The end of reason. Unamuno, Life 5.26
Unamuno
concludes his chapter on reason by identifying the end of reason as
total dissolution, the deconstruction of any basis for action. All
actions must carry some motive which reason can analyze, distress,
and deconstruct, leaving the agent distrustful of motive, and so of
its expression. The end of rational analysis thus becomes paralysis,
when we see starkly our mortal limitations, a sight often accompanied
by emotional despair. What to do with that? The next chapter will say
more.
La
disolución racional termina en disolver la razón misma, en el más
absoluto escepticismo, en el fenomenalismo de Hume o en el
contingencialismo absoluto de Stuart Mill, éste el más consecuente
y lógico de los positivistas. El triunfo supremo de la razón,
facultad analítica, esto es, destructiva y disolvente, es poner en
duda su propia validez. Cuando hay una úlcera en el estómago, acaba
éste por digerirse a sí mismo. Y la razón acaba por destruir la
validez inmediata y absoluta del concepto de verdad y del concepto de
necesidad. Ambos conceptos son relativos; ni hay verdad ni hay
necesidad absolutas. Llamamos verdadero a un concepto que concuerda
con el sistema general de nuestros conceptos todos, verdadera a una
percepción que no contradice al sistema de nuestras percepciones;
verdad es coherencia. Y en cuanto al sistema todo, al conjunto, como
no hay fuera de él nada para nosotros conocido, no cabe decir que
sea o no verdadero. El universo es imaginable que sea en sí, fuera
de nosotros, muy de otro modo que como a nosotros se nos aparece,
aunque ésta sea una suposición que carezca de todo sentido
racional. Y en cuanto a la necesidad, ¿la hay absoluta? Necesario no
es sino lo que es y en cuanto es, pues en otro sentido más
trascendente, ¿qué necesidad absoluta, lógica, independiente del
hecho de que el universo existe, hay de que haya universo ni cosa
alguna?
El
absoluto relativismo, que no es ni más ni menos que el escepticismo,
en el sentido más moderno de esta denominación, es el triunfo
supremo de la razón raciocinante.
Ni
el sentimiento logra hacer del consuelo verdad, ni la razón logra
hacer de la verdad consuelo; pero esta segunda, la razón,
procediendo sobre la verdad misma, sobre el concepto mismo de
realidad, logra hundirse en un profundo escepticismo. Y en este
abismo encuéntrase el escepticismo racional con la desesperación
sentimental, y de este encuentro es de donde sale una base —¡terrible
base!— de consuelo. Vamos a verlo.
The
process of rational dissolution ends by dissolving reason herself,
leaving only the most total skepticism: the phenomenalism of Hume, or
the absolute contingency of John Stuart Mill, who is the most
consequential and logical of the positivists (†). The supreme
triumph of reason, an analytical faculty for destruction and
dissolution, is to put in doubt its own efficacy. As an ulcer in the
stomach will eventually digest itself, so reason ends by unmaking the
efficacy of concepts such as truth or necessity, both in the
immediate present and in the grand scheme of things. Both of these
concepts are relative, relational, contingent. There exists no
absolute truth or necessity. We use the word true to
mark a concept that accords with the general system of all our
concepts, to indicate a perception that does not contradict the total
sum of our perceptions. Truth is coherence. Taking that system or sum
in its totality, we cannot say whether it is true or not, as we know
nothing beyond or outside it. It is very easy to conceive that the
universe in itself, beyond our perception of it, is very different
from what we apprehend, though this conception lacks all rational
sense. As for necessity: is she absolute? A thing is only necessary
insofar as it exists, in certain limited circumstances. In a more
transcendent sense, what absolute necessity can there be, logically,
beyond the fact that the universe exists? Is
it really necessary that a universe exist, or that any particular
thing within it do so?
Absolute
relativism, which is neither more nor less than skepticism in the
most modern sense of the word, represents the supreme triumph of
reason, the perfection of her work.
As
sentiment fails to make consolation true, so reason fails to make
truth comfortable. But in the meantime, reason, proceeding on the
path of truth, on our fundamental conception of reality, manages to
drown herself in deep skepticism. In this abyss, rational skepticism
encounters sentimental despair, and from their meeting there arises a
foundation—and what a fearful foundation it is!—for consolation.
We shall see it.
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(†)
Hume echoes the ancient Democritus (cf. Galen, De experientia
medica 15.7-8; Aristotle,
Metaphysica 1009b
Bekker) by observing that “vice and virtue may be compared
to sounds, colours, heat, and cold, which modern philosophy says are
not qualities in objects but perceptions in the mind” (Treatise
of Human Nature 3.1.1).
John Stuart Mill's views on contingency are well expressed in his
book On Liberty (pub. 1859),
whose second chapter includes the following passage, which shows what
Unamuno means by absolute contingency:
“Each individual devolves upon his own world the
responsibility of being in the right against the dissentient worlds
of other people; and it never troubles him that mere accident has
decided which of these numerous worlds is the object of his reliance,
and that the same causes which make him a Churchman in London, would
have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Pekin. Yet it is as
evident in itself, as any amount of argument can make it, that ages
are no more infallible than individuals; every age having held many
opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd;
and it is as certain that many opinions now general will be rejected
by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the
present.”