Unamuno

Miguel de Unamuno

Most philosophy begins with an abstraction: a thinking subject, a principle, a method. Miguel de Unamuno begins with a person. The man his great book is about, he insists on the first page, is not the thinking subject of the philosophers but the man of flesh and bone, the one who is born and suffers and wills, who eats and sleeps and loves, and who, beneath every doctrine he professes, does not want to cease to be. That refusal, the longing to go on existing as oneself forever, is for Unamuno the deepest fact about a human being and the true starting point of thought. Everything else in his philosophy is the working out of the war this longing fights against the reason that cannot satisfy it.

The hunger for immortality. The passion at the base of the human animal, Unamuno argues, is the hunger for immortality: the craving not to be annihilated, to persist as this very self and not merely as some idea or atom that survives. It is the root of religion and the engine of culture, and it hides under every philosophy that pretends to have risen above it. The person who claims serenely not to mind ceasing to exist has, in Unamuno's view, simply not looked the matter in the face. Strip away the consolations and the poses, and what is left is a will that wants, fiercely and unreasonably, to live and never stop.

The tragic sense. Against that hunger stands reason, and reason gives a cold answer. Followed honestly, it cannot guarantee immortality and tends, if anything, to deny it; it points toward annihilation. So the human being is torn down the middle: the will demands eternal life, reason refuses to grant it, and neither side will surrender to the other. The tragic sense of life is the name Unamuno gives to living inside that contradiction without resolving it, refusing equally the rationalist who kills the longing and the dogmatist who manufactures a false certainty to soothe it. Philosophy, on this view, is not a system that settles the question; it is the honest record of the struggle as it is lived in an actual, suffering person.

Agonic faith. Faith, for Unamuno, is not the calm possession of a truth. It is agony, in the word's old sense of agon, a contest, a struggle. To have faith is to want to believe against one's own doubt, and a faith that has stopped doubting, that no longer struggles, is for him a dead faith. The believer and the skeptic are not two people but one, locked in permanent combat, and the life of the spirit is that combat itself. This is why Unamuno taught himself Danish: so that he could read Kierkegaard, the brother who had also made faith a leap taken in fear and trembling rather than a conclusion reached in peace.

Quixotism. The Spanish answer to the tragic sense, and Unamuno's own, has a name and a face: Don Quixote. The knight who rides out to fight for an ideal that reason has already declared absurd, who would rather be defeated in the struggle than comfortable in surrender, who makes himself immortal by his deeds and his refusal to stop, is for Unamuno a philosopher of the will to not-die. Quixotism is the tragic sense turned into action: the determination to be more, to win glory against the certainty of failure, to throw the whole weight of one's existence against the verdict of the merely reasonable. Unamuno read Cervantes' mad knight as the gospel of Spain and the patron saint of everyone who refuses to be cured of his hope.

Neither reason nor longing alone. It would be easy to take Unamuno for an enemy of reason, and that is a misreading. He grants reason its full rights; it is reason that strips away the comfortable lies, and he will not let faith pretend to be knowledge. But reason left to itself ends in despair, and the vital longing left to itself ends in credulity, and the whole art of living is to let neither win the final victory. The book closes with a prayer that gathers the entire stance into a line: "May God deny you peace, but give you glory." It is the petition of a man who chooses the struggle over the false calm of certainty and the false calm of resignation alike.

What this room reads. The corpus is J. E. Crawford Flitch's translation of The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in Peoples (1921), from Project Gutenberg, the philosophical masterpiece that contains the man of flesh and bone, the hunger for immortality, the tragic sense, agonic faith, and quixotism. Citations run by chapter. Unamuno's Essays and Soliloquies and his Life of Don Quixote and Sancho are further sources not yet in the namespace, and the chat says so when a question reaches past what the corpus holds. Unamuno was also a major novelist and poet; this room reads the philosopher.

Unamuno was the conscience of modern Spain, rector of the ancient University of Salamanca and a man who paid for his independence with exile, and who told the worshippers of brute force to their faces that they might conquer but they would never convince. Read now, he stands as one of the first existentialists, a thinker who put the concrete, willing, suffering individual at the center of philosophy a full generation before the word existentialism was current. He took the wager and the grandeur-in-misery of the human creature from Pascal, and the leap of agonic faith from Kierkegaard, and he handed on to Camus the confrontation between a person's hunger for meaning and a universe that returns no answer. Schopenhauer's will to live is his ancestor, and William James, with his right to believe beyond the evidence, his cousin. The tragic sense is not pessimism. It is the refusal to be either consoled by a lie or silenced by despair, and the demand, against everything, for glory.