|
Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo
The Spanish philosopher and
writer Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo
(1864-1936) was the earliest
20th-century thinker to arrive
at a perspective on man and the
world that can be described as
existentialist.
The total
preoccupation of the
philosophy of Miguel de Unamuno
was "the man of flesh and bone"
- the concrete individual with
his passions, needs, hopes, and
fears as the context within
which human thinking and
speaking occur. Unamuno was
specifically concerned with the
problem of faith in the modern
world - "the agony of
Christianity." He concluded that
the split between faith and
reason, heart and head, could
not be healed by reason; that
modern man must remain in a
paradoxical and
agonizing tension between
faith and doubt, his religious
beliefs only passionate hopes in
the teeth of skepticism. Unamuno
intensely lived out this modern
predicament of faith in his
own life, and he has been called
the Spanish Kierkegaard.
Unamuno was born on Sept. 29,
1864, in Bilbao. Of Basque
descent, he was raised and
educated in the traditional
piety and provincial learning of
19th-century Spanish
Catholicism. From 1875 to 1880
he attended the Instituto
Vizcaíno de Bilbao. In 1880 he
entered the University of
Madrid, where for the first time
he was thrown into a
cosmopolitan world of
stimulating and sharply
conflicting ideas. He received
his baccalaureate degree in
filosofía y letras in 1883
and his doctorate in 1884.
During his university days
Unamuno ceased being a
practicing Catholic and espoused
the scientific outlook and
methods that he found in the
works of leading European
philosophers of the day. At this
time he also began learning a
number of languages in order to
be able to read books in their
original language.
Marriage and Professorship
Unamuno returned to Bilbao in
1884 and spent 6 years trying to
secure a professorship at a
university. During this period
he began writing articles in his
professional field, philology,
but he was also beginning to
explore philosophical matters.
These years also witnessed a
prolonged courtship between
Unamuno and his childhood
sweetheart, Concepción Lizárraga,
whom he was unable to marry
until he had secured a
university appointment. At this
time he began to raise serious
questions about the
adequacy of scientific
positivism as a
philosophical outlook and to
turn in an
existentialist direction.
Always centrally concerned with
language, he found that the
vocabulary of love used by the
actual "man of flesh and bone"
simply could not be reduced to
scientific categories. Even more
sharply, it was the acutely
personal
contemplation of death as
the great existential limiter of
love and of life that led him to
a philosophical outlook and
method that concerned itself
wholly with the concrete
individual and with his rich
vocabulary of desires and
meanings, of which the language
of science was only one.
In 1890 Unamuno secured an
appointment as professor of
Greek language and
literature at the
University of Salamanca, and
the following year he married
Concepción and went immediately
to Salamanca to assume his
scholarly duties. In 1897 he
underwent a decisive religious
crisis whose outcome was a
return to faith, although not to
the traditional teachings of
Roman Catholicism but to an
intensely personal, lifelong
religious struggle that found
its resources both in the
Spanish mystics and in the great
Protestant spiritual leaders
Martin Luther and Søren
Kierkegaard.
First Important Publications
Unamuno's years at Salamanca
were tremendously productive.
His Life of Don Quixote and
Sancho, a study of the
literary figure who seemed to
Unamuno to symbolize the "soul
of Spain, " was published in
1905. His best-known work,
The Tragic Sense of Life in Men
and in Peoples, appeared in
1913. In it he explored man's
"hunger of immortality, " which
he found could not be justified
or satisfied on purely rational
grounds but only through
paradoxical and passionate
affirmation of God and eternity
by a faith and hope that
continually battled with doubt
and despair.
From 1901 to 1914 Unamuno was
rector of the University of
Salamanca. He was relieved of
this position because he
publicly favored the Allies in
World War I. Always
politically outspoken, in 1924
he was exiled to the
Canary Islands because of
his forceful opposition to the
Spanish military dictatorship of
Miguel Primo de Rivera.
Unamuno managed to escape to
France. Although pardoned a
short time later, he refused to
return to Spain. He lived first
in Paris and then, after 1925,
in the border town of Hendaye.
While in Paris, Unamuno wrote
one of his major works, The
Agony of Christianity,
published in 1925. It presents
several variations on one of his
favorite Gospel passages, "Lord,
I believe; help my
unbelief!" (Mark 9:23),
discussing modern man's agony of
faith and doubt.
Final Years
After the fall of Primo de
Rivera, Unamuno returned to
Spain in 1930 and was reinstated
at the University of Salamanca.
When the Spanish Republic was
proclaimed in 1931, he was
officially
exonerated and elected a
member of the new Parliament.
When the
Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, he found himself in
Falangist territory. For several
months he said nothing and was
allowed to continue as rector.
But in October, when a
ceremonial assembly at the
university was used by Francisco
Franco's spokesmen for vicious
political propaganda, Unamuno
publicly denounced the Falangist
as having only brute force and
not "reason and right" on their
side. He was immediately removed
as rector and kept under house
arrest until his death from a
heart attack on Dec. 31, 1936.
Unamuno's prolific literary
production included essays,
novels, and poems as well as
technical works on a wide
variety of philosophic,
artistic, religious, and
cultural themes. Very few of his
writings have been translated
into English. In addition to the
books already mentioned, his
The Christ of Velásquez
(1920), a study, in verse, of
the Spanish painter, is
available in English, as are a
book of poems and a volume of
three short novels, Three
Exemplary Novels and a Prologue
(1920).
|
