Rational ethics? Impossible. Unamuno, Life 5.21
Unamuno
continues his argument ad hominem against
Spinoza. He finds Spinoza being very rational about ethics, but for
him this is not enough: ethics require sentiment that is not simply
rational, that will not be reduced to reason. It does not please him
when Spinoza makes virtue its own reward. He suspects that this line
of argument develops from Spinoza being quite sadly denied many good
rewards in life, so that he must make or frame happiness in terms
accessible from a position of misery. He grasps happiness
intellectually, in terms of rational explanation, because he does not
have it actually, where he and all of us would prefer to take it—or
so Unamuno seems to think.
En
el escolio a la proposición 41 de esta misma última y más trágica
parte de esa formidable tragedia de su
Ética,
nos habla el pobre judío desesperado de Ámsterdam, de la persuasión
común del vulgo sobre la vida eterna. Oigámosle: «Parece que creen
que la piedad y la religión y todo lo que se refiere a la fortaleza
de ánimo, son cargas que hay que deponer después de la muerte, y
esperan recibir el precio de la servidumbre, no de la piedad y la
religión. Y no sólo por esta esperanza, sino también, y más
principalmente, por el miedo de ser castigados con terribles
suplicios después de la muerte, se mueven a vivir conforme a la
prescripción de la ley divina en cuanto les lleva su debilidad y su
ánimo impotente; y si no fuese por esta esperanza y este miedo, y
creyeran, por el contrario, que las almas mueren con los cuerpos, ni
les quedara el vivir más tiempo sino miserables bajo el peso de
la piedad,
volverían a su índole, prefiriendo acomodarlo todo a su gusto y
entregarse a la fortuna más que a sí mismos. Lo cual no parece
menos absurdo que si uno, por no creer poder alimentar a su cuerpo
con buenos alimentos para siempre, prefiriese saturarse de venenos
mortíferos, o porque ve que el alma no es eterna o inmortal,
prefiera ser sin alma (amens)
y vivir sin razón; todo lo cual es tan absurdo que apenas merece ser
refutado (quae
adeo absurda sunt, ut vix recenseri mereantur)».
Cuando
se dice de algo que no merece siquiera refutación, tenedlo por
seguro, o es una insigne necedad, y en este caso ni eso hay que decir
de ella, o es algo formidable, es la clave misma del problema. Y así
es en este caso. Porque sí, pobre judío portugués desterrado en
Holanda, sí, que quien se convenza, sin rastro de duda, sin el más
leve resquicio de incertidumbre salvadora, de que su alma no es
inmortal, prefiera ser sin alma, amens,
o irracional, o idiota, prefiera no haber nacido, no tiene nada,
absolutamente nada de absurdo. Él, el pobre judío
intelectualista definidor del amor intelectual y de la felicidad,
¿fué feliz? Porque este y no otro es el problema. «¿De qué te
sirve saber definir la compunción, si no la sientes?» dice el
Kempis. Y, ¿de que te sirve meterte a definir la felicidad si no
logra uno con ello ser feliz? Aquí encaja aquel terrible
cuento de Diderot sobre el eunuco que, para mejor poder escoger
esclavas con destino al harem del soldán, su dueño, quiso recibir
lecciones de estética de un marsellés. A la primera lección,
fisiológica, brutal y carnalmente fisiológica, exclamó el eunuco
compungido: «¡Está visto que yo nunca sabré estética!» Y así
es; ni los eunucos sabrán nunca estética aplicada a la selección
de mujeres hermosas, ni los puros racionalistas sabrán ética nunca,
ni llegarán a definir la felicidad, que es una cosa que se vive y se
siente, y no una cosa que se razona y se define.
In
the note to the forty-first proposition in this same final and most
tragic part of the formidable tragedy that is his Ethics, the
poor, hopeless Jew from Amsterdam speaks to us of the faith common
folk have in eternal life. Listen to what he says: “It appears that
they believe that piety and religion, and indeed everything that
depends on strength of mind, are burdens that we cast off after
death. They hope to receive a reward from their service
to piety and religion, not from piety and religion themselves. And it
is not merely this hope of reward that moves the masses:
their principal motivation is fear of being punished with terrible
pains after death. This fear moves them to live in keeping with the
prescription of divine law insofar as the weakness of their minds
allows. If it were not for their hope and fear of eternity—if
they believed that the soul perished with the body—they
would not persist in living miserable under the weight of piety. They
would revert to their natural character, preferring to accommodate
all things to their taste, delivering their affairs to fortune more
than to any deliberate plan of their own. Their attitude is no less
absurd than that of a man who, being unable to conceive
how he might feed
his body on healthy food forever, decides to ingest copious amounts
of deadly poisons, or again of one who, when he sees that the soul is
not eternal or immortal, chooses to become witless and live without
any reason. All
this is so ridiculous that it hardly merits refutation.”
When
something is marked as unworthy of refutation, be sure that it is
either meaningless nonsense, as here it is not, or something
formidable, the very key to the problem presented. That is what we
see here. For it makes very good sense, poor Jew of Portugal exiled
to Holland, that someone convinced that the soul is mortal—beyond
all shadow of doubt, beyond even the slightest hope of uncertain
redemption—should
choose to live without soul, raving irrationally as an idiot, or that
he should wish never to have been born. There is nothing absurd in
that, at all. And what of yourself? Was our poor thinker happy, as he
proposed intellectual definitions for rationalized love and
happiness? This is the real problem here. “What is the use of
defining compunction, if you don't feel it?” Kempis asks (†).
What use is defining happiness, if one does not manage thereby to be
happy? An apt lesson here
comes from that terrible story told by Diderot (‡),
about the eunuch who asked a man of Marseilles for lessons in beauty,
so that he might better choose female slaves for the harem of his master,
the sultan. At the end of
the first lesson, which was brutally, carnally physical, the eunuch
confessed his inadequacy: “Evidently I shall never know beauty!”
And so it is. Eunuchs shall never understand beauty in terms
applicable to the recognition of lovely women, and pure rationalists
shall never understand ethics. Nor shall they succeed in defining
happiness, which is something we live and feel, not
a thing to be reasoned or
defined.
---
(†)
Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471), the German canon regular responsible
for writing the Imitation
of Christ.
(‡)
Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was a French philosopher, best known for
his work on the Encyclopédie
(pub.
1751-1772), a wide-ranging description of the world as it appeared in
the age of Enlightenment. He wrote many other works, though,
including fictional tales such as the one referenced here.