“The Tragic Sense of Life”

I used to be re-reading a small a part of Miguel de Unamuno‘s, Tragic Sense of Life (1910) after I got here throughout these haunting strains:

Why do I want to know whence I come and whither I am going, whence comes and whither goes all the things that environs me, and what’s the which means of all of it? For I don’t want to die completely, and I want to know whether or not I’m to die or not undoubtedly. If I don’t die, what’s my future? and if I die, then nothing has any which means for me. And there are three options: (a) I do know that I shall die completely, after which irremediable despair, or (b) I do know that I shall not die completely, after which resignation, or (c) I can not know both one or the opposite, after which resignation in despair or despair in resignation, a determined resignation or are resigned despair, and therefore battle.

…

For the current allow us to stay keenly suspecting that the longing to not die, the starvation for private immortality, the trouble whereby we are inclined to persist indefinitely in our personal being, which is, in accordance with the tragic Jew (Spinoza), our very essence, that that is the affective foundation of all data and the private inward starting-point of all human philosophy, wrought by a person and for all males. And we will see how the answer of this inward affective downside, an answer which can be however the despairing renunciation of the try at an answer, is that which colors all the remainder of philosophy. Underlying even the so-called downside of information there’s merely this human feeling, simply as underlying the enquiry into the “why,” the trigger, there’s merely the seek for the “wherefore,” the tip. All the remainder is both to deceive oneself or to want to deceive others; and to want to deceive others with a view to deceive oneself.

Unamuno’s chic description of the tragic sense of life is paying homage to the feelings of Blaise Pascal. Each writers convey a lostness relating to our place in an detached cosmos. Once I used to show existentialism—Unamuno is an early existentialist—college students complained that it was each tragic and miserable. They noticed little worth within the longings of somebody like Unamuno, or in Dostoevsky’s “struggling is the origin of consciousness,” or in Sartre’s “Life begins on the opposite aspect of despair.” Some even discovered Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning too miserable.

Now I don’t consider there’s any intrinsic worth in struggling; I don’t consider in ache, struggling, warfare, demise, or in any of the opposite limitations and evils that encompass us. However the recognition of how horrible, tragic, and absurd life is in contrast with how good it could possibly be has a redeeming function—the chance that this recognition might encourage us to eradicate these evils. That is the worth of Unamuno’s recognition of the tragic sense of life.