The Tragic Sense of Life

The main philosophical work of the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno, published in 1913. It starts not from abstract humanity but from 'the man of flesh and bone' who is born, suffers and dies, and above all does not want to die. This hunger for immortality, Unamuno argues, is the deepest human longing and the hidden motive of philosophy. Yet reason cannot prove that we survive death and tends to deny it, while the heart refuses to accept that conclusion. Neither can defeat the other, and from their conflict comes the tragic sense of life. Unamuno does not resolve the conflict but builds on it: uncertainty becomes the ground of a faith that is willed rather than known, and of a morality in which we should act so that our annihilation would be an injustice. He discusses love, pity and suffering, and God as the consciousness of the universe, and ends with Don Quixote as a model of heroic, absurd hope.

It is a passionate account of the clash between reason and the wish to live for ever, and an early voice for themes later taken up by Camus and other existentialists.