Tragic Sense of Life, by Miguel de Unamuno

Fuerteventura, Where Unamuno Was Exiled in 1924

_{Credit: @shaka, template from the LMAC Collage Contest, Round #187. Used with permission of the author.}

I belong to a class of reader for whom at some point in life books became teacher, counselor, companion. There, in books, ideas were entertained that could not be discussed with any person I knew. Because of the role certain authors played in my intellectual and psychological development, I came to regard these people with a kind of reverence.

Miguel de Unamuno

_{Credit: Ramon Casas (1866-1932). Public domain. Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) was born in Balboa, Spain. He was brought up in a strict Catholic home. He became a professor of Greek at the University of Salamanca, and a rector at the same university. After a military coup by Primo de Rivera in 1924, Unamuno published essays criticizing the government. Rivera banished the writer to Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands. Unamuno escaped to Paris, France and did not return to Spain until 1930 (From poets.org).}

Two authors that stand out especially as being influential in my youth are Fyodor Dostoevsky and Miguel de Unamuno. Over the years, of course, the elevated status I accorded these authors was tarnished a bit as I read their books more critically. This was true, for example, of Dostoyevsky, whose writing is marred by blatant antisemitism. My reconsideration of Unamuno likewise resulted in a less idealized impression, although I do not see in him the grievous moral failure I discovered in Dostoevsky.

Unamuno in Exile at Fuerteventura

_{Credit: Author unknown. 1925. Public domain. After his return to Spain in 1930, Unamuno once again became a rector at the University of Salamanca.(From poets.org).}

When I first read the title of Unamuno's most influential work, the one under consideration today, the words resonated with me. Finally, someone had said what I had felt for years, a feeling I had never expressed to a living soul. I read the title, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, when I was studying Spanish in college, but the acute sense they recalled reached all the way back to 1953, when I was six years old.

It was New Years Eve and the Times Square ball was dropping. Another year gone, and a new one, 1953, beginning. All around me people were celebrating. I was in my uncle's house and the large extended family had gathered. They toasted themselves and their futures. I sat alone in front of the television and thought about how quickly time passed, how inexorable it was and how powerless I was to stop it. I experienced in that instant my own looming mortality.

Times Square Ball, 2000

_{Credit: Hunter Kahn. Public domain. This is the most recent version of the ball. The first one was dropped in 1907. The one I saw in 1953 was the second version of the ball. (From Wikipedia)}

In an attempt to hold onto time I swore I would never forget the moment the ball dropped. The living room, my family, the television--all of it frozen, fixed forever in my mind. I was trying to control the inevitable.

Of course I never expressed these thoughts to anyone, but they became part of my psyche. Not until I read the title of Unamuno's essay did I find expressed so perfectly what I had felt on New Years Eve, 1953. Did I misinterpret that title? Did I see only what I needed to see? A close look at the text of the piece shows that Unamuno was exactly on the same page I had turned to years before.

Statue of Miguel de Unamuno in Salamanca

_{Credit: Pravdaverita. Used under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. The statue stands in front of the house where Unamuno lived and died. In 1936, Francisco Franco overthrew the government in Spain. Unamuno and his friends spoke out against the new regime. Many of Unamuno's friends were executed and the order was given to shoot him. However he was instead confined to his home under house arrest. There he died, on New Years Eve, in 1936. (From poets.org).}

Tragic Sense of Life begins with a disquisition on what it means to be human. Unamuno is well-versed in philosophy. He was the Rector of Salamanca University after all, and for time a professor of Greek at the same school. He begins his essay by discussing different philosophies, and sums up the intention of these philosophies with this statement: This means that your essence, reader, mine, that of the man Spinoza, that of the man Butler, of the man Kant, and of every man who is a man, is nothing but the endeavour, the effort, which he makes to continue to be a man, not to die.

This wisdom, this crystallization of Western philosophical thought, echoed poignantly my effort as a six-year-old, in 1953, to halt the passage of time and to hold onto life.

Unamuno's essay is not what I would call an easy read. Some might even find it turgid. Unamuno not only goes deeply into classic philosophical theories, but his style of writing is more typical of the nineteenth century than the twenty-first. But the reader does not have to feel overwhelmed by the many academic references in the piece. Read through and find the kernels, the bit of self-examination that reflects the essential concerns of most people as they achieve consciousness of their place in the cosmos.

Traditionally, religion answered most of these existential questions. As Unamuno writes, Whence do I come and whence comes the world in which and by which I live? Whither do I go and whither goes everything that environs me? What does it all mean?

However, even those who traditionally look to religion for explanation of these profound questions, at times have doubts. These doubts often remain unspoken (as my doubts were as a child), because people lack the courage to confront the questions themselves, or because they do not want to experience the censure that would result from expressing such thoughts out loud.

But Unamuno does not shrink from the truth that comes with a consciousness of self, and an awareness that self is mortal.

He asserts, There is something which, for lack of a better name, we will call the tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception of life itself and of the universe, a whole philosophy more or less formulated, more or less conscious.

And,

Consciousness is a disease.

He goes on to explain that life is suffering. He wrestles with the idea of God. There is no way to objectively prove the existence of God, nor the logical validity of religion. Unamuno leads us through many tortuous steps as he grapples with this struggle against belief.

In the end, he resolves the struggle by embracing the irrationality of belief. A belief in God is absurd, and yet he, Unamuno, must have it in order to accept life and his place in the cosmos. He writes of those who decry belief:

And even if this belief be absurd, why is its exposition less tolerated than that of others much more absurd? Why this manifest hostility to such a belief? Is it fear? Is it, perhaps, spite provoked by inability to share it?

To Unamuno, life is suffering, but suffering that can be ameliorated through love. He writes, For all consciousness is consciousness of death and of suffering. And love may be accessed, he asserts, through pity--not the sorry thing envisioned by Nietzsche--but, in Unamuno's words:

In order to love everything, in order to pity everything, you must feel everything within yourself, you must personalize everything. For everything that it loves, everything that it pities, love personalizes. We only pity--that is to say, we only love--that which is like ourselves and in so far as it is like ourselves, and the more like it is the more we love; and thus our pity for things, and with it our love, grows in proportion as we discover in them the likenesses which they have with ourselves. Or, rather, it is love itself, which of itself tends to grow, that reveals these resemblances to us. If I am moved to pity and love the luckless star that one day will vanish from the face of heaven, it is because love, pity, makes me feel that it has a consciousness, more or less dim, which makes it suffer because it is no more than a star, and a star that is doomed one day to cease to be.

Unamuno asserts that philosophy is closer to poetry than it is to science. It is more about feeling than it is about rationality. It is on this level that I responded to his essay. I had felt something as a very young child, and many people (most people at some time) feel the same angst, for the same reason at some point in their lives. I don't think I was an especially precocious child--though perhaps I was an unusually serious six-year-old. What was it in me, in my experience that led to me to have these thoughts at such an early age?

I looked at Unamuno's biography this week and was surprised to see some similarities between his experience and mine, although mine had been much shorter.

Unamuno Plaza, Balboa, Spain (2014)

_{Credit:Attribution: Валерий Дед. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.}

We were both raised in homes where Catholicism was pervasive. In mine, prayers were a nightly ritual, and that ritual included remembering the dead. We essentially spoke to the dead and for the dead. They were always with us. Unamuno's Spanish Catholicism permeated his world view. He even considered becoming a priest but decided instead to marry his childhood sweetheart.

After Unamuno married, he had ten children. One of his children, Raimundo, suffered from a "tragic neurological disease"...chronic hydrocephalus secondary to a case of probable meningitis". In all the critiques I consulted about Unamuno's work, none described this tragedy in his life, and yet it was essential to his world view. He himself wrote extensively about his preoccupation with his son's illness and eventual death.

The parallel with my life stunned me, when I learned this. One of my brothers had suffered traumatic brain injury at birth. A twin, he had the misfortune to be born second. The first born was delivered without event, but second was permanently disabled in a most severe way.

My brother played a central role in our family. He was much loved, but he suffered. Then one day he left. He got too big and too sick to stay at home. His leaving for me was a kind of death that shook me to the core.

There it was, the unlikely link between Unamuno and me. The profound Catholicism, focus on the afterlife, and witness to the irrationality of suffering in our midst.

Unamuno was brilliant, sophisticated, and accomplished. All things I am not. But at his core, he would have recognized me in him, as I recognized him in me.

I don't hold him on a pedestal as I once did. His essay has statements in it that I take exception to, but I still respect the quality of his mind, and his heart. It is mostly his heart I think that reached me. And this is exactly as he would want it. As he writes, For all human souls are brother-souls.

Tragic Sense of Life is certainly not a book for everyone, although all who want to be schooled in the foundation of modern philosophy and literature should familiarize themselves with his work. He was profoundly influential in both philosophy and literature.

If one of my readers is depressed, skip this one. I'm not sure I would be as influenced by the work if I first read it today as I was years ago, but I was influenced, and so have many people been influenced. I hope this review wasn't a bit on the esoteric side for some of my readers.

Thank you for reading, if you have read this far (or if you have read any of it at all).

Peace and love to all.

---

Book Cover, in Original Spanish Edition, 1912

_{Credit: Miguel de Unamuno. Public domain.}

The book may be read free on the Internet Archive

The book is also available on Amazon in paperback and hardcover ($8.90 and $16.99). It's also available on Kindle, but why read it on Kindle when you can read it for free on the Internet?

Included in all versions of the book are lengthy introductions by the author and translator. These I did not bother with in this review and just lightly skimmed over in my reading of the book.

Including the extra sections, the paperback is 248 pages.

Spanish edition was first published in 1912.

Unamumo himself collaborated on the English translation. He was fluent in several languages.

Some resources consulted in writing this blog
overdrive.com
us.archive.org
Neurosciences and History
poets.org
askaphilosopher.org
Wikipedia