https://doi.org/10.26142/stgd-2021-024
Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), a Spanish existentialist living at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, deals primarily with anthropological issues in his philosophical thoughts. He is interested in a specific human being, of flesh and blood (“de carne y hueso”), and above all in the teleological dimension of human existence. The desire for immortality is the basic longing of the human will, which seeks a way out of the labyrinth of nothingness to which man is condemned by matter. According to the Spanish philosopher, man needs God as a strong foundation for the realization of his desire for immortality.
The human being carries within himself not only the longing for infinity, but also the hardly expressible “Mystery” that we can identify with the inexpressible presence of the divinity in man. The desire for eternity is fuelled by this “Mystery” that constitutes a part of human nature.
In the essay “El secreto de la vida” (“The Mystery of Life”), written in 1906, the main directions of Miguel de Unamuno's thinking appear - the existence of God as an existential problem and the inability to understand Him directly by reason as the cause of the feeling of pathos.
Unamuno's philosophical and religious thinking is vitalist and existential. In it he refers to the philosophical intuitions of St. Augustine, Blaise Pascal and Søren Kierkegaard. His reflection on the theological dimension of existence is based on a religious element, which is expressed primarily in the author's in-depth reflections on “the longing for immortality” (“la ansia de inmortalidad”) and on “the sense of the pathos of human life”.
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