Work · Life & Existential Philosophy
The Tragic Sense of Life
Argues that the human being of flesh and bone longs not to die, that reason cannot justify this hope and faith cannot give it up, and that life must be lived in this conflict.
Introduction
Unamuno published “The Tragic Sense of Life” first as a series of articles in the journal “La España Moderna” in 1911–12 and as a book in 1913. It begins not with humanity in the abstract but with “the man of flesh and bone” and his hunger for immortality, which Unamuno links to Spinoza’s thesis that each thing strives to persist in its being. Reason shows that this hope cannot be proved, and faith cannot do without it; from their conflict comes a tragic sense of life that is not to be resolved but lived, as uncertain faith, as the effort to make oneself irreplaceable and as compassion. The book draws on Pascal, Kierkegaard and Spanish mysticism and ends with Don Quixote as the figure of this stance. It became Unamuno’s best-known work and was soon translated into French, English and German.
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