Conocimiento y realidad en Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida

Abstract

The relations between knowledge and reality in Unamuno’s major work show the leading role of experience in human life. The author outlines the main features of a phenomenology of experience, starting from inner sensation and perception, up to love and feeling as the form of self-awareness. The «hunger of inmortality» appears as the basic form of human experience. The sense of reality is partly constructed by man, according to the aims and interests of his personal and social life. Consciousness is ultimately the source of sense, inasmuch as the world can offer sense and finality only in relation to consciousness. The conflict between reason and life, so important in Unamuno, becomes evident in the struggle between the possible knowledge of man’s final destiny and the unpredictable reality of death. The lack of certainty about this is the starting point for a form of scepticism that maintains the tension between faith in inmortality and hunger for a conscious existence beyong death.