And so it always will be. _Primum vivere, deinde philosophari_,
or perhaps better, _primum supervivere_ or _superesse_.
Every position of permanent agreement or harmony between reason and
life, between philosophy and religion, becomes impossible. And the
tragic history of human thought is simply the history of a struggle
between reason and life--reason bent on rationalizing life and forcing
it to submit to the inevitable, to mortality; life bent on vitalizing
reason and forcing it to serve as a support for its own vital desires.
And this is the history of philosophy, inseparable from the history of
religion.
Our sense of the world of objective reality is necessarily subjective,
human, anthropomorphic. And vitalism will always rise up against
rationalism; reason will always find itself confronted by will. Hence
the rhythm of the history of philosophy and the alternation of periods
in which life imposes itself, giving birth to spiritual forms, with
those in which reason imposes itself, giving birth to materialist forms,
although both of these classes of forms of belief may be disguised by
other names. Neither reason nor life ever acknowledges itself
vanquished. But we will return to this in the next chapter.
The vital consequence of rationalism would be suicide. Kierkegaard puts
it very well: "The consequence for existence[33] of pure thought is
suicide.... We do not praise suicide but passion.
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