“The truth is that reason is the enemy of life.” Regarded as Spain’s most influential thinker, Miguel de Unamuno was a prolific writer of novels, essays, poetry, and plays. Tragic Sense of Life, published in 1912, was his most important philosophical work and is now generally considered one of the great existential texts of the 20th century—as provocative a work in its own right as anything written during the post-war period by Sartre, Camus, or Heidegger. In it Unamuno rejects the life of reason for one of intense passion, faith, and love, establishing Don Quixote as the great role model for contemporary man. Wisdom Classic Editions. The goal of SophiaOmni’s Wisdom Classic Editions is to reintroduce important works by great thinkers from the past that have something significant to say about the human condition and our place in the universe.
This is the masterpiece of Miguel de Unamuno, a member of the group of Spanish intellectuals and philosophers known as the "Generation of '98," and a writer whose work dramatically influenced a wide range of 20th-century literature.
His down-to-earth demeanor and no-nonsense outlook makes this 1921 book a favorite of intellectuals to this day, a practical, sensible discussion of the war between faith and reason that consumed the twentieth century and continues to rage in the twenty-first century.
de Unamuno's philosophy is not the stuff of a rarefied realm but an integral part of fleshly, sensual life, metaphysics that speaks to daily living and the real world.