En el Acto III de Man and Superman, de
George Bernard Shaw, los personajes discuten sobre el sentido de la
acción, y del matrimonio y de la reproducción y de la vida y de la
existencia, concluyendo con una defensa de la Fuerza Vital en boca de
Don Juan, una fuerza que guía la evolución y que llevará al hombre hacia
su destino en el Superhombre (en la obra se alude explícitamente a
Nietzsche). El Diablo, otro de los interlocutores, es mas escéptico: el
Universo visto globalmente no tiene propósito, y el hombre, con todo su
cerebro y su inteligencia, no es sino una especie destructiva:
DON
JUAN. You forget that brainless magnificence of body has been tried.
Things immeasurably greater than man in every respect but brain have
existed and perished. The megatherium, the icthyosaurus have paced the
earth with seven-league steps and hidden the day with cloud vast wings.
Where are they now? Fossils in museums, and so few and imperfect at
that, that a knuckle bone or a tooth of one of them is prized beyond the
lives of a thousand soldiers. These things lived and wanted to live;
but for lack of brains they did not know how to carry out their purpose,
and so destroyed themselves.THE
DEVIL. And is Man any the less destroying himself for all this boasted
brain of his? Have you walked up and down upon the earth lately? I have;
and I have examined Man's wonderful inventions. And I tell you that in
the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he
outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the
slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt to-day
eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand
years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a
thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of
weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism
that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular
energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers
far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his
cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could
have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy
typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys
compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing
in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in
his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you boast is a force
of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness. What is his
religion? An excuse for hating ME. What is his law? An excuse for
hanging YOU. What is his morality? Gentility! an excuse for consuming
without producing. What is his art? An excuse for gloating over pictures
of slaughter. What are his politics? Either the worship of a despot
because a despot can kill, or parliamentary cockfighting. I spent an
evening lately in a certain celebrated legislature, and heard the pot
lecturing the kettle for its
blackness, and ministers answering questions. When I left I chalked up
on the door the old nursery saying—"Ask no questions and you will be
told no lies." I bought a sixpenny family magazine, and found it full of
pictures of young men shooting and stabbing one another. I saw a man
die: he was a London bricklayer's laborer with seven children. He left
seventeen pounds club money; and his wife spent it all on his funeral
and went into the workhouse with the children next day. She would not
have spent sevenpence on her children's schooling: the law had to force
her to let them be taught gratuitously; but on death she spent all she
had. Their imagination glows, their energies rise up at the idea of
death, these people: they love it; and the more horrible it is the more
they enjoy it. Hell is a place far above their comprehension: they
derive their notion of it from two of the greatest fools that ever
lived, an Italian and an Englishman. The Italian described it as a place
of mud, frost, filth, fire, and venomous serpents: all torture. This
ass, when he was not lying about me, was maundering about some woman
whom he saw once in the street. The Englishman described me as being
expelled from Heaven by cannons and gunpowder; and to this day every
Briton believes that the whole of his silly story is in the Bible. What
else he says I do not know; for it is all in a long poem which neither I
nor anyone else ever succeeded in wading through. It is the same in
everything. The highest form of literature is the tragedy, a play in
which everybody is murdered at the end. In the old chronicles you read
of earthquakes and pestilences, and are told that these showed the power
and majesty of God and the littleness of Man. Nowadays the chronicles
describe battles. In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another
with bullets and explosive shells until one body runs away, when the
others chase the fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they
fly. And this, the chronicle concludes, shows the greatness and majesty
of empires, and the littleness of the vanquished. Over such battles the
people run about the streets yelling with delight, and egg their
Governments on to spend hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter,
whilst the strongest Ministers dare not spend an extra penny in the
pound against the poverty and pestilence through which they themselves
daily walk. I could give you a thousand instances; but they all come to
the same thing: the power that governs the earth is not the power of
Life but of Death; and the inner need that has nerved Life to the effort
of organizing itself into the human being is not the need for higher
life but for a more efficient engine of destruction. The plague, the
famine, the earthquake, the tempest were too spasmodic in their action;
the tiger and crocodile were too easily satiated and not cruel enough:
something more constantly, more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive
was needed; and that something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the
stake, the gallows, and the electrocutor; of the sword and gun; above
all, of justice, duty, patriotism and all the other isms by which even
those who are clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to
become the most destructive of all the destroyers.
Más
adelante este diálogo, expone o reconoce Don Juan la tesis de que la
evolución humana está guiada por la guerra y la lucha por el poder. Es
una interesante y temprana exposición de la tesis evolutiva de que somos hijos de la guerra:
THE DEVIL. Yes; and this civilization! what is it, after all?
DON
JUAN. After all, an excellent peg to hang your cynical commonplaces on;
but BEFORE all, it is an attempt on Man's part to make himself
something more than the mere instrument of Woman's purpose. So far, the
result of Life's continual effort not only to maintain itself, but to
achieve higher and higher organization and completer self-consciousness,
is only, at best, a doubtful campaign between its forces and those of
Death and Degeneration. The battles in this campaign are mere blunders,
mostly won, like actual military battles, in spite of the commanders.
THE STATUE. That is a dig at me. No matter: go on, go on.
DON
JUAN. It is a dig at a much higher power than you, Commander. Still,
you must have noticed in your profession that even a stupid general can
win battles when the enemy's general is a little stupider.
THE STATUE. [very seriously] Most true, Juan, most true. Some donkeys have amazing luck.
DON
JUAN. Well, the Life Force is stupid; but it is not so stupid as the
forces of Death and Degeneration. Besides, these are in its pay all the
time. And so Life wins, after a fashion. What mere copiousness of
fecundity can supply and mere greed preserve, we possess. The survival
of whatever form of civilization can produce the best rifle and the best
fed riflemen is assured.
THE
DEVIL. Exactly! the survival, not of the most effective means of Life
but of the most effective means of Death. You always come back to my
point, in spite of your wrigglings and evasions and sophistries, not to
mention the intolerable length of your speeches.
El
ideal de Don Juan, la evolución creadora de formas superiores, requiere
sin embargo la inteligencia, sea cual sea su origen. La cima de la
existencia humana, lo más parecido al superhombre que tenemos hoy, es
the
philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner
will of the world, in invention to discover the means of fulfilling that
will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means. Of all
other sorts of men I declare myself tired.
—sin
embargo la obra termina con Don Juan (Tanner) casado con Doña Ana,
impulsado se supone por la Fuerza Vital, y rindiéndose a las argucias
matrimoniales femeninas: "The Life Force enchants me: I have the whole world in my arms when I clasp you"....
Tanto
más curiosa esta conclusión desde el punto de vista de Bernard Shaw,
cuando se piensa que su propia esposa impuso en su matrimonio la
condición de no tener relaciones sexuales. Debería de estar pensando en
la vida y deseos de los otros.
—oOo—
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