“Neither is the longing for immortality saved, but rather dissolved and submerged, by agnosticism, or the doctrine of the unknowable. …The unknowable, if it is something more than the merely hitherto unknown, is but a purely negative concept, a concept of limitation. And upon this foundation no human feeling can be built up.”

—  Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), V : The Rationalist Dissolution

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Neither is the longing for immortality saved, but rather dissolved and submerged, by agnosticism, or the doctrine of th…" by Miguel de Unamuno?
Miguel de Unamuno photo
Miguel de Unamuno 199
19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher 1864–1936

Related quotes

Terence McKenna photo

“I think people have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality, that we're surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable and nobody knows what's out there.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Spacetime Tsunami http://www.deoxy.org/t_sunami.htm, Interview with Carla Sinclair, bOING bOING #10.
Variant: I think people have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality, that we're surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable and nobody knows what's out there.
Context: I think that people don't understand. As the Firesign Theater used to say, 'Everything you know is wrong.' But that is a very liberating understanding, because if everything you know is wrong, then all the problems you thought were insoluble can be framed differently. And there's a way to take the world apart and put it back unrecognizably. We don't really understand what consciousness is at the really deep levels. With some of the tryptamine hallucinogens, you see into possibilities where questions like, 'are you alive?' 'are you dead?' 'are you you?' seem to have been transcended. I think people have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality, that we're surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable and nobody knows what's out there.

F. J. Duarte photo

“Personally, I find the concept of a "final theory," or a "theory of everything," rather limiting. The fun of discovery will most likely last as long as the human race continues.”

F. J. Duarte (1954) Chilean-American physicist

in [F. J. Duarte, Laser Physicist, Optics Journal, 2012, 978-0-9760383-1-3, 154]

Immanuel Kant photo

“I maintain that in every special natural doctrine only so much science proper is to be met with as mathematics; for… science proper, especially of nature, requires a pure portion, lying at the foundation of the empirical, and based upon à priori knowledge of natural things. …the conception should be constructed. But the cognition of the reason through construction of conceptions is mathematical. A pure philosophy of nature in general, namely, one that only investigates what constitutes a nature in general, may thus be possible without mathematics; but a pure doctrine of nature respecting determinate natural things (corporeal doctrine and mental doctrine), is only possible by means of mathematics; and as in every natural doctrine only so much science proper is to be met with therein as there is cognition à priori, a doctrine of nature can only contain so much science proper as there is in it of applied mathematics.”

Immanuel Kant book Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science

Preface, Tr. https://books.google.com/books?id=OCJLAAAAMAAJ Ernest Belfort Bax (1883)
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786)

Karl Barth photo

“We must be clear that whatever we say of God in such human concepts can never be more than an indication of Him; no such concept can really conceive the nature of God. God is inconceivable.”

Karl Barth (1886–1968) Swiss Protestant theologian

Dogmatics in Outline (1949)
Context: When attempts were later made to speak systematically about God and to describe His nature, men became more talkative. They spoke of God's aseity, His being grounded in Himself; they spoke of God's infinity in space and time, and therefore of God's eternity. And men spoke on the other hand of God's holiness and righteousness, mercifulness and patience. We must be clear that whatever we say of God in such human concepts can never be more than an indication of Him; no such concept can really conceive the nature of God. God is inconceivable. <!-- p. 46

John Muir photo

“Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.”

John Muir book My First Summer in the Sierra

Terry Gifford, EWDB, page 204
1860s, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869

Leon Uris photo

“Research to me is as important, or more important, than the writing. It is the foundation upon which the book is built.”

Leon Uris (1924–2003) American novelist

Explaining how all his novels were researched; quoted in his Guardian obituary, 2003 http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2003/jun/25/guardianobituaries.books

Bernhard Riemann photo

“The concept-systems of antithesis are concepts that are indeed thoroughly determined by negative predicates but are not positively representable.
Just because a precise and complete representation of these concept-systems is impossible, they are inaccessible to direct investigation and elaboration by our reflection. They may, however, be regarded as lying at the limit of the representable, i. e., we can form a concept-system lying within the representable, which passes over into the given system by simple change of magnitude ratio. By abstracting from the ratios of the quantities, the concept-system remains unchanged in case of transition to the limit. At the limit itself, however, some of the correlative concepts of the system lose their susceptibility of being represented, and those, indeed, that mediate the relation between other concepts.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

General Relation of the Concept System of Thesis and Antithesis
Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Edward de Bono photo

“The rejection process is incorporated in the concept of the negative. The negative is a judgement device.”

Edward de Bono (1933) Maltese physician

Source: Lateral Thinking : Creativity Step by Step (1970), p. 159.
Context: The rejection process is incorporated in the concept of the negative. The negative is a judgement device. It is the means whereby one rejects certain arrangements of information. The negative is used to carry out judgement and to indicate rejection. The concept of the negative is crystallized into a definite language tool. This language tool consists of the words no and not. Once one learns the function and use of these words one has learned how to use logical thinking. The whole concept of logical thinking is concentrated in the use of this language tool. Logic could be said to be the management of NO.

Immanuel Kant photo

“The concept of space, therefore, is a pure intuition, being a singular concept, not made up by sensations, but itself the fundamental form of all external sensation.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section III On The Principles Of The Form Of The Sensible World

Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
Context: Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries — a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world.

Related topics