Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

And this supreme preoccupation cannot be purely rational, it must be affective. It is not enough to think about our destiny, it must be felt. And the would-be leader of men who says and proclaims that he pays no heed to the things of the spirit, does not deserve to lead them. Which does not mean, of course, that any determinate solution is to be required of him. Solution? Is there, indeed, any?

For my part, I will never willingly yield myself, nor entrust my confidence, to any popular leader who has not a real conviction that the leader of a people is a leader of men—men of flesh and bone; men who are born, suffer, and, although they may not wish to die, die; men who are ends in themselves, not merely means; men who have to be themselves and not others; men, in short, who seek that which we call happiness. It is inhuman, for example, to sacrifice one generation of men to the generation following when there is no regard for the destiny of those sacrificed—not merely for their memory, for their names, but for themselves.

All this idea that a man lives in his children, or in his works, or in the universe, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only those who suffer from affective stupidity and who may, for the rest, be persons of a certain cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess a great talent or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid as far as the feelings are concerned, and even morally imbecile. There have been instances.

Those who are mentally talented and affectively stupid usually say that it is useless to seek to delve into the unknowable or to kick against the pricks. It is as if one should say to a man whose leg has been amputated that it is useless to think about it. And we all lack something; only some of us feel it and others do not. Or they pretend not to feel it, and then they are hypocrites.

There is something which, for want of a better name, we will call the tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception of life itself and of the universe, a whole philosophy, more or less formulated, more or less conscious. And this sense may be possessed, and is possessed, not only by individual men but by whole peoples. And this sense does not flow from ideas but rather determines them, although afterwards, of course, these ideas react upon the sense and confirm it. Sometimes this sense may proceed from a casual illness—from dyspepsia, for example—but at other times it is constitutional. And it is useless to speak of men who are healthy and men who are unhealthy. Apart from there being no normal standard of health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And, further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, when compared with the ass or the crab, already a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.

Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those who possess the tragic sense of life. I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, René, Obermann, Thomson,[9] Leopardi, Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard—men laden with wisdom rather than with knowledge.

And there are, I believe, also peoples who possess this tragic sense of life.

THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY

The great master of rationalist phenomenalism, David Hume, begins his essay “On the Immortality of the Soul” with these decisive words: “It appears difficult by the mere light of reason to prove the immortality of the soul. The arguments in favour of it are commonly derived from metaphysical, moral, or physical considerations. But it is really the Gospel, and only the Gospel, that has brought to light life and immortality.” Which is equivalent to denying the rationality of the belief that the soul of each one of us is immortal.

Kant, who took Hume as the starting-point for his criticism, attempted to establish the rationality of this longing for immortality and the belief that it imports, and that is the real origin, the inward origin, of his “Critique of Practical Reason” and of his categorical imperative and of his God. But in spite of all this, the sceptical affirmation of Hume remains unshaken. There is no way of rationally proving the immortality of the soul. There are, on the other hand, ways of rationally proving its mortality.