Tragic Sense of Life
Miguel de Unamuno wrote this book with the desperation of a man confronting his own mortality, and it reads like no philosophy you've ever encountered. Rather than abstract speculation about existence, he demands we confront the irreducible fact of our own death and the terrifying hunger for immortality that haunts every human soul. Unamuno, the fiery Basque intellectual who clashed with Franco and died in exile, argues that the great rationalists have it backwards: philosophy must begin not with concepts but with the 'man of flesh and bone', the breathing, suffering, terrified individual who aches for continuance beyond the grave. He dismantles the rationalist fantasy that truth must be useful or comforting, insisting that the longing for eternal life proves nothing except that we cannot bear the thought of annihilation. This 1921 masterpiece from Spain's Generation of '98 pulses with a savage, Iberian intensity that makes most contemporary existentialism seem timid by comparison. It is for anyone who has lain awake at night and refused to look away from the void.
Editions
X-Ray
“Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly”
— Miguel de Unamuno
“Warmth, warmth, more warmth! For we are dying of cold and not darkness. It is not the night that kills, but the frost.””
— Miguel de Unamuno
“Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.””
— Miguel de Unamuno
“Yes, yes, I see it all!”
— Miguel de Unamuno
“And usually [the philosopher] philosophizes either in order to resign himself to life, or to seek some finality in it, or to distract himself and forget his griefs, or for pastime and amusement.””
— Miguel de Unamuno
“The truth is that reason is the enemy of life.””
— Miguel de Unamuno
“Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.””
— Miguel de Unamuno
“Consciousness (conscientia) is participated knowledge, is co-feeling, and co-feeling is com-passion. Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea. And when love is so great and so vital, so strong and so overflowing, that it loves everything, then it personalizes everything and discovers that the total All, that the Universe, is also a person possessing a Consciousness, a Consciousness which in its turn suffers, pities, and loves, and therefore is consciousness. And this Consciousness of the Universe, which a love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we call God.””
— Miguel de Unamuno
“A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him, ‘Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing?’ And the sage answered him, ‘Precisely for that reason”
— Miguel de Unamuno
