Tragic Sense of Life
by Miguel de Unamuno
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Book Summary Information
Author: Miguel de UnamunoEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-12-01
ISBN: 1602069972
Number of pages: 372
Publisher: Cosimo Classics
Book Reviews of Tragic Sense of Life
Book Review: Thoughts on The Tragic Sense of Life
Summary: 4 Stars
Unamuno's contention is that man's hunger for personal immortality is central and ineradicable. All religion and culture stems from our stark awareness of our mortality and our need for immortality. From man's heart he builds hope in an eternal, because he instinctively hungers for personal immortality. Yet man's reason convinces him there can be no immortality, thus feeling and reason -- heart and head -- are in everlasting deadlock. For Unamuno, all attempts to resolve this deadlock are futile, and ultimately it is this deadlock, the uncertainty it fosters, that forms the foundation for faith. It is this very uncertainty, this longing for immortality in the face of apparently inevitable annihilation, which forms the basis of "the tragic sense of life."
It was the attempt to resolve this conflict between faith and reason, by St. Thomas Aquinas and others, which produced "the Rationalist dissolution" of scholastic philosophy. Philosophers and theologians who attempted to "rationalize" the existence of God only ended up losing their real faith in God, substituting for it faith in the God idea.
Unamuno contends that man needs to believe in his personal immortality, and that those who say they have accepted personal annihilation are in self-deception. He further asserts that God created man, and man, in turn, creates god, each in the other's image. He speculates that all of evolution, throughout the whole universe, is a process of consciousness, or spirit, seeking to free itself from matter. God suffers, as each finite being suffers.
This idea reminded me of the Hindu notion that God loses himself in each being, engaging in divine Lila or play by pretending to be simply the finite being, and then craving reunification with the All.
Faith and belief in God begin by wishing God exists, writes Unamuno. Thus, belief is inseparable from will. Those who do not believe in God simply do not want to believe in God. Those who believe started out by wanting to believe. It is this yearning, this fervent longing for a God who made the universe for man, and allows for immortality, which eventuates in faith. But the faith must always rest on uncertainty, lest it sink into the fanaticism of the true believer or devolve into the stodgy God idea of the rationalist theologians, which, to Unamuno' is simply a form of agnosticism or atheism.
I found his insistence on man's need to believe in his personal immortality the weakest part of his argument. I do think there a fundamental desire to believe in some form of immortality, but there is no need for it to be "personal." Indeed the insistence that it be "personal" is an egoic limitation to be transcended. Since the ego or "personality" is itself a delusion, it can only be a delusion to believe in its immortality. That is why all the great masters from Buddha to Krishna have insisted upon transcending the ego personality, because only therein lies the gateway to true immortality.
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