The questions are the questions we have asked since the dawn of consciousness: Who am I? To what end do I exist? “I,” answered Unamuno, “am a man.” Man - the individual human life - was the beginning of everything for Unamuno. “I am a man no other man do I deem a stranger.” It is a deeply personal account of one man’s anguish in the night. But The Tragic Sense of Life is more (or you might say less) than a work of philosophy. It was considered - in his time - to be a masterpiece, an influential work of early existentialist philosophy.

One hundred years ago, in 1913, Miguel de Unamuno published a book called The Tragic Sense of Life. Miguel de Unamuno would develop from his nightmare a messy, passionate philosophy of conflict, a philosophy of tragedy. Rather, he would embrace this angel as his wife had embraced him in his grief.

He would not turn his back on the Angel of Nothingness. The philosopher would build no system that would eliminate his inner turmoil. This “crisis of 1897” marked the crossroad of Miguel de Unamuno’s spiritual and intellectual journey. In a moment of supreme, of abysmal anguish, wracked with superhuman weeping, when she saw me in the claws of the Angel of Nothingness, she cried out to me from the depths of her maternal being, superhuman and divine: “My child!” I discovered then all that God had done for me in this woman, the mother of my children, my own virgin mother…my mirror of holy, divine unconsciousness and eternity. She held him and called out, “My child!” Years later, Unamuno wrote of this experience and the lasting effect of those two words. That night in 1897, Unamuno’s wife Concha found her husband sobbing. Miguel de Unamuno believed that this tragedy was his fault, divine punishment for turning away from his childhood faith and embracing scientific rationalism. Raimundo’s illness disabled him physically and mentally. Just a few months earlier, Unamuno’s infant son Raimundo had contracted meningitis. Miguel de Unamuno woke one night in 1897, tormented by dreams of falling into nothingness. Unamuno was a Spanish patriot and one of its most outspoken critics a Basque who was also a Spaniard a child who wanted to be a Catholic saint a philosopher who was suspicious of philosophy. The philosopher and poet was born in conflict. Miguel de Unamuno’s earliest memory was of a bomb landing on the roof of his neighbor’s house during Spain’s final Carlist War.

Miguel de unamuno tragic sense of life