Miguel de Unamuno

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo

(born Sept. 29, 1864, Bilbao, Spain — died Dec. 31, 1936, Salamanca) Spanish philosopher and writer. He served twice as rector of the University of Salamanca (1901 – 14; 1931 – 36); he was dismissed first for espousing the Allied cause in World War I and later for denouncing Francisco Franco's Falangists. Though he also wrote poetry and plays, he was most influential as an essayist and novelist. In The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Peoples (1913), he stressed the role spiritual anxiety plays in driving one to live the fullest possible life. His most famous novel is Abel Sánchez (1917), a modern re-creation of the biblical story of Cain and Abel. The Christ of Velázquez (1920), a study in poetic form of the great Spanish painter, is a superb example of modern Spanish verse.

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Biography: Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo

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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).

Biography

Miguel de Unamuno was born in the medieval centre of Bilbao, Spain, the son of Félix de Unamuno and Salomé Jugo. As a young man, he was interested in the Basque language, and competed for a teaching position in the Instituto de Bilbao, against Sabino Arana. The contest was finally won by the Basque scholar Resurrección María de Azkue.

Unamuno worked in all major genres: the essay, the novel, poetry and theatre, and, as a modernist, contributed greatly to dissolving the boundaries between genres. There is some debate as to whether Unamuno was in fact a member of the Generation of '98 (an ex post facto literary group of Spanish intellectuals and philosophers that was the creation of José Martínez Ruiz — a group that includes Antonio Machado, Azorín, Pío Baroja, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Ramiro de Maeztu and Ángel Ganivet, among others).

In addition to his writing, Unamuno played an important role in the intellectual life of Spain. He served as rector of the University of Salamanca for two periods: from 1900 to 1924 and 1930 to 1936, during a time of great social and political upheaval. Unamuno was removed from his post by the government in 1924, to the protest of other Spanish intellectuals. He lived in exile until 1930, first banished to Fuerteventura (Canary Islands), from where he escaped to France. Unamuno returned after the fall of General Primo de Rivera's dictatorship and took up his rectorship again. It is said in Salamanca that the day he returned to the University, Unamuno began his lecture by saying "As we were saying yesterday, ...", as Fray Luis de León had done in the same place four centuries before, as though he had not been absent at all. After the fall of Rivera's dictatorship, Spain embarked on its second Republic, a short-lived attempt by the people of Spain to take democratic control of their own country. He was a candidate for the small intellectual party Al Servicio de la República

The burgeoning Republic was eventually squashed when a military coup headed by General Francisco Franco caused the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Having begun his literary career as an internationalist, Unamuno gradually became a convinced Spanish nationalist, feeling that Spain's essential qualities would be destroyed if influenced too much by outside forces. Thus for a brief period he actually welcomed Franco's revolt as necessary to rescue Spain from radical influence. However, the harsh tactics employed by the Francoists in the struggle against their republican opponents caused him to oppose both the Republic and Franco. Unamuno said of the military revolt that it would be the victory of "a brand of Catholicism that is not Christian and of a paranoid militarism bred in the colonial campaigns", referring in the latter case to uprising of Franco's forces in Spanish Morocco.^[1]

As a result of his opposition to Franco, Unamuno was effectively removed for a second time from his University post. Also, in 1936 Unamuno had a brief public quarrel with the Nationalist general Millán Astray at the University in which he denounced both Astray and elements of the Francoist movement. He called the battle cry of the rightist Falange movement—"Long live death!"—repellent and suggested Astray wanted to see Spain crippled. One historian notes that his address was a "remarkable act of moral courage" and that he risked being lynched on the spot. Shortly afterwards, he was placed under house arrest, where he remained, broken-hearted, until his death ten weeks later.^[2]

Fiction

Unamuno wrote the following books, in chronological order:

Paz en la guerra (Peace in War) (1897) — a novel that explores the relationship of self and world through the familiarity with death. It is based on his experiences as a child during the Carlist siege of Bilbao in the Third Carlist War.
Amor y pedagogía (Love and Pedagogy) (1902) — a novel uniting comedy and tragedy in an absurd parody of positivist sociology.
El espejo de la muerte (The Mirror of Death) (1913) — a collection of stories.
Niebla (Mist) (1914) — one of Unamuno's key works, which he called a nivola to distinguish it from the supposedly fixed form of the novel ("novela" in Spanish).
Abel Sánchez (1917) — a novel that uses the story of Cain and Abel to explore envy.
Tulio Montalbán (1920) — a short novel on the threat of a man's public image undoing his true personality, a problem familiar to the famous Unamuno.
Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo (Three Exemplary Novels and a Prologue) (1920) — a much-studied work with a famous prologue. The title deliberately recalls the famous novelas ejemplares of Miguel de Cervantes.
La tía Tula (Aunt Tula) (1921) — his final large-scale novel, a work about maternity, a theme that he had already examined in Amor y pedagogía and Dos madres.
Teresa (1924) — a narrative work that contains romantic poetry, achieving an ideal through the re-creation of the beloved.
Cómo se hace una novela (How to Make a Novel) (1927) — the autopsy of an Unamuno novel.
Don Sandalio, jugador de ajedrez (Don Sandalio, Chess Player) (1930).
San Manuel Bueno, mártir (Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr) (1930) — a brief novella that synthesizes virtually all of Unamuno's thought. The novella centres on a heroic priest who has lost his faith in immortality, yet says nothing of his doubts to his parishioners, not wanting to disturb their faith, which he recognizes is a necessary support for their lives.

Philosophy

Unamuno's philosophy was not systematic, but rather a negation of all systems and an affirmation of faith "in itself." He developed intellectually under the influence of rationalism and positivism, but during his youth he wrote articles that clearly show his sympathy for socialism and his great concern for the situation in which he found Spain at the time. The title of Unamuno's most famous work, Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida (The Tragic Sense of Life) An important concept for Unamuno was intrahistoria. He thought that history could best be understood by looking at the small histories of anonymous people, rather than by focusing on major events such as wars and political pacts.

Unamuno's Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida as well as two other works — La Agonía del Cristianismo (The Agony of Christianity) and his novella "San Manuel Bueno, mártir" — were included on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of the Catholic Church until the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.

Unamuno summarized his personal creed thus: "My religion is to seek for truth in life and for life in truth, even knowing that I shall not find them while I live."

Poetry

For Unamuno, art was a way of expressing spiritual problems. His themes were the same in his poetry as in his other fiction: spiritual anguish, the pain provoked by the silence of God, time and death.

Unamuno was always attracted to traditional meters and, though his early poems did not rhyme, he subsequently turned to rhyme in his later works.

Among his outstanding works of poetry are:

Poesías (Poems), (1907) — his first collection of poetry, in which he outlined the themes that would dominate his poetics: religious conflict, Spain, and domestic life
Rosario de sonetos líricos (Rosary of Lyric Sonnets) (1911)
El Cristo de Velázquez (The Christ of Velázquez) (1920) — a religious work, divided into four parts, where Unamuno analyzes the figure of Christ from different perspectives: as a symbol of sacrifice and redemption, as a reflection on his Biblical names (Christ the myth, Christ the man on the cross, Christ, God, Christ the Eucharist), as poetic meaning, as painted by Diego Velázquez, etc.
Andanzas y visiones españolas (1922) — something of a travel book, in which Unamuno expresses profound emotion and experiments with landscape both evocative and realistic (a theme typical of his generation of writers)
Rimas de dentro (Rhymes from Within) (1923)
Rimas de un poeta desconocido (Rhymes from an Unknown Poet) (1924)
De Fuerteventura a París (From Fuerteventura to Paris) (1925)
Romancero del destierro (Ballads of Exile) (1928)
Cancionero (Songbook) (1953, published posthumously)

Drama

Unamuno's dramatic production presents a philosophical progression.

Questions such as individual spirituality, faith as a "vital lie", and the problem of a double personality were at the center of La esfinge (The Sphinx) (1898), and La verdad (Truth), (1899).

In 1934, he wrote El hermano Juan o El mundo es teatro (Brother Juan or The World is a Theatre).

Unamuno's theatre is schematic; he did away with artifice and focused only on the conflicts and passions that affect the characters. This austerity was influenced by classical Greek theatre. What mattered to him was the presentation of the drama going on inside of the characters, because he understood the novel as a way of gaining knowledge about life.

By symbolizing passion and creating a theatre austere both in word and presentation, Unamuno's theatre opened the way for the renaissance of Spanish theatre undertaken by Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Azorín, and Federico García Lorca.

Confrontation with Millán-Astray

On October 12, 1936 the celebration of the Dia de la Raza had brought together a politically diverse crowd at the University of Salamanca, including Enrique Pla y Deniel, the Archbishop of Salamanca, and Carmen Polo Martínez-Valdés, the wife of Franco, Falangist General José Millán Astray and Unamuno himself. According to the British historian Hugh Thomas in his magnum opus The Spanish Civil War (1961), the evening began with an impassioned speech by the Falangist writer José María Pemán. After this, Professor Francisco Maldonado decried Catalonia and the Basque Country as "cancers on the body of the nation," adding that "Fascism, the healer of Spain, will know how to exterminate them, cutting into the live flesh, like a determined surgeon free from false sentimentalism."

From somewhere in the auditorium, someone cried out the motto "¡Viva la Muerte!" As was his habit, Millán-Astray responded with "¡España!"; the crowd replied with "¡Una!" He repeated "¡España!"; the crowd then replied "¡Grande!" A third time, Millán-Astray shouted "¡España!"; the crowd responded "Libre!" This was a common Falangist cheer. Later, a group of uniformed Falangists entered, saluting the portrait of Franco that hung on the wall.

Unamuno, who was presiding over the meeting, rose up slowly and addressed the crowd: "You are waiting for my words. You know me well, and know I cannot remain silent for long. Sometimes, to remain silent is to lie, since silence can be interpreted as assent. I want to comment on the so-called speech of Professor Maldonado, who is with us here. I will ignore the personal offence to the Basques and Catalonians. I myself, as you know, was born in Bilbao. The Bishop," Unamuno gestured to the Archbishop of Salamanca, "whether you like it or not, is Catalan, born in Barcelona. But now I have heard this insensible and necrophilous oath, "¡Viva la Muerte!", and I, having spent my life writing paradoxes that have provoked the ire of those who do not understand what I have written, and being an expert in this matter, find this ridiculous paradox repellent. General Millán-Astray is an invalid. There is no need for us to say this with whispered tones. He is an invalid of war. So was Cervantes. But unfortunately, Spain today has too many invalids. And, if God does not help us, soon it will have very many more. It torments me to think that General Millán-Astray could dictate the norms of the psychology of the masses. An invalid, who lacks the spiritual greatness of Cervantes, hopes to find relief by adding to the number of invalids around him."

Irritated, Millán-Astray responded: "¡Muera la inteligencia! ¡Viva la Muerte!" ("Death to intelligence! Long live death!"), provoking applause from the Falangists. Pemán, in an effort to calm the crowd, exclaimed "¡No! ¡Viva la inteligencia! ¡Mueran los malos intelectuales!" ("No! Long live intelligence! Death to the bad intellectuals!")

Unamuno, unfazed, continued: "This is the temple of intelligence, and I am its high priest. You are profaning its sacred domain. You will win[venceréis], because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince [pero no convenceréis]. In order to convince it is necessary to persuade, and to persuade you will need something that you lack: reason and right in the struggle. I see it is useless to ask you to think of Spain. I have spoken." Millán-Astray, controlling himself, shouted "Take the lady's arm!" Unamuno took Carmen Polo by the arm and left in her protection.

References

^ Helen Graham (2005). The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions. Oxford University Press. p. 68. ISBN 9780192803771. [1]
^ Antony, Beevor (2006). The Battle for Spain. London: Phoenix. pp. 111–113.

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Persondata
NAME	Unamuno, Miguel de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Unamuno y Jugo, Miguel de (full name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION	author and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH	September 29, 1864
PLACE OF BIRTH	Bilbao, Spain
DATE OF DEATH	December 31, 1936
PLACE OF DEATH	Spain

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