What is the mist ?
The mist is life, reality, delusion, the self, god, passion – every pattern, the multiplicity of patterns, the fact that every pattern can be inverted. Mist metaphysics, it’s being described through the book but its relevance to reality outside literature is only being discussed by the author at the last 20 pages of the book. Unamuno has a specific theological answer to his ‘problem’ which relates to his other book The Tragic Sense of Life (1912). The mist is the state of which we all live in, it has its allure and magic, it’s a state of existence, of living, it is an object without form and realization, not a defined one. Augusto, the main character cannot perform any true action, he exists within the mist. In the beginning of the story he goes for a purposeless walk, he chooses chance as his guide, but isn’t that a paradox ? the story begins with allegedly simple actions though when you try to analyze them in the same way Unamuno does, nothing seems to be simple enough. Apparently, Augusto’s purpose is to be purposeless, to wander but without any destination. When he chooses to wait until a dog comes and then follow him, then he is being led without even knowing (another paradox) by a perky young woman, oddly enough this random perky young woman will become the love of his life, the subject of his desire which he will not achieve, and what would replace it ? it’s the dog Orpheus, the name came from the myth, in which Orpheus went to the land of the dead to get his wife back to the land of the living.
And now in which direction shall I go? To the right or to the left?”
For Augusto was less of a traveler through life than a stroller. “I will wait until a dog passes,” he said, “and I will start out in the direction that he takes.”
The mist is the element which can hold someone in his place, only with defined purpose like love one can shake the mist and get out of it and find a purpose.
Contradiction
We are confronted with the meaning of actions that we know from our lives like: to know, to judge, to check, to go, to move to act. These action taken by the main character Augustus are not idleness or action but something undefined in between, an empty definition. The rain in the beginning of the book serves as an anecdote to the rest, we are introduced with a completely different type of character than what literature has known until that point. The situation is only being made possible through the specifics of that person (a Chekhovian situation). A person does not have to reach his arm to realize that it’s raining but he still does it. This is being brought up to send our contemplations towards the aesthetical dimension, and what is being said here : the umbrella is the device that is supposed to protect us from the rain (reality) , be at the moment that its being used it loses its beauty, ideal form and meaning (because the umbrella cancels the situation and reason it was made for). In opposite to today’s common materialistic approach, when Augusto in the beginning of the book refers to Eugenia as ‘his Eugenia’, not the flesh and blood, but the Ideal, Its reversing the order of material – ideal to be ideal-material. The material Eugenia is ephemeral contrary to the hallucination, the ideal, the form, the thought. Everything about the flesh Eugenia is related to chance while the ideal is eternal, therefore it is suggested that the only way Augustus can really fully have Eugenia is to have the Ideal, complete and Eternal Eugenia, which is quite the opposite from the flesh Eugenia, which is not only controlled by chance, but also capricious, she does not obey to rules – sure not the ones of her aunt and uncle, she refuses any attempt of forcing a certain trajectory in life which is not coming from herself, she defies an outside pattern. There is a reference to the Cartesian approach that only one can built and define his own hallucinations and inner world, which is not dependent on the outside world. Facts would always be a part of chance and therefore they exist only outside the subject. The one thing one can only build which would be truly himself comes within himself and not from the outside. Descartes: The only territory of action is the subject. Descartes failed to build his own vision because he lived in a time which made him involved with theology which prevented him to fully develop his own vision.
The fact that Eugenia has already a fiancée makes Augusto even happier , why is that ? to get out of the mist and lack of meaning (like his friends are suggesting), Augusto needs to find a purpose or a goal, paradoxically the more harder to reach a certain goal the more activity it will need from the person who is pursuing it. This goal is an emotional one rather than rational, because the rational is indifferent – the rational will always consider an opposite reaction, it is neutral. The rational can also provide endless possibilities thus resulting in indecision.
Plato in his allegory of a chariot, the rational doesn’t have the strength to pull the chariot. For that you have the will and the instinct. The rational can only work hypothetically, in a Socratic way. The emotion is focused by its nature towards an object, for example when someone is in love and then somebody else will be the focus point.
Contradiction according the new logic of the 20th century (Ludwig Wittgenstein, TLP, 1922) is an empty form, it does not have real meaning. Every conversation the book can lead to the nihil of cognition, empty statements, they cannot create a real thought. The cognition is not setting itself to set a goal. We define true action as one that begins with a thought and then changes the outside world. We must know how to distinguish between coincidence and action. There is a gap between what Augustus is thinking that he is achieving and what are the real-world results.
See also : Ludwig Wittgenstein, Descartes, Spinoza, Husserl and the phenomenologists.
The subject of language – Reality, Aesthetic beauty and the human pattern
Reality for us is pure coincidence. Language serves as a bridge between reality and aesthetics. Transcendence is the supreme meaning of everything. The language is one of the main elements the book is dealing with (maybe not explicitly). Often the 20th century is being considered the century of language – in the history of philosophy the century of language revolution, structuralism, semiotics, language as a medium, the social lingual array, a lot of theses started being very dominant, one of the main examples being Mikhail Bakhtin. Words and language can be a cause for problems because they are preventing us from transmitting accurate feelings and moreover, they cannot convey certain notions, especially dealing with aesthetics and or music. Unamuno like Kafka successfully builds contradicting life textures through the use of language. With Kafka every semantic unit is being imploded as contradiction, but with Unamuno is being represented as the Mist as meaningless.
Aesthetics
Aesthetics are the freezing of patterns and life is the disintegration of patterns. The Kantian model is mentioned in the context of art and music, one can build a rhythm within the Mist but it does not necessarily relate to anything but itself, it is a-priori.
“It is unfortunate,” thought Augusto, “that we need the services of things and have to make use of them. All beauty is marred by use, if not destroyed. The noblest function of objects is that of being contemplated. How beautiful is an orange before we eat it!
Human existence loses its meaning without aesthetics, all our conceptions and ideas even language is based upon Aesthetics in way. An orange can be an object of aesthetical value, through our ability to develop aesthetics the orange becomes an idea, a frozen pattern, there is an ideal perfect orange which is sensational and cannot be described in words, once the dimension of the aesthetics comes into words or practice it is no longer the ideal and perfect shape of beauty. One can derive to a Kantian conclusion that art can or will take the place of reality, since the creator of art is man, reality can be created by man and therefore change the status of what we perceive coming from outside, meaning the effects of coincidence and chance.
Mise en abyme – a concept explored in the field of aesthetics and epistemology, it is a story within a story, view from the world into the world or an infinite recurring sequence. In this case the fact the author is present in his own book. A deliberating blur between the process of reading, meaning the realization of the literal fictional universe, and the reality that that reality is creating. This blurring of the partition between the reader and the book has a metaphysical result. It serves certain ideology, firstly vide known in the story of Don Quixote, where in the second chapter there’s a connection between the book and the characters. The author is using this technique to point out the relation between, god the Transcendence the ultimate form of all ideas creator of man, Man the author the creator of ideas, The character the idea itself. The relationship that Unamuno suggests is very reflective in a way that is cancelling the hierarchy between god-man-idea because ideas existed before they were pointed out by their creator and will be there also after. The idea, the creation of man point out to god, is the only way to transcend above material and corporeality and the fact that it exits shows the presence of the transcendence in the human soul.
See also: Andre Gide, Velazquez’s las meninas, Don Quixote
Meaningless and the reality of the real (or the real of reality)
Life is purely incidental, the only option to give meaning to it is by giving it a direction, a purpose, a destiny, a subject (of love), emotion. Chance and incident have the power to disintegrate the meanings we give to things, because those things can be subjected to habit and circumstances. Every subject is dialectic by nature and can get it meaning and therefore its power only from its opposite – life and death, love and hate, etc. Meaning can be achieved by falling in love. Augusto was born to be in love says Victor or his mother or the female characters in his life, they know that he must get married, that will give him purpose which he clearly lacks. This act of falling in love is not working for Augusto because he is basing its foundation on pure chance, randomness. As a logic process it will implode and collapse.
Necessity and Randomness
“But tell me, Orfeo, what necessity is there that God should be, or the world, or anything whatever? Why does anything need be? Doesn’t it seem to you that this idea of need—necessity is nothing but the highest form that chance takes in our minds?”
The book claims that there is no difference between the two. The perfect order and total chaos are the same unless someone can build a division between the two. That someone can’t be a person, because as humans we are always a part of chance and randomness. Only an imaginary being or a fictional one could create those boundaries between Randomness and Necessity. The fact that man can create patterns and form, that are necessities, or that you can act upon, means that it exists. The fact that it exists leads to the ‘necessary’ conclusion that there is a transcendence behind it. Unamuno is one of the theological philosophers which believes this to be god. Descartes also pointed out the in the root of the subject which is the rational beings lies the endless form of infinity which also symbolized god to him.
The dialectic form of love
In love there are two elements: the lover and the loved one. Which one is responsible for the other? We cannot find clearly an object and subject because both are depended on each other. Both get their form and definition from the other and can’t exist by their own. This a relationship is dialectical and provides us with understanding about the human existence. It is necessary for us to find purpose (otherwise we are just mist) but for a true purpose to exist there must be something creating it, a target need a source to be a target and vice versa. Augustus is not choosing an object of love but instead love as a concept, without a specific object. When he is involved with Rosario the maid, he is devoting himself to a concept and not the person, Rosario, which cancels her as an object. In the book Rosario needs Augustus to acknowledge her importance, only by feeling how much invisible she can potentially be she understands how visible she can be, it shows us that a from can only take shape from outside, it cannot sustain itself. An object needs a subject. The theological approach sees a bigger transcendent supreme pattern which a person is part of, without it there can be no meaning to things and therefore it’s also the proof of the existence of a transcendence.
Augusto is taking this path of finding love, he sees it within the limits of art, his goal, his love is a form of art. When Augusto is identifying Eugenia as the object of his desire, she is capricious, insubordinate and does not respond to Augusto. Why does Augusto do not take it back? The refusal of Eugenia only makes it worse for him, not because he is trying to achieve the unachievable, but because the refusal makes the object of love to dissolve into this mist, the undefined and unrealized, then the tension between the two polarities grows, the attainable and unattainable.
See also: Plato – Symposium (385 BC) , Luis Buñuel – That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), George Berkeley – A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710)
The ending and its consequences, Transcendence and idealism
The last chapter changes the rest of the book in a unique way, it undermines the foundation of the Mimesis (imitation of reality) that the other chapter created. We must then do a reconstruction of the rest to understand its meaning. The climax is not of the tale, but it is of the theme, and one that will require to review and to put in a different light everything that is happened until now (the end) in the book. The term which is called representation or mimesis is undermined. Then the book becomes a mass about what we conceive as reality. This is our deconstruction of how we define reality. The Mist is whatever humanity touches, ontologically. It is a progression towards something that is unknown. A few years later after the book was published with the emergence of Kafka this term of mist would be called a Labyrinth. A labyrinth might be a better representation of that concept because although it is really defined, we are still getting lost in it. While having a clear direction in the Labyrinth, every step will get you nowhere. That is The absurd that is the opposite of finding, or going into a certain direction, to have a purpose. Unamuno’s approach is passive whilst Kafka’s Active, It’s the difference between lacking meaning and not having one.
The meaning of the book can be the destruction of old institutions, of clear definitions, predictions, the possibility to plan, to construct, of knowing. Stephan Zwieg pointed out the death of the world of yesterday and thus the world of humanism, but also the possibility to re-construct the man as a defined entity. Augusto is an entity that is lacking definition, he has no direction. The possibility of finding reason and meaning through rationality or emotion is no longer possible, mainly because everything is incidental, everything is founded by chance which dissolves its meaning. Think about the formality in the book, like the words in a letter to your lover that is being passed by her doorkeeper then it’s quite evident how it will never get its full emotional and ideal potential meaning. The reality and the worlds of words is a world of contradictions.
Conclusion :
The novel, as existed before Unamuno, belongs to the epistemology of the enlightenment, rationality, everything can be defined or known. Unamuno needed to invent a new novel, ‘Niebla’ to develop a new epistemology. The Niebla can relates to the identification of a new type of human in the beginning of the 20th century. Parallel to the development in psychology and the subconscious, science and philosophy, the study of structure of language, the book surfaces the unanswered questions of that time. How does Unamuno do it? Like Chekhov, in which every character is as important than the other once, same with Niebla in which every line of story is meaningful in the same way. The emotional connection has the same intensity with all of the characters, the small character can also surface the problems that the book is dealing with. A character in the book is inventing a new type of literature which is based upon the concepts of the book. The Mise en abyme (like a möbius belt) is used as a technique in an very special and extravagant way , the hierarchy between the representation and presented are being dissolved by a paradox or a logical error. A logical structure that is based on a contradiction. The end the created is faced with his creator (feared and trembled, see Kierkegaard), he (Augusto) can only subject himself to the writer after he identified him as his creator, not before, above all doubt and uncertainty, a dialectical move which results in the type of faith Kierkegaard is talking about.
Unamuno sees the object (individual) and subject (reality) as elements that are dialectically lacking the ability to give meaning to each other, the solution he suggests is a third element – the transcendence, which includes all things not represented in reality, but only in a higher degree of human thought such as ethics and creativity. This is something that Plato suggested in a way around 380 BC and an idea that was developed further throughout philosophy. Unamuno adds another philosophical complication by having himself and his character meet in the world of the Diegesis (world of fiction). Unamuno develop it to its full extend. At the end of the book the author is losing his power as an all-knowing narrator, he creates a paradoxical system which causes us an ontological vertigo in which we cannot tell anymore the hierarchy, the author and his character are both on the same place arguing. Unamuno is suggesting that if the mist is the human existence, art is being experienced as reality, then we can search for the author of the aesthetics of life, the transcendence beyond the mist which will allow us (maybe) to find our way. The idea is stronger than the author, even more real, because it has always existed and will keep on existing. The fictional character will stay forever in the minds of the readers and humanity, it has more presence than their authors. Though the character dies in the book (well it has to) the idea behind it stays.
Just as much as in Don Quixote, idealism which is firstly portrayed as craziness is then realized to be the only escape from the craziness of the world. The highest form of good is only outside of reality. Then how do we define the real world as secondary to the ideal? how do we deal with reality outside our own thought when what gives shape to reality is our own thought ? we have to redefine or re-evaluate reality. The book is a very early precursor for the post-modernist movement in terms of the philosophy, which happened only during the 60s and 70s, 50 years after the books was written.
Philosophy and modernism:
Speaking in a very generic way, the philosophical point of view brought up in the book starts with Descartes’ Ideal of rationality, this ideal aims to achieve valuable knowledge through thought and rationality, meaning everything can be known from the laws of the universe until the mind and the soul of a human. Leibniz developed a program for rationality through math and philosophy, in these tools we should have been able attain true knowledge about the universe and ourselves. Frege was the one (again speaking very generally) to shift the focus from the Aristoteles type of logic to an analytical type of logic. The focus of his philosophy is the language, he suggested the “third realm” which is timeless objective existence which exists apart from both the mental and physical. This influenced later on philosophers like early Carnap and Wittgenstein which further focused the philosophical discussion over language.
What Carnap and Wittgenstein asked: why should we live in a system of symbols of consciousness that are random? we should build a system that correlates with reality (that was Leibniz’s life’s ambition). Wittgenstein tried to deal with this in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Can we rebuild the language so it can never makes mislead us into building sentences that are not making sense (even though they can be very complicated and look valid to most of us). Our consciousness according to this theory should not then be left in the mist, clear the mist.
Popper claimed that only after we have a certain flashlight, we can discover certain things with it. Unamuno helped creating this flashlight by showing how much we are still struggling with understanding the nature of the world and our thought in a fundamental way. With those finding in the fields of philosophy, art followed with experiments in the aesthetic field, how can we find new ways, not of imitating reality but to imitate the our impression, how we as humans conceive reality, finding a new epistemology which is based not on representation, not the object, but in the word, the sign.
In literature this shift was seen when realism, which portrayed reality through particularization, the tiny details of every real object, started dealing with psychology and the subconscious (in literature for example Dostoyevsky, Henri James). Those were elements which belong to us humans which language cannot describe, to touch this subject of the abstract schematization was needed, conceptualization. The subconscious holds things which do not fit a form or a pattern. Doubting is a way of overcoming the delusion of western civilization about the existence of reality which is reachable and objective for us. If reality can only be attained though the subject therefore reality is just an echo of our own subjectivity. (A claimed suggested by G. Berkley, Hume, Kant, etc.) The realm of human imagination has its own rules and its own elements that we can explore and discover.
Modernism was a last attempt to hold on to what we knew as reality a moment before everything else collapses, by recruiting the power of art and language. For the modernists our only way to not loose reality as we know it is to build or reconstruct it through art. This is where modernism and post-modernism overlapped. To give a concrete example from the book, there was an attempt to reconstruct meaning through love and emotion, through a dog’s perspective, through a philosophical move which is not based on rationality per se. this new era which continued to what we call post modernism raised new questions and doubts about the nature of reality and the subject, even to the point of doubting their existence. We can see how technology and contemporary art and entertainment separated paths with reality and is having its own dimension – the internet, computer games, virtual reality. Those elements that start with an imitation of reality are being developed to be characterized by the way they imitate reality and not reality itself, a caricature that is only magnifying itself (which is called humanity).
The prototype philosophers that were dealing with the psychological side of loss of meaning were Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, they are both considered to be the precursors of Existentialism. While Kierkegaard suggested something like Unamuno’s approach, finding the proof of Transcendence within yourself through a leap of faith, a minor adjustment. Unamuno would suggest the go back to god like Dostoyevsky, but before, you must lose your faith before you find it again. Nietzsche suggest the re-evaluation of all values, the re-evaluation of our definition of a value. Nietzsche is really the first one to elaborate on the question of how to exist in a world with no absolute transcendental authority of any kind. That is mostly a moral distress, if god is dead, there can be no morals, there can be no man. Through in his writing we can feel the disaster of total nihilism, against it Nietzsche came up with a new type of man, the Übermensch, the greatest creator ever lived, so powerful, he can create his own rules and morals only by himself.
Further and relevant reading:
Philosophers:
Plato – Symposium
George Berkeley
José Ortega y Gasset
Henri Poincaré
Henri Bergson
Nietzsche – The birth of tragedy
Kierkegaard – fear and trembling
Roman Ingarden (under category of Receptionism & Phenomenology)
Wittgenstein
Writers / authors :
Stephan Zwieg
William James
Robert Atler
Machado de Assis
Andre Gide – The counterfeiters & Les Caves Du Vatican
John Barth – Chimera
F. Dostoyevsky
Vladimir Nabokov
Henri James
Thomas Mann – The magic mountain
Jorge Luis Borges
Umberto Ecco
Modernist writers :
Virginia Woolf
E.M. Forester
Marcel Proust
Knut Hamsun
James Joyce (early material)
Artists:
Rene Magritte
Alfred Hitchcock
Special thanks goes to Henry Unger