Unamuno was convinced that out of the tragic sense of life—the despair and pain that unfulfilled religious longing entails—emerges heroics deeds, hope, and love.

These two authors offer an important counter-discourse for our twenty-first century aversion of suffering, but the ultimate purposes of that suffering are very different in Unamuno and Kierkegaard, and those goals should be clear to anyone who would take up the possibility of seeing positive ends for suffering.

“unhealed wound”

Unamuno claims that truth must be lived and his truth, his faith is querer creer (to want to believe).

One can reasonably ask if Unamuno’s stance of privileging doubt over faith keeps him from the more robust Christian faith of Kierkegaard and Pascal.

Unamuno wrote, “Philosophy is a product of the humanity of each philosopher, and each philosopher is a man of flesh and bone who addresses himself to other men of flesh and bone like himself. And, let him do what he will, he philosophizes not with the reason only, but with the will, with the feelings, with the flesh and with the bones, with the who

Philosophy begins, and in my view must end, as an attempt to answer real questions asked by real people.

“Creer en Dios es anhelar que le haya y es, además, conducirse como si le hubiera; es vivir de ese anhelo y hacer de él nuestro íntimo resorte de acción. De este anhelo o hambre de divinidad surge la esperanza; de ésta la fe, y de la fe y la esperanza, la caridad”

It is important to record the actions taken by this Spanish philosopher that affected the trajectory of Spanish history, actions that sprang from his faith and his longing for God to exist.