The world, our living myth. Unamuno, Life 7.16
According
to Unamuno, it is impossible for humanity to achieve perfect
philosophical clarity, as this would require us to think with
something other than our actual thought, which is an artifact of
senses whose nature resists too much clarity. Our senses show us the
universe personified because that is how we perceive things, even
before we relate to them. The world, for us, is a vast experience of
human shape whose dimensions appear written in language necessarily
allusive rather than inclusive, descriptive rather than definitive.
It is myth.
¡Ver
claro!... ¡ver claro! Sólo vería claro un puro pensador, que en
vez de lenguaje usara álgebra, y que pudiese libertarse de su propia
humanidad, es decir, un ser insustancial, meramente objetivo, un no
ser, en fin. Mal que pese a la razón, hay que pensar con la vida, y
mal que pese a la vida, hay que racionalizar el pensamiento.
Esa
animación, esa personificación va entrañada en nuestro mismo
conocer. «¿Quién llueve? ¿quién truena?», pregunta el viejo
Estrepsiades a Sócrates en
Las
Nubes, de
Aristófanes, y el filósofo le contesta: «No Zeus, sino las nubes.»
Y Estrepsiades: «Pero, ¿quién sino Zeus las obliga a marchar?» a
lo que Sócrates: «Nada de eso, sino el torbellino etéreo.» «¿El
Torbellino? —agrega Estrepsiades—, no lo sabía ... No es, pues,
Zeus, sino el Torbellino el que en vez de él rige ahora.» Y sigue
el pobre viejo personificando y animando al Torbellino; que reina
ahora como un rey no sin conciencia de su realeza. Y todos, al pasar
de un Zeus cualquiera a un cualquier torbellino, de Dios a la
materia, v. gr., hacemos lo mismo. Y es porque la filosofía no
trabaja sobre la realidad objetiva que tenemos delante de los
sentidos, sino sobre el complejo de ideas, imágenes, nociones,
percepciones, etc., incorporadas en el lenguaje, y que nuestros
antepasados nos trasmitieron con él. Lo que llamamos el mundo, el
mundo objetivo, es una tradición social. Nos lo dan hecho.
Clear
insight! Only a pure thinker could achieve this, someone using
algebra instead of language. An insubstantial being so freed from its
own humanity as to be merely objective: no being at all, in the end.
In spite of all that reason can do, we must think with our lives, and
in spite of all our living, we must rationalize our thoughts.
This
process of animation or personification is inextricably woven into
the fabric of all our knowledge. “Who rains? Who thunders?”
Strepsiades asks Socrates in the Clouds,
by Aristophanes (†),
and the philosopher answers: “Not Zeus, but the clouds!” To which
Strepsiades replies, “But who is forcing the clouds to march if not
Zeus?” Socrates: “None of that nonsense here! Our
universe is moved by a vortex in the ether!” “Vortex?”
Strepsiades muses. “So it's Vortex who turns the world now instead
of Zeus.” The poor old man goes on personifying Vortex, animating
him as a king, though he lacks
all awareness of his own
kingdom. And all of us do the same, leaving our own Zeus behind for
whatever vortex we find, transferring our worship from God to matter.
This happens because
philosophy does not work upon the objective reality that confronts
our senses; instead, it must handle the collection of ideas, images,
notions, insights, etc., that our language embodies, and that our
ancestors have handed down to us in that language. What we call the
world, the objective world, is a
social tradition. It is given to us already made, an artifact cast in the forms
of our
language.
---
(†)
Unamuno produces a free
translation of the passage found in Clouds 368ff.
The vortex here (δῖνος) is a swirl of primeval matter imagined
as the source of our universe by various ancient philosophers.