“The tragic sense of life is the sense of the conflict between reason and feeling, between the desire for immortality and the impossibility of believing in it.”
“The tragic sense of life is the sense of the conflict between reason and feeling, between the desire for immortality and the impossibility of believing in it.”
Commentary
This formulation names the conflict that Unamuno places at the centre of human existence: the desire for personal immortality and the inability of reason to guarantee it. The book, which takes its title from this tension, argues that the struggle between faith and doubt is not an error to be overcome but the very condition of a mature religious life. Paul Ilie, in Unamuno: An Existential View of Self and Society (1967), argues that the tragic sense is the foundation of Unamuno's anthropology, in which the self is defined by its unfulfilled longing. Colin Smith's introduction to his Spanish-language editions shows how the book responded to the crisis of Spanish intellectual life after 1898. The English rendering reflects the translation tradition, and the Spanish text should be checked for exact wording.