The world is myth to us. Unamuno, Life 7.14
Modernity
rests upon the premise that reason allows us to dominate the world.
Unamuno does not believe this: our domination of the world fails, and
with it our reason, which depends fundamentally upon language and
imagination that are not susceptible to perfect rationalization (now
or ever). Attempts to create purely rational semantics, signals for
action and thought that never speak falsely, must fail, he warns, as
the very humanity that demands them is necessarily irrational, with
whatever power of reason we have existing to facilitate our vital
lunacy, not replace it. This position is also Hume's (though he
arrives there with a different background, on a different path).
En
vano Comte declaró que el pensamiento humano salió ya de la edad
teológica y está saliendo de la metafísica para entrar en la
positiva; las tres edades coexisten y se apoyan, aun oponiéndose,
unas en otras. El flamante positivismo no es sino metafísica cuando
deja de negar para afirmar algo, cuando se hace realmente positivo, y
la metafísica es siempre, en su fondo, teología, y la teología
nace de la fantasía puesta al servicio de la vida, que se quiere
inmortal.
El
sentimiento del mundo, sobre el que se funda la compresión de él,
es necesariamente antropomórfico y mitopeico. Cuando alboreó con
Tales de Mileto el racionalismo, dejó este filósofo al Océano y
Tetis, dioses y padres de dioses, para poner al agua como principio
de las cosas, pero este agua era un dios disfrazado. Debajo de la
naturaleza, φύσις, y del
mundo, κόσμος, palpitaban
creaciones míticas, antropomórficas. La lengua misma lo llevaba
consigo. Sócrates distinguía en los fenómenos, según Jenofonte
nos cuenta (Memorabilia 1.1.6-9), aquellos al alcance del
estudio humano y aquellos otros que se han reservado los dioses, y
execraba de que Anaxágoras quisiera explicarlo todo racionalmente.
Hipócrates, su coetáneo, estimaba ser divinas las enfermedades
todas, y Platón creía que el sol y las estrellas son dioses
animados, con sus almas (Philebo, 16;
Leyes, X), y sólo
permitía la investigación astronómica hasta que no se blasfemara
contra esos dioses. Y Aristóteles en su Física, nos dice que
llueve Zeus, no para que el trigo crezca, sino por necesidad, ἐξ
ἀνάγκης. Intentaron mecanizar o racionalizar a
Dios, pero Dios se les rebelaba.
In
vain did Comte declare that our human thought, having left the age of
theology behind, is already departing the metaphysical age of reason
to enter into a new era of positive scientific facts (†). These
three ages actually coexist and support one another, even when they
are opposed. Ardent positivism becomes metaphysical the moment it
passes from denying to affirming, and metaphysics is always theology,
in its depths. Theology, for its part, is born from the imagination
that exists to serve our life, which longs to be immortal.
Our
feelings for the world, on which our attempts to control or contain
it are founded, necessarily render it in human forms, as myth. When
Thales of Miletus opened the gates of dawn on the age of rationalism,
he left behind Ocean and Tethys, gods and parents of gods, to make
water the beginning of all things. A rational, philosophical
move, but this water was a god in disguise. Underneath abstract
language about nature (Greek physis)
and the world (Greek kosmos)
lurked actual
creatures
of myth, throbbing
expressions of life rendered into human shapes. The language itself
carried their life within its music. Socrates, Xenophon tells us,
used to divide empirical phenomena into two classes, one within the
reach of humanity and the other reserved for gods; he loathed that
Anaxagoras would attempt to explain everything rationally
(Memorabilia 1.1.6-9).
His contemporary
Hippocrates, the physician,
judged all sicknesses to be divine, and Plato believed that sun and
stars are living gods, with souls unique to themselves (Philebus
16; Laws 10):
he would only allow astronomy as long as its investigations refrained
from blaspheming these divinities.
Aristotle, in his Physics,
tells us that Zeus rains not to make the grain grow, but of
necessity—being
compelled. They attempted then to mechanize or rationalize God, but
God rebelled against them.
---
(†)
Auguste Comte (1798-1857) dedicated his life to the idea that
modernity requires a secular religion, a modus vivendi that
is clinically separate from ancient traditions &
superstition (such as the Catholicism he rejected in his native
France). Comte's modern religion would be objective & scientific,
incorporating all social relations in simple & rational ways,
reducible to universally legible algorithms. This, in a nutshell, was
Positivism, which remains important as a harbinger of many
contemporary approaches to humanity (& modern academic
disciplines such as sociology). Unamuno believes that Comte makes a
critical error when he tries to separate myth from fact, superstition
from science, metaphysics from human life. Humanity lives by
imagination, necessarily, which means that we never escape the realm
of superstition entirely. Science cannot generate myths or rituals
whose outcomes are perfectly rational or universally legible, and
societies cannot dispense with the need for myths and rituals, so
old-time religion abides, even when we try to banish it.