Man, the man of flesh and blood,
  the man who is born, suffers, and dies.

           One only needs to imagine the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) sitting comfortably in a high back chair grimacing, puffing over some of the historical and often quite vacuous anthro/philosophical renditions of man. Amongst these, Unamuno points out Aristotle’s notion of a featherless biped, Rousseau’s man as social-contractor, the Manchester school’s man as homo economicus, Linnaeus’ now household moniker homo sapiens, and some flagrantly comical entity described as the “vertical mammal.”

           Besides being egregiously positivistic in make up, none of these naive descriptions leave an iota of possibility, of existential wiggle room for Unamuno’s  – man in the street corner  – who the Basque thinker rightly addresses as a singular, autonomous entity, one of flesh and bones. The author leers and scowls and scratches his head in discomfort.

           On the opposite shore of this material rendition of man - nothing more than intimations of man from the outside – Unamuno struggles to depict man as a concrete, proto-Adamic man of flesh and blood. The latter signaling “you and I, that man yonder, all of us who walk firmly on the Earth” and who is the anti-thesis of the mere idea of man, what is essentially “a no-man.”

           Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life is vitally incandescent and philosophically sonorous. The thought of a seasoned thinker expressed in the vital manner of a gifted poet, Unamuno refuses to be pigeonholed – he is a simple man who embraces his fate. His thought brims with a sincere appreciation for life that - well, as he puts it – a life that cannot be qualified as anything less than tragic for those who feel and who recognize that life is often a maze that traps the best guided illusions. But tragic?  Why tragic, some will ask?  Why not absurd, irrational or even comic, as so many others have characterized life?  A major difference, Unamuno tells us, has to do with the fact – this is not another theory in a century of make-work, industrial complex, and professional theorists - that life cannot be understood as an abstraction, but that is always encountered as a concrete entity.

           Martin Buber suggests in Good and Evil that the lie is only possible after man conceives of truth. If the lie is to have any meaning whatsoever then clearly this is the case because we already possess a prior understanding of what is true. Unamuno, much like Nietzsche wonders and asks what effect truth has on the human psyche. And given that man acts on or negates ideas and beliefs, then what can be said about his actions? Some people may be empty, their beliefs or lack thereof originating from some comic book caricature of human reality; however, man cannot live in a vacuum.

           Unamuno stutters. He begins a line of thought, pauses, retraces his steps and finally launches forward like a wide-eye predator. He often surprises us. His is not the sterile method of, say, an analytic thinker. Concerning himself with the transcendent reality that informs and shapes our use of words, he challenges the reader to a dual. This Spanish writer comes armed with an incessant vitality that demands to squeeze life of its contents.

           When it comes to the question of immortality, nothing substantial can be addressed, much less attained if this matter is not addressed by the very subject who poses it. This can never become an abstraction, as hitherto man does not possess a science that can quantify personal constitution. What an embarrassment, how sophomoric it seems, Unamuno unabashedly tells us, to make the meaning of immortality into a round table, collective exposition. No philosophical conference attendees or committee members, or mere cowards need apply. The question of immortality is evasive, always confronting us with our naked, translucent selves. If we choose to run from this, we can do so in many guises.

           Philosophy, Unamuno passionately argues, begins with reflection on the nature of the subject. He presents the case that all histories of philosophy proceed from abstractions, always relegating the philosopher to the background. He argues that the “inner biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, is assigned a secondary place. And yet it is precisely that inner biography which can mean most to us.” This is the most auspicious and curious aspect noticed by a young thinker upon first encountering the history of philosophy. This is noticed and sublimated by the genuine thinker and not by the scholar, scholastic or historian of philosophy – all pedants to Unamuno – because it is only through the vocation of the thinker that the vital, biographical nature of man is appropriated. Only philosophies which reflect “the integral spiritual yearning of their authors possess the greatest consistency and life,” he reassures us.

           Unamuno defines philosophical vocation: “Philosophy responds to our need to form a complete and unitary concept of life and the world. And, following on our conceptualization, the impulse which engenders an inner attitude or even action.” Action, that much abused word, however, is that which springs from an inner will, never taking its cue from external reality. Action is always dictated by the self. Even more daunting still, action, in its purity, throughout Unamuno’s work is demonstrated as essentially pro-active. Action, then, is life affirming, grounding the individual in feeling what is lived. Thus, the aforementioned impulse “instead of being a consequence of this conception, is the cause of it.”

           But why conceive of immortality in the first place, when this is precisely a phenomenon that is best accommodated by belief?  Unamuno poses the question not in a naïve fashion that finds its strength in affirming one or the other pole. His is a delicate, yet sincere posturing. What matters in such questions, he reaffirms, is truth, difficult and unsettling as this often proves to be. Seemingly unorthodox and unconventional at first glance, and however deceptive, his position nonetheless signals a third way. Unamuno’s thought will not be easily pigeonholed, proving that the most sincere answer is rarely the longest.

           Let us now ponder Newton’s three laws of motion in relation to Unamuno’s thought on immortality. No, this is not another exercise in frigid and calculative rationalism. On the contrary, let us think of it as a metaphor – ironically, as a life infusing backbone to belief.  Newton’s Principia Mathematica posits - the first law: that a body in motion will remain in motion – in a straight line – unless acted upon from the outside. The second law takes in consideration that momentum – linear – is proportional to the force applied, thus f = force, m =mass, v = velocity, t =time, and a = acceleration. The third law is to modern physics, in a demonstrative sort of way what the law of opposites was to Empedocles: every action has a corresponding reaction.

           The three laws of motion make it into Unamuno’s meditation on immortality, some may ask in shock?  Perhaps. Our ability to see is only limited by our predisposition to do so.

           The first law is consistent with man’s sleep walking inertia, a biological entity, or so we have been told for the last two hundred years, who can only see as far as his senses will allow. This is the dominant philosophical materialism exercising its grasp on our contemporary sensibility and imagination. Today, it is convenient to negate the aforementioned and hence fill ourselves with pseudo spiritual importance that, being a mere carapace for the most part, temporarily and conveniently manages to fill the emptiness and dull drums of a mechanical existence. When can imagine Unamuno saying “Lies! More lies!” Unamuno understands the score full well, “I know very well that all this is sheer platitude; but in going about the world one meets men who seem to have no sense of themselves.” This latter observation is a bull’s eye.

           Thus, only a clash with reality, the jolt brought about by a crisis or such similar external push can serve to change the course of this limiting inertia. As to the second law, “the rate of change of linear momentum…,” we can substitute force with will, a kind of Leibnizian conatus, acceleration with self-conscious vitality, and time with the intuition of time relative to the seasoning of the self.  How much force (will) is applied to fulfill the necessary motion (Aristotelian) that brings about the realization of differentiation - as against the forces of objectification - this is always commensurate with our level of intuition. We achieve what we are capable of.  What remains clear is that free will is a much simpler concept than positivists will have us believe. A walk around the neighborhood, a gathering of strangers or the seemingly infinite number of ways in which we handle our lives bear this out. All science worthy of the name begins with observation.

           The third law can be said to mesh quite readily with the second, where the desired realization or manifestation of the will comes about through despite forces acting upon it, and which subsequently cause the disruption of the inertia of conscious sleepwalking.

           When asked if longing for immortality with the heart and proving it with the mind did not denote a contradiction, Unamuno asserts. “Contradiction?  Indeed there is!  Since we live solely from and by contradictions, since life is tragedy and the tragedy is in the perpetual struggle without hope or victory, then it is all a contradiction.” Contradictions are fine when we must deal with them as external phenomena found in the world at large. Human existence and biological life often do not seem to correspond to the same phenomena. Human existence, that is, that which recognizes itself as self-conscious and as passing through time, if not the very measure of time itself, cannot easily incorporate the simple, axiomatic causes of biological death.

           But what can it mean for a self-conscious being to realize that it must perish?  How many pangs of fear, disenchantment and disillusionment must one assuage in order to arrive at the acceptance of such a conclusion?  Human reality bites. Marcel and Unamuno both remind us of this. And yet, we manage to live and prosper – and even come to find happiness, if not contentment – because we are more resilient than we care to be emotionally.

           Unamuno intimates that it makes perfect sense to say, “Everyone dies, all things die.” This is an example of what he calls a universal judgment. Universal because it pertains to that class, the faceless “all” that we find so convenient in dispersing our fears and inadequacies. However, since man does not live his life for others, nor do we experience life in some feel-good, collective, we, this is why “I” always makes singular judgments that can only pertain to the reality that is the self and for itself.  Personal immortality is, well, personal. This is a singular concern because even though others may feel the same way and share in my same concerns, this singularity is vitally radical and thus not interchangeable.

           Unamuno does not play word games: “If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man.” If we detect an advanced sense of urgency in Unamuno’s choice words this is only so because philosophy for him is merely a tool, an instrument for personal salvation. Eschewing all notions of career, public perception and even the contemporary mania for marketing ideas, his thought is free and unhindered by institutionalized fashionable conventions.

            The Tragic Sense of Life depicts the thought of a thinker, naked before the reader, and placing the shortcomings and inadequacies of its author on the chopping block. With Unamuno we are at least assured to be the recipients of the joys of sincere thought. Absent are the limited adhesion and allegiance to the history of philosophy – at least in having to follow its linear development – and the devotion to this or that school or movement. The aforementioned cannot satiate Unamuno’s personal longing for immortality because it is not conceived, he tells us, with the man of flesh and blood in mind.

           Unamuno is a master at jostling with the question of life and reason. This, he knows, often stretches the patience of the reader. And, why not?  This concern is truly bothersome to him as well. We experience this restlessness at the start of chapter two of The Tragic Sense of Life, a chapter entitled, “The Point of Departure.”

           Twisting and turning in his easy chair, Unamuno takes us through the tortured and contradictory history of ideas. Can we become paralyzed by excessive knowledge? Certainly, he assures us. If we have built rational sand castles or ant hills it is because “nevertheless the primordial fact is that curiosity sprang from the need to know in order to live, and this is the dead weight and gross matter which all knowledge and science carries in its womb.”

           But if genuine knowledge is geared in the service of life, doesn’t this suggest that perhaps the ultimate knowledge is self-knowledge?  If this is the case, then this signals an ultra-knowledge of sorts, or what is essentially a transcendence of knowledge: wisdom. This is, then, all very much in keeping with Unamuno’s desire and longing for immortality. This is why he can say, “What distinguishes us from animals is reflective knowledge, the knowledge of knowing itself.”

           Human reality is much more illusive and sinister, even though its greatest riddles can be contained in the palm of one hand. Unamuno figures that to quarantine and thus solve life’s seemingly untenable antinomies, one must possess a flair for what Aristotle called “first philosophy.” Unamuno reasons: “To philosophize is to investigate the first causes and the ultimate ends of things.” This is the work of personal autonomy, authenticity. We philosophize in order to live. And what is found at the end of all reflection is no other than the same entity that reflects: the self. The man of flesh and bones finds itself only when he exercises sincerity, for “the contraband ‘I’ is the one that is theoretical.”

           The fact that Unamuno is a first-rate poet has a lot to say about the way that he maneuvers through philosophical questions and their landscape. His contention that what we really desire to know is not the cause of things but the end, where we are going, is not strictly speaking the concern of scientists.

           As we read Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life, his essay on the nature of immortality, we cannot help but realize how literate he is and how presentation ultimately affects the reader’s perception and subsequently his conceptual ability to grasp the nature of the questions, universal indeed that the thinker brings up.

           The poetic sensibility is a profound ally to philosophical vocation. In fact, it is next to impossible to conceive of philosophy and reflection without the widescreen, panoramic perspective that is so natural to the poet. The poet’s vision entertains a kind of Gestalt notion of human existence. No rock is left unturned and no landscape is glossed over without noticing the importance of the part to the whole. Unamuno’s ability as a poet enhances our view of reason, if not the merely reasonable by alluding to the soft contours, those vague spaces that unite reason and feeling.

           Unamuno, the man of flesh and bones, father and husband, stands at equidistance from these other two. This is the same sentiment that Borges, an admirer of the Basque poet, would come to mean by “Borges and I.” As a man of aches and pains, Unamuno comes to distrust the intellect as a kind of spy in the house of feeling. The intellect is a tool, a magnificent one at that, but just that, a tool. The intellect is an instrument that man makes use of as man, not as a final end but as a useful means to an end. The end in this case is nothing other than personal human existence. While the poet has an idea of the universal or eternity in a grain of sand – the man, as man cannot contribute other than as flesh and bones. And while the philosopher seeks first principles and axioms, the man of flesh and bones asks, “and just what master these principles, cause and axioms come to serve?”

           It makes very little sense to Unamuno, the man, to accept first principles that even though objective in their own right, can only exist to explain the human condition of the self-conscious entity that seeks it: man. Unamuno juxtaposes these different poles in unpredictable and fresh ways: “there is nothing more universal than the individual, for what becomes of one becomes of all. Every man is worth more than all humanity.” Imagine the reaction and misunderstanding that this statement gives rise to. This is anathema to the bible of positivism, to the whole ideological machinery of the twentieth-century welfare state. He goes on to say, “nor is there any point in sacrificing each to all, save in so for as all sacrifice themselves to each.”

           Turning inward, the man of flesh and blood captures himself passing through a moment that cannot be reproduced in its entirety – this is what the whole longing for immortality is, isn’t?  Beneath this give and take that pins self-consciousness against vitality, there, amidst the mayhem and disenchantments of living, is the man of flesh and bones. Another name for this tension is the affirmation of life.  Irony?  What else is life?