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Tragic Sense Of Life by Miguel de Unamuno

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[24] Joseph Pohle, "Christlich Katolische Dogmatik," in _Systematische
Christliche Religion_, Berlin, 1909. _Die Kultur der Gegenwart_ series.

[25] "Objections to Unitarian Christianity Considered," 1816, in _The
Complete Works of William Ellery Channing, D.D._, London, 1884.




V

THE RATIONALIST DISSOLUTION


The great master of rationalist phenomenalism, David Hume, begins his
essay "On the Immortality of the Soul" with these decisive words: "It
appears difficult by the mere light of reason to prove the immortality
of the soul. The arguments in favour of it are commonly derived from
metaphysical, moral, or physical considerations. But it is really the
Gospel, and only the Gospel, that has brought to light life and
immortality." Which is equivalent to denying the rationality of the
belief that the soul of each one of us is immortal.

Kant, whose criticism found its point of departure in Hume, attempted to
establish the rationality of this longing for immortality and the belief
that it imports; and this is the real origin, the inward origin, of his
_Critique of Practical Reason_, and of his categorical imperative and of
his God. But in spite of all this, the sceptical affirmation of Hume
holds good. There is no way of proving the immortality of the soul
rationally. There are, on the other hand, ways of proving rationally its
mortality.

It would be not merely superfluous but ridiculous to enlarge here upon
the extent to which the individual human consciousness is dependent upon
the physical organism, pointing out how it comes to birth by slow
degrees according as the brain receives impressions from the outside
world, how it is temporarily suspended during sleep, swoons, and other
accidents, and how everything leads us to the rational conjecture that
death carries with it the loss of consciousness. And just as before our
birth we were not, nor have we any personal pre-natal memory, so after
our death we shall cease to be. This is the rational position.

The designation "soul" is merely a term used to denote the individual
consciousness in its integrity and continuity; and that this soul
undergoes change, that in like manner as it is integrated so it is
disintegrated, is a thing very evident. For Aristotle it was the
substantial form of the body--the entelechy, but not a substance. And
more than one modern has called it an epiphenomenon--an absurd term. The
appellation phenomenon suffices.

Rationalism--and by rationalism I mean the doctrine that abides solely
by reason, by objective truth--is necessarily materialist. And let not
idealists be scandalized thereby.

The truth is--it is necessary to be perfectly explicit in this
matter--that what we call materialism means for us nothing else but the
doctrine which denies the immortality of the individual soul, the
persistence of personal consciousness after death.

In another sense it may be said that, as we know what matter is no more
than we know what spirit is, and as matter is for us merely an idea,
materialism is idealism. In fact, and as regards our problem--the most
vital, the only really vital problem--it is all the same to say that
everything is matter as to say that everything is idea, or that
everything is energy, or whatever you please. Every monist system will
always seem to us materialist. The immortality of the soul is saved only
by the dualist systems--those which teach that human consciousness is
something substantially distinct and different from the other
manifestations of phenomena. And reason is naturally monist. For it is
the function of reason to understand and explain the universe, and in
order to understand and explain it, it is in no way necessary for the
soul to be an imperishable substance. For the purpose of explaining and
understanding our psychic life, for psychology, the hypothesis of the
soul is unnecessary. What was formerly called rational psychology, in
opposition to empirical psychology, is not psychology but metaphysics,
and very muddy metaphysics; neither is it rational, but profoundly
irrational, or rather contra-rational.

The pretended rational doctrine of the substantiality and spirituality
of the soul, with all the apparatus that accompanies it, is born simply
of the necessity which men feel of grounding upon reason their
inexpugnable longing for immortality and the subsequent belief in it.
All the sophistries which aim at proving that the soul is substance,
simple and incorruptible, proceed from this source. And further, the
very concept of substance, as it was fixed and defined by scholasticism,
a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept,
designed expressly to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul.

William James, in the third of the lectures which he devoted to
pragmatism in the Lowell Institute in Boston, in December, 1906, and
January, 1907[26]--the weakest thing in all the work of the famous
American thinker, an extremely weak thing indeed--speaks as follows:
"Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and
made it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have
fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are
from every contact with them. Yet in one case scholasticism has proved
the importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I
refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance
here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value. Since the accidents
of the wafer do not change in the Lord's Supper, and yet it has become
the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance
solely. The bread-substance must have been withdrawn and the Divine
substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate
sensible properties. But though these do not alter, a tremendous
difference has been made--no less a one than this, that we who take the
sacrament now feed upon the very substance of Divinity. The
substance-notion breaks into life, with tremendous effect, if once you
allow that substances can separate from their accidents and exchange
these latter. This is the only pragmatic application of the
substance-idea with which I am acquainted; and it is obvious that it
will only be treated seriously by those who already believe in the 'real
presence' on independent grounds."

Now, leaving on one side the question as to whether it is good
theology--and I do not say good reasoning because all this lies outside
the sphere of reason--to confound the substance of the body--the body,
not the soul--of Christ with the very substance of Divinity--that is to
say, with God Himself--it would appear impossible that one so ardently
desirous of the immortality of the soul as William James, a man whose
whole philosophy aims simply at establishing this belief on rational
grounds, should not have perceived that the pragmatic application of the
concept of substance to the doctrine of the Eucharistic
transubstantiation is merely a consequence of its anterior application
to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. As I explained in the
preceding chapter, the Sacrament of the Eucharist is simply the
reflection of the belief in immortality; it is, for the believer, the
proof, by a mystical experience, that the soul is immortal and will
enjoy God eternally. And the concept of substance was born, above all
and before all, of the concept of the substantiality of the soul, and
the latter was affirmed in order to confirm faith in the persistence of
the soul after its separation from the body. Such was at the same time
its first pragmatic application and its origin. And subsequently we
have transferred this concept to external things. It is because I feel
myself to be substance--that is to say, permanent in the midst of my
changes--that I attribute substantiality to those agents exterior to me,
which are also permanent in the midst of their changes--just as the
concept of force is born of my sensation of personal effort in putting a
thing in motion.

Read carefully in the first part of the _Summa Theologica_ of St. Thomas
Aquinas the first six articles of question lxxv., which discuss whether
the human soul is body, whether it is something self-subsistent, whether
such also is the soul of the lower animals, whether the soul is the man,
whether the soul is composed of matter and form, and whether it is
incorruptible, and then say if all this is not subtly intended to
support the belief that this incorruptible substantiality of the soul
renders it capable of receiving from God immortality, for it is clear
that as He created it when He implanted it in the body, as St. Thomas
says, so at its separation from the body He could annihilate it. And as
the criticism of these proofs has been undertaken a hundred times, it is
unnecessary to repeat it here.

Is it possible for the unforewarned reason to conclude that our soul is
a substance from the fact that our consciousness of our identity--and
this within very narrow and variable limits--persists through all the
changes of our body? We might as well say of a ship that put out to sea
and lost first one piece of timber, which was replaced by another of the
same shape and dimensions, then lost another, and so on with all her
timbers, and finally returned to port the same ship, with the same
build, the same sea-going qualities, recognizable by everybody as the
same--we might as well say of such a ship that it had a substantial
soul. Is it possible for the unforewarned reason to infer the simplicity
of the soul from the fact that we have to judge and unify our thoughts?
Thought is not one but complex, and for the reason the soul is nothing
but the succession of co-ordinated states of consciousness.

In books of psychology written from the spiritualist point of view, it
is customary to begin the discussion of the existence of the soul as a
simple substance, separable from the body, after this style: There is in
me a principle which thinks, wills, and feels.... Now this implies a
begging of the question. For it is far from being an immediate truth
that there is in me such a principle; the immediate truth is that I
think, will, and feel. And I--the I that thinks, wills, and feels--am
immediately my living body with the states of consciousness which it
sustains. It is my living body that thinks, wills, and feels. How? How
you please.

And they proceed to seek to establish the substantiality of the soul,
hypostatizing the states of consciousness, and they begin by saying that
this substance must be simple--that is, by opposing thought to
extension, after the manner of the Cartesian dualism. And as Balmes was
one of the spiritualist writers who have given the clearest and most
concise form to the argument, I will present it as he expounds it in the
second chapter of his _Curso de Filosofia Elemental_. "The human soul is
simple," he says, and adds: "Simplicity consists in the absence of
parts, and the soul has none. Let us suppose that it has three parts--A,
B, C. I ask, Where, then, does thought reside? If in A only, then B and
C are superfluous; and consequently the simple subject A will be the
soul. If thought resides in A, B, and C, it follows that thought is
divided into parts, which is absurd. What sort of a thing is a
perception, a comparison, a judgement, a ratiocination, distributed
among three subjects?" A more obvious begging of the question cannot be
conceived. Balmes begins by taking it for granted that the whole, as a
whole, is incapable of making a judgement. He continues: "The unity of
consciousness is opposed to the division of the soul. When we think,
there is a subject which knows everything that it thinks, and this is
impossible if parts be attributed to it. Of the thought that is in A, B
and C will know nothing, and so in the other cases respectively. There
will not, therefore, be _one_ consciousness of the whole thought: each
part will have its special consciousness, and there will be within us as
many thinking beings as there are parts." The begging of the question
continues; it is assumed without any proof that a whole, as a whole,
cannot perceive as a unit. Balmes then proceeds to ask if these parts A,
B, and C are simple or compound, and repeats his argument until he
arrives at the conclusion that the thinking subject must be a part which
is not a whole--that is, simple. The argument is based, as will be seen,
upon the unity of apperception and of judgement. Subsequently he
endeavours to refute the hypothesis of a communication of the parts
among themselves.

Balmes--and with him the _a priori_ spiritualists who seek to
rationalize faith in the immortality of the soul--ignore the only
rational explanation, which is that apperception and judgement are a
resultant, that perceptions or ideas themselves are components which
agree. They begin by supposing something external to and distinct from
the states of consciousness, something that is not the living body which
supports these states, something that is not I but is within me.

The soul is simple, others say, because it reflects upon itself as a
complete whole. No; the state of consciousness A, in which I think of my
previous state of consciousness B, is not the same as its predecessor.
Or if I think of my soul, I think of an idea distinct from the act by
which I think of it. To think that one thinks and nothing more, is not
to think.

The soul is the principle of life, it is said. Yes; and similarly the
category of force or energy has been conceived as the principle of
movement. But these are concepts, not phenomena, not external realities.
Does the principle of movement move? And only that which moves has
external reality. Does the principle of life live? Hume was right when
he said that he never encountered this idea of himself--that he only
observed himself desiring or performing or feeling something.[27] The
idea of some individual thing--of this inkstand in front of me, of that
horse standing at my gate, of these two and not of any other individuals
of the same class--is the fact, the phenomenon itself. The idea of
myself is myself.

All the efforts to substantiate consciousness, making it independent of
extension--remember that Descartes opposed thought to extension--are but
sophistical subtilties intended to establish the rationality of faith in
the immortality of the soul. It is sought to give the value of objective
reality to that which does not possess it--to that whose reality exists
only in thought. And the immortality that we crave is a phenomenal
immortality--it is the continuation of this present life.

The unity of consciousness is for scientific psychology--the only
rational psychology--simply a phenomenal unity. No one can say what a
substantial unity is. And, what is more, no one can say what a substance
is. For the notion of substance is a non-phenomenal category. It is a
noumenon and belongs properly to the unknowable--that is to say,
according to the sense in which it is understood. But in its
transcendental sense it is something really unknowable and strictly
irrational. It is precisely this concept of substance that an
unforewarned mind reduces to a use that is very far from that pragmatic
application to which William James referred.

And this application is not saved by understanding it in an idealistic
sense, according to the Berkeleyan principle that to be is to be
perceived (_esse est percipi_). To say that everything is idea or that
everything is spirit, is the same as saying that everything is matter or
that everything is energy, for if everything is idea or everything
spirit, and if, therefore, this diamond is idea or spirit, just as my
consciousness is, it is not plain why the diamond should not endure for
ever, if my consciousness, because it is idea or spirit, endures for
ever.

George Berkeley, Anglican Bishop of Cloyne and brother in spirit to the
Anglican bishop Joseph Butler, was equally as anxious to save the belief
in the immortality of the soul. In the first words of the Preface to his
_Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge_, he tells us
that he considers that this treatise will be useful, "particularly to
those who are tainted with scepticism, or want a demonstration of the
existence and immateriality of God, or the natural immortality of the
soul." In paragraph cxl. he lays it down that we have an idea, or rather
a notion, of spirit, and that we know other spirits by means of our own,
from which follows--so in the next paragraph he roundly affirms--the
natural immortality of the soul. And here he enters upon a series of
confusions arising from the ambiguity with which he invests the term
notion. And after having established the immortality of the soul, almost
as it were _per saltum_, on the ground that the soul is not passive like
the body, he proceeds to tell us in paragraph cxlvii. that the existence
of God is more evident than that of man. And yet, in spite of this,
there are still some who are doubtful!

The question was complicated by making consciousness a property of the
soul, consciousness being something more than soul--that is to say, a
substantial form of the body, the originator of all the organic
functions of the body. The soul not only thinks, feels, and wills, but
moves the body and prompts its vital functions; in the human soul are
united the vegetative, animal, and rational functions. Such is the
theory. But the soul separated from the body can have neither
vegetative nor animal functions.

A theory, in short, which for the reason is a veritable contexture of
confusions.

After the Renaissance and the restoration of purely rational thought,
emancipated from all theology, the doctrine of the mortality of the soul
was re-established by the newly published writings of the second-century
philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias and by Pietro Pomponazzi and
others. And in point of fact, little or nothing can be added to what
Pomponazzi has written in his _Tractatus de immortalitate animae_. It is
reason itself, and it serves nothing to reiterate his arguments.

Attempts have not been wanting, however, to find an empirical support
for belief in the immortality of the soul, and among these may be
counted the work of Frederic W.H. Myers on _Human Personality and its
Survival of Bodily Death_. No one ever approached more eagerly than
myself the two thick volumes of this work in which the leading spirit of
the Society for Psychical Research resumed that formidable mass of data
relating to presentiments, apparitions of the dead, the phenomena of
dreams, telepathy, hypnotism, sensorial automatism, ecstasy, and all the
rest that goes to furnish the spiritualist arsenal. I entered upon the
reading of it not only without that temper of cautious suspicion which
men of science maintain in investigations of this character, but even
with a predisposition in its favour, as one who comes to seek the
confirmation of his innermost longings; but for this reason was my
disillusion all the greater. In spite of its critical apparatus it does
not differ in any respect from medieval miracle-mongering. There is a
fundamental defect of method, of logic.

And if the belief in the immortality of the soul has been unable to find
vindication in rational empiricism, neither is it satisfied with
pantheism. To say that everything is God, and that when we die we return
to God, or, more accurately, continue in Him, avails our longing
nothing; for if this indeed be so, then we were in God before we were
born, and if when we die we return to where we were before being born,
then the human soul, the individual consciousness, is perishable. And
since we know very well that God, the personal and conscious God of
Christian monotheism, is simply the provider, and above all the
guarantor, of our immortality, pantheism is said, and rightly said, to
be merely atheism disguised; and, in my opinion, undisguised. And they
were right in calling Spinoza an atheist, for his is the most logical,
the most rational, system of pantheism.

Neither is the longing for immortality saved, but rather dissolved and
submerged, by agnosticism, or the doctrine of the unknowable, which,
when it has professed to wish to leave religious feelings scathless, has
always been inspired by the most refined hypocrisy. The whole of the
first part of Spencer's _First Principles_, and especially the fifth
chapter entitled "Reconciliation"--that between reason and faith or
science and religion being understood--is a model at the same time of
philosophical superficiality and religious insincerity, of the most
refined British cant. The unknowable, if it is something more than the
merely hitherto unknown, is but a purely negative concept, a concept of
limitation. And upon this foundation no human feeling can be built up.

The science of religion, on the other hand, of religion considered as an
individual and social psychic phenomenon irrespective of the
transcendental objective validity of religious affirmations, is a
science which, in explaining the origin of the belief that the soul is
something that can live disjoined from the body, has destroyed the
rationality of this belief. However much the religious man may repeat
with Schleiermacher, "Science can teach thee nothing; it is for science
to learn from thee," inwardly he thinks otherwise.

From whatever side the matter is regarded, it is always found that
reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts
it. And the truth is, in all strictness, that reason is the enemy of
life.

A terrible thing is intelligence. It tends to death as memory tends to
stability. The living, the absolutely unstable, the absolutely
individual, is, strictly, unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce
everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no
more than one single and self-same content in whatever place, time, or
relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains the same
for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different
each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of
the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes
it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to
arrest it. In order to analyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or
destroy it. In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it,
to lay it out rigid in the mind. Science is a cemetery of dead ideas,
even though life may issue from them. Worms also feed upon corpses. My
own thoughts, tumultuous and agitated in the innermost recesses of my
soul, once they are torn from their roots in the heart, poured out on to
this paper and there fixed in unalterable shape, are already only the
corpses of thoughts. How, then, shall reason open its portals to the
revelation of life? It is a tragic combat--it is the very essence of
tragedy--this combat of life with reason. And truth? Is truth something
that is lived or that is comprehended?

It is only necessary to read the terrible _Parmenides_ of Plato to
arrive at his tragic conclusion that "the one is and is not, and both
itself and others, in relation to themselves and one another, are and
are not, and appear to be and appear not to be." All that is vital is
irrational, and all that is rational is anti-vital, for reason is
essentially sceptical.

The rational, in effect, is simply the relational; reason is limited to
relating irrational elements. Mathematics is the only perfect science,
inasmuch as it adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides numbers, but not
real and substantial things, inasmuch as it is the most formal of the
sciences. Who can extract the cube root of an ash-tree?

Nevertheless we need logic, this terrible power, in order to communicate
thoughts and perceptions and even in order to think and perceive, for we
think with words, we perceive with forms. To think is to converse with
oneself; and speech is social, and social are thought and logic. But may
they not perhaps possess a content, an individual matter, incommunicable
and untranslatable? And may not this be the source of their power?

The truth is that man, the prisoner of logic, without which he cannot
think, has always sought to make logic subservient to his desires, and
principally to his fundamental desire. He has always sought to hold fast
to logic, and especially in the Middle Ages, in the interests of
theology and jurisprudence, both of which based themselves on what was
established by authority. It was not until very much later that logic
propounded the problem of knowledge, the problem of its own validity,
the scrutiny of the metalogical foundations.

"The Western theology," Dean Stanley wrote, "is essentially logical in
form and based on law. The Eastern theology is rhetorical in form and
based on philosophy. The Latin divine succeeded to the Roman advocate.
The Oriental divine succeeded to the Grecian sophist."[28]

And all the laboured arguments in support of our hunger of immortality,
which pretend to be grounded on reason or logic, are merely advocacy and
sophistry.

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