Tragic Sense Of Life Part 24

But the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution came, bringing Helen to us, or, rather, urged on by Helen, and now they talk to us about Culture and Europe.

Europe! This idea of Europe, primarily and immediately of geographical significance, has been converted for us by some magical process into a kind of metaphysical category. Who can say to-day--in Spain, at any rate--what Europe is? I only know that it is a shibboleth (_vide_ my _Tres Ensayos_). And when I proceed to examine what it is that our Europeanizers call Europe, it sometimes seems to me that much of its periphery remains outside of it--Spain, of course, and also England, Italy, Scandinavia, Russia--and hence it is reduced to the central portion, Franco-Germany, with its annexes and dependencies.

All this is the consequence, I repeat, of the Renaissance and the Reformation, which, although apparently they lived in a state of internecine war, were twin-brothers. The Italians of the Renaissance were all of them Socinians; the humanists, with Erasmus at their head, regarded Luther, the German monk, as a barbarian, who derived his driving force from the cloister, as did Bruno and Campanella. But this barbarian was their twin-brother, and though their antagonist he was also the antagonist of the common enemy. All this, I say, is due to the Renaissance and the Reformation, and to what was the offspring of these two, the Revolution, and to them we owe also a new Inquisition, that of science or culture, which turns against those who refuse to submit to its orthodoxy the weapons of ridicule and contempt.

When Galileo sent his treatise on the earth's motion to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, he told him that it was meet that that which the higher authorities had determined should be believed and obeyed, and that he considered his treatise "as poetry or as a dream, and as such I desire your highness to receive it." And at other times he calls it a "chimera"

or a "mathematical caprice." And in the same way in these essays, for fear also--why not confess it?--of the Inquisition, of the modern, the scientific, Inquisition, I offer as a poetry, dream, chimera, mystical caprice, that which springs from what is deepest in me. And I say with Galileo, _Eppur si muove!_ But is it only because of this fear? Ah, no!

for there is another, more tragic Inquisition, and that is the Inquisition which the modern man, the man of culture, the European--and such am I, whether I will or not--carries within him. There is a more terrible ridicule, and that is the ridicule with which a man contemplates his own self. It is my reason that laughs at my faith and despises it.

And it is here that I must betake me to my Lord Don Quixote in order that I may learn of him how to confront ridicule and overcome it, and a ridicule which perhaps--who knows?--he never knew.

Yes, yes--how shall my reason not smile at these dilettantesque, would-be mystical, pseudo-philosophical interpretations, in which there is anything rather than patient study and--shall I say scientific?--objectivity and method? And nevertheless ... _eppur si muove!_

_Eppur si muove!_ And I take refuge in dilettantism, in what a pedant would call _demi-mondaine_ philosophy, as a shelter against the pedantry of specialists, against the philosophy of the professional philosophers.

And who knows?... Progress usually comes from the barbarian, and there is nothing more stagnant than the philosophy of the philosophers and the theology of the theologians.

Let them talk to us of Europe! The civilization of Thibet is parallel with ours, and men who disappear like ourselves have lived and are living by it. And over all civilizations there hovers the shadow of Ecclesiastes, with his admonition, "How dieth the wise man?--as the fool" (ii. 16).

Among the people of my country there is an admirable reply to the customary interrogation, "How are you?"[59] and it is "Living." And that is the truth--we are living, and living as much as all the rest. What can a man ask for more? And who does not recollect the verse?--

_Coda vez que considero que me tengo de morir, tiendo la capa en el suelo y no me harto de dormir._[60]

But no, not sleeping, but dreaming--dreaming life, since life is a dream.

Among us Spaniards another phrase has very rapidly pa.s.sed into current usage, the expression "It's a question of pa.s.sing the time," or "killing the time." And, in fact, we make time in order to kill it. But there is something that has always preoccupied us as much as or more than pa.s.sing the time--a formula which denotes an esthetical att.i.tude--and that is, gaining eternity, which is the formula of the religious att.i.tude. The truth is, we leap from the esthetic and the economic to the religious, pa.s.sing over the logical and the ethical; we jump from art to religion.

One of our younger novelists, Ramon Perez de Ayala, in his recent novel, _La Pata de la Raposa_, has told us that the idea of death is the trap, and spirit the fox or the wary virtue with which to circ.u.mvent the ambushes set by fatality, and he continues: "Caught in the trap, weak men and weak peoples lie p.r.o.ne on the ground ...; to robust spirits and strong peoples the rude shock of danger gives clear-sightedness; they quickly penetrate into the heart of the immeasurable beauty of life, and renouncing for ever their original hastiness and folly, emerge from the trap with muscles taut for action and with the soul's vigour, power, and efficiency increased a hundredfold." But let us see; weak men ... weak peoples ... robust spirits ... strong peoples ... what does all this mean? I do not know. What I think I know is that some individuals and peoples have not yet really thought about death and immortality, have not felt them, and that others have ceased to think about them, or rather ceased to feel them. And the fact that they have never pa.s.sed through the religious period is not, I think, a matter for either men or peoples to boast about.

The immeasurable beauty of life is a very fine thing to write about, and there are, indeed, some who resign themselves to it and accept it as it is, and even some who would persuade us that there is no problem in the "trap." But it has been said by Calderon that "to seek to persuade a man that the misfortunes which he suffers are not misfortunes, does not console him for them, but is another misfortune in addition."[61] And, furthermore, "only the heart can speak to the heart," as Fray Diego de Estella said (_Vanidad del Mundo_, cap. xxi.).

A short time ago a reply that I made to those who reproached us Spaniards for our scientific incapacity appeared to scandalize some people. After having remarked that the electric light and the steam engine function here in Spain just as well as in the countries where they were invented, and that we make use of logarithms as much as they do in the country where the idea of them was first conceived, I exclaimed, "Let others invent!"--a paradoxical expression which I do not retract. We Spaniards ought to appropriate to ourselves some of those sage counsels which Count Joseph de Maistre gave to the Russians, a people not unlike ourselves. In his admirable letters to Count Rasoumowski on public education in Russia, he said that a nation should not think the worse of itself because it was not made for science; that the Romans had no understanding of the arts, neither did they possess a mathematician, which, however, did not prevent them from playing their part in the world; and in particular we should take to heart everything that he said about that crowd of arrogant sciolists who idolize the tastes, the fashions, and the languages of foreign countries, and are ever ready to pull down whatever they despise--and they despise everything.

We have not the scientific spirit? And what of that, if we have some other spirit? And who can tell if the spirit that we have is or is not compatible with the scientific spirit?

But in saying "Let others invent!" I did not mean to imply that we must be content with playing a pa.s.sive role. No. For them their science, by which we shall profit; for us, our own work. It is not enough to be on the defensive, we must attack.

But we must attack wisely and cautiously. Reason must be our weapon. It is the weapon even of the fool. Our sublime fool and our exemplar, Don Quixote, after he had destroyed with two strokes of his sword that pasteboard visor "which he had fitted to his head-piece, made it anew, placing certain iron bars within it, in such a manner that he rested satisfied with its solidity, and without wishing to make a second trial of it, he deputed and held it in estimation of a most excellent visor."[62] And with the pasteboard visor on his head he made himself immortal--that is to say, he made himself ridiculous. For it was by making himself ridiculous that Don Quixote achieved his immortality.

And there are so many ways of making ourselves ridiculous I ... Cournot said _(Traite de l'enchainement des idees fondamentales_, etc., -- 510): "It is best not to speak to either princes or peoples of the probabilities of death; princes will punish this temerity with disgrace; the public will revenge itself with ridicule." True, and therefore it is said that we must live as the age lives. _Corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum vocatur_ (Tacitus: _Germania_ 19).

It is necessary to know how to make ourselves ridiculous, and not only to others but to ourselves. And more than ever to-day, when there is so much chatter about our backwardness compared with other civilized peoples, to-day when a parcel of shallow-brained critics say that we have had no science, no art, no philosophy, no Renaissance, (of this we had perhaps too much), no anything, these same critics being ignorant of our real history, a history that remains yet to be written, the first task being to undo the web of calumniation and protest that has been woven around it.

Carducci, the author of the phrase about the _contorcimenti dell'affannosa grandiosita spagnola_, has written (in _Mosche Cochiere_) that "even Spain, which never attained the hegemony of the world of thought, had her Cervantes." But was Cervantes a solitary and isolated phenomenon, without roots, without ancestry, without a foundation? That an Italian rationalist, remembering that it was Spain that reacted against the Renaissance in his country, should say that Spain _non ebbe egemonia mai di pensiero_ is, however, readily comprehended. Was there no importance, was there nothing akin to cultural hegemony, in the Counter-Reformation, of which Spain was the champion, and which in point of fact began with the sack of Rome by the Spaniards, a providential chastis.e.m.e.nt of the city of the pagan popes of the pagan Renaissance?

Apart from the question as to whether the Counter-Reformation was good or bad, was there nothing akin to hegemony in Loyola or the Council of Trent? Previous to this Council, Italy witnessed a nefarious and unnatural union between Christianity and Paganism, or rather, between immortalism and mortalism, a union to which even some of the Popes themselves consented in their souls; theological error was philosophical truth, and all difficulties were solved by the accommodating formula _salva fide_. But it was otherwise after the Council; after the Council came the open and avowed struggle between reason and faith, science and religion. And does not the fact that this change was brought about, thanks princ.i.p.ally to Spanish obstinacy, point to something akin to hegemony?

Without the Counter-Reformation, would the Reformation have followed the course that it did actually follow? Without the Counter-Reformation might not the Reformation, deprived of the support of pietism, have perished in the gross rationalism of the _Aufklarung_, of the age of Enlightenment? Would nothing have been changed had there been no Charles I., no Philip II., our great Philip?

A negative achievement, it will be said. But what is that? What is negative? what is positive? At what point in time--a line always continuing in the same direction, from the past to the future--does the zero occur which denotes the boundary between the positive and the negative? Spain, which is said to be the land of knights and rogues--and all of them rogues--has been the country most slandered by history precisely because it championed the Counter-Reformation. And because its arrogance has prevented it from stepping down into the public forum, into the world's vanity fair, and publishing its own justification.

Let us leave on one side Spain's eight centuries of warfare against the Moors, during which she defended Europe from Mohammedanism, her work of internal unification, her discovery of America and the Indies--for this was the achievement of Spain and Portugal, and not of Columbus and Vasco da Gama--let us leave all this, and more than this, on one side, and it is not a little thing. Is it not a cultural achievement to have created a score of nations, reserving nothing for herself, and to have begotten, as the Conquistadores did, free men on poor Indian slaves? Apart from all this, does our mysticism count for nothing in the world of thought?

Perhaps the peoples whose souls Helen will ravish away with her kisses may some day have to return to this mysticism to find their souls again.

But, as everybody knows, Culture is composed of ideas and only of ideas, and man is only Culture's instrument. Man for the idea, and not the idea for man; the substance for the shadow. The end of man is to create science, to catalogue the Universe, so that it may be handed back to G.o.d in order, as I wrote years ago in my novel, _Amor y Pedagogia_. Man, apparently, is not even an idea. And at the end of all, the human race will fall exhausted at the foot of a pile of libraries--whole woods rased to the ground to provide the paper that is stored away in them--museums, machines, factories, laboratories ... in order to bequeath them--to whom? For G.o.d will surely not accept them.

That horrible regenerationist literature, almost all of it an imposture, which the loss of our last American colonies provoked, led us into the pedantry of extolling persevering and silent effort--and this with great vociferation, vociferating silence--of extolling prudence, exact.i.tude, moderation, spiritual fort.i.tude, synteresis, equanimity, the social virtues, and the chiefest advocates of them were those of us who lacked them most. Almost all of us Spaniards fell into this ridiculous mode of literature, some more and some less. And so it befell that that arch-Spaniard Joaquin Costa, one of the least European spirits we ever had, invented his famous saying that we must Europeanize Spain, and, while proclaiming that we must lock up the sepulchre of the Cid with a sevenfold lock, Cid-like urged us to--conquer Africa! And I myself uttered the cry, "Down with Don Quixote!" and from this blasphemy, which meant the very opposite of what it said--such was the fashion of the hour--sprang my _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_ and my cult of Quixotism as the national religion.

I wrote that book in order to rethink _Don Quixote_ in opposition to the Cervantists and erudite persons, in order to make a living work of what was and still is for the majority a dead letter. What does it matter to me what Cervantes intended or did not intend to put into it and what he actually did put into it? What is living in it is what I myself discover in it, whether Cervantes put it there or not, what I myself put into and under and over it, and what we all put into it. I wanted to hunt down our philosophy in it.

For the conviction continually grows upon me that our philosophy, the Spanish philosophy, is liquescent and diffused in our literature, in our life, in our action, in our mysticism, above all, and not in philosophical systems. It is concrete. And is there not perhaps as much philosophy or more in Goethe, for example, as in Hegel? The poetry of Jorge Manrique, the Romancero, _Don Quijote_, _La Vida es Sueno_, the _Subida al Monte Carmelo_, imply an intuition of the world and a concept of life (_Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht_). And it was difficult for this philosophy of ours to formulate itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period that was aphilosophical, positivist, technicist, devoted to pure history and the natural sciences, a period essentially materialist and pessimist.

Our language itself, like every cultured language, contains within itself an implicit philosophy.

A language, in effect, is a potential philosophy. Platonism is the Greek language which discourses in Plato, unfolding its secular metaphors; scholasticism is the philosophy of the dead Latin of the Middle Ages wrestling with the popular tongues; the French language discourses in Descartes, the German in Kant and in Hegel, and the English in Hume and in Stuart Mill. For the truth is that the logical starting-point of all philosophical speculation is not the I, neither is it representation (_Vorstellung_), nor the world as it presents itself immediately to the senses; but it is mediate or historical representation, humanly elaborated and such as it is given to us princ.i.p.ally in the language by means of which we know the world; it is not psychical but spiritual representation. When we think, we are obliged to set out, whether we know it not and whether we will or not, from what has been thought by others who came before us and who environ us. Thought is an inheritance.

Kant thought in German, and into German he translated Hume and Rousseau, who thought in English and French respectively. And did not Spinoza think in Judeo-Portuguese, obstructed by and contending with Dutch?

Thought rests upon prejudgements, and prejudgements pa.s.s into language.

To language Bacon rightly ascribed not a few of the errors of the _idola fori_. But is it possible to philosophize in pure algebra or even in Esperanto? In order to see the result of such an attempt one has only to read the work of Avenarius on the criticism of pure experience (_reine Erfahrung_), of this prehuman or inhuman experience. And even Avenarius, who was obliged to invent a language, invented one that was based upon the Latin tradition, with roots which carry in their metaphorical implications a content of impure experience, of human social experience.

All philosophy is, therefore, at bottom philology. And philology, with its great and fruitful law of a.n.a.logical formations, opens wide the door to chance, to the irrational, to the absolutely incommensurable. History is not mathematics, neither is philosophy. And how many philosophical ideas are not strictly owing to something akin to rhyme, to the necessity of rightly placing a consonant! In Kant himself there is a great deal of this, of esthetic symmetry, rhyme.

Representation is, therefore, like language, like reason itself--which is simply internal language--a social and racial product, and race, the blood of the spirit, is language, as Oliver Wendell Holmes has said, and as I have often repeated.

It was in Athens and with Socrates that our Western philosophy first became mature, conscious of itself, and it arrived at this consciousness by means of the dialogue, of social conversation. And it is profoundly significant that the doctrine of innate ideas, of the objective and normative value of ideas, of what Scholasticism afterwards knew as Realism, should have formulated itself in dialogues. And these ideas, which const.i.tute reality, are names, as Nominalism showed. Not that they may not be more than names (_flatus vocis_), but that they are nothing less than names. Language is that which gives us reality, and not as a mere vehicle of reality, but as its true flesh, of which all the rest, dumb or inarticulate representation, is merely the skeleton. And thus logic operates upon esthetics, the concept upon the expression, upon the word, and not upon the brute perception.

And this is true even in the matter of love. Love does not discover that it is love until it speaks, until it says, I love thee! In Stendhal's novel, _La Chartreuse de Parme_, it is with a very profound intuition that Count Mosca, furious with jealousy because of the love which he believes unites the d.u.c.h.ess of Sanseverina with his nephew Fabrice, is made to say, "I must be calm; if my manner is violent the d.u.c.h.ess, simply because her vanity is piqued, is capable of following Belgirate, and then, during the journey, chance may lead to a word which will give a name to the feelings they bear towards each other, and thereupon in a moment all the consequences will follow."

Even so--all things were made by the word, and the word was in the beginning.

Thought, reason--that is, living language--is an inheritance, and the solitary thinker of Aben Tofail, the Arab philosopher of Guadix, is as absurd as the ego of Descartes. The real and concrete truth, not the methodical and ideal, is: _h.o.m.o sum, ergo cogito_. To feel oneself a man is more immediate than to think. But, on the other hand, History, the process of culture, finds its perfection and complete effectivity only in the individual; the end of History and Humanity is man, each man, each individual. _h.o.m.o sum, ergo cogito; cogito ut sim Michael de Unamuno_. The individual is the end of the Universe.

And we Spaniards feel this very strongly, that the individual is the end of the Universe. The introspective individuality of the Spaniard was pointed out by Martin A.S. Hume in a pa.s.sage in _The Spanish People_,[63] upon which I commented in an essay published in _La Espana Moderna_.[64]

And it is perhaps this same introspective individualism which has not permitted the growth on Spanish soil of strictly philosophical--or, rather, metaphysical--systems. And this in spite of Suarez, whose formal subtilties do not merit the name of philosophy.

Our metaphysics, if we can be said to possess such a thing, has been metanthropics, and our metaphysicians have been philologists--or, rather, humanists--in the most comprehensive sense of the term.

Menendez de Pelayo, as Benedetto Croce very truly said (_Estetica_, bibliographical appendix), was inclined towards metaphysical idealism, but he appeared to wish to take something from other systems, even from empirical theories. For this reason Croce considers that his work (referring to his _Historia de las ideas esteticas de Espana_) suffers from a certain uncertainty, from the theoretical point of view of its author, Menendez de Pelayo, which was that of a perfervid Spanish humanist, who, not wishing to disown the Renaissance, invented what he called Vivism, the philosophy of Luis Vives, and perhaps for no other reason than because he himself, like Vives, was an eclectic Spaniard of the Renaissance. And it is true that Menendez de Pelayo, whose philosophy is certainly all uncertainty, educated in Barcelona in the timidities of the Scottish philosophy as it had been imported into the Catalan spirit--that creeping philosophy of common sense, which was anxious not to compromise itself and yet was all compromise, and which is so well exemplified in Balmes--always shunned all strenuous inward combat and formed his consciousness upon compromises.

Angel Ganivet, a man all divination and instinct, was more happily inspired, in my opinion, when he proclaimed that the Spanish philosophy was that of Seneca, the pagan Stoic of Cordoba, whom not a few Christians regarded as one of themselves, a philosophy lacking in originality of thought but speaking with great dignity of tone and accent. His accent was a Spanish, Latino-African accent, not h.e.l.lenic, and there are echoes of him in Tertullian--Spanish, too, at heart--who believed in the corporal and substantial nature of G.o.d and the soul, and who was a kind of Don Quixote in the world of Christian thought in the second century.

But perhaps we must look for the hero of Spanish thought, not in any actual flesh-and-bone philosopher, but in a creation of fiction, a man of action, who is more real than all the philosophers--Don Quixote.

There is undoubtedly a philosophical Quixotism, but there is also a Quixotic philosophy. May it not perhaps be that the philosophy of the Conquistadores, of the Counter-Reformers, of Loyola, and above all, in the order of abstract but deeply felt thought, that of our mystics, was, in its essence, none other than this? What was the mysticism of St. John of the Cross but a knight-errantry of the heart in the divine warfare?

And the philosophy of Don Quixote cannot strictly be called idealism; he did not fight for ideas. It was of the spiritual order; he fought for the spirit.

Imagine Don Quixote turning his heart to religious speculation--as he himself once dreamed of doing when he met those images in bas-relief which certain peasants were carrying to set up in the retablo of their village church[65]--imagine Don Quixote given up to meditation upon eternal truths, and see him ascending Mount Carmel in the middle of the dark night of the soul, to watch from its summit the rising of that sun which never sets, and, like the eagle that was St. John's companion in the isle of Patmos, to gaze upon it face to face and scrutinize its spots. He leaves to Athena's owl--the G.o.ddess with the glaucous, or owl-like, eyes, who sees in the dark but who is dazzled by the light of noon--he leaves to the owl that accompanied Athena in Olympus the task of searching with keen eyes in the shadows for the prey wherewith to feed its young.

And the speculative or meditative Quixotism is, like the practical Quixotism, madness, a daughter-madness to the madness of the Cross. And therefore it is despised by the reason. At bottom, philosophy abhors Christianity, and well did the gentle Marcus Aurelius prove it.