Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

The world is for consciousness. Or rather this for, this notion of finality, and feeling rather than notion, this teleological feeling is born only where there is consciousness. Consciousness and finality are the same thing fundamentally.

If the sun possessed consciousness it would think, no doubt, that it lived in order to give light to the worlds; but it would also and above all think that the worlds existed in order that it might give them light and joy in giving them light and so live. And it would think well.

And all this tragic fight of man to save himself, this immortal craving for immortality which caused the man Kant to make that immortal leap[7] of which I have spoken, all this is simply a fight for consciousness. If consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than existence.

It is possible that someone will discover that everything that I am saying rests upon a contradiction, since sometimes I express a longing for immortality and at other times I say that this life does not possess the value that is attributed to it. Contradiction? To be sure! The contradiction of my heart that says Yes and of my head that says No. Of course there is contradiction. Who does not recollect those words of the Gospel: “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief”? Contradiction? Of course! For we only live upon contradictions and by them; life is tragedy, and the tragedy is perpetual struggle, without victory or the hope of victory; life is contradiction.

It is a question, as you see, of an affective value, and against affective values reasons do not avail. For reasons are nothing more than reasons, that is to say, they are not even truths. There are definition-mongers—pedants by nature and by grace—who produce an effect upon me like that of a man who consoles a father for the loss of a son, dead in the prime of his life, by saying: “Patience, friend, we all must die.” Would you think it strange if this father were irritated by such an ineptitude? For it is an ineptitude. How often may it not be said—

para penser cual tú, sólo es preciso
no tener nada más que inteligencia?[8]

There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain or with whatever other organ may be the specific organ for thinking; while others think with the whole body and with the whole soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life. And the people who think only with the brain become definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought. And you know what a professional is....

If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything rather than a philosopher; he is, above all, a pedant, that is to say, a caricature of a man. The cultivation of any science—of chemistry, of physics, of geometry, of philology—may be, though within very narrow limits and restrictions, a work of differentiated specialization; but philosophy, like poetry, is either a work of integration and harmony or else it is mere philosophism, pseudo-philosophical erudition.

All knowledge has an ultimate object. Knowing for the sake of knowing is, say what you will, nothing but a solemn begging of the question. We learn a thing either for an immediate practical end, or in order to complete the rest of our knowledge. Even the ideas that appear to us most theoretical—that is to say, of least immediate application to the non-intellectual necessities of life—answer to an intellectual necessity, which is also a real necessity, to a principle of unity and continuity of consciousness. But just as scientific knowledge has its finality in the rest of our knowledge, the philosophy which we may be forced to choose has another extrinsic finality—it refers to our whole destiny, to our attitude towards life and the universe. And the most tragic problem of philosophy is that of reconciling intellectual necessities of the heart and the will. For it is just here that every philosophy that claims to resolve the eternal and tragic contradiction that is the very basis of our existence breaks down. But do all men confront this contradiction?

Little can be hoped for from a ruler, for example, who has not been preoccupied at some time or other, even if only in some dim way, with the first beginning and ultimate end of all things, and, above all, of men, with their first “why” and their ultimate “wherefore.”