It’s glorious to be blogging for the first time--I finally found an author in this class with whom I can connect on a certain level. There's something about Unamuno that really resonates with me. See, I was raised in a religious household, attending church multiple times a week, and I was convinced that the Bible (all of it) was truth. Then high school happened, and my sprinkling of non-Christian friends forced me to face my own uncertainties. I couldn’t reason out the intricacies of Christianity to them because I began to see that certain portions of the Bible were not completely consistent throughout. I became Unamuno’s allegorical guy whose “ground [s]he thought firm begins to rock,” trembling because my worldview had been utterly shattered (158). My remaining adolescence consisted of my denial of the fervent faith that used to possess me.
Was it faith, though? I recall in Search class last year, we discussed the meaning of faith. Doesn’t having faith require a certain transcendence of logical bounds? Can the belief in something that has been rationally established be termed faith? Isn’t faith’s full name on the dotted line something akin to “Faith, Leap of”? This weaves in Kierkegaard’s whole shebang on the teleological suspension of the ethical, for Abraham wouldn’t deserve the “Father of Faith” epithet if he didn’t have to shuck his attachments to the ethical (plural, public) realm. Abraham’s entire logical jump was based on the belief that he would kill Isaac and Isaac would also live to produce the nation of peoples Yahweh had promised Abraham. That’s some heavy stuff. I only had to contend with a few discrepancies in my holy text. All the same, mine was not a real faith until it was tested.
My favorite part of The Tragic Sense of Life, though, is the discussion of infinitude. I found the idea that truth lay in the subjective realm very palatable, and it felt like Unamuno’s assertion that “whoever desires immortality with a passion and even against all reason deserves it most of all” was directed at the 16 year old Christine. Granted, this principle of unguarded passion would have been lost on me then, but I did have a grasp of the concept of transcending the objective and scientific. My focus back then was not on the infinitude of my existence, but on God’s (alleged) everlasting love. Essentially, I was operating under the conviction that faith (regardless of how paradoxical or irrational) in some Being who loved me without end was preferable to the actual love of finite, fickle human beings. This unfounded thirst for the infinite was my subjective way of reaching for the real truth.
One last gush of Unamuno lovin’: “A human God—and we can conceive of no other—would never reject whoever could not believe in him with his head; it is not in his head but in his heart that the wicked man says that there is no God, that is: he does not want God to exist”(160). Unamuno effectively soothes the whirling mind of the skeptical Christian. In claiming that God, a human God (after all, we were made in his image, right?), empathizes with our human disconnect between reason and faith, Unamuno justifies and absolves many Christians of the discomfort they face in juggling their two warring spheres.
Unamuno ends with a command to be happy. Isn’t it strange how the Christian philosophers are the most hopeful (see Lacey’s post)?
1 comment:
I liked this post Christine. I find Unamuno's philosophical bombs to be pretty enthralling. I appreciated how he ends with a (somewhat random) command for people to pursue happiness. I also find his view (like many other philosopher's) of truth being another form of subjectivity.
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