Unamuno's Mirror-Games: On the Seeming Omnipotence and Meaningfulness of Writing in the Grammatical Void

1.IntroductionImagine as vividly as possible that you suddenly become blind and that, once you have comforted yourself with other sense impressions, you go deaf. Imagine that you subsequently lose not only your senses of touch, smell and taste, but also the very feeling of your members, so that you remain as an inert thing that cannot even opt for suicide. You still might take refuge in your thoughts and memories, but imagine that they gradually fade until you preserve nothing more than the mere awareness of existing. But imagine that you also end up losing such awareness. Then you are not even entirely alone, for you are already nothing, to the extent that you are not even aware of your nothingness. This fear of ceasing to exist beats in every line of the Spanish philosopher, playwright, poet and novelist Miguel de Unamuno (1994), who considered it impossible to live quietly while truly taking for granted that one's own consciousness will disappear: in his opinion, thinking about the extinction of consciousness provokes a vertigo that cannot be cured by reason. Thus, it is not biological or physical death but the dissolution of consciousness which terrifies Unamuno (1954), for he was convinced that the value and meaning of everything depends on consciousness: indeed, consciousness constitutes the guarantee to be and exist both for the universe and for the individual. On the one hand, the world exists inasmuch as it is reflected and known by consciousness, which also gives it a purpose. On the other hand, Unamuno emphasizes, following Senancour, the impossibility of conceiving ourselves as not existing. Although he is not able to imagine how nothingness - understood as the extinction of consciousness - would be like, he was gripped by the idea that his consciousness, and by extension his identity or feeling of being himself, may dissolve forever.This terror of death was motivated to a large extent by the deep mark that the deaths of some relatives, especially that of his six-year-old son in 1902, left on him. Yet terror of the dissolution of consciousness was also largely due to the fact that Unamuno associated the consciousness of being oneself with the effort to survive and go on being, that is, the effort of constantly trying to flee from being nothing. His work was addressed to readers sensitized to the possibility of losing their consciousness, but it was also intended to alert the passive individual who is indifferent to such idea. For Unamuno assumed that, once his reader had fallen prey to terror of extinction, he would aim at being all, as that is the only means to escape from being nothing. However, the objective should not consist in ending up being all, but in aiming or wishing it without ever succeeding: if someone ended up being all, he would no longer be himself because his individuality would have mixed with all and it could not be distinguished as an unique and nontransferable one. Starting from the intuition that this aim of being all should never be fulfilled, Unamuno will focus his work on the clash or embrace between reason, which denies the possibility of maintaining consciousness after death, and the wish that we become immortal and do not lose our consciousness even after having died. In his opinion, the certainty that death entails the dissolution of personal consciousness would make our lives impossible as much as the complete conviction that personal consciousness persists after death, as both would plunge us into the deepest quietism. Yet he thinks that each of us has doubts about both alternatives. Far from trying to remove this uncertainty, Unamuno wants to fan the flames of such doubt because he locates in the very basis of human life not an unconditional faith free from all doubt, but a faith which arises from doubt and uncertainty. The sense of life no longer lies in achieving a definitive goal - because establishing oneself in perfection would entail sinking into nothingness - but in continuously fighting uncertainty in order to maintain one's own consciousness. …