The will to live. Unamuno, Life 7.15
Unamuno
believes that it is a mistake to think we can escape from religion,
in the broadest sense, because the essential element of religion is
something vital in our psyche, a will to live beyond the moment we
currently inhabit. Rejecting the historical tradition of any
particular religion, and its philosophies, does not liberate us from
the need to do the work these tools existed for. So we reinvent that
which past ages already invented, in a new form that we can use. Rejecting
medieval religions, and their philosophies, doesn't set modern
philosophy free from humanity, so in due time a Bergson will arise to
cast modern molds for the ancient will to live that persists in us.
There is no avoiding the expression of our vitality as some kind of
worship that manifests in our language as belief. The role of belief
is not limited or limitable to expressing merely the facts; we put
facts into myths, which always show us the world in human shapes,
shapes that we relate to instinctively, in ways that can never be
perfectly or universally rationalized.
Y
el concepto de Dios, siempre redivivo, pues brota del eterno
sentimiento de Dios en el hombre, ¿qué es sino la eterna protesta
de la vida contra la razón, el nunca vencido instinto de
personalización? ¿Y qué es la noción misma de sustancia, sino
objetivación de lo más subjetivo, que es la voluntad o la
conciencia? Porque la conciencia, aun antes de conocerse como razón,
se siente, se toca, se es más bien como voluntad, y como voluntad de
no morir. De aquí ese ritmo de que hablábamos en la historia del
pensamiento. El positivismo nos trajo una época de racionalismo, es
decir, de materialismo, mecanicismo o mortalismo; y he aquí que el
vitalismo, el espiritualismo vuelve. ¿Qué han sido los esfuerzos
del pragmatismo sino esfuerzos por restaurar la fe en la finalidad
humana del universo? ¿Qué son los esfuerzos de un Bergson, v.
gr., sobre todo en su obra sobre la evolución creadora, sino
forcejeos por restaurar al Dios personal y la conciencia eterna? Y es
que la vida no se rinde.
Y
de nada sirve querer suprimir ese proceso mitopeico o antropomórfico
y racionalizar nuestro pensamiento, como si se pensara sólo para
pensar y conocer, y no para vivir. La lengua misma, con la que
pensamos, nos lo impide. La lengua, sustancia del pensamiento, es un
sistema de metáforas a base mítica y antropomórfica. Y para hacer
una filosofía puramente racional, habría que hacerla por fórmulas
algebraicas o crear una lengua —una lengua inhumana, es decir,
inapta para las necesidades de la vida—para ella, como lo intentó
el Dr. Ricardo Avenarius, profesor de filosofía, en Zürich, en su
Crítica
de la experiencia pura (Kritik
der reinen Erfahrung),
para evitar los preconceptos.
Y este vigoroso
esfuerzo de Avenarius, el caudillo de los empiriocriticistas, termina
en rigor en puro escepticismo. Él mismo nos lo dice al final del
prólogo de la susomentada obra: «Ha tiempo que desapareció la
infantil confianza de que nos sea dado hallar la verdad; mientras
avanzamos, nos damos cuenta de sus dificultades, y con ello del
límite de nuestras fuerzas. ¿Y el fin?... ¡Con tal de que
lleguemos a ver claro en nosotros mismos!»
The
concept of God is always coming back to life, as it springs from the
ever abiding sensation of God in the heart of humankind. What is this
feeling if not an eternal protest of life against reason, an
unconquered and invincible instinct to personify? What is the very
notion of substance, if not an objectification of the most subjective
thing we know, which is will or consciousness? For consciousness,
even before it becomes aware of itself as reason, feels itself,
touches itself, exists on its own as will, specifically the will not
to die. Hence the rhythm we remarked earlier in the history of
thought. Positivism brought us an age of reason: in other words, an
age of materialism, mechanism, or mortal limitation. And lo! the
outcome of this was a return of vitalism, of spiritualism. For what
else has pragmatism sought to accomplish besides restoring our faith
in the human finality of the universe? What is Bergson (†), for
instance, trying to do in his works, especially the one on creative
evolution, if not forcibly to restore our personal God and eternal
consciousness? Life refuses to surrender.
There's
no point in wishing to suppress this mythopoetic or anthropomorphic
process, trying to rationalize our thought as though its only purpose
were pure cogitation or knowledge, and not living. The very language
that holds our thoughts impedes us from thus relinquishing our
humanity. As the substance of our thought, our language is a system
of metaphors grounded firmly in myths of very human shape. To fashion
a purely rational philosophy, we would have to craft it by algebraic
formulae, or create a new language for it—an inhuman language, one
useless for discussing the necessities of life. Dr. Richard Avenarius
(‡), professor of philosophy at Zürich,
attempted this in his
Critique of Pure Experience,
which was calculated to avoid every preconception anyone might have.
This vigorous attempt by Avenarius, the captain of the critical
positivists, ends in a rigorous and pure skepticism. As the man
himself says at the conclusion of the prologue to this book, “It is
some time since our infantile confidence of discovering the truth has
disappeared. The further we advance, the more we realize the
difficulties
of this terrain, and the limits of our powers. What is the end of our
quest? … We merely wish to
achieve clear insight into ourselves!”
---
(†)
Henri-Louis Bergson
(1859-1941) was a French philosopher who argued that reality is best
grasped by our immediate experiences rather than any abstract
reasoning. He did this from a position essentially modern and
secular, having left Judaism after discovering Darwinian evolution as
a teenager. He published several works, including the famous Creative
Evolution (L'Évolution
créatrice, pub. 1907).
He preferred metaphors to
concepts, noting that nobody rational would deduce our ability to
swim from any concept derived from the way we walk on land: swimming
emerges for conception only after we enter the water. All concepts
for him were post hoc
reflections of real experience.
(‡)
The Swiss philosopher Richard Ludwig Heinrich Avenarius (1843-1896)
wanted to describe our experiences in perfectly rational terms,
without recourse to metaphors that make up historical language. His
tradition was continued by Ernst Mach, and drew ire from Lenin, when
Avenarius criticized the materialism of Carl Vogt.