Tragic Sense of Life | Page 4

must rest on a religious basis. And it is on a religious basis that
Unamuno founds his individualism. Hence the true Spanish flavour of
his social theory, which will not allow itself to be set down and
analyzed into principles of ethics and politics, with their inevitable
tendency to degenerate into mere economics, but remains free and fluid
and absolute, like the spirit.
Such an individualism has therefore none of the features of that
childish half-thinking which inspires most anarchists. It is, on the
contrary, based on high thinking, the highest of all, that which refuses
to dwell on anything less than man's origin and destination. We are
here confronted with that humanistic tendency of the Spanish mind
which can be observed as the dominant feature of her arts and literature.
All races are of course predominantly concerned with man. But they all
manifest their concern with a difference. Man is in Spain a concrete
being, the man of flesh and bones, and the whole man. He is neither
subtilized into an idea by pure thinking nor civilized into a gentleman
by social laws and prejudices. Spanish art and letters deal with concrete,
tangible persons. Now, there is no more concrete, no more tangible
person for every one of us than ourself. Unamuno is therefore right in
the line of Spanish tradition in dealing predominantly--one might
almost say always--with his own person. The feeling of the awareness
of one's own personality has seldom been more forcibly expressed than
by Unamuno. This is primarily due to the fact that he is himself
obsessed by it. But in his expression of it Unamuno derives also some
strength from his own sense of matter and the material--again a
typically Spanish element of his character. Thus his human beings are
as much body as soul, or rather body and soul all in one, a union which
he admirably renders by bold mixtures of physical and spiritual
metaphors, as in gozarse uno la carne del alma (to enjoy the flesh of

one's own soul).
In fact, Unamuno, as a true Spaniard which he is, refuses to surrender
life to ideas, and that is why he runs shy of abstractions, in which he
sees but shrouds wherewith we cover dead thoughts. He is solely
concerned with his own life, nothing but his life, and the whole of his
life. An egotistical position? Perhaps. Unamuno, however, can and
does answer the charge. We can only know and feel humanity in the
one human being which we have at hand. It is by penetrating deep into
ourselves that we find our brothers in us--branches of the same trunk
which can only touch each other by seeking their common origin. This
searching within, Unamuno has undertaken with a sincerity, a
fearlessness which cannot be excelled. Nowhere will the reader find the
inner contradictions of a modern human being, who is at the same time
healthy and capable of thought set down with a greater respect for truth.
Here the uncompromising tendency of the Spanish race, whose eyes
never turn away from nature, however unwelcome the sight, is
strengthened by that passion for life which burns in Unamuno. The
suppression of the slightest thought or feeling for the sake of
intellectual order would appear to him as a despicable worldly trick.
Thus it is precisely because he does sincerely feel a passionate love of
his own life that he thinks out with such scrupulous accuracy every
argument which he finds in his mind--his own mind, a part of his
life--against the possibility of life after death; but it is also because he
feels that, despite such conclusive arguments, his will to live perseveres,
that he refuses to his intellect the power to kill his faith. A knight-errant
of the spirit, as he himself calls the Spanish mystics, he starts for his
adventures after having, like Hernán Cortés, burnt his ships. But, is it
necessary to enhance his figure by literary comparison? He is what he
wants to be, a man--in the striking expression which he chose as a title
for one of his short stories, nothing less than a whole man. Not a mere
thinking machine, set to prove a theory, nor an actor on the world stage,
singing a well-built poem, well built at the price of many a compromise;
but a whole man, with all his affirmations and all his negations, all the
pitiless thoughts of a penetrating mind that denies, and all the desperate
self-assertions of a soul that yearns for eternal life.

This strife between enemy truths, the truth thought and the truth felt, or,
as he himself puts it, between veracity and sincerity, is Unamuno's
_raison d'être_. And it is because the "_Tragic Sense of Life_" is the
most direct expression of it that this book is