Reflection for November 4 - Unamuno and Heidegger

Class discussion this week was dictated by Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. Beginning with Unamuno’s philosophical struggle between logic and passion, we are presented with the notion that strife in living is inevitable. That is, everyone at some point is going to encounter struggles within their everyday lives; however, certain conditions can produce more or less strife. For example, Unamuno wants to point out that “but whoever is convinced that he is sailing, perhaps without a set course, on an unstable or sinkable craft, will not be daunted if he finds the deck giving way beneath his feet and threatening to sink” (Unamuno in Solomon, 158). Yet, I would stress the point that this does not necessarily entail that the individual without a set course in his life is without any worries. This type of person still experiences pain and strife within his or her life that is certainly complex and confusing, but I feel that Unamuno wants it to be understood that this pain will be substantially less than that of the fanatics. But who are the fanatics?

            Unamuno wants to express that individuals tend to get their motivations and morals from a sort of pre-packaged set. We can identify these as “dogmas” which people tend to give in and identify with. However, to Unamuno, this is not something that should be praised with approval. Rather, “virtue, therefore, is not based upon dogma, but dogma upon virtue, and it is not faith which creates martyrs but rather martyrs who create faith” Unamuno in Solomon, 159). That is, the doctrines by which each and every one of us use to describe ourselves is nothing more than an attempt to justify our actions to others. Unamuno describes how this is so when describing how a man may justify his morals in fear of being damned into eternal hellfire. However, Unamuno wants to show that even in the absence of believing in hellfire, or the idea that he may experience such a place, this man will simply come up with another alternative for explaining and justifying his actions or morals.

            From here I still want to return to this notion of the fanatics. Unamuno states that “whoever bases or thinks he bases his conduct – his inner or outward conduct, his feeling or his action – on  a dogma or theoretical principle which he deems incontrovertible, runs the risk of being a fanatic” Unamuno in Solomon, 158). Even so, why would a fanatic experience more pain? To Unamuno, the amount of pain can be associated with life can be identified with the groundwork for which one justifies their actions. A fanatic subscribes to a dogma to justify the way in which they live, however if she finds the groundwork for her morals to begin to shake, the fall appears to be much more tremendous than someone who is not a fanatic. Therefore, it would appear as if the idea of the fanatic is to be associated with more pain than someone who believes that “by acting thus he will make it true, prove it true, and that by thus acting he will create his spiritual world” (Unamuno in Solomon, 158).

            Turning to Heidegger, we understand that there is a sense of a similarity to that of the philosophical approach of Unamuno. To be quite honest, I found Heidegger’s writing style to be more than a bit confusing and difficult to read. Nevertheless, I still want to return to one of the very first class discussion questions from group 16, that being whether or not we should believe that a dog has da-sein. To answer this, I found it odd that no one appeared to desire to return to Kierkegaard’s examples of the ethical and aesthetic life. I would indeed agree that one of the greatest determinants of da-sein would be the capability of understanding mortality. Along with this, since human beings appear to be the only creatures that know that we are going to die, I would argue that only humans can have da-sein. Yet, I feel that this does not go far enough.

            I feel that another determinant for da-sein should be the ability to contemplate life. Interestingly enough, this appears to be the kind of determinant that we saw from the ethical life portrayed by Kierkegaard. Compared to the aesthetic life that can most easily be explained within the life of an animal such as a dog, I would argue that many of the same qualities of the ethical life are indeed contained within da-sein. To counter what an individual during class discussion stated about dogs fearing for their life when they retreat: why would you have any reason to believe that the dog understands mortality? Wouldn’t it be more likely that the dog fears the experience of pain, rather than the extremely complicated and philosophical notion of life and the desire to preserve it?

            I believe that da-sein has an extremely important impact on the further examination of authentic and inauthentic life. While I want to return to this in more detail on next week’s blog, I feel that it is important to bring up the point that Heidegger more than likely would feel that modernization has created the circumstances in which people are thrown into a particular society that has created certain social standards. These standards tell us how to live, and how to shape our morals. To Heidegger, this would be the creation of an inauthentic life; a life that should be compared to one which can be won. By winning, it is meant that we have chosen our own value in absence of external influence. But more on this later.