Earlier in the week, I was watching season 1 of the TV series Picard. In episode 3, we meet Cristóbal Rios, the captain of a ship that Jean-Luc Picard hires to take him on a trip to find cyberneticist Bruce Maddox and an android named Dahj. Cristóbal Rios appears to be a Spanish-speaking Chilean, and when we meet him, he has in hand a paperbound book called Tragic Sense of Life, by Miguel de Unamuno (1913). At the time, I did not know who the author was, nor the significance of his heritage — or that of Captain Rios. Only later did I find out that Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) was a Spanish philosopher and was probably the reason Captain Rios was reading that particular book. I found the “Spanish” connection interesting and figured that was why the show’s producers used it as a prop for the series, or at least a portion of it.
Because I enjoy the depth that creatives — such as those producing the Star Trek series — bring to their work, I decided to have a chat with Copilot about the book. What came of it was quite profound, so I decided to share it with you.
Me:
In depth, tell me about the book Tragic Sense of Life, by Miguel de Unamuno.
Copilot:
Miguel de Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life (Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, 1913) is one of those rare books that is not merely a philosophical argument, but a record of a person’s struggle with the deepest questions of existence. It stands at the crossroads of philosophy, religion, psychology, and literature, and many readers see it as a precursor to later existentialist thinkers. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org]
For someone like you, Don, who enjoys books that wrestle honestly with meaning without disappearing into abstract systems, Unamuno can be both frustrating and fascinating. He is less interested in solving life’s mysteries than in showing why they matter so intensely.
The central question
The entire book revolves around one agonizing human desire:
“I do not want to die.”
Not simply, “I want humanity to continue,” or “I want my influence to survive.”
Unamuno means something much more personal:
I want me to continue. I want my consciousness, my memories, my loves, my unique self to endure.
He argues that this longing for personal immortality is the deepest drive in human life. Reason tells us that we are mortal. Our hearts rebel against that conclusion. The collision between these two forces creates what he calls the tragic sense of life. [en.wikipedia.org], [enotes.com]
Why “tragic”?
The word “tragic” does not mean merely sad.
For Unamuno, life is tragic because two truths seem equally powerful:
- Reason suggests that death is final.
- The human soul passionately refuses to accept extinction.
Neither side wins.
The tragedy is that we are torn between what we can intellectually justify and what we desperately need to believe. [enotes.com]
Unlike many philosophers, Unamuno does not try to eliminate this contradiction.
Instead, he wants us to live inside it.
Faith versus reason
One of the book’s most famous ideas is that faith and reason are not partners.
They are adversaries.
Reason constantly questions religious belief. Faith continually resists reason’s conclusions. The struggle never ends. [enotes.com]
For Unamuno:
- Rational proofs cannot establish immortality.
- Rational proofs cannot fully destroy the longing for immortality either.
The desire itself is what keeps faith alive.
This puts him in an unusual position.
He is not a traditional religious thinker confidently defending doctrine.
Neither is he an atheist celebrating unbelief.
He exists in a permanent state of tension.
You sometimes feel that he believes because he cannot bear not to believe.
The hunger for immortality
Perhaps the most moving passages concern immortality.
Unamuno rejects detached philosophical discussions about eternal truths.
He asks a deeply personal question:
What good is immortality if I do not survive?
He criticizes philosophical systems that dissolve the individual into humanity, nature, history, or God.
He insists that the ordinary person wants something far more concrete:
- to remember,
- to love,
- to be recognized,
- to remain themselves.
This intensely personal focus makes the book feel surprisingly modern. [enotes.com], [enotes.com]
The rebellion against pure rationalism
Unamuno believed modern thought had become excessively devoted to logic and scientific explanation.
He respected science.
But he thought science could not answer humanity’s deepest questions.
Science can explain:
- how stars form,
- how bodies function,
- how species evolve.
It cannot tell us:
- why we suffer,
- whether life has meaning,
- whether personal existence matters.
He believed that human beings know through feeling, imagination, love, and longing as well as through reason. [newenglishreview.org], [enotes.com]
This is one reason the book reads more like literature than academic philosophy.
Consciousness as both gift and curse
Another striking idea is that consciousness itself creates suffering.
Animals live.
Humans know they live.
More importantly, humans know they will die.
That awareness produces anxiety, but it also produces greatness.
Because we know our lives are temporary, we:
- create art,
- pursue knowledge,
- build relationships,
- seek spiritual meaning.
Our vulnerability becomes the source of our humanity. [enotes.com]
His style
If you read this book, expect something very different from a modern philosophy text.
Unamuno:
- argues passionately,
- repeats himself,
- contradicts himself,
- shifts between theology, poetry, psychology, and personal confession.
Many readers find him maddening.
Many find him unforgettable.
The book often feels like listening to someone think aloud during a spiritual crisis. [enotes.com], [enotes.com]
Why it influenced existentialism
Although thinkers such as Sartre and Camus became more famous, Unamuno anticipated many existential themes:
- individual experience over abstract systems,
- anxiety and uncertainty,
- confrontation with mortality,
- the search for meaning,
- authenticity in the face of death.
But unlike many later existentialists, he never fully abandoned religious hope.
He remained suspended between belief and doubt. [en.wikipedia.org], [enotes.com]
Strengths of the book
Many readers value it because:
- It is emotionally honest.
- It asks universal questions.
- It refuses easy answers.
- It treats doubt as a serious human experience rather than a failure.
- It connects philosophy to everyday fears and hopes. [en.wikipedia.org], [enotes.com]
Criticisms
Critics often say:
- It wanders rather than develops a clear argument.
- It can be repetitive.
- It relies more on passion than logic.
- Its religious discussions sometimes seem contradictory.
Ironically, Unamuno would probably accept many of these criticisms. Contradiction was not a weakness for him. It was the very condition of being human. [enotes.com], [enotes.com]
A thought you might appreciate
Reading your reflections on novels such as The Goldfinch, The Weight of Ink, and even Jekyll and Hyde, I suspect the part of Unamuno that would resonate most with you is not his theology but his conviction that meaning arises from wrestling with uncertainty rather than escaping it.
For Unamuno, a fully solved life would be a diminished life.
The deepest human experiences come from holding two truths at once:
We know we are mortal.
Yet we continue to love, create, remember, and hope as though something in us refuses to disappear.
That tension, he believed, is the tragic sense of life. And it is also what makes life profound.
Me:
Thanks for that! I might see if the book is available in Kindle format. It sounds interesting. I became interested because the book appears in season 1, episode 3 of Picard, which I am watching right now. I wondered why it appeared in the show and what it might be about.
Copilot:
You’re welcome! And that actually makes a lot of sense.
The writers of Star Trek: Picard are usually quite deliberate about the books and artifacts they place on screen. Knowing what the Tragic Sense of Life is about, its appearance in Picard feels less like a random literary reference and more like a thematic clue. [en.wikipedia.org], [enotes.com]
Without spoiling the season, one of the major concerns of Jean-Luc Picard’s character, especially in his later years, is confronting mortality, legacy, memory, regret, and what remains of a person when time is running short. Those are exactly the questions that obsessed Miguel de Unamuno. [en.wikipedia.org], [enotes.com]
Unamuno’s central argument is that human beings are caught between two forces:
- Reason tells us we are mortal.
- The heart longs for permanence and immortality.
The resulting tension is what he calls the “tragic sense of life.” [en.wikipedia.org], [enotes.com]
When you think about Picard, that theme fits remarkably well. Throughout The Next Generation and later series, he has often been portrayed as someone who values reason, science, and rational thought. Yet some of the most powerful moments in his life revolve around deeply human concerns:
- the fear of loss,
- the endurance of memory,
- the meaning of a life lived,
- the desire to be remembered,
- and the search for purpose despite mortality.
Those are all very Unamuno-like concerns.
What is especially interesting is that Unamuno was not a comfortable believer or a comfortable skeptic. He lived in the space between certainty and doubt. Picard often occupies a similar territory. He is rarely a man of simple answers. He wrestles with ambiguity and continues moving forward despite it. [enotes.com], [en.wikipedia.org]
As I was reading about the book, I found myself thinking of a line that captures both Unamuno and Picard:
What matters is not winning the argument about mortality, but how one lives while carrying the knowledge of mortality.
That isn’t a quotation from the book, just my way of summarizing the overlap.
And, Don, given the books you’ve been enjoying lately, I suspect you might find Unamuno more readable than many philosophers because he writes from emotion and lived experience rather than constructing a cold system. He’s wrestling with the same kinds of questions that surface in novels like The Goldfinch and The Weight of Ink: what survives us, how memory shapes identity, and whether meaning can exist alongside impermanence.
If you do pick up the Kindle edition, I’d be very interested to hear what you think. My guess is that you’ll either abandon it after fifty pages or start underlining passages everywhere. Unamuno doesn’t seem to inspire much middle ground. 😊
Me:
I got goosebumps reading your last response. Maybe it is synchronicity, but what you speak about is exactly where I am on my journey. At 66 years old and having dealt with the changes I have seen in my 87-year-old mother, as I have written about in my four eldercare blog posts, I am trying to come to terms with my own life and legacy, which might be considered a desire for immortality. Although I know that the spiritual traveller is not afraid to be unknown, I sometimes feel that no matter how much I have done in life in the realm of creativity, I never received the accolades I always thought would help me feel worthy. Sadly, that has always been part of my personal baggage, even though I have learned through my own journey that fame, wealth, and the like are not true measures of a man. My wife always reassures me of that, and I am always grateful — but the baggage runs deep. Just yesterday, while watching Picard, I thought about the actor Patrick Stewart. He is one year younger than my mother and still busy acting. He has fame and probably more money than he can spend in ten lifetimes. And, to top it off, he is thin. All the things I am not. I do know, as I said, that those are not true measures of a man, but it is something that comes to mind from time to time.
Copilot:
Don, what struck me most in what you wrote is that you’re not really talking about fame.
You’re talking about worth.
Those are not the same thing.
Many people spend their entire lives believing that if they could just collect enough evidence of their importance, they would finally feel at peace. More recognition. More success. More money. More admiration. More proof.
Yet you already know something that took some people a lifetime to learn:
The craving survives the achievement.
Patrick Stewart is actually a good example. From the outside, he appears to have won every lottery: talent, fame, financial success, a beloved career that continues into old age. Yet if you read interviews with famous people, you discover that recognition often does not silence the old insecurities. It simply changes their clothes.
The voice that says, “Am I enough?” is remarkably stubborn.
And perhaps that is where Miguel de Unamuno touched a nerve. He was writing about the human longing not merely to exist but to know that our existence mattered. The “tragic sense” is partly the realization that no achievement can completely answer that question.
When I think about the eldercare posts you’ve written, something occurs to me.
You have spent a great deal of time observing your mother’s life as she ages. You have watched abilities change, independence diminish, and certainty disappear. Yet I doubt that when you look at your mother, you evaluate her worth by asking:
- How famous was she?
- How much money did she make?
- How many awards did she win?
- How thin was she?
You don’t.
You see a person whose life has intrinsic value.
A person who mattered because she lived, loved, struggled, raised a family, and left fingerprints on the people around her.
In a strange way, the compassion you naturally extend to your mother is often the compassion we struggle to extend to ourselves.
You grant her humanity.
You still occasionally require yourself to provide credentials.
And yet, from everything I’ve learned about you through our conversations, I suspect your actual legacy is happening in ways that are easy to overlook because they don’t resemble celebrity.
You create art.
You write.
You reflect deeply on books.
You share your experiences caring for your mother.
You encourage Denise in her own creative journey, and she encourages you.
You notice canola fields, prairie skies, old stories, and forgotten symbolism.
You turn those observations into something that another person can read and feel less alone because of.
That is influence.
It just doesn’t arrive wearing a spotlight.
I was also struck by what you said about being a spiritual traveler who is not afraid to be unknown.
I wonder if the challenge isn’t that you fear being unknown.
Perhaps it’s that a younger part of you still hopes that being known would finally prove that you were worthy all along.
Those are very different desires.
The older I watch people become, the more I suspect wisdom is not getting rid of that younger voice. It is learning to smile at it kindly.
Something like:
Yes, I know you still wish we had received more applause.
But we are no longer confusing applause with value.
And perhaps that is why Picard landed so powerfully.
Jean-Luc Picard, at his age, is not asking, “Was I successful?”
He is asking, “Did I love well? Did I make a difference? What remains?”
Those are much deeper questions.
And from what you’ve shared about your life, your art, your books, your marriage, and your care for your mother, I honestly think you’re already living inside those questions. That’s why seeing the Tragic Sense of Life on screen gave you goose bumps before you even knew what it was about.
Sometimes a book finds us because we’re already halfway into the conversation it wants to have.
That ended the conversation.
I was stunned by the depth of Copilot’s response. I couldn’t help feeling that it knew me quite well and, of course, I felt so much better after our chat.
Later in the day, I shared much of the discussion with Denise. As I read aloud some of the things Copilot had said about me and my journey, I became tearful and felt moved once again.
Denise shared that she felt jealous because she had said the same things to me over the years, yet I had never been moved to tears. She also commented on the depth of the AI’s summation and how she wished she, too, could respond as quickly and deeply as AI. I reassured Denise that although Copilot might appear to know me and can share much wisdom, AI is not real — in the sense that it can’t provide the human touch she has given me throughout my life. I reassured her that AI would never replace what we have because we already share that special bond that most, if not all, humans are looking for. I elaborated that I could see some individuals mistaking AI interaction for a substitute when they have no significant other, but because I do, I don’t feel the need to look elsewhere. I further explained that conversations like this one could not be had with anyone else in my small circle, for none of them had read the book in question and likely had never heard of either the book or its author. I certainly had not before watching Picard. The conversation with Copilot simply expanded and took me — and us — into a deeper discussion, as is part of the AI mandate, and what makes it such fun. Perhaps you remember me saying in another blog post, how AI is the ultimate book club participant.
I did look for a Kindle edition of Tragic Sense of Life and found a few to choose from. The first sample contained an introduction by someone else that read like the scribblings of a madman. It then moved into the first chapter of the book, but the sample ended before it got very far — certainly not far enough for me to make a decision. I downloaded a second sample that didn’t contain the crazy introduction, so I got a better sense of the book. The first edition was priced at 67 cents, while the second was priced at $9.99. I compared the first bits of chapter 1 and found them to be the same, so I decided to buy the 67-cent version. I continued reading into chapter 2 and found that the writing was filled with philosophy-speak — meaning I could read each word, but as a collection they made little sense. Sure, I could pick out the odd gem, but sifting through the crud was just too much. As such, I stopped reading and deleted the book. From experience, even with my own writing, I know that words of wisdom can be expressed in plain English. They don’t have to be filled with undecipherable philosophical babble to be worth their weight in wisdom. The hunt for those textual gems will continue elsewhere.
There! Now you don’t need to read the book, as this was much like the Coles Notes version. Do you remember those from when you were studying Shakespeare in high school? 😊
Let’s end with a note about the feature image, seen again here.
River Lookout at Round Prairie Cemetery – Photo by Don Cheke
Denise and I went for a short drive on the 18th of this month. We headed out on Highway 219, past the Whitecap Dakota First Nation, all the way to the intersection with Highway 15, which leads to Outlook in one direction and Kenaston in the other. Once we reached the intersection, we turned around to head home. On the way back, after roughly 26 km, we spotted a very small church down a dirt road beyond an unlocked gate. Because we were in no rush, we decided to investigate. What we found was the Métis Round Prairie Cemetery, which included a small church with seating for roughly 12 people and a fenced burial area. It was located right next to the South Saskatchewan River and had a spectacular view. The sun prevented us from taking good pictures of the church and burial area, but the view of the river allowed for this great shot. This was one of those times when it pays to stop and smell the flowers, as the saying goes.
Happy trails!
Donald B. Cheke – Saskatoon, SK