Thursday, October 13, 2005

Selections: Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936)

There is something which, for want of a better name, we shall call the tragic sense of life, and it carries along with it an entire conception of the Universe and of life itself, an entire philosophy more or less formulated, more or less conscious. And this sense may animate, and does animate, not only individual men, but entire peoples. And this sense does not so much flow from ideas as determine them, even though later these ideas react upon it and corroborate it. But there is more to it than that: man, because he is man, because he possesses consciousness, is already, in comparison to the jackass or the crab, a sick animal. Consciousness is a disease. Man is possessed either of an excess of matter or an excess of spirit, or to put it better, either he feels a spiritual hunger, that is, a hunger for eternity or he feels a material hunger, that is, a hunger to submit to annihilation. When spirit is in excess and man feels a hunger for yet more of it, he pours his own spirit out and spreads it abroad, and as it pours out it grows by contact with the spirits of others; when, on the other hand, avarice takes hold, man withdraws into himself, thinking thus to better preserve himself, and ends by losing everything . . . It is not charity to rock and lull our fellow men to sleep in the inertia and heaviness of matter, but rather to arouse them to the anguish and torment of spirit. Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future. Suffering - which comes from the collision between con-sciousness and unconsciousness - is cured, not by submerging oneself in the unconscious, but by raising onself to the highest consciousness and thus suffering more. The evil of suffering is cured by more suffering, by higher suffering. There is no point in taking opium; it is beter to put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound, for if you fall asleep and no longer feel pain, then you no longer exist. And the point is to exist. Do not, then, close your eyes before the overawing Sphinx, but gaze on her face to face, and let her take you in her mouth and chew you with her hundred thousand poisonous teeth and swallow you up. And when she has swallowed you, you will know the sweet taste of suffering. Suffering is the way of consciousness, and it is through suffering that living beings achieve self-consciousness. To possess consciousness of oneself, to have personality, is to know and feel oneself distinct from other beings. And this feeling of distinctiveness is reached only through a collision, through more or less severe suffering, through a sense of one's own linits. Consciousness of oneself is simply consciousness of one's own limitation. I feel that I am myself when I feel that I am not others; to know and feel the extent of my being is to know where I cease being, the point beyond which I no longer am. The passion to be remembered if possible when oblivion overtakes all others is tremendous. From it flows every envy, the cause, according to the biblical narrative, of the crime which began human history: the murder of Abel by his brother Cain. It was not a struggle for bread: it was a struggle to survive in God, in the divine memory. Envy is a thousand times more terrible than physical hunger, for envy, is a spiritual hunger. If the so-called problem of life, the basic problem of food, were ever solved, the earth would be turned into a hell, as the struggle for survival would become even more intense . . . We aim at being everything because we feel it is the only way to escape being nothing. Enemies of the state say that Cain, the fratricide, was the founder of the State. And we must accept that such is the fact. Civilization began upon the day that one man, subjecting another to his will and compelling him to do the work for both of them, was enabled to devote himself to contemplation of the world, and thereafter put his captive to the creation of lavish works. Slavery allowed Plato to speculate upon the ideal republic, and it was war which brought about slavery. It is for no idle reason that Athena is the goddess of warfare and of science. But is there any real need to reiterate these obvious truths, so often forgotten only to be so many times recalled?

Friday, October 07, 2005

the art of perspective

Man's sense of the infinite underwent a fundamental and radical revaluation; the religious and eschatological nature of which was replaced by the mathematical and scientific - estrangement being the result of the distance measured, alienation became a function of Geometry . . . the vanishing point of the sublime.