Head & Heart. Unamuno, Life 8.20

Unamuno articulates once more his view of humanity as necessarily schizophrenic, or bipolar. Reason draws us to set limits, whose ultimate expression is death (the final frontier of this life). Imagination draws us to unite everything, beyond all limit, burying ourselves in infinity (another kind of death: the individual is revealed to have innumerable parts, so many that he cannot take definitive shape). Our passage through life necessarily requires us to engage both reason and imagination. We must limit but also unite, as individuals and as groups. The outcome is that we never achieve a perfectly rational or utterly imaginary life: real life partakes in mortality, which we witness rationally, and imagination, which reveals wholes we cannot rationalize.

La razón es una fuerza analítica, esto es, disolvente, cuando dejando de obrar sobre la forma de las intuiciones, ya sean del instinto individual de conservación, ya del instinto social de perpetuación, obra sobre el fondo, sobre la materia misma de ellas. La razón ordena las percepciones sensibles que nos dan el mundo material; pero cuando su análisis se ejerce sobre la realidad de las percepciones mismas, nos las disuelve y nos sume en un mundo aparencial, de sombras sin consistencia, porque la razón fuera de lo formal es nihilista, aniquiladora. Y el mismo terrible oficio cumple cuando sacándola del suyo propio la llevamos a escudriñar las intuiciones imaginativas que nos dan el mundo espiritual. Porque la razón aniquila y la imaginación entera, integra o totaliza; la razón por sí sola mata y la imaginación es la que da vida. Si bien es cierto que la imaginación por sí sola, al darnos vida sin límite nos lleva a confundirnos con todo, y en cuanto individuos, nos mata también, nos mata por exceso de vida. La razón, la cabeza, nos dice: ¡nada! la imaginación, el corazón, nos dice: ¡todo!, y entre nada y todo, fundiéndose el todo y la nada en nosotros, vivimos en Dios, que es todo, y vive Dios en nosotros que sin Él, somos nada. La razón repite: ¡vanidad de vanidades, y todo vanidad! Y la imaginación replica: ¡plenitud de plenitudes, y todo plenitud! Y así vivimos la vanidad de la plenitud, o la plenitud de la vanidad.

Y tan de las entrañas del hombre arranca esta necesidad vital de vivir un mundo ilógico, irracional, personal o divino, que cuantos no creen en Dios o creen no creer en Él, creen en cualquier diosecillo, o siquiera en un demoniejo, o en un agüero, o en una herradura que encontraron por acaso al azar de los caminos, y que guardan sobre su corazón para que les traiga buena suerte y les defienda de esa misma razón de que se imaginan ser fieles servidores y devotos.

Reason is an analytical force: in other words, a solvent. When it has finished unmaking the form of our intuitions, dissolving every shape taken by the individual instinct for preservation or the communal instinct for perpetuation, it goes on to digest those instincts, too, erasing their very substance. Reason separates and gives order to the sensible perceptions that supply our material world, but when its analysis reaches the perceptions themselves, it dissolves them, relegating them to a world apparent rather than real. They become shadows without substance, for reason without bound or form to contain it must reduce all things to nothing, annihilating everything that exists. When we remove it from its proper realm and apply it to search out the depths of the imaginative intuitions that give us the spiritual world, it fulfils this same terrible office. As reason exists to separate and annihilate, so imagination exists to join and render whole. Reason on its own brings death, and imagination gives life. It is true that imagination kills us, too, at least as individuals, when it delivers us life without limit, a vital excess that causes us to confound ourselves with everything. Reason, our head, cries, “Nothing!” while imagination, our heart, says, “Everything!” And between these two, nothing and everything, drawing upon each in the crucible of ourselves, we forge this life, living in God, who is everything, while he dwells also in us, who without him are nothing. Reason repeats the refrain: “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!” And imagination replies, “Fulness of plenitude! All is fulness!” Thus do we live, experiencing the vanity of fulness, or the fulness of vanity.

So deep within the bowels of man this vital need is driven, to inhabit an illogical and irrational world, a world personal and divine, that even those who do not believe in God (or who think they don't believe) will believe in any substitute for him that they can find. Any godling or demon, divination or sign, that they chance upon in the road, they cling to, keeping it over their hearts as an omen of good fortune, a defense against the very reason they imagine themselves to serve with faithful devotion.