The Battle for Existence. Unamuno, Life 6.9
Unamuno
conceives our life as a battle between the heart, which longs to live
without dying, and the head, which calculates that this is
impossible. In his reading of history, we go through periods of
vitalism, when our irrational will to survive forever manifests in
worship without great attachment to material forms, and periods of
rationalism, when material forms become the most significant culture
we possess, because we accept reason and reject immortality. Attempts
to harmonize will and reason here must fail, he thinks, as any
harmony we achieve turns with time into one of them claiming victory
that the other then rises to deny.
El
instinto de conocer y el de vivir, o más bien de sobrevivir, entran
en lucha. El Dr. E. Mach, en su obra sobre El
análisis de las sensaciones y la relación de lo físico a lo
psíquico
(Die
Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältniss des Physischen zum
Psychischen),
nos dice en una nota (I, § 12),
que también el
investigador, el sabio,
der
Forscher, lucha
en la batalla por la existencia, que también los caminos de la
ciencia llevan a la boca, y que no es todavía sino un ideal en
nuestras actuales condiciones sociales el puro instinto de conocer,
der
reine Erkenntnisstrieb.
Y así será siempre.
Primum
vivere, deinde philosophari,
o mejor acaso primum
supervivere o
superesse.
Toda
posición de acuerdo y armonía persistentes entre la razón y la
vida, entre la filosofía y la religión, se hace imposible. Y la
trágica historia del pensamiento humano no es sino la de una lucha
entre la razón y la vida, aquélla empeñada en racionalizar a ésta
haciéndola que se resigne a lo inevitable, a la mortalidad; y ésta,
la vida, empeñada en vitalizar a la razón obligándola a que sirva
de apoyo a sus anhelos vitales. Y esta es la historia de la
filosofía, inseparable de la historia de la religión.
El
sentimiento del mundo, de la realidad objetiva, es necesariamente
subjetivo, humano, antropomórfico. Y siempre se levantará frente al
racionalismo el vitalismo, siempre la voluntad se erguirá frente a
la razón. De donde el ritmo de la historia de la filosofía y la
sucesión de períodos en que se impone la vida produciendo formas
espiritualistas, y otros en que la razón se impone produciendo
formas materialistas, aunque a una y otra clase de formas de creer se
las disfrace con otros nombres. Ni la razón ni la vida se dan por
vencidas nunca. Mas sobre esto volveremos en el próximo capítulo.
The
instinct to know and the instinct to live, or rather to survive, wage
constant war against each other. Dr. Ernst Mach (†), in his book on
The Analysis of our Feelings, and the Relationship between Matter
and Spirit, tells us in a note
(1.12) that even the wise researcher fights in the battle for
existence, that all the ways of science lead to its front lines, and
that the instinct that drives us toward pure knowledge, knowledge for
its own sake without any bearing on this war, is but an ethereal
ideal. Thus will it ever be.
First live, then philosophize,
as the Latin proverb says. We
could make it better: You must survive, or at least
manage to remain alive, before you do philosophy.
Every
position that promises lasting harmony or agreement between reason
and life, philosophy and religion, becomes in time impossible.
Instead, the tragic history of human thought is wholly occupied by
war between these principles, with reason seeking to rationalize life
by making her surrender to inevitable mortality, while life tries to
vivify reason, forcing her to serve and support vital desires. This
is also the history of philosophy, inseparable from the history of
religion.
Our
attitude toward the world, the feeling we hold for its objective
reality, is necessarily subjective, human, and calculated to bestow
our humanity upon it—at least notionally. So vitalism shall rise
forever against rationalism, and will against reason. Hence the
rhythm we find in the history of philosophy, which shows us periods
of vital will and morbid reason alternating in constant succession:
vital will dominates with spiritual forms of culture, until reason
ascends and imposes material ones. Each side hides behind new names
as time passes, but the same fight goes on. Neither will surrender to
the other, ever. We shall revisit the significance of their conflict
in the next chapter.
---
(†)
Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach (1838-1916) was an Austrian
philosopher and physicist, best remembered for his work on shock
waves, which produced the Mach number. This number represents the
ratio of local velocity in a limited material circumstance to the
speed of sound in the medium that occupies that circumstance. As it
represents the ratio of two speeds, this number is dimensionless.
Mach's philosophy held that material phenomena are best understood as
momentary expressions of the actual distribution of matter in the
universe (a position that inspired Einstein to posit general
relativity). Mach also conducted research in physiology and
psychology.