Philosophia ars vivendi. Unamuno, Life 6.20
Unamuno
warns the reader that he is going to share personal sentiments: what
follows are lessons from his life, rationalized only enough to make
them accessible to us. They will not withstand every logical
challenge, as we are all capable of approaching them from premises
that reveal the limits of their force. Like many ancient
philosophers, Unamuno finds the fundamental form of philosophy to be
living, not thinking or writing or systematizing per se, and
its final expression is art, not science.
Si
en lo que va a seguir os encontráis con apotegmas arbitrarios, con
transiciones bruscas, con soluciones de continuidad, con verdaderos
saltos mortales del pensamiento, no os llaméis a engaño. Vamos a
entrar, si es que queréis acompañarme, en un campo de
contradicciones entre el sentimiento y el raciocinio, y teniendo que
servirnos del uno y del otro.
Lo
que va a seguir no me ha salido de la razón, sino de la vida, aunque
para trasmitíroslo tengo en cierto modo que racionalizarlo. Lo más
de ello no puede reducirse a teoría o sistema lógico; pero como
Walt Whitman, el enorme poeta yanqui, os encargo que no se funde
escuela o teoría sobre mí.
I
charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me.
Myself
& Mine.
Ni
son las fantasías que han de seguir mías, ¡no! Son también de
otros hombres, no precisamente de otros pensadores, que me han
precedido en este valle de lágrimas y han sacado fuera su vida y la
han expresado. Su vida, digo, y no su pensamiento sino en cuanto era
pensamiento de vida; pensamiento a base irracional.
If
in what follows you find a broken series of arbitrary aphorisms, with
only brusque transitions to bridge the gaps between, transitions that
force us to meet our need for narrative continuity by death-defying
leaps of thought, don't say you weren't warned. We are entering now,
if you will accompany me, into the field of contradictions that lies
between sentiment and reason, and there we must make use of each, of
sentiment and of reason, as occasion presents.
The
lessons that follow came to me not from reason, but from life, though
in order to share them with you I must adopt some method of
rationalizing them. Their full shape cannot be reduced to a theory or
logical system: indeed, like the great Yankee poet Walt Whitman,
I
charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me.
Myself
& Mine, in Leaves
of Grass (1891).
I
cannot lay any uniquely personal
claim to the fantasies that follow, either. They belong also to other
men—not other
thinkers precisely, but people who have preceded me into this vale of
tears, where they too have taken out their
lives and found ways of expressing them. I say lives
here, not thought,
because any thought they had was only a thought belonging to life, a
thought fundamentally irrational.