Book Review: "Tragic Sense of Life" by Miguel de Unamuno

Tragic Sense of Life (1913)  

Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936)

Translated from the Spanish by J. E. Crawford Flitch 

304 pages

What gives life meaning? One of the most fundamental questions we can ask ourselves, and the subject, directly or indirectly, of many shelves worth of fiction and non-fiction. In his book Tragic Sense of Life, the Spanish author and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno gives his clear and unequivocal answer: what gives life meaning is our longing to understand the “wherefore” of our destiny, and our “thirst for eternal life,” which he states is a fundamental desire we all share. To have awareness of these questions, he states, is to have a “tragic sense of life.”

Unamuno makes his argument over twelve chapters, originally written as a series of essays. These essays build on one another, each with a relatively small number of core ideas, perhaps two or three.   Unamuno addresses these ideas at length, approaching them from different angles, seeming to anticipate objections, alternative proposals or uncertainties the reader might have, and countering them with his carefully reasoned arguments. His writing style and structure give a reader the feeling that Unamuno has not so much written this work for someone to read and become convinced, but rather that he imagines himself speaking directly to the reader, and since he can not be there in person, having written down what he would have said had he been able to sit across the table from us. For the lay-reader, who may not be familiar with the many philosophers and writers he quotes, and with the details of the philosophical and theological arguments he recalls, Unamuno’s style helps to somewhat lighten the complexity and density of the reasoning; getting the gist of his argument in each chapter and for the work as a whole is fairly straightforward, even if the details of his reasoning can require a careful reading with reference works at hand.

Not having the background to adequately analyze his philosophical arguments, the following is intended to provide a sense of Unamuno’s arguments and approach. It will necessarily be selective, and should be considered as more of a sampling than a comprehensive summary.

Unamuno opens with his view that, contrary to the modern presumption, man is actually an affective (feeling) creature much more than a rational one:

Perhaps that which differentiates [man] 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 --- but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree.(3) 

For him what is important is man as an individual: paramount is each individual’s life and the “wherefore” of their destiny. Thus, for example, he feels that society only has importance in so much as it furthers the life of the individual. Man being an affective being and the individual of highest importance, he then argues that a philosophy developed outside of this context, that is, as a logical, abstract theory, is senseless. What is critical is that a philosopher recognize the affective nature of man, and, conversely, that we who wish to understand a philosopher’s work, first understand the philosopher as “a man of flesh and bone.”

And the most important goal of that philosopher, that man’s work? For Unamuno the starting point for all philosophy, for all knowledge, comes from man’s “longing not to die, the hunger for personal immortality.” He states that every person longs for this immortality, whether consciously or unconsciously, and that those who say they do not are merely deceiving themselves. He finds evidence of this deep longing in the variety of cultures throughout the history of the world in which the final resting places of the dead have been more permanent than the houses they lived in while alive. He finds it also in the creation of religions, stating that “the existence of God is … deduced from the [desire for the] immortality of the soul, and not the immortality of the soul from the existence of God.” He even views attempts by people to claim their place in history through works of art, or writing, or other projects as “vain” attempts at pseudo-immortality that only reveal their hidden, passionate longing for eternal life. Of knowledge he argues that it must have an object, the seeking of knowledge for its own sake being pointless; beyond what is useful for survival, the point of gathering knowledge is to help us understand our future destiny as individuals.

Unamuno looks too at the history of Catholicism and what he describes as its transformation from the focus of the apostles on the proximate end of the world, to the views of Paul of Tarsus, who did not know Christ personally, but realized that the end of the world may not be quite so near as thought, and who transformed belief in the resurrection of Christ into a belief in personal eternal life. Unamuno discounts religions such as Protestantism, which tend to focus on one’s life on earth in the context of Christianity and God, and so less on the eternal life of the soul. This he differentiates from Catholicism, which he argues views sin as an inherited state, which in being forgiven can lead to the promise of eternal life. Religion, and more particular theology, comes up short for Unamuno however, in not giving one a basis or explanation for believing in eternal life. Thus, he goes on to examine rational arguments for immortality.

Rationality, and what he felt to be the growing domination of reason, appear to Unamuno as the bitterest enemies of the soul’s longing for eternal life. He argues that not only do rationalists counter the possibility of the immortality of the soul with reasoned and scientific arguments, but they in fact often end up at an anti-theological hate: they are bent on proving wrong anyone who does believe such things. Others among them, though not succumbing to this hate, attempt to develop reasoned arguments of the meaning of life within the context of life ending in death; thus, for example, they argue that man should live life to the fullest, giving meaning to life through how we live during our limited time on earth. For Unamuno, all of these rational arguments are simply attempts by rationalists to console themselves before their deep-seated, unconscious disappointment born of believing that beyond death is only eternal darkness.

Finding religious arguments for the eternal soul too facile, and reasoned arguments against the possibility of immortality unconvincing, Unamuno describes how he reached a point of skepticism, which he defines as occurring when reason conflicts with desire, in this case, with the desire for immortality:

Skepticism, uncertainty --- the position to which reason, by practicing its analysis upon itself, upon its own validity, at last arrives --- is the foundation upon which the heart’s despair [about the desire for immortality] must build up its hope. (94)

With this background Unamuno then spends several chapters reviewing in detail key terms that will serve as the foundation for his investigation on the immortality of the soul based on this skepticism, this intersection where reason conflicts with desire. These terms --- love, pity, faith, belief, charity --- he defines and relates to one another, and then brings to bear on his argument.

Love, he argues, begins with sexual love, based on the need to perpetuate ourselves. But this sexual love can give way to a more profound spiritual love, which he feels is born out of suffering: when two or more people suffer through a difficult situation, especially one which strikes at their deepest desires (for the lives of their children, say, or the lives of their compatriots) then a spiritual love is born between or among them. Furthermore, since love can only come from suffering, he argues that love and happiness cannot be experienced together --- to not suffer (that is, to be happy) is to not have emotion and so not to live or be alive:

The moment love becomes happy and satisfied, it no longer desires and it is no longer love. The satisfied, the happy, do not love; they fall asleep in habit, near neighbor to annihilation. To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be. Man is the more man --- that is, the more divine --- the greater his capacity for suffering, or, rather, for anguish. (181)

Unamuno goes on to claim that this spiritual love is closely tied to pity, since, through pitying someone, we open ourselves up to understanding their suffering, and so to loving them. This ability of man to pity others envelops the whole natural world for Unamuno, in that through our imagination and feeling we tend to anthropomorphize everything around us --- feeling the pain and suffering of a tree, for example, when one of its branches is cut off. That we do this more at some times and less at others demonstrates the conflict in man between the rational and the affective sides of our spirit. Charity is then the result of pity, the desire to alleviate suffering around us.

The tendency of man to anthropomorphize applies also to our image of God, in Unamuno’s opinion. Man imagines God in his own image because he cannot imagine him in any other way. For Unamuno, divinity arose out of man’s feeling that there is a consciousness in nature, a consciousness that eventually became the Divinity, God, as a personification of the natural world. He argues that even groups of gods, such as in Greek times, were really ultimately parts of a single God, or Divinity of nature.

Over time, philosophy and theology took this Divinity and, according to Unamuno, defined it, thereby idealizing it and creating the idea of God. However, he finds that these definition, or proofs, of God’s existence don’t actually get us any closer to an understanding of God.  They in fact represent at best a kind of hypothesis, an explanation that fits the “facts.” Taking one example of the difficulties that arise from this, Unamuno points out that:

… in the moral order the question arises whether falsehood, or homicide, or adultery, are wrong because [God] has so decreed it, or whether He has so decreed it because they are wrong. If the former, then God is a capricious and unreasonable god, who decrees one law when He might equally well have decreed another, or, if the latter, He obeys an intrinsic nature and essence which exists in things themselves independently of Him --- that is to say, independently of His sovereign will; and if this is the case, if He obeys the innate reason of things, this reason, if we could but know it, would suffice us without any further need of God, and since we do not know it, God explains nothing. This reason would be above God. Neither is it of any avail to say that this reason is God Himself, the supreme reason of things. A reason of this kind, a necessary reason, is not a personal something. It is will that gives personality. And it is because of this problem of the relations between God’s reason, necessarily necessary, and His will, necessarily free, that the logic and Aristotelian God will always be a contradictory God.

The scholastic theologians never succeeded in disentangling themselves from the difficulties in which they found themselves involved when they attempted to reconcile human liberty with divine prescience and with the knowledge that God possesses of the free and contingent future; and that is strictly the reason why the rational God is wholly inapplicable to the contingent, for the notion of contingency is fundamentally the same as the notion of irrationality.(144)

This passage, aside from demonstrating the difficulties of attempting to use rational means to prove God’s existence, also displays Unamuno’s style and approach in this book: he uses reason as well as imagination to argue, essentially, that neither reason nor imagination alone can succeed in satisfactorily describing the meaning of life and man’s desire for immortality.

From the development of the concept of Divinity and God, Unamuno moves on to a discussion of faith and belief. He argues that people do not have faith in an abstract concept or idea, they instead have faith in the person telling them the concept or idea. Since faith relies on believing another person, it is therefore not possible to have faith without uncertainty, without the anguish of deciding whether someone warrants that faith. To take this to a secular plane, his argument is that a person does not generally have ‘faith’ in a scientific theory --- if they have proven its validity for themselves they would simply know it is true, and so would not have to have ‘faith’ in it being true; instead they have faith in a scientist or group of scientists who have claimed (and to our satisfaction, confirmed) its validity. Thus for Unamuno, faith in God is having trust and confidence in God’s authority, and so is not something that can be rationally explained.

All of this set-up culminates in the tenth essay in the book in which Unamuno imagines what it could mean to have eternal life. He rejects the idea of the soul as simply merging with God upon the death of the body, because for him, to lose the individuality of the soul is no better than the soul dying when the body dies. Similarly he finds unacceptable the idea of a final resting place of the soul in God as an eternal happiness, since he feels that one of the key defining qualities of the individual soul as being alive is the suffering and anguish of the search for understanding the ultimate meaning of life --- if that search is suddenly met with the full answer then what point eternal life beyond that? (He notes that even hell represents an eternal life of the soul, since it is defined to be a place of eternal suffering.)

Finally, having examined and found wanting the explanations that have been put forward over the years by philosophers and theologians of what eternal life could be, he states that the longing for immortality is simply what our souls must do, however irrational or contra-rational the desire may seem to be. He considers that it may even be the striving for immortality, the passionate desire to achieve eternal life, that is the necessary requirement to warrant it:

We must needs believe in the other life, in the eternal life beyond the grave, and in an individual and personal life, in a life in which each one of us may feel his consciousness and feel that it is united, without being confounded, with all other consciousnesses in the Supreme Consciousness, in God; we must needs believe in that other life in order that we may live this life, an endure it, and give it meaning and finality. And we must needs believe in that other life, perhaps, in order that we may deserve it, in order that we may obtain it, for it may be that he neither deserve it nor will obtain it who does not passionately desire it above reason and, if need be, against reason.

And above all, we must feel and act as if an endless continuation of our earthly life awaited us after death; and if it be that nothingness is the fate that awaits us we must not … so act that it shall be a just fate.”(227)

Taking the discussion to the practical level, Unamuno considers how we might go about living on Earth in a manner that demonstrates our passionate desire for immortality and so warrants our achieving it. He argues that this is accomplished by living life in a manner that makes us indispensable, and so deserving of eternal life. For Unamuno this can only come through engagement in the world with other individuals who share our same goal (of eternal life) and so should be engaging with us on the same basis. By way of contrast, he rejects wholeheartedly the concept of religious withdrawal from society, for example into a monastery or cloister, for in doing this one becomes only less involved in society and so less indispensable during one’s life.

With regard to the work we do, he concludes that we should not concern ourselves with searching for the work for which we are most suited, or somehow destined to do. Rather we must focus on performing whatever work we are doing with a passion that, again, makes us indispensable, that is, in a way that impresses our life into the lives of those around us. And, he argues, so should others, in their turn, live their lives in the same way, thus becoming indispensable for us. He deplores the sad state of someone not passionate for their work, their soul “sacrificed for the sake of the livelihood.” Moving to the very concrete, he disparages in this regard labor organizations, which he says have a tendency to create an environment in which employees can and are even expected to work ‘down’ to the lowest common denominator, and also employers --- “a hundred times more blameworthy” --- who discourage passionate work by focusing on paying the least possible amount for the work, instead of encouraging and paying for the best possible effort.

Unamuno concludes with an essay tying these ideas to Spain and Spanish Catholicism, using the quintessential Spanish character of Don Quixote as an embodiment for his thoughts.

Despite the sprinkling of quotes in Latin, French, Italian, German, and Spanish (with oddly only the Spanish provided with translations in the footnotes), and the references to works of philosophy and theology from ancient Greece to Unamuno’s Spain of the early 1900’s, the fundamental argument of this work is clear and simple to understand: the most important question, the most pressing concern of a person is what the destiny of their soul will be, and whether their inherent longing for eternal life will be granted. Unamuno’s book provides a fascinating look at one philosopher’s, or as he himself might prefer, one man’s answer to that question.

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