Miguel de Unamuno’s theory of tragic sentiment is central to understanding his unique contributions to religious existential thought, which centers on the production of perhaps the most unavoidable and distinctive kind of human feeling. His theory is rightly attributed with being influenced by the gestational thought of, inter alios, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, but within these pages I should like to suggest a peculiar kinship between seemingly strange bedfellows, namely, between Unamuno and Immanuel Kant. Although the relationship between (...) Unamuno and Kant is conflicted, ranging from clear indications of influence to expressions of antipathy, there has been relatively little comparative research done on these two thinkers. Moreover, this scant literature has mainly explored connections between Unamuno’s existential thought and Kant’s first two Critiques. In these works, however, feelings are regarded as inclinations and thus receive no serious consideration. In what follows, I therefore juxtapose Unamuno’s analysis of tragic feeling in The Tragic Sense of Life with Kant’s discussion of the feelings of beauty and the sublime in the Critique of Judgment. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Miguel de Unamuno (1865–1936, Spanish‐Basque) Lev Shestov (1866–1938, Russian) Karl Barth (1886–1968, Swiss) Martin Buber (1878–1965, Austrian and Israeli).

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In five brief chapters the author presents Unamuno's theories of language and truth, his epistemological views, and what the author terms his "Quixotic" existentialism. None of the problems alluded to are discussed in any depth, but the brevity of the book recommends it to those seeking an introduction to the main lines of Unamuno's thought.—S. A. E.

En el artículo se describe el tránsito filosófico-existencial de Tula, protagonista de la novela La tía Tula de Miguel de Unamuno, por los tres estadios vitales del filósofo danés Søren Kierkegaard. A lo largo del texto, se muestra que las dudas existenciales que se plantea la protagonista son extensivas para todo el género humano. Además, el texto busca mostrar cómo la narrativa del pensador español está plagada de reflexiones filosóficas y está fuertemente influida por el existencialismo cristiano de Kierkegaard. (...) Debatiéndose entre la fe y la razón, Tula transita por los estadios tomando decisiones que entrañan sufrimiento. En esta novela, se plasman los afanes del ser humano por la perpetuación, inmortalidad y salvación frente al rostro descarnado de la nada. (shrink)

Resumen: En este trabajo se indaga en las respuestas que Miguel de Unamuno ofrece al problema de la conciencia de ser como parte esencial de la construcción biográfica. A partir de algunas de sus obras más representativas pero, sobre todo, a través la más genuinamente existencialista, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, tratamos de esclarecer los códigos argumentales sobre los que Unamuno desarrolla, a veces abruptamente, las ideas de memoria, intimidad o mismidad así como las tribulaciones que estas le (...) provocan respecto de dos de los ámbitos doctrinales que más le definen como filósofo: la doctrina del hombre de carne y hueso y la doctrina de la inmortalidad. Constatamos cómo ambas doctrinas, singularmente construidas a partir de la noción de conciencia encarnada, se resuelven a través de la conciencia de singularidad y esta, a su vez, como volición de pervivencia corpórea.: In this work, the answers that Miguel de Unamuno offers to the problem of the consciousness of being as an essential part of the biographical construction are explored. From some of his most representative works but, above all, through the most genuinely existentialist, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, we try to clarify the argumentative codes on which Unamuno develops, sometimes abruptly, the ideas of memory, intimacy or sameness, as well as the tribulations that these provoke him with regard to two of the doctrinal areas that most define him as a philosopher: the doctrine of man in flesh and bone and the doctrine of the immortality of the flesh. We note how both doctrines, uniquely constructed from a notion of incarnate consciousness, are resolved as a volition of corporeal survival. (shrink)

In recent years the study of local religious histories, especially in Europe, has gained in prominence. Because of the encounters between different cultural traditions in the Middle Ages and the voyages of discovery, the religious history of the Iberian Peninsula became one of the most complex in Europe. This article focuses on one portion of this history around the turn of the 19th/20th century, and in particular on two attempts to blame the Catholic religion for the general crisis (...) in Spain and Portugal at the start of the modern era. These two forms of critiquing religion are illustrated by the examples of Miguel de Unamuno and Antero de Quental, whose writings were characteristic of the typical relationship between religion and intellectuals in this period. Not only were the Spanish philosopher and the Portuguese poet influential on their own and later generations, but they are also truly representative of a certain tragic ”loss“ of religion in the Iberian Peninsula. (shrink)

This book examines solutions to the crisis of modernity proposed by the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno and the Mexican philosopher Antonio Caso. Acceptance of the objective claims of modern scientific rationality and the consequent rejection of the objective validity of artistic, moral, and religious claims generates the crisis of modernity. The problem is that of justifying artistic, moral, and religious claims. Miguel de Unamuno in his classic work,The Tragic Sense of Life, addresses the conflict between (...) the belief in personal immortality and modern scientific rationality. Holding that there is no rational justification for the belief in immortality, Unamuno finds a solution in a “saving scepticism” to act “as if” he deserved immortality. In his book Existence as Economy, as Art, and CharityCaso attempts to create an aposteriori metaphysics based on the “current” results of science supplemented by the intuitions of art and morality. In doing so, Caso believes that he has enlarged the scope of the knowable to include objects of art, morality, and religion. Unamuno, by accepting the strict line of demarcation between faith and reason has no other recourse but to turn to decisionism. By turning to intuitionism, Caso believes that he has blurred the line of demarcation. Decisionism and intuitionism, therefore, are worthy of further exploration. (shrink)

The study deals with the conception of personal immortality in Miguel de Unamuno’s works. The starting point of his reflections is a particular person of “flesh and blood“ and his authentic existence. Unamuno’s “hunger of immortality“ is inspired by man’s confrontation with the phenomenon of death. For Unamuno existential phenomena of suffering and anxiety seem to be the keyword to the authentic existence and God then becomes a guarantor of individual immortality. The study concentrates on Unamuno’s conception of God (...) in the spirit of panentheism and Spanish Krausism. It observes Unamuno’s philosophical sources of information when discussing the question of immortality from Pythagoras to Platon while opposing the views of impersonal immortality (e.g. B. Spinoza). His theological argumentation is based mainly on S. Kierkegaard, St. Paul and Spanish mystics. His philosophical ideas are extracted especially from his works The Tragic Sense of Life, The Agony of Christianity and The Intimate Diary. His novella Saint Emmanuel The Good, Martyr serves as a fictional illustration of his ideas. The study concludes with the evaluation of Unamuno as an author writing “philosophizing literature“ and as a predecessor of existentialist literature, who was orientated towards Christian personalism. (shrink)

My dissertation is in two parts. First, it develops a philosophical concept of “tragic uncertainty,” derived from early twentieth-century Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. Secondly, it demonstrates ethical application of tragic uncertainty to human societal events. The ethical imperative created from tragic uncertainty—and not either tragedy or uncertainty alone—is the following. Given a tragic situation with a great degree of uncertainty, people living with doubt, mental despair, and perpetual anguish because of it should be provided relief. Generally, this relief (...) should be in the form of therapy, by which I mean an affective and emotional release. Two important case studies are explored. One on corrupted political systems in the USA-Mexico border. The other in Honduras, on both climate change and corrupted political systems. These are explained and categorized as tragically uncertain. Corresponding, minimal practical solutions accompany the ethical imperative created to remedy tragic uncertainty. (shrink)

This book provides a coherent and systematic analysis of Miguel de Unamuno’s notion of religious faith and the reasoning he offers in defense of it. Unamuno developed a non-cognitivist Christian conception of religious faith, defending it as being something which we are all naturally lead to, given our (alleged) most basic and natural inclination to seek an endless existence. Illuminating the philosophical relevance this conception still has to contemporary philosophy of religion, Oya draws connections with current non-cognitivist (...) notions of religious faith in general, and with contemporary religious fictionalist positions more particularly. -/- The book includes a biographical introduction to Miguel de Unamuno, as well as lucid and clear analyses of his notions of the ‘tragic feeling of life’, his epistemological paradigm, and his naturally founded religious fictionalism. Revealing links to current debates, Oya shows how the works of Unamuno are still relevant and enriching today. (shrink)

El presente artículo rastrea el pensamiento antropológico de Miguel de Unamuno, descubriendo su esencia en el aspecto religioso. El desarrollo de este argumento permite explicitar la formación intelectual de Unamuno, destacando la relación de su pensamiento con tres de los filósofos que más le influyeron: Agustín, Pascal y Kierkegaard. El estudio de las relaciones entre ellos permite, a su vez, volver a poner la cuestión sobre Dios como un problema filosófico siempre actual. This article presents anthropological thought of (...) class='Hi'>Miguel de Unamuno. The religious aspect expresses the essence of the Spanish writer's thought. In the development of his mind three important authors have influenced Western philosophy: St. Augustine, Pascal and Kierkegaard. This paper studies the relationships between them and with them again proposes the question of God as a philosophical problem. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue against the received view among Unamuno scholars that Miguel de Unamuno was defending a sort of pragmatic argument for religious faith and that his notion of religious faith as “querer creer” (“wanting to believe”) is to be identified with William James’s “the will to believe”. As I will show in this paper, one of the aspects that makes Unamuno’s reasoning philosophically relevant is his ability to formulate a non-pragmatist defense (...) of religious faith without a prior commitment to the truth of any religious or theological statement and grounded in our longing for an endless existence through God’s Salvation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought by Habib C. MalikJ. KellenbergerHabib C. Malik. Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997. Pp. xxii + 437. Cloth, $59.95.At the end of the twentieth century no one who has any acquaintance with Western philosophical or religious thought would fail to recognize Kierkegaard’s name. (...) This was not always so. Kierkegaard wrote in his native Danish in the first half of the nineteenth century, and for decades his thinking and his name were virtually unknown outside Scandanavia. Habib C. Malik’s book contains the richly detailed story of how Kierkegaard’s thought became known in Europe and in the English-speaking world. Malik breaks down the reception of Kierkegaardian ideas into several phases: “non-reception,” the beginnings of reception, “misreception,” suppression, and serious reception. In the first phase Kierkegaard was read in Denmark, but not understood. In [End Page 637] the second phase, during the 1840s and 1850s while Kierkegaard was still alive, his writings started to become known outside Denmark in Scandanavia (and even reached North America via Scandanavian-American immigrants). In the period of “misreception,” as Malik calls it, Kierkegaard’s ideas or catch-words are appropriated but not fully understood—as with Ibsen, Malik argues. After Kierkegaard’s journals and papers began to be published in the 1870’s, there developed a new kind of interest in Kierkegaard, the “biographical-psychological approach,” initiated by Georg Brandes, in which Kierkegaard’s ideas and themes were interpreted in terms of the crucial events in Kierkegaard’s life. This approach led to the substance of Kierkegaard’s thinking being suppressed by what became a morbid interest in Kierkegaard’s personal life, such as a preoccupation with Kierkegaard’s relationship to Regine Olsen and then reading “The Diary of a Seducer” or key parts of Fear and Trembling as an expression of this event. The period of suppression reaches into the 1880s and 1890s as scholars and translators, like Christoph Schrempf, use Kierkegaard for their own ends. Schrempf, a Lutheran minister who renounces his belief, looks to Kierkegaard for support for his new stance and translates Kierkegaard into German, omitting passages that do not foster his end. Finally there is the period of serious reception, or its beginning, especially in the German-speaking world. Malik ends the story of Kierkegaard’s reception with the period following the First World War, before the development of twentieth century Existentialism.In the book’s eight chapters a vast number of minor and major cultural figures are dealt with. Some, like Hans Christian Andersen and Hans Christian Ørsted (the rector of Kierkegaard’s university and the discoverer of electromagnetism, whose approach to religion was cosmological) Kierkegaard knew and interacted with. Most, like Ibsen, Brandes, Schrempf, and Hans Peter Barford (the first editor of Kierkegaard’s extensive papers) and Albert Bärthold (who learned Danish to translate Kierkegaard into German and during the 1870’s regularly produced translations and commentaries) enter the story after Kierkegarrd’s death. Malik recounts Kierkegaard’s Kirkekampen (church-struggle) with the Lutheran Danish state-Church, and he brings out how Kierkegaard’s writing in this period of his “Attack on Christendom” greatly influenced the way he was initially received. He discusses the reaction to Kierkegaard by the early Swedish writer and feminist Fredrika Bremer, and he discusses Kierkegaard’s later influence on such various thinkers and writers as Miguel de Unamuno, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (to name some of the more familiar).There are many nuggets of detail in the book. For instance, those who have read Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist would know that in 1888 Brandes called Kierkegaard to Nietzsche’s attention, but too close to the onset of Nietzsche’s madness for him to read Kierkegaard. However we learn from Malik that Brandes in a letter had characterized Kierkegaard as “one of the profoundest psychologists that have ever existed” and that Nietzsche in his reply in February of 1888 actually expressed the intention to “take up the psychological problem of Kierkegaard” when... (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 76–81 Comments on Eugene Thacker’s “Cosmic Pessimism” Nicola Masciandaro Anything you look forward to will destroy you, as it already has. —Vernon Howard In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. The cosmicity of the sigh resides in its profound negative singularity. Moving via endless auto-releasement, it achieves the remote. “ Oltre la spera che piú larga gira / passa ’l sospiro ch’esce del mio core ” [Beyond the sphere that circles widest / penetrates (...) the sigh that issues from my heart]. 1 The axiomatic sigh of the pessimist is in a way the pure word of philosophy, a thought that thinks without you, speaks where you are not. The live pneumatic form of the soul’s eventual exit from the dead body’s mouth, the sigh restores consciousness to the funeral of being, to the passing away that is existence. Pessimism speaks in piercing aphorisms because first it sighs. “Beyond the sphere passeth the arrow of our sigh. Hafiz! Silence.” 2 … pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. To the pessimist, the ‘real’ world—the world on whose behalf we are expected to wake up in the morning—is a ceaseless index of its own unreality. The pessimist’s day is not an illumined space for the advancement of experience and action, but a permanently and inescapably reflective zone, the vast interior of a mirror where each thing is only insofar as it is, at best, a false image of itself. Within this speculative situation, inside the doubleness of the mirror, pessimism splits into two paths, false and true, one that tries to fix pessimism (establish a relation with the mirror) and decides in favor of the apparent real, and another that totally falls for pessimism (enters the mirror) and communes with the greater reality of the unreal. These two paths are distinguished by their relation to pessimism’s guilt vis-à-vis the world’s reality-project. The first form, that which remains pessimism for the world and puts on a smiling face, stays guilty to itself (i.e. unconscious) and thus turns hypocritical, becoming at once the pessimism of the commoner who really just wants things to be better for himself and the pessimism of the elite who wants to critically refashion reality in his own image. The general form of this worldly, hypocritical pessimism is the impulse to ‘make the world a better place’, which is the global mask under which the world is diurnally made worse. The second form, that which follows pessimism away from the world and ceases to put on a smiling face, refuses guiltiness as itself theessential Occidental mode of pretense and turns honest, becoming at once the intelligent pessimism required of all ordinary action and the radical pessimism necessary for self-knowledge: seeing that no one is capable of doing good. The general form of this universal, honest pessimism is the impulse not to worry, to give up and embrace dereliction, which is the only real way the world is actually improved. Where worldly pessimism is the engine productive of interminably warring secular and sacred religions (good-projects), universal pessimism strives hopelessly for the paradise of a supremely instantiated pessimus: things are getting so bad that there is no longer any time for them to get worse; things are so constantly-instantly worst that this is BEST. Cosmic pessimism is the mode of universal pessimism which can yet discourse with the world, which has not chosen silence and can spread the inconceivably BAD NEWS in an orderly form ( kosmos ) that the world can understand (if it wanted to). … the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world. That is what the world is (the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world). … a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos. Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. Pessimism’s love of fate is a blind love, a love of the blindness of being human in a cosmos conceived around the human’s eclipse, a heavy levitation in the contradictory space between the inescapability of its having been and the impossibility of its will-be. Pessimism’s song of futility is a sensible way of loving fate, with a minimum of eros, by means of a kind of matrimonial love of the fatal. As music, pessimism stays open to the irreparable and the inexorable without the binding of affirmation, in the apparent absence of the radical, infinitely surplus will that absolute amor fati seems to require. Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? “Unless a man aspires to the impossible, the possible that he achieves will scarcely be worth the trouble of his achieving it. We should aspire to the impossible, to absolute and infinite perfection [….] The apocatastasis is more than a mystical dream: it is a norm of action, it is a beacon for high deeds [….] For true charity is a species of invasion [….] It is not charity to rock and lull our fellow men to sleep in the inertia and heaviness of matter, but rather to arouse them to anguish and torment of spirit.” 3 … the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought. “The paroxysm of interior experience leads you to regions where danger is absolute, because life which self-consciously actualizes its roots in experience can only negate itself [….] There are no arguments [….] On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos [….] I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing .” 4 It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. According to the earliest account of Cecilia’s martyrdom, the beheading turns out worse. After not severing her head in three strokes, “the cruel executioner left her half dead” (seminecem eam cruentus carnifex dereliquit). 5 Cecilia’s effortlessly powerful endurance of the three strokes—a fitting icon for pessimism as an art of dereliction—demonstrates the “passivity and absence of effort [….] in which divine transcendence is dissolved.” 6 There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. Like words from a pre-waking dream. There is no reason to think that they are not. NOTES 1. Dante Alighieri. Vita Nuova . ed. and trans. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1995. 41:10. 2. Hafiz of Shiraz. The Divan . trans. H. Wilberforce Clarke. London: Octagon Press. 1974. 10.9. 3. Miguel de Unamuno. The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations . trans. Anthony Kerrigan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1972. 305-6. 4. E.M. Cioran. On the Heights of Despair . trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992. 9-10. 5. Giacomo Laderchi. S. Caeciliae Virg[inis] et Mart[yris] Acta. . . Rome. 1723. 38. 6. Georges Bataille. On Nietzsche . trans. Bruce Boone. London: Continuum. 2004. 135. See Nicola Masciandaro. “ Half Dead: Parsing Cecilia .” A Commentary on Eugene Thacker’s "Cosmic Pessimism" Gary J. Shipley Pessimism is the refusal to seek distraction, the refusal to remodel failure into a platform for further (doomed) possibilities, the refusal of comfort, the acceptance of the sickness of healthy bodies, the cup of life overflowing with cold vomit. If, as Ligotti suggests when discussing Invasion of the Body Snatchers , 1 humans prefer the anxieties of their familiar human lives to the contentment of an alien one, then the pessimist, we could argue, represents some perverted combination of the two, preferring (presuming he has a choice) the defamiliarization of human life to the contentment of its unquestioned mundanity. The quasi-religious state of mind that Wittgenstein would mention on occasion, that of “feeling absolutely safe,” 2 is a state the pessimist could only imagine being approximated by death, or perhaps some annihilative opiate-induced stupor. This Wittgensteinian commingling of certainty and faith looks every bit the futile gesture, a mere rephrasing of collapse or partial collapse. The only certainty open to the pessimist is that of the toxic formula of life itself—a formula known and lacuna-free. Certainty, far from being the gateway to deliverance, becomes the definitive impediment; and the possibility of salvation, as long as it remains, becomes crucially reliant on postulations of ignorance, epistemic gaps, a perennial incompleteness: “the perfect safety of wooed death […] the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the miniscule unknown.” 3 The height of Leibniz’s Panglossian insanity nurtured the idea that our knowing everything—via the universal calculus—could be accurately described a triumph, as opposed to a nightmare in which our every futility is laid bare. Stagnancy and boredom are perhaps two of the greatest ills of Western civilisation, and the most potent pessimism tells you that you’re stuck with both. The most we can hope for, by way of salvation, is to throw open our despair to the unknown. The fact that Schopenhauer’s pessimism stopped short of morality and allowed him to play the flute, as Nietzsche complained, highlights the predicament of a man who despite having adorned nothingness with a smiling face still found himself alive. The demand here is that it be felt: a cross-contamination of intellect and emotion. The safety net of numerous parentheses makes for a failed philosophy, rather than a philosophy of failure. Depressives make bad pessimists, because, unless they choose to die, living will always infect them with necessities of hope, forcing them to find something, anything (all the various “as ifs”) to make existence tolerable. For as Cioran observed, while “[d]epressions pay attention to life, they are the eyes of the devil, poisoned arrows which wound mortally any zest and love of life. Without them we know little, but with them, we cannot live.” 4 And even when cured of our depressions we’ll find ourselves consumed, eaten alive by the hyper-clinical (borderline autistic) mania that replaces them: a predicament captured all too clearly in the microscriptual fictions of Robert Walser, where spectral men and women stifle their depressive madness with protective comas of detail, their failed assimilations buried beneath thick crusts of remote data. Like Beckett’s Malone their stories may have ended, but cruelly their lives have not. Pessimism is an extraneous burden (a purposeless weight) that makes everything else harder to carry, while at the same time scooping it out and making it lighter. If pessimism had a sound it would be the harsh non-noise of tinnitus—the way that every person would hear themselves if they refused their distractions long enough to listen: a lungless scream from the extrasolar nothing of the self. The music of pessimism—if indeed we can imagine such a thing—is the reverberating echo of the world’s last sound, conjectured but never heard, audible only in its being listened for. The one consolation of this hollow paradox of audibility being, that “he will be least afraid of becoming nothing in death who has recognized that he is already nothing now.” 5 The pessimist suffers a derangement of the real, a labyrinthitis at the nucleus of his being: he’s the stumbling ghost relentlessly surprised that others can see him. If Cioran’s refusal is manifested in sleep (when even saying ‘no’ is too much of a commitment), then Pessoa’s resides in the dreams inside that sleep. Pessoa chooses to exploit the fact that he’s being “lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied” 6 by growing more voids to live him. His is a Gnostic breed of sleep, “sleeping as if the universe were a mistake,” 7 a sleep that dreams through Thacker’s cosmic pessimism (“a pessimism of the world-without-us.”, “the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time” 8 ), through the critical error of there being anything at all when there could be nothing. The metaphysical pessimist is someone who, however well life treats them, still desires to wake from it, as from the poisonous air of a bad dream. Pessimism is a paradox of age, being simultaneously young and old; its youth residing in a refusal to accept the authority of existence (its rich history, its inherent beneficence), a refusal to “get over” the horror of what it sees with its perpetually fresh eyes, and its maturity in the unceremonious disposal of the philosophical playthings (those futile architectures) of adolescence. As Thacker remarks: “Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique.” 9 A sentiment shared with Pessoa, who duly categorizes those that choose to enact this futile struggle: “The creators of metaphysical systems and of psychological explanations are still in the primary stage of suffering.” 10 If the pessimist has shared a womb with anyone, it’s with the mystic and not the philosopher. As Schopenhauer tells us: “The mystic is opposed to the philosopher by the fact that he begins from within, whereas the philosopher begins from without. […] But nothing of this is communicable except the assertions that we have to accept on his word; consequently he is unable to convince.” 11 The crucial difference between the mystic and the pessimist is not the latter’s impassivity and defeatism, but his unwillingness/inability to contain in any way the spread of his voracious analyticity, his denial of incompleteness, his exhaustive devotion to failure. The truth of our predicament, though heard, is destined to remain unprocessed. Like the revelations of B.S. Johnson’s Haakon (“We rot and there’s nothing that can stop it / Can’t you feel the shaking horror of that?” 12 ) the pessimist’s truths are somehow too obvious to listen to, as if something inside us were saying, “Of course, but haven’t we gotten over that?” Pessimism is simple and ugly, and has no desire to make itself more complex or more attractive. The true moral pessimist knows that the Utilitarian’s accounts will always be in the red. He can see that for all his computational containments, his only honest path is a negative one, and that such a path has but one logical destination: that of wholesale human oblivion. Thacker notes how at the core of pessimism lies the notion of “the worst,” through which death is demoted by the all-pervasive suffering of a life that easily eclipses its threat. And so with doom made preferable to gloom, death begins to glint with promise, “like beauty passing through a nightmare.” 13 But even among pessimists suicide is, for the most part, thought to be an error. Schopenhauer, for instance, regarded suicide a mistake grounded in some fundamentally naïve disappointment or other. Pessoa too thought suicide an onerous escape tactic: “To die is to become completely other. That’s why suicide is a cowardice: it’s to surrender ourselves completely to life.” 14 There is a call here to be accepting of and creative with the puppetry of your being, an insistence that it’s somehow a blunder to attempt to hide in death from the horrors you find inlife. 15 Tied up with this perseverance is the slippery notion of the good death, for maybe, as Blanchot warns, suicide is rarely something we can hope to get right, for the simple reason that “you cannot make of death an object of the will.” 16 “Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete,” 17 and this is not simply because the project itself belies something yet to be disclosed, but because the project itself is a thing waiting. It waits on a cure it knows will not come, but for which it cannot do anything (as long as it continues to do anything) but wait. NOTES 1. See Thomas Ligotti. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race . New York: Hippocampus Press. 2010. 91. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein. “A Lecture on Ethics.” Philosophical Review . (74) 1. 1965. 8. 3. Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire . New York: Vintage. 1989. 221. 4. E. M. Cioran. The Book of Delusions . trans. Camelia Elias. Hyperion. 5.1. (2010): 75. 5. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 609. 6. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 67. 7. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 35. 8. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 68. 9. Ibid. 73. 10. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 341. 11. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 610-11. 12. B.S Johnson. “You’re Human Like the Rest of Them.” in Jonathan Coe. Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson . London: Picador. 2004. 177. 13. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 415. 14. Ibid. 199. 15. “Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.” Anne Sexton. No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose . ed. Steven Gould Axelrod. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1985. 92. 16. Maurice Blanchot. The Space of Literature . trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1989. 105. 17. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 75. (shrink)

In 1930, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) wrote one of his most well-known novels, San Manuel Bueno, mártir [Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr]. The novel is about the fictional character Manuel Bueno, a catholic priest from a small Spanish village who, despite being unable to believe the Christian claim that there is an after earthly death life, devotes himself to the spiritual care of his people, being thereby sanctified after his death. The aim of this paper is to (...) show that the guideline of San Manuel Bueno, mártir is the expression, in fictional, non-philosophical language, of the conception of religious faith Unamuno had already defended in his major philosophical work, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida en los hombres y los pueblos [The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations]. (shrink)

Apart from being one of the main and early receptors of Pragmatism, Miguel de Unamuno was particularly influenced by William James. The four books of the American philosopher that Unamuno read, Principles of Psychology, The Will to Believe, The Varieties of Religious Experience and Pragmatism, were a source of inspiration and influence in the development of Miguel de Unamuno’s thought.

The acknowledged masterpiece of Unamuno expresses the anguish of modern man as he is caught up in the struggle between the dictates of reason and the demands of his own heart.

From Plato's _Republic_ and Aristotle's _Poetics_ to Nietzsche's _The Birth of Tragedy_, the theme of tragedy has been subject to radically conflicting philosophical interpretations. Despite being at the heart of philosophical debate from Ancient Greece to the Nineteenth Century, however, tragedy has yet to receive proper treatment as a philosophical tradition in its own right. _Philosophy and Tragedy_ is a compelling contribution to that oversight and the first book to address the topic in a major way. Eleven new essays by (...) internationally renowned philosophers clearly show how time and again, major thinkers have returned to tragedy in many of their key works. _Philosophy and Tragedy_ aks why it is that thinkers as far apart as Hegel and Benjamin should make tragedy such an important theme in their work, and why, after Kant, an important strand of philosophy should present itself tragically. From Heidegger's reading of Sophocles' Antigone to Nietzsche and Benjamin's book-length studies of tragedy, _Philosophy and Tragedy_ presents an outstanding and original study of this preoccupation. The five sections are organised clearly around five major philosophers: Hegel, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Benjamin. (shrink)

This is the masterpiece of Miguel de Unamuno, a member of the group of Spanish intellectuals and philosophers known as the "Generation of '98," and a writer ...

De beste inzichten doen we op in een staat van indolentie. Sterker nog: luiheid, zo stelt Miguel de Unamuno, is een voorwaarde voor beschaving. Alleen wanneer anderen voor hem werken, is de luilak in staat zijn blik naar de sterren te richten en zich af te vragen waarom ze daar staan. De luilak valt zelden lof ten deel, terwijl men hem dankbaar zou moeten zijn voor zijn vruchtbare invallen: terwijl wij bedrijvig zijn, doet hij het denkwerk.

" Mais là où nous devons aller chercher le héros de notre pensée, ce n'est pas chez un philosophe ayant vécu en chair et en os, mais chez un être de fiction et d'action, plus réel que tous les philosophes : Don Quichotte. Car il y a un quichottisme philosophique, sans doute, mais aussi une philosophie quichottesque. Est-elle autre chose, au fond, celle des conquistadors, des contre-réformateurs, celle de Loyola, et surtout, dans l'ordre de la pensée abstraite mais sentie, celle (...) de nos mystiques? Et l'on ne peut dire que la philosophie de Don Quichotte fut exactement l'idéalisme : il ne combattait pas pour des idées. C'était le spiritualisme : il combattait pour l'esprit ". Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) s'inscrit dans la tradition de Pascal, de Kierkegaard et aussi de Nietzsche. Dans ce livre, écrit en 1912, l'auteur ne tente pas seulement de définir un christianisme qui se trouve souvent en marge des doctrines officielles, mais oppose également sa conception de l'homme et du monde à celles du rationalisme moderne. (shrink)

En momentos de zozobra y duda, de torpeza y desengaño, como los que corren, puede convenir volver la vista atrás e indagar en tiempos pasados de parecido tenor. Fijarse en épocas, como las que siguieron al malhadado 1898, de derrotas interiorizadas e inciertos mimbres de futuro, para vislumbrar propuestas críticas, reflexivas, como las que, a principios del siglo XX, hizo Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) arremetiendo contra los muchos extraños moradores de la política: la soberbia, el fulanismo o la ramplonería, (...) la fatuidad o el dogmatismo. (shrink)

Se reúnen en este volumen La agonía del cristianismo y una selección de los ensayos y artículos de Unamuno más directamente referidos a los temas y problemas religiosos."Más directamente" porque, en rigor, es el tema religioso el centro de la obra toda de Miguel Unamuno.

This book reprints a wide variety of articles and speeches for the first time since they appeared in Spanish and foreign journals and in clandestine broadsheets from France. Some censored material has been restored.