Reason attacks, and faith, which does not
feel secure without reason, must come to
terms with it. And thus appear those tragic
contradictions and lacerations of
consciousness.

How many people in this insipid, arid, technological age will be able to understand a line like: “One does not feed the heart with reasons?”  A positivistic age cannot help but to seek over-intellectualized explanations even to vital concerns. We seek in the psychoanalyst the very same inane, conditioned answers that, we, in our zombie-like, myopic lives have come to embrace and cherish. This process is conveniently circular, redundant.

And how many are willing to comprehend and share in the thought of figures the likes of Socrates, Gracian, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard or Unamuno?  This is a difficult task that requires sincerity.  To make sense of a thinker’s work is tantamount to wanting to know. Does our age possess such pathos for life? Today we have forgotten that we must will ourselves to know. The human condition is nothing if not resistance to human existence. Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) is profoundly instructive when he writes that to know is to do so with all of our faculties, not just the intellect.

As we read Unamuno’s seminal essay on the nature of immortality, The Tragic Sense of Life we cannot help but to realize how literate and lyrical he is. This is an instrumental quality that ultimately affects the readers’ perception and ability to grasp the nature of immortality that the Spanish thinker presents us with. The questions he poses are universal and timeless. What seems so irritating about Unamuno for us today is that he strips man of his social set-up, of his all too familiar material surroundings and leaves us to fend for ourselves with our own existential devices. This is frightening to most and hardly fits in with our present “life-style,” our “post-modern” sensibility.

Unamuno’s commentary on Catholicism is perhaps more original and penetrating than most. Consider the truth of his notion that part of the agony of Catholicism “oscillates between mysticism and rationalism.” This is agonizing because if stretched too far in the direction of mysticism - a vital condition, to say the least – it looses its strength as a universal church. If, on the other hand, its rationalist pole becomes dominant it then becomes a theology of fusion, the stuff of the intellect – a form of rationalized activism. Thus, Unamuno reminds us of Chesterton when he writes: “Catholicism oscillates between religionized science and scientificized religion.” Yet Unamuno, much like Kierkegaard before him silently walked about with the firm impression that perhaps the aforementioned has very little to do with his thirst for life, death and immortality.

The personal quest for immortality, then, is one that is strictly tied to the strength of our imagination. Hence, he views imagination, much as he does intuition, as a corollary of reason that must be safeguarded from the onslaught of vile philosophical materialism - a sub-branch of reason - once the former has been stripped of its vital health.

Human reality, perhaps much like Catholicism itself, oscillates between a quest for the rational and that which cannot become abstracted: the autonomy of the self.  In this respect Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life can be called a vital biography.  I assert this, because after all of our reading, our roundtable conferences, our talks, our teaching and learning, etc., there still remains that impenetrable, slippery, and indefinable thing that stands alone - and that must always stand alone - that which we experience as the self.  And…we should add, the more that the self comes to know and realize itself, the greater the difficulty that it will have in making itself known to others in its totality, its fullness. This has everything to do with our avocation and execution in making sense of personal differentiation. 

In the beginning there is the self, and in the end this is what remains. But few can know this, given that what excites people’s imagination most is always the sensual and it’s enticing and undulating material processes. This is also a fine example of our servitude to sensualism, our allegiance to physicalism in all its variegated forms.

To be moved by the notion of immortality one must already be aware that to do so is also to suggest a great deal about oneself. Of course, this is not an admission that the problem is merely an intellectual exercise. On the contrary. The latter activity disqualifies itself by its very abstracted and calculative method.

The quest for immortality is always personal. The autonomy of human life is central to a vibrant desire to live onwards. Unamuno: “That which lives, that which is absolutely unstable, absolutely individual, is, strictly speaking, unintelligible.” This is, of course, a very difficult situation that Unamuno has placed us in. What are we to do with philosophy, properly speaking, and the domain of rational thought?  If everything that is vital is irrational, or non-rational, as Unamuno argues, and everything rational is anti-vital, “for reason is essentially skeptical,” we thus find ourselves practicing a very narrow discipline. Can we conclude with Unamuno, then, that the products of personal reflection may or may not be transferable - made public, that is?  Aberrations in human life abound, and none is so abominable, Unamuno is right to point out, as the man that is only defined and who views himself as solely “intellectual.” This should strike us as an odd entity indeed.

The longing for immortality, as Unamuno conceives it, never comes about as the result of a rational process. This alone makes The Tragic Sense of Life an interesting anomaly amongst philosophical works that entertain this topic. He makes this sentiment clear when he writes: “And so, neither the vital longing for human immortality can count on any rational configuration nor can reason supply us with any incentive or consolation in life or any true end purpose for it.” This essentially boils down to a question of will versus reason. While will fashions the possibility of immortality, often based on hope and a sheer desire to live, the best that reason can do is remain skeptical. This is why Unamuno argues that reason is essentially materialistic in its predisposition as well as its outcome. While reason builds its premises on logical principles, the will tries to make sense out of life without the use of formulas. Without formulas, life is conceived and enjoyed as a fluid reality that demands imagination. For instance, Unamuno is correct in pointing out that Descartes’ doubt is actually comic because it is theoretical and even theatrical: “Descartes’ doubt is that of a man who plays at doubting without really being in doubt.”

Unamuno best characterizes reflection on immortality as something that is done spontaneously, and out of a need to explain our inner human condition. However, in the absence of genuine emotions, thought on immortality, the Spanish thinker reiterates, becomes a vacuous and contrived exercise. We can perhaps best categorize this state of intellectual curiosity by comparing it to Hegel’s work. Unamuno argues that Hegel was a “state-philosopher” and as such “he must make philosophy abstract, those are the demands of his office.” This, according to Unamuno, is the case of a make-work philosophy.     

Unamuno’s treatment of the question of immortality, unlike ponderous and tortured analytical treatises that attempt to prove immortality in terms of “personal identity” and “mental states” etc., comes about as the thought of a concrete individual. His philosophy defies easy characterization. It is an attempt to reflect on the nature of vital life.

The difficulty in any attempt to write about life and living has everything to do with the time-lapse and artificial aspect of writing. The natural thing to do is to live life, not write about it. To write means to record our lived vitality. Unamuno even goes as far as to say: “The end purpose of life is to live, and not to understand.” This statement contains a vitally poetic quality that is very difficult to accommodate today in an age of excessive quantification.

Can anyone achieve both?  This seems like a rhetorical question given Unamuno’s incessant cry for the former by utilizing the appropriate tools of understanding. Unamuno’s ability to write in an impassioned conversational style allows him the freedom to describe, explain and simply vent existential concerns that remain true to their vitally original condition. This is truly Unamuno’s philosophical genius. Placing himself in his work, he can then write in a manner that is more congenial to the philosophical vocation. Eschewing excessive “proofs” for vital understanding is the staple of his thought. Incidentally, this is also a central tenant of Alfred North Whitehead’s Modes of Thought. After all, how do genuine philosophical conversations sound? When they are sincere, philosophical conversations are spontaneous and vital, all parties always willing to become enlightened.

We admire the writer that is candid in his search for understanding and who is willing to roll up his sleeves and showcase his vital nature. Unamuno recognizes this condition. He tells us that the same way that there are people defective in intellect, “so there are people defective in feeling, whatever their intelligence.”

Some commentators have described Unamuno’s ability to display his emotions as a condition brought about by his baroque “Spanishness” and “Iberian temperament.”  Some of this may be true, but one ought to be careful not to take this too far and fail to capture the essence of the individual man. Kierkegaard, Camus and William James are all what can be considered vital thinkers. Schopenhauer’s Maxims and Counsels sound very different from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel’s Science of Logic.

What Unamuno accomplished in The Tragic Sense of Life is to showcase philosophy as a way of life. Unlike other twentieth century thinkers, he does not apologize for his concrete stance. He agonizes over the question of life, death and immortality much the same that anyone else who has truly penetrated into the nature of such concerns. This fresh zest for human existence is a rather rare condition in intellectuals.  Life is hardly easy, we are told. Some never believe or accept this truism and thus spent their entire life bouncing their heads against walls.  Human reality is thicker and brasher than human whims and flights of fancy. What is real is often anathema to what we are as persons and what we desire. What can we do?  What ought we to do?  Unamuno entertains these questions well. Rather than continue to pound his head against the often impenetrable obscurity – mystery, dare we say? – of human existence as other “feeling defective” thinkers, he opts to live and then write about it.

The Tragic Sense of Life is just that, a living and breathing rendition of a philosophical vocation that refuses to become pigeonholed by its own myopia. And unfortunately, like science which must explore its premises inductively - one by one - the great number of thinkers who address philosophy in this pseudo-scientific vein cannot help but to run aground both, intellectually and in questions of existential vitality. Moral bankruptcy and a dearth of genuine spiritual sentiment are both central presuppositions of most current attempts at philosophy. Thinkers often fail in their intellectual concerns precisely because their concerns are merely intellectual in intent and scope.

Straddling the dual currents of reason and life is hardly an intellectual task. It is instead an adventure, an enterprise that requires practical, everyday courage. And courage does not originate in ethics textbooks. Today, we are moved by the fact that what made the success of the 200 or so U.S Army Rangers expeditionary force so successful in climbing the cliffs of Normandy prior to the D-Day landing, was not good air cover and intelligence alone. Whether tackling the question of life and death on the deadly beaches of Normandy or facing the prospect of age and disease, Unamuno sees no other solution to tackle the question of immortality, than as if it actually matters and not as a “theoretical” temporary bandage.

The Tragic Sense of Life is an important book for many reasons. On one level, it serves as an existential biography. This seems equally fitting of Unamuno, its author or anyone else who shares in this same type of agony. While offering a competent history of immortality in Catholicism as well as in philosophical literature, what makes this work so autobiographical in nature is the author’s understanding that no matter the evidence in either case, his remains a practical and urgent existential search. There is nothing timely, fashionable, or modish about this.

Another aspect of the author’s quest that makes The Tragic Sense of Life personal is witnessed in his preoccupation with the essence of substance. He wonders why human existence should be surrounded by nothingness – before and after – and can’t help but to think that perhaps the whole quest is absurd. Our world, then, Unamuno tells us, is a world of appearance. And where do we fit in?  We are “those wretched shadows who file by, going from nothingness to nothingness, mere sparks of consciousness shinning for a moment in the infinite and eternal darkness.” Unamuno’s notion of immortality is often just a whisper in the dark, or what Camus has called hope against hope.

Regardless of the possible truth of the aforementioned, Unamuno manages to touch a nerve with the reader because he makes the quest for immortality a vital, not an intellectual one. Consciousness, then, is the culprit of our greatest joys and sorrows: “For all consciousness is an awareness of death and suffering,” he reminds us. And what makes everything that is important to us such has to do with the amount of love and care that a particular consciousness grants human reality. We sense the world in its fullness when we bestow our personality on things. And thus, “to possess consciousness of oneself, to have personality, is to know and feel oneself distinct from other beings.”

Hence we seem to have come full circle in regard to the inherent tension of life and reason. For Unamuno, imagination is the faculty of intuition and insight and not reason necessarily. Because imagination and intuition are so diffused in our lives and reason is of a calculative nature, we can then see why imagination and intuition possess a vital make-up.

The crux of The Tragic Sense of Life can be measured as the strain that life feels between its rational and imaginative components. Said in a different way, we can assert that life, that is, the vital is never satisfied by concepts and abstractions.

Unamuno’s citing of Giambattista Vico’s notion of a mythopoeic aesthetics places his own work in clear perspective. Unamuno makes reference to Vico’s metaphysics of early man in order to demonstrate that it is true that we might not be able to reconstruct the mind-set and worldview of early man. But Unamuno does not stop there. He goes on to offer a historical analysis of how such primitive emotions refuse to become consumed by a positivistic age. The reason for this is simple: “consciousness, even before it recognizes itself in reason, senses itself, is palpable to itself most especially in the form of will – the will not to die.”

Immortality, in Unamuno’s eyes is no other than the “eternal protest of life against reason, the unconquerable instinct for personalization.” Unamuno tells us that life will not surrender to over-rationalization.

The world, as we know it is no other than a social tradition. This statement sounds odd at first. But in order to understand this we must refer to immortality as an existential category. If Unamuno and Vico are correct to assume that primitive man encountered the world through a vital mythology, then we must assert that such a mythology was necessary. It was also a phenomenon that spoke directly to the individual. The reason that Unamuno views the world as alienating has everything to do with his longing for existential autonomy.

The world that we encounter, for good or worst is an already man-made world. We work from pre-established precepts that are not of our doing. Even when we accept these conditions, Unamuno forcibly argues, we still fail to recognize its beauty and logos. Hence, “philosophy does not work from the objective reality available to our senses, but from a complex of ideas, images, notions, perceptions, and so on, embodied in the language and transmitted to us by our forebears.” 

Now, this is as troublesome a point to make, as it is true. Admittedly we cannot remake the world in our own image – or ought to – through sheer personal whim. This is not Unamuno’s point, however. What we encounter as world has an effect on us that we naturally incorporate into our lives. This is embedded in the notion of the world as that which acts on us. The lasting question, then, has to do with our willingness or disposition, as the case may be, to sense ourselves in the world. Man is a cosmic being, one that must continue to feel itself rooted in the midst of a personal drama.  Man, primitive or contemporary owes itself the responsibility to encounter its life and the backdrop that is the world as a vital sensation that always resists over-rationalization. Unamuno strikes a vital cord in describing the essence of human existence and the role that philosophy plays in this: “Because we are conscious we feel that we exist, which is quite different from knowing we exist, and we want to feel that everything else also exists and that every other individual entity is also an “I.”

Unamuno offers us a strikingly original idea of immortality that posits immortality as being tied to consciousness, as the latter is sustained by God. But consciousness does not amount to reason necessarily. What is real, he argues, is consciousness. However, consciousness feels itself to exist intuitively, not exclusively rationally. This is why he tells us that the “process of assimilating nutriment is no less real than the process of knowing about the nutriment.” Hence, Unamuno argues that to assign finality to the universe is equivalent to witnessing it as consciousness. God is not so much a personal God in Unamuno’s view, but rather the supreme consciousness that gives meaning to our own individual consciousness by sustaining it. Immortality and consciousness go hand in hand.

But God is indefinable and thus cannot be arrived at through reason. The Tragic Sense of Life is the wanting for God to exist. The truth pertaining to God, as is also true of consciousness has to do with a condition that is extra rational. Reason serves a good purpose by organizing the perceptions conveyed by the senses, but tends to go awry when it turns its attention to the nature of those perceptions or what may be referred to as the “why” of things.

Philosophers have traditionally talked about God very differently than believers or the man on the street corner. To believers God is a force, the power that is responsible for the creation and maintenance of the universe. This is also a personal matter. To them God is providence. The average man on the street that has not placed too much stock on the idea of God also imagines this entity to be a force, more or less. But this is not exactly the case with most philosophers.

Without having to concern ourselves here with atheists, positivists and materialists – these frame their questions in terms of negation and thus contribute very little to this matter – we find that the question of God still suffers from too much over-intellectualizing, often even on the part of apologists – theologians and others alike. This occurs, as Unamuno is quick to point out, when questions of God and immortality are effaced without the need or desire to fulfill a vital impetus. He is clear about this point: “And faith in God, as we shall see, is quite simply based upon the vital need to endow existence with a finality, to make it answer to a purpose. We need God, not in order to understand the ‘why,’ but in order to feel and assert the ultimate ‘wherefore,’ to give meaning to the universe.”

This particular aspect of his thought is essential in understanding his ideas on God and immortality as these are entertained in a positivistic age. The problem, as Unamuno conceives it, is that when the aforementioned need vanishes, what remains is merely the “idea of God.”  Of course, God as an idea and the vital need to find a vital first cause to our being are hardly compatible notions.

The Tragic Sense of Life is Unamuno’s chastisement of the former. Again, Unamuno makes this point clear: “To define something is to idea-lize it, for which purpose its incommensurable or irrational element, its vital essence, must first be put aside. And thus the God who is felt, the divinity sensed as a unique person and consciousness outside ourselves – though at the same time enveloping and sustaining us – was converted into the idea of God.”           

Rather than creating some progress in this question, in the sense of scientific techniques for growing, storing and transporting food, for instance, the question of God and immortality has been stunted, paralyzed into oblivion. A positivistic age simply takes such concerns – or beliefs, as the case may be – as a form of make-work, plaything that merely helps us to kill time.

All rational attempts to “prove” the existence of God are futile attempts in idealizing God. Unamuno’s sweeping indignation in The Tragic Sense of Life warns the positivist mind to back off and not concern itself with vital questions that it negates a prior, and which are best left to the spiritual and emotive aspects of man. Reason serves a good purpose by organizing the perceptions brought about by the senses, but fails when it turns its attention to the nature of perceptions, that is, to reason itself.

The Tragic Sense of Life is the thought of a seasoned, vital thinker, one who sees through the illusions that man sets up for itself - and their limit - as well as one who recognizes the need for these. Consider Unamuno’s argument that the world would be inconceivable without a consciousness – man’s – to make sense of it. Shrewd enough to understand anti-humanist claims that this is merely a form of anthromorphism, Unamuno then asks, can anyone conceive of another?  And…he would suggest to these smug critics that whatever other form of self-aware consciousness that is conceived, invented or imagined will ironically still find its origin in a human, all too human consciousness.

Rather than playing intellectual, disingenuous games, Unamuno simply goes for the throat – after all of our modish, seasonal and fashionable theories have worn off their momentary effects – he asks: how are we to live?

Dancing around and avoiding the stale but always tempting grasp of scholasticism, Unamuno manages to save his essay – as well as his thought – from self-referential boredom and inanity. Instead he infuses The Tragic Sense of Life with vital life. This allows us to make sense of immortality using all of the tools at our disposition, not just the intellect. This majestic work is a testament to the thought of this flesh and bone thinker and the sorry state of philosophy and reflection in general, today, when some academic critics and other pedants criticize The Tragic Sense of Life as being too “lyrical.”

Pure consciousness. What can this mean?  What becomes of man if indeed we were to attain immortality?  Such a condition would essentially signify an end to mortal torment, our worrying about death. But what if…what if our newly found state of being quickly runs its course into disappointment and gives way to boredom – horrible and eternal ennui – what then?  Will we then not turn into a sort of spiritual Sisyphus of another kind?

Immortality unbound: A spiritual El Dorado with material wants and the absence of carnal desire, eternal bliss, and effervescent being. But for whom?  What becomes of those who having built an altar to the flesh and its varied degree of correlatives, and who never develop - much less cultivate the soul - the very vitality that desires immortality?  It seems that Unamuno’s ranting and playful ideas have covered all the relevant angles.

Far from arguing for immortality for all, something akin to a democratically coerced salvation of the soul, Unamuno instead suggests an innovation. His thought hits new heights when he begins to uncover some of the premier contradictions of the human condition by asserting that what man wants is not eternal life – immortality – but rather eternal pleasure. Not wanting to die and the desire for immortality are hardly compatible ideas in Unamuno’s thought. The major component of his argument for immortality is best synthesized as: to desire eternal life is to want it enough to will it.

Unamuno cites Seneca’s contention in De Consolatione ad Marciam that what we really want after death is a carnal life, “without its evils, without its tedium – and without death.” This is a contradiction, without a doubt, because carnal felicity cannot take place but in a physical existence.

Concern for personal immortality is decided not so much through rational proofs but by the sheer force of metaphysical reflection. To call Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life lyrical is to miss the point that he tries to make. To suppress life in order to reason is precisely what he criticizes.

Unamuno’s answer to zealous and overly intellectual critics is that life is lived on many fronts and by utilizing many tools. We think in order to live. Thought is a tool at the service of life.

There is a strong sense in The Tragic Sense of Life that Unamuno’s raw power as a philosopher is his total abandonment of academic scholasticism. Eschewing popular conventions, as well as most of the history of philosophy, his courage and conscience as an independent thinker is tested to its limit in his refusal to rely on anything but his own thought. No more concretely pressing and heavy-handed task can be imagined. What a rather anti-thetical idea this must seem to “post-modern” man: to live by the sweat of one’s own thought and reasoned convictions.

Original, yet unpretentious in the totalizing scope of his conclusions, Unamuno’s thought is based on his idea that man – the subjective entity – is always a stranger in the objective realm. Man, he tells us, is a refugee from nature not out of desire, but through disposition. Rather than deifying nature, Unamuno views it as the seat of death itself.

Man’s incessant cry, then, is seen in his need to transcend nature. This transcendence is no other than another word for immortality. He tells us: “The origin of human companionship itself was a form of opposition to nature: a terrified reaction to ruthless nature first linked men together in a social bond. Human society is, in effect, the source of reflective consciousness and of the craving for immortality, and it is human society which sets the seal of grace upon the state of nature: and man, by humanizing and spiritualizing Nature through his industry, supernaturalizes her.”

What is most important to realize in the aforementioned statement is its sheer sincerity, a form of sincerity that is willing to look itself in the mirror before perishing. Nature, quite frankly, Unamuno warns us, scares us. The order of death is swifter, broader and grander than anyone of us can even begin to imagine.

Unamuno argues in his book Paisajes del Alma (Landscape of the Soul), a series of essays on the landscape of Spain that man is alone – this realization is strongest when we travel – we have no other recourse than to recoil into ourselves. This solitude, this beating heart that is not seen but felt, this is reality.

This existential solitude that sooner or later must confront itself, Unamuno is adamant, does not easily settle into the acceptance of physical death. Yet nowhere is Unamuno’s wit more cutting, his imagination and analytical faculties more ablaze than in the tenth chapter of The Tragic Sense of Life where he develops his notion that to attain immortality is tantamount to wanting it.

Unamuno’s devastating argument that salvation is not found in an all-or-nothing, collective mold, but rather that it is individual is rather difficult to ignore. As opposed to the belief that immortality comes as a derivation of life itself, Unamuno instead wonders whether perhaps the essence of immortality is not truly an existential matter.

This idea of immortality is in keeping with his respect for individuality. “And perhaps we must believe in that other life in order to deserve it, to attain it, for perhaps whoever does not desire it above reason and, if need be, against reason, neither deserves it nor attains it,” he affirms.

To offer reasons – what some call proofs – for our eventual earthly demise as a biological entity, comes as a result of the resignation to die. Pedants, Unamuno advises, are resigned to the acceptance of death through elaborate systems of logical conjectures. How else to swallow such a bitter pill?  Reality stings.

Unamuno views things differently. The value of human life ought to be measured in its ability to safeguard the spirit that it encapsulates. A spirit-less life is hardly of use to man. Arguing that those who do not believe in the immortality of the soul “assign a ridiculously excessive value to life” Unamuno explains: “But life is of use only insofar as it serves its lord and master, spirit, and if the master perishes along with the servant, then neither the one nor the other is of any great value.”

Unamuno’s concern for immortality is made clear when we understand that “the individual is the end-purpose of the universe.” The longing for immortality is not the result of a rational process. It is instead the fruit of vital passion. Passion like suffering, Unamuno goes on to add, “like suffering creates its subject.”

In effect, the longing for immortality is precisely the opposite of killing time. The idea of passing or killing time cannot conceive of life as always running out of time. This vital realization would paralyze most people.

The human condition is seemingly much more ethereal than the illusion of collective bargaining suggests. The starting point of all reflection is always that which is closest to us – even though often bypassed – the self. The reason for this, Unamuno reiterates, is that to feel oneself as an individual person is always a much more immediate and relevant condition than to think: “History, the cultural process,” he continues, “finds its perfection and effectiveness only in the individual; the end of History and Humanity is man, each man, each individual. Homo sum, ergo cogito; cogito ut sum Michael de Unamuno. The individual is the end-purpose of the universe.”

The Tragic Sense of Life meanders through the many attempts that philosophers have made to prove and disprove human immortality. He also takes a close look at theology and rationalist theologians, as he refers to them. All of these attempts fail miserably while setting up some rather stale and often impenetrable scholastic edifices.

But philosophy?  What about genuine, vital philosophy?  Reflection on our tragic sense of life, Unamuno reminds us in the final pages of this work, is precisely what philosophy ought to be.  Philosophy, he informs us, is best explained as a vital human activity, and, “May its role not also be to characterize the tragic sense of life itself, such as we have been studying it, to formulate the conflict between reason and faith, between science and religion, and deliberately to sustain this conflict?”

The Tragic Sense of Life begins with an exploration of “the man of flesh and bones and culminates by returning to the importance of the individual vis-à-vis the cosmos. In the beginning of this truly enlightening work, Unamuno points out that the history of philosophy is curiously devoid of philosophers, only philosophy and that “the inner biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, is assigned a secondary place.”

And yet, as a book on the immortality of the soul – individual identity – this inner biography is precisely what is at stake given that “our philosophy, that is, our mode of understanding or not understanding the world and life, springs from our impulse toward life itself.”

But how Unamuno goes about describing this “any man” of flesh and bones is what distinguishes this now classic text from others that deal with the same topic. The trajectory of the “I” that is the man of flesh and bones is followed from its original undifferentiated Being to its self-awareness as consciousness, and how this comes to know itself as a continuous entity that possesses self-identity. If “I am I” and everything else is said to remain outside of me as objects, then how do I come to terms with the eventual dissolution of this newly found subjectivity?

Reflection on immortality is what Unamuno refers to as mundane philosophy. May we ask what other type there is?  Unamuno’s Quijotismo sees the Spanish philosopher doing battle with time, as he witnesses the frigidity and self-assurance of every tick of the clock.

Unamuno, a pessimist?  No more so than Don Quijote who believes in eternal life. The man of flesh and bones must encounter the world with courage and a resignation of will that ironically enables the imagination to battle its own fate. Yet not fate as universal and abstract, as some specimen found in a textbook or laboratory. Man’s origin, Unamuno explains, is not of this world, even though our material lives may be. These are his chosen tools to battle both life and time.

Human existence, or The Tragic Sense of Life is dealt a double assault by thought and feeling for those concerned with immortality. Those who ignore the former suffer a tragic death, while those who embrace it die a comic – ridiculous – death.