Consciousness is a disease.

Taken as an Unamunian aphorism, “Consciousness is a disease” points to the idea that reflective self-awareness can feel like an affliction: it intensifies suffering by making us lucid about finitude, contradiction, and death. In Unamuno’s existential-religious thought, the human being is torn between reason (which coolly analyzes and often negates consoling beliefs) and the “hunger for immortality” (the will to persist, to matter). Consciousness, in this sense, does not merely illuminate life; it can corrode spontaneity and peace, producing anguish precisely because it refuses to let us rest in simple instinct or unexamined faith.