Our being. Unamuno, Life 7.17
For
us, to be is to be doing, and doing is a process that requires
feeling. It is not enough to think the world; we must feel it to know
what we think.
El
hombre no se resigna a estar, como conciencia, solo en el Universo,
ni a ser un fenómeno objetivo más. Quiere salvar su subjetividad
vital o pasional haciendo vivo, personal, animado al Universo todo. Y
por eso y para eso ha descubierto a Dios y la sustancia, Dios y
sustancia que vuelven siempre en su pensamiento de uno de otro modo
disfrazados. Por ser conscientes nos sentimos existir, que es muy
otra cosa que sabernos existentes y queremos sentir la existencia de
todo lo demás, que cada una de las demás cosas individuales sea
también un yo.
El
más consecuente, aunque más incongruente y vacilante idealismo, el
de Berkeley, que negaba la existencia de la materia, de algo inerte y
extenso y pasivo, que sea la causa de nuestras sensaciones y el
substracto de los fenómenos externos, no es en el fondo más que un
absoluto espiritualismo o dinamismo, la suposición de que toda
sensación nos viene, como de causa, de otro espíritu, esto es, de
otra conciencia. Y se da su doctrina en cierto modo la mano con las
de Schopenhauer y Hartmann. La doctrina de la Voluntad del primero de
estos dos y la de lo Inconsciente del otro, están ya en potencia en
la doctrina berkeleyana, de que ser es ser percibido. A lo que hay
que añadir: y hacer que otro perciba al que es. Y así el viejo
adagio de que operari
sequitur esse, el obrar se sigue al ser, hay que
modificarlo diciendo que ser es obrar y sólo existe lo que obra, lo
activo, y en cuanto obra.
Mankind
is not resigned to being the only consciousness in the Universe, nor
to being just another objective phenomenon like the rest. We want to
save our vital & passionate subjectivity by vivifying,
personifying, and animating all the Universe. For this reason we have
discovered God and substance, two things that return constantly to us
under one guise or another. Being conscious means that we feel
our existence, which is very different from knowing it
intellectually, and we desire to feel the existence of all other
things. We want each of them to be another self, an ego like ours.
The
most significant idealist position, though it is incoherent and
vacillating, is the one taken by Berkeley, who denied the existence
of matter. For him, there is nothing inert, extended, and passive
that can be taken as the cause of our feelings, or the substrate of
external phenomena. The foundation of this conception is an
absolutely spiritual or dynamic understanding of the world, which
supposes that every feeling reaches us as the effect or imprint of
another spirit than our own, i.e. another consciousness. His doctrine
has a certain affiliation with those taught by Schopenhauer and
Hartmann (†). Schopenhauer's doctrine of Will and Hartmann's
doctrine of the Unconscious are both latent in Berkeley's
observation, that being is perception. To this we should add that
being is also making another perceive one's own existence. And so we
must modify the old adage, that function follows being, to say
that being is function, and the only thing that exists is something
active, something that functions, something that can only be seen or
known insofar as it does work.
---
(†)
Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906) posited will & reason
as equal partners in expressing the stirring or process by which
unconsciousness turns into consciousness, which has desire (will) &
teleology (reason). He thought Schopenhauer wrong to make will prior
to reason. Originally destined for a military career, bad knees led
him to philosophy, where he made a living selling books, refusing
professorships.