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Baroja's Rejection of Traditional Medicine in El árbol de la ciencia

2007; Routledge; Volume: 85; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14753820701791502

1478-3428

Benjamín Fraser,

Empathy and Medical Education

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1Pío Baroja, ‘Sufrir y pensar’ (1899), in Obras completas, 8 vols (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1946–51), VIII, 865–66. 2Margaret Newman, Health as Expanding Consciousness (New York: National League for Nursing Press, 1999). 3Pío Baroja, El árbol de la ciencia (New York: Las Americas Publishing Company, n.d.). In-text references will be to this edition. 4Pío Baroja, Las horas solitarias (1918) (Madrid: Caro Raggio, 1982). Also in Obras completas, V, 299–303. Baroja also refers to Bergson's concept of élan vital (from L’Évolution créatrice) in Momentum catastrophicum (1919). Sherman Eoff, in The Modern Spanish Novel. Comparative Essays Examining the Philosophical Impact of Science on Fiction (New York: New York U. P., 1961), places the possible point of contact even before the 1911 publication of El árbol de la ciencia, as I shall indicate below. 12Newman, Health as Expanding Consciousness, 81. 14Margaret A. Newman, ‘The Pattern that Connects’, Advanced Nursing Science, 24:3 (2002), 1–7 (p. 5). 5Abby Fuoto, ‘A Critique of Margaret Newman's Health as Expanding Consciousness’ (unpublished manuscript), 5. 6Itzhak Bentov, Stalking the Wild Pendulum (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978). 7Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper, 1959). 8David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London/New York: Ark, 1983 [1st ed. 1980]). 9Arthur M. Young, The Geometry of Meaning (San Francisco: Robert Briggs, 1976); Arthur M. Young, The Reflexive Universe: Evolution of Consciousness (San Francisco: Robert Briggs, 1976). 10Richard Moss, The I That is We (Millbrae: Celestial Arts, 1981). 11Martha E. Rogers, An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing (Philadelphia: Davis, 1970). 13I am using Bergson's understanding of intellect throughout. Bergson sees the intellect as that part of thought most attuned to space and thus most suited to measure and divide—to understand quality only through quantity. The reader is directed to three key Bergsonian texts: Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889), trans. F. L. Pogson (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2001); Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896), trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: G. Allen/New York: Macmillan, 1912); and Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907), trans. A. Mitchell (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1998). 15Newman, Health as Expanding Consciousness, 82. 16Newman, Health as Expanding Consciousness, 82. See also Margaret Newman, ‘Prevailing Paradigms in Nursing’, Nursing Outlook, 40:1 (1992), 10–14. 17Newman, Health as Expanding Consciousness, 6. 18Bergson, Time and Free Will. 19Bergson, Creative Evolution. 20Bergson, Matter and Memory. 21Bergson is arguably present in her analysis indirectly through the work of David Bohm. 22Newman, Health as Expanding Consciousness, 6. 23In order to finalize the synthesis of the philosophical methods of Newman and Bergson, I have turned to the language used by Gilles Deleuze in his article on Bergson's method of division. See Gilles Deleuze, ‘Bergson's Conception of Difference’, in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles/New York: Semiotext[e], 2004), 32–51. 24Newman, Health as Expanding Consciousness, 9 (original emphasis). 25Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003 [1st ed. 1983]), 56. 26Newman, Health as Expanding Consciousness, 33. 27Newman, Health as Expanding Consciousness, 36. 28One of the most famous of these is Zeno's insistence that if Achilles moves ten times faster than the tortoise, but the tortoise has a ten-metre head start, then Achilles will never surpass the tortoise. Zeno's explanation is that by the time Achilles has moved the ten metres, the tortoise has already moved one metre more, and so on. 29Newman, Health as Expanding Consciousness, 57. See also one of Bergson's most notable passages—that on the cinematograph of the mind in Creative Evolution, 306 (‘We take snapshots’). 30Newman, Health as Expanding Consciousness, 58 (original emphasis). 31Newman, Health as Expanding Consciousness, 73. 32Newman, Health as Expanding Consciousness, 106. 34Newman, Health as Expanding Consciousness, 77 (original emphasis). 33Newman, Health as Expanding Consciousness, 107. 35Pío Baroja, El dolor: Estudio de psico-física (1896) (Salamanca: Real Academia de Medicina de Salamanca, 1980). A later article ‘Sufrir y pensar’, is a continuation of the ideas of his thesis, and is included in Obras completas, VIII, 865–66. The pagination of the Obras completas differs according to impression. 36See César Barja, ‘Pío Baroja’, in his Libros y autores contemporáneos (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1935), 299–359; Félix Bello Vázquez, Pío Baroja: el hombre y el filósofo (Salamanca: Univ. de Salamanca, 1993); E. Inman Fox, ‘Baroja y Schopenhauer: El árbol de la ciencia’, Revue de Litterature Comparée, 37 (1963), 350–59; C. Alex Longhurst, ‘Kant in Baroja: El árbol de la ciencia and The Critique of Pure Reason’, BSS, LXXXII:3–4 (2005), 529–48; Roberta Johnson, Crossfire: Philosophy and the Novel in Spain 1900–1934 (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1993). 37Carmen Iglesias, El pensamiento de Pío Baroja: ideas centrales (México: Antigua Librería Robredo, 1963), 42. 38Iglesias, El pensamiento de Pío Baroja, 43; on this last point see also Ignacio R. M. Galbis, Baroja: el lirismo de tono menor (New York: Eliseo Torres & Sons, 1976), 159. 39Baroja, Obras completas, VII, 926. Baroja mentions Zeno of Elea on the same page, perhaps evoking Bergson's understanding of the Eleatic paradoxes of movement. His Galería de tipos de la época (1947), from the same volume of the Memorias in the Obras completas, mentions Bergson along with other thinkers of the turn of the century, although with no precise mention of when Baroja might have read the latter. 40Baroja notes in La intuición y el estilo that ‘el más inteligente de todos esos filosófos modernos, que ha sido, probablemente, Bergson, ha ido armado con hechos deducidos de la teoría de Einstein a ver si podía desmoronar las bases kantianas’ (Obras completas, VII, 994). It is important to note that most of Bergson's work up to and including L’Évolution créatrice (1907) was written with no knowledge of Einstein's special theory. It was not until 1922 with the original publication of Bergson's Duration and Simultaneity (1922), ed. and intro. Robin Durie, trans. Leon Jacobson and Mark Lewis (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999) that the real confrontation between the two began. See also Timothy S. Murphy, ‘Beneath Relativity: Bergson and Bohm on Absolute Time’, in The New Bergson, ed. John Mullarkey (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 1999), 66–81. 41See for example Baroja, La intuición y el estilo, in Obras completas, VII, 1001–02. 42Eoff, The Modern Spanish Novel, 166 and 183. 43Magdalena Cueto Pérez, Aspectos sistemáticos en la narrativa de Pío Baroja: ‘El árbol de la ciencia’ (Oviedo: Univ. de Oviedo, 1985), 196. 44Beatrice P. Patt, Pío Baroja (New York: Twayne, 1971), 56. 45Baroja, Las horas solitarias, 175. 46Baroja, Las horas solitarias, 182. 47Baroja's final words on the subject of Bergson are the following: ‘Así como Kant encontró falible el principio de Causalidad, Bergson quiere ir más lejos y encontrar falibilidad en el Tiempo. En esto, como decíamos antes, no hace más que exponer la trayectoria de Heráclito. Explicar cómo de la no homogeneidad del Tiempo, de la no trascendencia, de la no pureza de este principio saca Bergson un posible indeterminismo científico, sería para mí un poco largo y difícil. Ciertamente, también lo es para él, y el filósofo tiene que hacer grandes equilibrios sobre la cuerda floja, llevando la libertad en la espalda, y aun así no nos convence siempre de que su juego sea del todo limpio’ (Baroja, Las horas solitarias, 182). 48Baroja, Obras completas, VIII, 865–66. 49Baroja, Obras completas, V, 55–59. 50Baroja, El dolor, 50. 51Baroja writes: ‘Ese summum de sensaciones llamado cenestesia, es el protoplasma o materia prima de la sensibilidad, como todo lo que viene de los sentidos externos, es la materia prima de la inteligencia. Esta cenestesia, o sensación confusa del estado actual del organismo, se manifiesta por necesidades o tendencias permanentes o transitorias que cuando se satisfacen van seguidas de placer y de dolor cuando se contrarían’ (El dolor, 6). 52Baroja, El dolor, 9. 53See Johnson, Crossfire, 55. 54Johnson, Crossfire, 48. 55It may be relevant to recall the case of Nietzsche here. The Nietzschean inheritance in Baroja's works has been overly noted (see especially Gonzalo Sobejano, Nietzsche en España [Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1967]) but in this case allows a brief discussion of Nietzsche's own struggle with illness. Deleuze's essay on Nietzsche, republished in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, intro. John Rajchman, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 53–102, provides a look at how Nietzsche struggled not only with disease as content but as a formal element, itself an implicit reminder of Newman's own theory of health as expanding consciousness. Deleuze writes: ‘In what sense is illness—or even madness—present in Nietzsche's work? It is never a source of inspiration. Never did Nietzsche think of philosophy as proceeding from suffering or anguish, even if the philosopher, according to him, suffers in excess. Nor did he think of illness as an event that affects a body-object or a brain-object from the outside. Rather, he saw in illness a point of view on health; and in health, a point of view on illness. “To observe, as a sick person, healthier concepts, healthier values, then, conversely, from the height of a rich, abundant, and confident life, to delve into the secret work of decadent instincts—such is the practice in which I most frequently engaged …” Illness is not a motive for a thinking subject, nor is it an object for thought: it constitutes, rather a secret intersubjectivity at the heart of a single individual. Illness as an evaluation of health, health as an evaluation of illness: such is the “reversal”, the “shift in perspective” that Nietzsche saw as the crux of his method and his calling for a transmutation of values. Despite appearances, however, there is not reciprocity between the two points of view, the two evaluations. Thus movement from health to sickness, from sickness to health, if only as an idea, this very mobility is the sign of superior health; this mobility, this lightness in movement, is the sign of “great health” ’ (57–58). 57Consider Merleau-Ponty: ‘It is science which has accustomed us to regard the body as a collection of parts, and also the experience of its disintegration at death’ (Phenomenology of Perception, 501). 56Four examples early in the narrative are as follows (emphasis added): ‘Los chicos se agrupaban delante de aquella puerta como el público a la entrada de un teatro’ (8); ‘Abrieron la clase, y los estudiantes, apresurándose y apretándose como si fueran a ver un espectáculo entretenido, comenzaron a pasar’ (9); ‘Desde el suelo hasta cerca del techo se levantaba una gradería de madera muy empinada con una escalera central, lo que daba a la clase el aspecto del gallinero de un teatro’ (10); and ‘Aquella aparición teatral del profesor y de los ayudantes provocó grandes murmullos’ (10–11). 58Newman, Health as Expanding Consciousness, 81. 59All editions consulted read ‘le proporcionaba’, but since the subject of the sentence must be ‘las explicaciones’, it should read either ‘le proporcionaban’ (provided him with) or ‘lo proporcionaban’ (supplied it, i.e. ‘un puntal’). 60Bergson, Creative Evolution, 163. 61The quotation reads: ‘Algunas veces Andrés trató de convencer a la planchadora de que el dinero de la gente rica procedía del trabajo y del sudor de pobres miserables que labraban el campo, en las dehesas y en los cortijos. Andrés afirmaba que tal estado de injusticia podía cambiar: pero esto para la señora Venancia era una fantasía’ (139). 62This is Bergson's understanding of Kant. See Creative Evolution for a fuller exploration of Bergson's reading. 63This is Bergson's assessment of instinct and intelligence. A thorough exploration of the theme occurs in Creative Evolution. 64The following description seems typical of this attitude: ‘El médico, hombre estudioso, había llegado a dominar el diagnóstico como pocos. Fuera de su profesión, no le interesaba nada: política, literatura, arte, filosofía o astronomía; todo lo que no fuera auscultar o percutir, analizar orinas o esputos, era letra muerta para él’ (84). 65He is fond of a phrase of Democritus found in Lange's Historia del materialismo that reads ‘El que ama la contradicción y la verbosidad, es incapaz de aprender nada que sea serio’ (286). 66‘Andrés pudo comprobar que el pesimismo y el optimismo son resultados orgánicos como las buenas o malas digestiones’ (192). 67‘Estos vaivenes en las ideas, esta falta de plan y de freno, le llevaban a Andrés al mayor desconcierto, a una sobreexcitación cerebral continua e inútil’ (83). 68‘Se iba inclinando a un anarquismo espiritual, basado en la simpatía y en la piedad, sin solución práctica ninguna’ (82). 69‘¡Qué van ustedes a hacer! Lo único que pueden ustedes hacer es marcharse de aquí’ (273).