There is something which, for lack 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 so much flow from ideas as determine them, even though afterwards, as is
manifest, these ideas react upon it and confirm it. Sometimes it may originate in a chance
illness – dyspepsia, for example; but at other times it is constitutional. And it is useless to speak, as we shall see,
of men who are healthy and men who are not healthy. Apart from the fact that there is 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, in comparison with the ass
or the crab, a diseased animal.
Consciousness is a disease.
Among men of flesh and bone there have been
typical examples of those men who possess this tragic sense of life. I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine,
Pascal, Rousseau, René,
Obermann, Thompson,[1]
Leopardi, Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard – men burdened with
wisdom rather than with knowledge.
And there are, I believe, people who possess
this tragic sense of life also.
It is to this that we must turn our attention,
beginning with this matter of health and disease.
Miguel de Unamuno, The
Tragic Sense of Life (1912)[2]
[1]
John Thompson, author of The City of
Dreadful Night [translator’s note].
[2]
Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of
Life, tr. J.E. Crawford Flitch (New York: Dover, 1954), pp.17, 18. The above selection concludes Chapter 1, “The
Man of Flesh and Bone”. It is worth
pointing out that Unamuno’s work was published the same year as the sinking of
the Titanic.
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