‘Nullum Hominem a Me Alienum Puto’: The Agonic Humanism of Miguel de Unamuno

For Unamuno, true humanism cannot rest on an abstract idea of humanity but must affirm the concrete individual, the man of flesh and bone. To affirm man is to affirm his personal, ‘agonic’ consciousness: the inner struggle between rational scepticism and vital feeling. Man is torn between reason, which reveals the abyss of his finitude and mortality, and life, which drives his longing for immortality. From this irreconcilable conflict arises the ‘tragic sense of life’, the very condition of philosophizing, in which the concrete man is both subject and object.