Passion for being. Creative pessimism and deserved hope in Miguel de Unamuno

Abstract

The bourgeois understanding of life implies extending it as long as possible, and postponing and forgetting death. Death is for Heidegger the most authentic possibility of human existence. This means that the human being exists in order to die. Unamuno’s hunger for immortality, his «to want to live», can only be understood from «to have to die». The conscience of the latter is precisely the tragic sense of life that Unamuno exposes. Total and radical death supposes the absence of meaning. The hunger for immortality is equivalent to the passion for being, that is, to a struggle for the meaning of existence. Nothingness is waiting for us, but Unamuno calls the human being to make death an injustice. He defends a morality of deserved hope, according to which the human being must act in such a way that he does not deserve to die. This is the creative pessimism that gives us hope. Deserved hope, which presupposes the passion for being, is the only foundation of meaning in human life. Deserving eternity and meaning, there is no other way to experience eternity and meaning.