ABSTRACT
With typically playful but pointed provocativeness Unamuno reversed the Cartesian ‘cogito, ergo sum’. One doubts, however, if Descartes would have seriously objected to Unamuno’s ‘homo sum, ergo cogito’ (DSTV, X, 519), since such a reversal does not negate the Frenchman’s contention that being fully aware of his own thinking provided the certainty that he needed in order to convince himself of his existence. Whether such conviction comes from awareness of our own thought processes or simply from an in-built instinct makes little practical difference, and in some respects Unamuno remains a Cartesian. When in ‘Civilización y cultura’ he writes ‘hay un ambiente exterior, el mundo de los fenómenos sensibles, que nos envuelve y sustenta, y un ambiente interior, nuestra propia conciencia, el mundo de nuestras ideas, imaginaciones, deseos y sentimientos’ (VIII, 381), he is making essentially the same well-known distinction that Descartes made between res extensa and res cogitans, even if for Unamuno the dividing line between the two is rather more blurred than for the Frenchman. For Descartes, the mind (or soul), res cogitans, is a thinking entity, and a thinking entity is its thoughts and has no existence separate from those thoughts. The body, res extensa, is a physical entity, and as such it must have dimension (or measurement, or shape or volume), whereas thoughts do not have dimension. Descartes’s distinction can scarcely be more commonsensical, whatever explanation we then go on to favour for the appearance of mind rather than accept his circumstantially ‘safe’ explanation that God allows it to be self-standing and perduring. But as we shall see, Unamuno’s apparent rejection of Descartes is not based on his having found a better explanation for the human person as a thinking being.
