Joy requires suffering. Unamuno, Life 7.18
Unamuno
likes the doctrine of Will put forward by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who thought that before the world is anything we
represent (semantically, logically, etc.) it must be something that
drives us (emotively, prerationally, without fixed limit we can
find). The driving will to represent produces our lives, our thought,
and our culture, which is fundamentally sad or doomed because nothing
represented is ever perfectly able to capture or satisfy the will
that drives it. Sensing the frustration in others that we feel in
ourselves, with our natural inability to represent what is beyond
final representation, we develop compassion, the source of our
ability to cooperate and behave, as people. We also learn in time, by
suffering, to renounce will, to resign ourselves to lack of
representation. The final form of this resignation, conceived as
blissful release from the compelling drive to represent, is death.
Y
por lo que a Schopenhauer hace, no es menester esforzarse en mostrar
cómo la voluntad que pone como esencia de las cosas, procede de la
conciencia. Y basta leer su libro sobre la voluntad en la Naturaleza,
para ver cómo atribuía un cierto espíritu y hasta una cierta
personalidad a las plantas mismas. Y esa su doctrina le llevó
lógicamente al pesimismo, porque lo más propio y más íntimo de la
voluntad es sufrir. La voluntad es una fuerza que se siente, esto es,
que sufre. Y que goza, añadirá alguien. Pero es que no cabe poder
gozar sin poder de sufrir, y la facultad del goce es la misma que la
del dolor. El que no sufre tampoco goza, como no siente calor el que
no siente frío.
Y
es muy lógico también que Schopenhauer, el que de la doctrina
voluntarista o de personalización de todo, sacó el pesimismo,
sacara de ambas que el fundamento de la moral es la compasión. Sólo
que su falta de sentido social e histórico, el no sentir a la
humanidad como una persona también, aunque colectiva, su egoísmo,
en fin, le impidió sentir a Dios, le impidió individualizar y
personalizar la Voluntad total y colectiva: la Voluntad del Universo.
As
far as Schopenhauer is concerned, there is no need to exert ourselves
in demonstrating how the Will he posits as the essence of things
proceeds from consciousness. It is enough to read his book on will in
Nature, wherein he attributes a certain spirit or personality even to
plants. This doctrine led him naturally to pessimism, because the
most proper and intimate property of will is suffering. Will is a
force that feels its own existence, which is merely a way of saying
that it suffers. “It also rejoices!” someone shall add. But the
ability to rejoice cannot exist without a capacity for suffering, and
our faculty for joy is the same as our faculty for pain. The man
without suffering experiences no joy, just as there is no feeling of
warmth in someone who feels no cold.
It
is quite logical that Schopenhauer should find the foundation of
morality in compassion, after deriving a pessimistic outlook on the
world from his doctrine of the will, which amounts to a
personification of all things. Only his lack of social and historical
feeling, his failure to sense that humanity too is a person, albeit a
collective one, impeded him from sensing God, the individualization
and personification of Will that is at once total and collective: the
Will of the Universe. This vision was held back by his selfishness.