Vital doctrines. Unamuno, Life 6.24

Doctrine or teaching is something we use to explain to ourselves what we do. It is not the real driver of our action, which is prior to any explanation or illustration we might offer. So, when Unamuno comes to discuss the war between morbid reason and vital sentiment, he finds something prior to any doctrine, including his own, in their conflict. The teachings he derives from sentiment, against reason, are expressions of his love for life, a fierce attachment to vital expression and continuation in the teeth of the tomb that is our rational destiny. These expressions do not require justification or impose any burden of belief on others. Indeed, they don't even impose burdens on him; instead, they express the burden of existence, as he finds it in his own experience.

El hombre, en efecto, no se aviene a ignorar los móviles de su conducta propia, y así como uno a quien habiéndosele hipnotizado y sugerido tal o cual acto, inventa luego razones que lo justifiquen y hagan lógico a sus propios ojos y a los de los demás, ignorando, en realidad, la verdadera causa de su acto, así todo otro hombre, que es un hipnotizado también, pues que la vida es sueño, busca razones de su conducta. Y si las piezas del ajedrez tuviesen conciencia, es fácil que se atribuyeran albedrío en sus movimientos, es decir, la racionalidad finalista de ellos. Y así resulta, que toda teoría filosófica sirve para explicar y justificar una ética, una doctrina de conducta, que surge en realidad del íntimo sentimiento moral del autor de ella. Pero de la verdadera razón o causa de este sentimiento, acaso no tiene clara conciencia el mismo que lo abriga.

Consiguientemente a esto creo poder suponer que si mi razón, que es en cierto modo parte de la razón de mis hermanos en humanidad, en tiempo y en espacio, me enseña ese absoluto escepticismo por lo que al anhelo de vida inacabable se refiere, mi sentimiento de la vida, que es la esencia de la vida misma, mi vitalidad, mi apetito desenfrenado de vivir y mi repugnancia a morirme, esta mi irresignación a la muerte, es lo que me sugiere las doctrinas con que trato de contrarrestar la obra de la razón. ¿Estas doctrinas tienen un valor objetivo? —me preguntará alguien—, y yo responderé que no entiendo qué es eso del valor objetivo de una doctrina. Yo no diré que sean las doctrinas más o menos poéticas o infilosóficas que voy a exponer, las que me hacen vivir; pero me atrevo a decir que es mi anhelo de vivir y de vivir por siempre el que me inspira esas doctrinas. Y si con ellas logro corroborar y sostener en otro ese mismo anhelo, acaso desfalleciente, habré hecho obra humana, y sobre todo, habré vivido. En una palabra, que con razón, sin razón o contra ella, no me da la gana de morirme. Y cuando al fin me muera, si es del todo, no me habré muerto yo, esto es, no me habré dejado morir, sino que me habrá matado el destino humano. Como no llegue a perder la cabeza, o mejor aún que la cabeza, el corazón, yo no dimito de la vida; se me destituirá de ella.

Humans are effectively incapable of paying no heed to the motives driving their conduct; and thus, just like dupes waking from a hypnotic trance in which some action has been suggested, they invent spurious reasons to justify what they have done, rendering it logical in their own eyes and the sight of others. But each remains ignorant of the true cause of his action—as every other person must be, too, all of us being victims of hypnosis, asleep in the dream that is life—and so he must go in quest of reasons to justify his behavior. If chessmen were conscious, it is easy to imagine them attributing some personal will to their movements, discovering in these some terminal rationality or purpose of their own, outside the game. Thus it comes to pass that every philosophical theory serves to explain and justify an ethical one, a doctrine of proper behavior, which arises in reality from the intimate moral feeling of its author. But the true reason or cause for this feeling remains hidden; even the person harboring it may have no clear notion of what it is.

In light of the foregoing, certain beliefs become possible. I can believe that if my reason teaches me to adopt an attitude of total skepticism towards my desire for unending life, then my vitality suggests doctrines with which I will attempt to counter the work of reason. The personal reason invoked here is in some measure part of the greater reason that belongs to my fellow humans, brethren who share my own time and space. The vitality is my feeling or sense of life, the essential part of life itself: an uninhibited appetite for living, a revulsion to dying, and a stubborn refusal to surrender to death. “Do these doctrines of vitality have any objective worth?” someone shall ask me. I will rejoin that I don't know what objective worth means, as an attribute of doctrine. I shall not declare the vital doctrines I intend to set forth to be poetical or unphilosophical: they merely make me live. All I dare to affirm is that my desire to live, and live forever, is what inspires me with these doctrines. And if by them I succeed in strengthening and sustaining in another the same desire, however weak, I shall have done good human work, and above all, I will have lived. To sum it all up: I have no desire to die, whether I am right or wrong, on the side of reason or against her, or beyond her grasp altogether. And when at last I perish, if this is really the end of it all, I will not truly have died: for rather than allow myself to die, I will force human destiny to slay me. Inasmuch as I refuse to lose my head, or even better than my head, my heart, I do not renounce life: if we are to be parted, she must be torn away from me.