My iQuest Book

I am reading Miguel de Unamuno's Tragic Sense of Life for the iQuest book assignment. I will read roughly sixty pages a week in order to finish by January 28.

Unamuno is a late-nineteenth early-twentieth century Spanish author and philosopher, and Tragic is his major philosophical work originally published in Spanish in 1913. Earlier this year I read his novella "St. Manuel, the Good Martyr" about a priest who lives and dies in the service of God for selfless reasons despite his own faithlessness. This short story largely affected my religious outlook and deepened my interest in existential philosophy. I am excited to read Unamuno's longest, most well-known philosophical piece, a "masterpiece of Spanish literature" as I have heard. So far, I have read the first two chapters, and I have summarized three key points of each.

Chapter I: "THE MAN OF FLESH AND BONE"

1. The supreme object of all philosophy is the man of affection and feeling, the concrete man, the man of flesh and bone, not the abstract, rational creature. What differentiates man from other animals is feeling rather than reason.
2. The essence of this person of flesh and bone is the longing never to die, the longing to be himself indefinitely, the wish to eternalize his own flesh-and-bone experience. Of course, we all must die and this wish is irrational. Thus, all reason builds upon irrationalities.
3. Man is caught in a tragic deadlock between the head, which tells us we all must die, and the heart, which yearns to live forever. This unsolvable existential fact is the tragic sense of life. Consciousness is a disease because it disturbs the unity between reason and passion.

Chapter II: "THE STARTING POINT"

1. The two human instincts, reason and faith, are the foundations of individuals and whole "peoples".
2. Man has debated and will continue to debate at length the origin of knowledge and of mankind itself, but it is certain that we desire knowledge not for the sake of knowledge but in order to live and maintain life. Self-preservation and self-perpetuation, the tragic sense of life, is the starting point of all philosophy and all religion.
3. Truth for truth's sake is to deceive oneself or to wish to deceive others, and to wish to deceive others in order to deceive oneself. Underlying the pursuit of truth is the pursuit of immortality

Unamuno wrote this book to explain the paradox of man, to define the tension between reason and faith as the tragic sense of life and yet claim that this tension is essential and universal. I have always been fascinated by Unamuno's work and his passionate rhetoric is strangely satisfying. Unamuno was in fact introduced to me by my iQuest teacher mentor, Mr. King, and I look forward to finishing this book and discussing it with him.