published his works, including the treatise on the soul
cited by Unamuno. He remained a committed Catholic his entire life
and was not censured by the church for his explicit beliefs (i) that
Aristotle did not teach the immortality of the soul, contrary to what
Aquinas says, and (ii) that reason does not compel us to accept the
immortality of the soul.
(*)
Born into a British family of industrial magnates turned clergymen,
Myers (1843-1901) was educated as a classicist at Cheltenham College
and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his degree along with
several prizes (including one he returned under suspicion of
plagiarism) and a fellowship. Eventually, he became a state inspector
of schools (a professional bureaucrat). After losing faith in the
religion of his parents, he sought some basis for religion in
spiritualism, and founded with others the society whose publication
Unamuno read. The spiritualists were notoriously gullible, as their
history of dealing with mediums and psychics like Douglas Blackburn
and Eusapia Palladino shows.