Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

The other thing that is being incessantly talked about to-day is life, and to this it is easy to find an opposite. The opposite to life is death.

And this second opposition helps me to explain the first. Wisdom is to science what death is to life, or, if you prefer it, wisdom is to death what science is to life.

The object of science is life, and the object of wisdom is death. Science says: “We must live,” and seeks the means of prolonging, increasing, facilitating and amplifying life, of making it tolerable and acceptable; wisdom says: “We must die,” and seeks how to make us die well.

Homo liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat, et eius sapientia non mortis, sed vita meditatio est—so Spinoza announces in Proposition LXVII of the fourth part of his “Ethics”: The free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.

In this case, this wisdom, this sapientia, is no longer wisdom, but science. And it is also necessary to inquire what kind of man is meant by this “free man.” The man free from the supreme anguish, free from the eternal heartache, free from the gaze of the Sphinx, that is to say, the man who is not a man, the ideal of the modern European.

And here we have another concept which is as little sympathetic to me as those of life and science, the concept of liberty. There is no other true liberty than the liberty of death.

And what is at the bottom of all this? What are they seeking and pursuing, those who grasp at science and life and liberty, turning their backs, whether they are aware of it or not, upon wisdom and death? What they are seeking is happiness.

I believe—perhaps this belief of mine is also arbitrary—I believe that here we touch the bottom of our inquiry. The so-called modern European comes to the world to seek happiness for himself and for others, and believes that man ought to succeed in being happy. And this is a supposition to which I am unable to conform. And now, as I am confessing myself, I am going to put before you an arbitrary dilemma—arbitrary, because I cannot prove it to you logically, because it is imposed upon me by the feeling of my heart, not by the reasoning of my head: either happiness or love. If you want the one, you must renounce the other. Love kills happiness, happiness kills love.

And here it would be very apposite to adduce all that our mystics, our admirable mystics, our only classic philosophers, the creators of our Spanish wisdom, not our Spanish science—perhaps the terms “science” and “Spanish” are, happily, mutually repellent—have felt, felt rather than thought, about love and happiness—the muero porque no muero and the dolor sabroso and all the rest that emanates from the same depths of feeling.

And what relation does all this bear to the spiritual problem of Spain? Is it anything more than a purely and exclusively personal, that is to say arbitrary, position? Is it as a Spaniard that I feel all this? Is it suggested to me by the Spanish soul?