Embracing Hopelessness by Miguel A. De La de Torre

Author:Miguel A. De La de Torre [De La Torre, Miguel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fortress Press
Published: 2017-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

PART II: Unamuno and the Paradox of (Un)belief

How does one believe in God’s promise in the midst of a historical account whose empirical evidence makes any belief in God problematic? To curse God and die is very appealing, even though I fear nihilism. Unexamined belief fails to seriously wrestle with the reality of pain and suffering. So for Christians to speak of hope in the midst of Auschwitz’s or Dachau’s rationally and scientifically constructed death factories is cold-hearted, callous, and cruel. While recognizing nothing redemptive about unjust pain and suffering, we have to say that it is the wretched who have an epistemological privilege, a deeper and fuller understanding of life, because they are more in touch with their mortality. The paradox is that only by embracing the absurdity of mortality can life be experienced.

We turn again to the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, who also wrestles with, but more importantly, embraces the paradox of human existence. Unamuno’s employment of paradox creates a trickster methodology of thought that is contradictory and ambiguous. The thinker is free from the restraints of dogmatic, linear, rational thought. While the Eurocentric Enlightenment battles between the premodern faith and modern science, Unamuno attempts to harmonize these polar opposites to arrive closer to whatever truth might be. The employment of paradox can be demonstrated in his poem La oración del ateo (The Atheist Prayer):

You hear my supplications, God who does not exist,

and in your nothingness gather my complaints,

You who never leave poor men

without consolation of deceit. You resist not.

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