ABSTRACT
Miguel de Unamuno believes that longing for immortality is what motivates nearly all human behavior. Unfortunately, in a world in which many people despair of ever achieving true personal immortality, we increasingly turn to mere “shadows of immortality” for comforting ideas about how our names, energy, or basic material substance will carry on in our absence. Unamuno advocates fighting against such despair, staying out of the shadows, and longing for personal immortality even when it seems impossible. Unamuno’s approach to this issue resembles, in some ways, Søren Kierkegaard’s struggle for the cultivation of subjective selfhood. At the same time, it also runs afoul of Friedrich Nietzsche’s derisive claims about immortality-seekers. Whereas Nietzsche sees longing for immortality as a sign of being too weak to make the most of mortal life, the more Kierkegaardian Unamuno counters that it is a sign of strong appreciation for life to demand, without surrender, that there be more of it. Given the proper understanding of Nietzsche’s claims about eternal recurrence, he and Unamuno might not be quite as far apart as it initially seems. However, exploring the latter’s critique of the former suggests an intriguing way of characterizing contemporary pessimists about the desirability of immortality.
