by Pedro Blas González (June 2026)
If we believe that we have a soul and that it will not die entirely, it is because we desire it so intensely… the longing not to die, the hunger for personal immortality… is the affective basis of all knowledge. —Miguel de Unamuno,The Tragic Sense of Life
The Spanish philosopher and essayist Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) writes: “One does not feed the heart with reasons?” A positivistic age seeks over-intellectualized explanations, even to metaphysical/existential concerns. This is the dead-end legacy of scientism in late postmodernity.
To make sense of a thinker’s work is tantamount to desiring to know. Does our age possess such pathos for life and knowledge? We have forgotten that man must will himself to know. The human condition offers resistance to human existence. Unamuno is profoundly instructive, when he writes that “to know is to do so with all of our faculties, not just the intellect.”
Re-reading Unamuno’s seminal essay on the nature of immortality, The Tragic Sense of Life, I cannot help but realize how literate and lyrical pre late postmodern writers and thinkers were. This is an enlightening quality that affects a reader’s perception and ability to grasp the nature of human reality and immortality that the Unamuno presents us with.
Unamuno poses universal and timeless questions. What appears most irritating about Unamuno to the emancipated ‘sensibilities’ of late postmodern readers is that the Spanish thinker strips us of our social/political comfort zone, our all too familiar material and moral sand castles. Unamuno leaves us to fend for ourselves with our stunted or nonexistent existential imagination. This frightens us. Unamuno’s perspicuity rejects the machinery that foments late postmodern mendacity; our liberated-from-human-reality lives.
Unamuno’s commentary on Catholicism’s stance on the immortality of the soul is original and penetrating. Consider the truth of his idea that part of the agony of Catholicism “oscillates between mysticism and rationalism.” This is agonizing. If stretched too far in the direction of mysticism—a vital condition, to say the least, Catholicism loses its strength as a universal church.
If, on the other hand, the rationalist component of Catholicism becomes dominant, Catholicism becomes a theology of fusion, the stuff of the intellect—a form of rationalized, politically correct ‘theology.’
Unamuno reminds us of G. K. Chesterton. The British writer argues that the Catholic Church balances the tension between science and religion. We ought not to forget that the tension between life and reason began after the Enlightenment. Unamuno writes: “Catholicism oscillates between religionized science and scientificized religion.”
Unamuno—like the Danish thinker, Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote, “life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards,” —held the conviction that a ‘scientific theology’ has nothing to do with man’s thirst for life and immortality.
Man’s personal quest for immortality is strictly tied to the strength of our imagination. Unamuno views imagination, much as he does intuition, as a corollary of reason that must be safeguarded from the onslaught of philosophical materialism—a corruption of reason that strips the intuition that existential inquietude presents us with.
Human reality, like Catholicism itself, oscillates between a quest for the rational and that which cannot become abstracted: the autonomy of the self. Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life is a work of philosophical anthropology.
All our reading, roundtable conferences, talking points, teaching, and learning cannot penetrate into that impenetrable, indefinable, and ineffable entity that stands alone against material forces: the reality of the self.
The more that the self comes to know itself through self-reflection and actualization, the greater the difficulty it has in making itself known to others in its totality and fullness. This has everything to do with our avocation and execution in making sense of personal differentiation.
In the beginning there is the self and in the end this is what remains. Many people miss this truism; given that what often excites people’s imagination most are sensual, vague, and lazy perceptions that entice us to embrace material reality. This is an example of our servitude to sensualism and our allegiance to physicalism in all its variegated forms.
In order to be moved by the idea of immortality one must possess a sense of self. This is not merely an intellectual exercise. On the contrary, the intellect exhausts itself in the quest for immortality, given the calculative method of science—if not it’s demonic cousin, scientism.
The quest for immortality is a personal, thus existential affair. The autonomy of human existence—not merely biological life—is central to man’s vibrant desire to live onwards. I refer to this as the quest that seeks more than life. Unamuno explains: “That which lives, that which is absolutely unstable, absolutely individual, is, strictly speaking, unintelligible.”
Unamuno places late postmodern man in a difficult situation. What are we to do with philosophical reflection, properly speaking, and the domain of rational thought? If everything that is vital is irrational or non-rational, as Unamuno argues, and everything rational is anti-vital, “for reason is essentially skeptical,” we find ourselves practicing narrow existential aspirations.
Can we agree with Unamuno that the products of personal, existential reflection may or may not be objectively transferable to other people? If so, doesn’t the breath and realm of the scientific method shrink?
Aberrations in human life abound. In late postmodernity aberrations reign supreme. Unamuno is right to point out that one of these aberrations is people who define themselves as solely ‘intellectual, people who think of themselves as ‘smart.’ These people should strike us as odd and one-dimensional entities—at best. There are other names for such people…
The longing for immortality is not the result of a rational process. The Tragic Sense of Life is an interesting anomaly among philosophical works that address this topic. Unamuno writes: “And so, neither the vital longing for human immortality can count on any rational configuration nor can reason supply us with any incentive or consolation in life or any true end purpose for it.” This boils down to will versus reason. We find these concerns in Montaigne, Pascal and Kierkegaard, and the canon of Catholic philosophy, from Augustine to Aquinas, Marcel, Louis Lavelle and René Le Senne.
While will fashions the possibility of immortality, often based on hope and the sheer desire to live more than life, the best that reason can do is remain skeptical. This is why Unamuno argues that reason is essentially materialistic in its predisposition and outcome. Reason builds its premises on logical principles, while the will makes sense of life without the use of formulas.
Without formulas, life is conceived and enjoyed as a fluid reality that demands imagination and intuition—an existential impulse.
Unamuno best characterizes reflection on immortality as something that is done spontaneously, out of the need to explain our inner constitution. In the absence of genuine and honest aspirations, thought on immortality, the Spanish thinker reiterates, becomes a hollow and contrived exercise.
Unamuno’s treatment of the question of immortality is the thought and ambition of a concrete individual, a man of flesh and bones. He writes: “The end purpose of life is to live, and not to understand.” This statement contains an existential poetic quality that is difficult to accommodate today in an age of quantification.
Unamuno writes in a conversational style that allows him the freedom to relate personal existential concerns to thoughtful and discerning readers. Honest readers admire writers who are candid in their search for understanding. Unamuno tells us that just as there are people defective in intellect, “so there are people defective in feeling, whatever their intelligence.”
The Tragic Sense of Life showcases philosophical reflection as a way of life. Unamuno agonizes over the question of life, death, and immortality. This time immemorial zest for human existence is not a preoccupation of late postmodern writers and thinkers.
Life is not easy, we are told. Some people never believe or accept this truism and spent their life bouncing their heads against walls. This is a lamentable waste of human energy, given that reality is often anathema to human aspirations.
The Tragic Sense of Life is a living rendition of philosophical vocation that refuses to become pigeonholed or reduced to matter in our positivistic age.
Straddling the dual currents of reason and life is not an intellectual task. It is instead an adventure, an enterprise that requires moral courage that does not come from academic ethics textbooks.
The Tragic Sense of Life is an important book for many reasons. On one level, it serves as an existential biography. The book offers a competent history of immortality in Catholicism and philosophical literature.
Another aspect of Unamuno’s quest that makes The Tragic Sense of Life personal is the writer’s preoccupation with the essence of Being. Unamuno wonders why human existence should be surrounded by nothingness—before and after death. Or is it?
Our world, Unamuno tells us, is a world of appearance(s). Where does man fit in? We are “those wretched shadows who file by, going from nothingness to nothingness, mere sparks of consciousness shinning for a moment in the infinite and eternal darkness.”
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Pedro Blas González is Professor of Philosophy in Florida. He earned his doctoral degree in Philosophy at DePaul University in 1995. Dr. González has published extensively on leading Spanish philosophers, such as Ortega y Gasset and Unamuno. His books have included Unamuno: A Lyrical Essay, Ortega’s ‘Revolt of the Masses’ and the Triumph of the New Man, Fragments: Essays in Subjectivity, Individuality and Autonomy and Human Existence as Radical Reality: Ortega’s Philosophy of Subjectivity. He also published a translation and introduction of José Ortega y Gasset’s last work to appear in English, “Medio siglo de Filosofia” (1951) in Philosophy Today Vol. 42 Issue 2 (Summer 1998). His most recent book is Philosophical Perspective on Cinema.
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