Unamuno_Masur

Miguel de Unamuno
Author(s): Gerhard Masur
Source: The Americas, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Oct., 1955), pp. 139-156
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/979615
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MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

THE history of Ideas is still terra incognitol on our map of
the Latin American world. We are aware of certain European

influences on the Hispanic American people, such as the Spanish
mystics, Rousseau and the French romanticists, or Comte and his
school of thought. But few comprehensive studies of Latin American
thought exist. Not even the impact of Spanish philosophy has been
fully evaluated. Although we know that the representative thinkers
of the generation of 1898, Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Luis de
Zulueta and others were widely read, we know little of their effect
on the writings of Alfonso Reyes, B. SanIn Cano, Francisco Romero
and Jose Carlos Mariategui, to mention only some outstanding ex-
amples. Yet Unamuno was deeply interested in Latin American
problems and his comments on BolIvar, Sarmiento and Latin American
literature command our attention. Many critics recognize this signifi-
cant relationship. Rafael Heliodoro Valle, for instance, remarks:
"No cabe duda de que Unamuno ha sido el escntor espanol que mas
curiosidad intelectual ha tenido hacia nosotros.''1

The following pages are an attempt to summarize Unamuno's sig-
nificance for contemporary thought in our Western world. They will
be complemented by a more detailed study of the irnpact of modern
Spanish philosophy on the Latin American scene.

Historical comparisons are hazardous. To parallel the development
of the Russian and the Spanish mind, as Salvador de Madariaga does
in his essay on Unamuno, will strike many as fanciful.2 Such an
approach does, however, shed light on the historical position of these
cwo countries. Both have occupied advanced outposts on the fron-
tiers of Western civilization; both had to free themselves from oriental
domination, and in the process both incurred the influence of the power
which they had overturned. If we speak of Russia as an Eurasian
state, we may with as much reason call Spain an Eurafrican nation.

1 Letter to the author. I also wish to express my thanks to Senor Rafael Heliodoro
Valle and Senores B. Cano, Luis Monguio and Americo Castro for the interest they have
s :lown m.my.lnqu.l.rles.

2 Salvador de Madariagas Semblanzas literanas contemporAneas (Barcelona, 1924),
pp. 127-161.

139

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140 MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

The parallel may be substantiated in still another way. Spain and
Russia have been at the same time "absent and present" on the
European scene, after the manner in which Wladimir Weidle has
recently defined Russia's parcicipation in Western culture.3 Today
Spain occupies a place of distinction in the intellectual and artistic
life of our time, but during the eighteenth and even during the
greater part of the nineteenth centuries her contributions to the creative
impulses of the West were scanty and her own productivity at the
best provincial. Making allowance for the singular figure of Francisco
Goya, there are few names that would be preeminent in a cultural
history of the Europe of these eras. Spain's long-overdue awakening
came at the close of the nineteenth century, and came, as is well-
known, in response to the final disappearance of the ruins of her im-
perial greatness during the Spanish-American war. In nreality this
awakening constituted a delayed reaction, ending the state of traumatic
shock in which Spain had lived ever since the days of Maipu and
Ayacucho which sealed the Latin-American independence.

After 1898 her goal could no longer be "a Dios infinitas almas, al
rey infinitas tierras." After almost two hundred years of intellectual
hibernation, Spain awoke to regain a cultural posiiion which had been
rightfully hers in the times of the Renaissance and the Counter-ref-
ormation. The men who accepted the challenge thrust upon them
have been called the generation of 1898, and though this may not be
an exacc appellation in the chronological sense, it is, nevertheless, an
almost indispensable designation for that group which encompasses
Unamuno and Menendez Pidal, Ganivet and Benavente, Blasco Ibanez
and Valle Inclan, P1o Baroja and the Machados, Luis de Zulueta and
Eugenio d'Ors, Ortega y Gasset and Picasso, and finally Azorsn him-
self, who coined the phrase.4 These men comprised the artistic and
intellectual nucleus of contemporary Spain. In terms of iime it is a
prolonged generation, but its representative men share in certain ex-
periences and perspectives, and they all partake in the "espiritu de
protesta," the spirit of protest which Azorsn thought to be their
familiar trait.

The generation of 1898 embraces personalities whose date of birth
falls within the decades between 1860 and 1890. Unamuno was
born in 1864, Ganivet in 1865, Picasso in 1881, and Ortega in 1883.

3 Wladimir Weidles Rgssia, Absent a?zd Present (New Yorks 1952).
4 Azorins Clusicos y modertzos (Madrid, 1919), pp. 233-257; Hans Jeschke, Die Genera-
tion von 1898 gn Spanien (Halle, 1934) p. 47. See also Jose Ferrater Moras Una7meno
(Buenos Airess 1944) pp. 13 ff.

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GERHARD MASUR 141

A generation is, of course, conditioned by the legacy of the past, just
as it will be influenced by the common experience of events which it
may encounter and react against in itS own life span. The inherstance
of the past which overshadowed the youth of the Spanish writers and
thinkers of 1898 was the long struggle between liberals and tradition-
alists which had filled the greater part of the nineteenth century.

There was, on the side of liberalism, the strange phenomenon of
Krausisnao, an idealistic movement which took iz inspiration from
one of the minor representatives of German idealism, Karl Christian
Friedrich Krause, who, hardly known in his own country, had by
some freak of history, become the decisive influence in Spain's
philosophical life. Krause was the fountainhead of ethical inspiration
for many of the liberal reformers.5

On the side of the traditionalists there were Jaime Balnes and
Donoso Cortes. But the most powerful herald of Spanish conservatism
was Menendez y Pelayo. In the face of the praise that the liberals
lavished on the advancement of contemporary European science he
dared to speak of Ciencia Espanola; he confessed his belief in the
Roman Catholic Church, (soy catolico, no nuevo ni viejo), and had
the temerity to defend publicly the Inquisition as a national institution.6

In spite of the fact that the two parties stem from opposite philo-
sophical roots, both were engaged in grappling with the same problem:
Spain and her attitude toward the European civilization of the nine-
teenth century. The generation of 1898 inherited from its predecessors
both the underlying socio-political problem of Spanish reality and
the polemic which it engendered. And this is where Unamuno takes
his start.

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS

Unamuno was born in Bilbao, capital of the Basque country. "I am
a Basque," he loved to say with a certain truculence, "which means I
am even more of a Spaniard than the other Spaniards." Questionable
as this dictum may be, there can be no doubt that Unamuno was proud
of his origins, which he has described both in fiction and in autobiog-
raphy. With Ignatius of Loyola he represents the mystical toughness
of this unique little country.7

5Jeschke, Op. Cit., pp. 9 ff.

61btd.,pp.19ff.

7 Miguel de Unamuno, Paz en la guerra (Buenos Aires, 1940); Rec?4erdos de rzzez y
de mocedad (Buenos Aires, 1945), pp. 75, 77.

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142 MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

When he was nine years of age Bilbao was besieged by the Carlistas,
one of the factions in Spain's perpetual civil war, and Unamuno never
forgot the smell of gunpowder and the terrifying sound of shells and
bullets. Perhaps he realized, as he inhaled the clouds of smoke, that it
might become his destiny too, to fight men though not with matertal
weapons. And in very truth he was all his life to be both besieger and
besieged, both liberal and tradiiionalist, like those who fought for the
possession of Bilbao.8 Otherwise his childhood offers but few clues to
a deeper understanding. The institutes of higher learning through
which he passed contributed less to the formation of his mind than
did the discussions which he read in newspapers and listened to in
cafes. All of them circled around the fucure of Spain.

In 1891 he became professor of Greek at the University of Sala-
manca, after having tried in vain to obtain a chair in philosophy or
psychology. Salamanca became more to Unamuno than a teaching
position. It was a profound experience, one of the most deep-reaching
of his life, through which he became absorbed in the landscape and
spirst of Castile. His life became identified with Salamanca because he
found there the landmarks and the silence of history, Spanish history
of course, which nourished his soul. In 1900 he was appointed rector
of the University, a position which he held in spite of temporary
demotions to his last lecture in 1934.9 Although his interest in Greek
was nothing peripheral to this great lover and connoisseur of words,
he steadfastly refused to become a specialist in Greek or in any
other branch of the humanities, because, as he expressed it, Spain
needed something very different from experts in Greek, or as Ortegs
y Gasset would later put it, because he abhorred the idiocy of the
specialist.10 It was in Salamanca that he reached the youth of Spain,
however, and it was there that he became the legendary "don Miguel"
to whom his compatriots referred with intimate pride. His friends
Salvador de Madariaga, describes him: "A tall, broad-shouldered, bony
man, with high cheeks, a beak-like nose, pointed gray beard . . .
ln the deep sockets under the high aggressive forehead,' prolonged by
short iron-gray hair two eyes like gimlets eagerly watching the world
through spectacles . . . a fighting expression, but of noble fighting,
above the prizes of the passing world.''1l Indeed don Miguel never

8Arturo Barea, Unfinuno (Cambridge, England, 1952), p. 10.
9 F. Madrid, Genio e ingenio de Miguel de Unamuno (Buenos Aires, 1942), pp. 50, 61.
l°Ernst Robert Curtius, Kritische Essays zur Europaischen Literatur (Bern, 1950),
p. 228.
11 Salvador de Madariaga, Introduction to Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Lffe
(London, 1926), p. x.

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GERHARD MASUR 143

was, nor did he aspire to become, a specialist. He tried his hand at
philology, philosophy, poetry and the novel. The metaphysical in-
qliiry and the sonnet, the literary and the descriptive essay all at-
tracted him at different nmes though with varying degrees of success.

Certainly his was no narrow world; he could claim citizenship in
poetry, philosophy, and literature alike. His critics have judged his
versatility variously. Some accuse him of having dispersed his energies,
while others praise him as being head and shoulders above all his
Spanish contemporaries, the greatest genius which Spain has produced
since the days of Cervantes.12 But almost everyone admits that the
picture which emerges from so many diversified undertakings shows
"a grandeza de conjunto," a greatness of the whole, even if the parts
are sometimes disappointing.13 To reveal the unity concealed in his
utterances is one of the aims of this essay.

PHILOSOPHICAL DEVELOPMENT

One of Unamuno's volumes is entitled Contra esto y aquello,
(Against This and That), and to the superficial observer Unamuno
presents himself here simply as the perpetual rebel who always had a
desire, and moreover a need to be in opposition. His work aroused
distrust among the liberals, who condemned his religious ideas, and
hostility among the traditionalists, who scented in him the heretic.
Certainly the spirit of protest was strong in his veins; nevertheless,
there is a coherent though dialectic structure in his work which cannot
be explained in terms of opposition.

In reality what Unamuno was striving for all his life was precisely
the reconcilianon of contradictions, the coincidentia oppositoruon,
just what the Spanish soul has been striving for throughout its history.
In words which strongly evoke the memory of Faust, he says in one
of his sonnets:

Busco guerra en la paz, paz en la guerra, E1 sosiego en la accion y en
el sosiego la accion . . .

ni martir quiero ser ni ser verdugo.14

12 A. del Rio, "Vida y obra de Unamuno," in Revista Hispanica Moderna, I (Oct.,

1934), 12-19.
13 Cesar Barja, Libros y autores contemporoineos (New York, 1935), p. 39.
14 Miguel de Unamuno, Rosario de sonetos liricos (Madrid, 1950), p. 44.

I search for war in peace, for peace in war;
s.epoose m actlon, m actlon repose....
Neither martyr nor hangman am I.

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144 MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

In 1895 Unamuno addressed Spain for the first time in a series of
essays which were later published under the title, En Torno al
Casticiswo, translated by Marcel Bataillon as Thle Essence of Spain.
It was Unamuno's first attempt to define Spain's greatness and misery,
her historical achievements and her isolation in the midst of European
civilization.l5 Unamuno struck in these essays one of the dominant
chords of his entire work, which, through his influence, became an
important leitmotis for the generation of 1898.

The book leads us directly into the stormcenter of the discussion
between tradiiionalists and liberals. Colstizo, or casticismo, is a Spanish
word of untranslatable meaning. Its original sense points to what is
racially pure, but it has gradually been taken to represent the ideal of
pure Castilian expression, the spiritual concept of an incorrupiible tra-
dition.16 To Unamuno tradition does not and can not mean the back-
wash of Spain's entire history as the narrow-minded traditionalists
would have it. Against an attitude of indiscriminate conservatism he
set the eternal tradition of Spain. Unamuno's polemic against the
historical minded Spaniards of his time resembles in many aspects
Nietzsche's Vow Nutzen und NGrcActeil dRer Geschichte. Only that
which is more than historical makes history importantX the suprahis-
torical essence, or as Unamuno puts it in happy coinage, "lo intra-
historico," the essence of history as opposed to the merely temporary
and transitory.l7 The eternal tradition is what the seers of every
people should search for, because it is this eternal tradition that makes
mankind what it is.l8 His fight is for a living scholarship against a
senile and sterile erudition. "Los mejores libros de la historia son
aquellos en que vive lo presente.''19

In applying these ideas to Spain Unamuno endeavored to ascertain
what her share of this tradition might be. And indeed Spain had
produced eternal values which were supranational and by the same
token suprahistorical. Other people have left books, says Unamuno;
we have left souls. But he was also aware that the contemporary
Spain which he was addressing had all but forgotten her mission, that
she had been hiding behind the protective walls which the Inquisition
had once constructed around her to prevent the free commerce of

15 Unamuno, Ensayos, I (Madrid, 1916), passim; Barea, Op. Cit., p. 15. Marcel Bataillon
entitled his translation of Unamuno's work, L'essence de l'Espagne.

6 Curtius, Op. C1t., pp. 225-226.
17 Unamuno, Ensayos, I, 48.

8 lbid., p. 43.

1:9 Ibid., p. 48. "The best books of history are those in which the present lives."

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GERHARD MASUR 145

ideas. Stagnation had been the result. But the Spanish soul was great
only when it opened itself to the four winds and poured itself out
into the world. When the valves were throttled Spain sank into
slumber. "We have not yet awakened."20 Unamuno's message to
Spain was, therefore, to open her windows to the currents of Europe
and to reject the fear of losing her personality, for only thus might they
"regenerate this moral steppe.''21 To europeanize became the watch-
word. Let us lock the tomb of the Cid, symbol of the traditionalists,
with seven keys. There is a true anxiety for national regeneration in
these early writings of Unamuno which precede the final decline of
Spain's power by three years.

However, so complex and paradoxical a thinker was Unamuno that
we have to be on our guard lest we interpret his youthful ideas too
much from a liberal viewpoint. In truth, Unamuno never quite ac-
cepted the tenets of our technological society, and very soon came to
reverse his opinion about the true nature of the relationship between
Spain and the rest of Europe. Although he was fully cognizant of
the advancement of the sciences, both theoretical and applied, he had
no great faith in the idols of the nineteenth century-reason, progress,
and civilization. He summarily cursed the progress that obliges us to
get drunk with business, work and science, and that does not hear the
voice of eternal wisdom which murmurs its vornitas vanitd;tum.22 From
there it was only a step to defend the technological backwardness of
Spain and even the ignorance of her people; not as ignorance and
backwardness, of course, but as the complement of a higher form of
knowledge. Eleven years after Unamuno had admonished the Spanish
people to europeanize themselves, he confessed, "Alone with my con-
science I ask myself: Am I European; am I modern? And my con-
science answers: No, you are not European, what is called European;
no, you are not modern either, what is called modern."23

And his reason for this strange admission? It was not simply that
Unamuno wished to take advantage of his "inalienable right to con-
tradict himself" that he reversed his previous stand. Of all tyrannies,
the most hateful to him was the tyranny of ideas, the "ideocracia"
which carries with it the "ideofobia" as an inevitable consequence.*i
And he wanted to be an ideoclasta, a "rompe ideas," a destroyer of

20 lbid., pp. 211, 214.

21 Ibid., p. 218.
22 Ibid., II, 168 f.

23 Ibid., VII, 161; Barja, op. cit., p. 50.
24 Ibid., II, 201, 205.

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.....

146 MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

ideas.25 Again the similarity to Nietzsche seems significant. And like
Nietzsche he wished to destroy ideas for the sake of a deeper under-
standing of life, which does not surrender to abstract concepts.

lruth, says Unamuno, 1S somethmg more 1ntlmate than tne con-
cordance of two concepts, something closer (entromable) than the
equation of intellect and things; it is the consortium of my spirit with
the spirit of the universe.26 Such statements are not in harmony with
a prediliction for the europeanization of Spain. Rather than european-
ize Spain, Unamuno would now like to "hispanizar" Europe. The
order seems reversedX and so are the moral values. Our flaws, he now
declares, are the roots of our excellencies. And the result of his re-
flections was a new afiRrmation of Spain and her intrinsic values: the
aenxadglgaenrgauteagdeinofdivpiadssuiaolnis.m27, the excessive imagination, the temperament

REVALUATION OF IDEAS

It is not surprising to learn that this new position led Unamuno to a
revaluation of the classical ideals of Spanish literature. Among the
many aspects of Spanish literature which may attract the student LS
its singular capacity in the creation of great human types. Actually
there is no other European literature which equals the Spanish in this
respect. Of the four great prototypes which Spanish poets have be-
gotten-the Cid, Segismulldo, Don Quixote, Don Juan-only two ex-
ercised a cleep fascination over Unamuno's mind: Don Quixote and
Segismundo, and it can be said that the second phase of his work is
dedicated to an interpretation of Spain through the looking-glass of two
classical works: LGR VidGr es szleno and Don Quixote.

We already know that of the values which Spain has to offer, the
highest one, according to Unamuno, is that of the soul. Segismundo,
the hero of Life is bq Drea>r, becomes for Unamuno the true symbol of
Spain. Calder6n's wisdom, so strangely resembling that of Prospere,
that life is a dream and that dreams are but dreams, becomes the ex-
pression of all the illusions in which the Spanish soul was and is steeped.
Now Unamuno praises the Middle Ages, for whicll he found inherent
and ample sympathy in his mind, and he expresses a desire for the re-
turn of this golden age in which the people worked, prayed, believed,

25 Ibid., p. 205.
26 Ibid., II, 210.
27 Barja, Op. Cit., p. 51.

28 Unamuno, Ensayos, II, 163; see also, ibid., I, 96.

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GERHARD MASUR 147

hoped, and slept.29 The references to Calderon's play as one of the
great metaphysical interpretations of mankind, appear in Unamuno's
work with almost monotonous repetition. But Cervantes' Quixote
comes even closer to the core of the Spanish soul. It is difEcult for
the foreigner to gauge in proper proportion the significance which this
unique book has achieved in the hearts of the Spanish-speaking people.
Unamuno himself does not hesitate to call it a Spanish Bible. As such
it deserves a mystical interpretation. And this is exactly what Una-
muno intends in his commentary on the lives of Don Quixote and
Sancho Panza.3 Unamuno declares himself "Quichotista," not
"Cervantista"; that is to say, he is aware that Cervantes' creation
surpassed the conscious intentions of its creator. Therefore, Unamuno
feels free to interpret Cervantes' hero in the way mediaeval theologians
interpreted religious texts. He acknowledged little of the ironic
outlook that Cervantes maintained throughout his work. Instead
he makes it a legend and almost a scripture. As one of his critics
remarks, Unamuno's novel reads like the vita of a saint.31 Indeed it is
the paraphrase of the life of "Our Lord, Don Quixote," and the
similes to Christ are abundant throughout the whole book.

Unamuno wishes to rescue the memory of the Quixote from the
hands of the philistines who have monopolized it. He wants to start
a crusade to liberate the tomb of the "caballero de la locura del poder
de los hidalgos de la razon." Only one who is touched by the same
madness as the Quixote can relate and explain his life and deeds.32

To call Unamuno's interpretaiion of the Quixote lopsided would
be an understatement. He confessed that he himself had little humor.
For Unamuno "humorism" was a vision of the world, not according
to Zola's famous definition as seen through a temperament, but as seen
through an illness.33 He, therefore, misses completely the atmosphere
of serene and smiling depth which enabled Cervantes to show great-
ness in ridicule and ridicule in greatness. Don Quixote takes on the
traits of a saviour and his madness is the madness of the Cross. He be-
comes for Unamuno the champion of all spiritual values against the
utilitarian and pragmatic outlook of the twentieth century. The wind-
mills which Don Quixote takes for giants are today's Diesel engines
and motor cars. There is altogether too much reference to the

29 Ibid., II, 172.

30 Unamuno, Vida de don Quixote (7th ed.; Buenos Aires, 1946).
31 Curtius, oA cit.; p. 232.
32 Unamuno, Vida de don Quixote, p. 270.
33 Unamuno, SoliZoquios y conversaciones (Madrid, 1911 ), p. 111.

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148 MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

actuality of contemporary Spain in Unamuno's comment, and his book
sdpoeceZse n*oroetref*ruSGlfti-altlZsi.ts promise: to give us a view of Cervantes' hero sub

Yet toward the end of this strange treatise, Unamuno touches a
chord which, though highly subjective, explains what he was trying to
find in Cervantes' epic. Don Quixote's madness is the madness not to
die "la locura de no morir." "Intercede then for me, O my lord and
patron, so that you, Dulcinea del Toboso . . . may take my hand and
lead me to the immortality of name and fame . . . And if life is a
dream, let me dream it without end."34 Cervantes' wisdom merges
with Calderon's in this craving to circumvent death, this desire to
survive through all eternity, to be immortal. "Creer es crear," to
believe is to create; with this guidon we have already crossed the
ibnrtiodgtheewthraicghic lseeandsse toof Ulifnea.muno's greatest undertaking, his inquiry

We cannot, however, depart from Unamuno's comments on Cer-
vantes and Calder6n without a final word about his personality as re-
vealed in them. Although reared in Spain, and rarely out of the
country except for the years of his exile, his horizon was universal
and his concern was that of his own convulsed and perturbed age.
But while he was a citizen of the world, he remained patriotic and
even provincial. His readings were vast, and because of his pro-
ficiency in languages, he was not obliged to depend on translations.
Yet there are traces of parochialism in Unamuno which have, we be-
lieve, prevented him from becoming as widely known as his originality
and his sincerity would seem to merit.

UNAMUNO AND THE NOVEL

A considerable part of Unamuno's work is devoted to the novel
form and to the descriptive essay, but it must be frankly admitted
that he was master of neither genre, at least to the point where his
works might reach universal interest. Although the present essay
does not attempt to do justice to Unamuno's novels, a brief considera-

tion of them does not seem out of place. With the exception of the

one dedicated to his childhood, he tried to do for the novel what
Strindberg and Ibsen had been doing for the drama, that is, to convert
it into an intimate revelation of psychological conflicts, outside of any
definite time or place and concerned only with the human substance
shown in its naked struggle and agony.35 But this writer, for one,

34 Unamuno, Vida de don Quixote, p. 270.

35 Unamuno, Paz a la guerra (2nd. ed.; Buenos Azes, 1940), p. 7.

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GERHARD MASUR 149

cannot admit that he reached his goal. Niebla, amor y pedagogza,
Som Manuel Bueno, Martir, read more like essays than novels; the theme
prevails over character and plot. The characters themselves are like
silhouettes on a screen, mere outlines without depth or color. Only
one of his novels, La tiol Tuliol, has force enough to cast a spell over
the reader's mind. In this description of an arrogant and passionate
spinster who preferred to destroy her love and her beloved rather than
admit humiliation, and who clouded all her acts with the incense of
religious duties, Unamuno came very close to picturing the type of
religious hypocrisy of which Mauriac has given so many striking

examples.36

A like reservation also holds good for Unamuno's pictures of the
Spanish landscape. He wanted to look at "nature as history and at
history as nature," he wished to interpret "landscape as language, and
language as landscape."37 But stripped of their rhetorical garment such
intentions seem to hold little significance. Very likely the Spaniard
will read Unamuno's evocations with emotions which the foreigner
will find hard to duplicate. Nevertheless, though our appraisal con-
firms Unamuno's rank as a Spanish writer, it must, by the same token,
indicate the difficulties he would encounter in gaining a proper ap-
preciation outside the Iberian peninsula.

One other characteristic of Unamuno's personality should be men-
tioned. His ideas, though vital for our time, were few. They are
always expressed with vigor, but they are burdened by the attenuating
monotony of repetition. He was quite aware that the core of his
intellectual concept was limited, and he spoke of his habitual reiteration
with a mixture of irony and arrogance very typical of himself and of

Spain.

UNAMUNO THE MYSTIC

Because the few basic ideas around which Unamuno's work revolves
are deeply rooted in the Spanish heritage of mysticism and saintliness,
he has frequently been linked, and indeed linked himself, with the
great Spanish saints, St. Ignatius, St. Teresa of Avila, and Fray Luis
de Leon. Unamuno was a mystic and a moralist who wanted to foment
"el culto a las almas no a las letras," the cult of souls not of books, but
he was a moralist sui generis and certainly Hisprniole generis.38

36 Unamuno, La tia T2dia (Madrid, 1921).

37Unamuno, Cuenca lberica (Mexico City, 1943), p. 19; see also Paisajes del alma
(Madrid, 1944).

38 Unamuno, Algunas consideraciones sobre la literatra Hispano-Americana (Buenos

Aires, 1947), p. 106.

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150 MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

As a Spanish moralist he was an individualist in outlook and judg-
ment, both on himself and on the world around him. Unamuno's end
as well as his beginning is the self, or to use the impressive Spanish
pronoun, "el Yo."39 It is the individual that counts, but the individual
as a complete and concrete human being, the whole man, the man of
flesh and bone, not simply the concept of the individual. This is the
axis around which all of Unamuno's philosophy rotates. But this con-
cept of the self-"este terrible Yo"-did it not cut Unamuno off from
his fellow men? He was conscious that it might make him the
"prisoner of himself," and with a daring somersault, he decided that
it was precisely this principle that united him with all men. He rings
a change on an epigram of the ancients to make this clear: "'Homo
sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto,' said the L-atin play-wnght.
And I would rather say, 'Nullum hominem a me alienum puto: 'I am
a man; no other do I deem a stranger.' S40 In this manner he establishes
the principle that the self, or the man of flesh and bone, is the one
basic experience which all human beings share. This is a truism, and
to this length everyone is constrained to agree with Unamuno. His
real philosophy begins only when he advances toward the interpreta-
tion of the self. Man is an end in himself, not a means; man should
not be sacrificed to humanity; in reality, man should not be sacrificed to
anything since his highest desire is to survive. But man, he thinks, is
not assured of survival, and this is the question that disturbs him more
than any other. The uncertainty of his survival makes man tragic
and gives him "the tragic sense of life."

Unamuno lists a large group of thinkers and poets who have been
typical examples of this tragic sense of life: Marcus Aurelius, St.
Augustine, Pascal, Chateaubriand, Senancour, Leopardi, Vigny, Lenau,
Kleist, Amiel, Quental-and Kierkegaard. When Unamuno, in 1912
undertook to circumscribe man's position in the universe, he belonged
to the few who were then cognizant of the solitary depth of the
Danish philosopher. His own position as well as his philosophical
affinity made Unamuno a god-father of twentieth century existential-
ism. If this philosophy pretends to be more than a passing fad, if it
insists on expressing the grievous concern that contemporary man feels
to be the basis of his innermost quest, it must acknowledge Unamuno's
mment. agnum opus as one of the way-stations on its pathway of develop-

39 Unamuno, Sonetos, p. 147.

401bid., p. 147; Unamuno, El sentimiento tragico de la vida (Madrid, 1912), English
ftrroamnsFlliattciho'sntrbanyslaGti.onE.. Crawford Flitch (London, 1926), p. 1. All quotations are taken

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GERHARD MASUR 151

"Whence do I come, and whence comes the world in which and by
which I live? Whither do I go and whither goes everything that
environs me? . . . Such are the questions that man asks . . . And if
we look closely, we shall see that beneath these questions lies the
wish to know, not so much the 'why' as the 'wherefore,' not the
cause but the end.''4l Such was, of course, the quest of all the saints,
but Unamuno, son of the twentieth century, had lost the firm meta-
physical ground on which the saints could build their visions and
their hopes. The old Christian business of saving one's soul was still
his, but the answers once given could no longer satisfy him. He lived
in a world of scientific truth which did not admit of any conclusive
proof but factual evidence. But what proof could there be of im-
mortality, and what basis could there be for man's hope of survival?
The fact that science refused to recognize man's urge to be immortal
as anything but wsshful thinking, "the future of an illusion" as Freud
put it, led Unamuno to take a new position. "For living is one thing
and knowing is another; and . . . perhaps there is such an opposition

between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational,
not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And

this is the basis of the tragic sense of life."42

The old conflict between faith and reason is thus converted for the
man of the twentieth century into a conflict between life and reason.
But Unamuno was not simply a vitalist like Nietzsche, Bergson or
Dilthey. Life does more than supersede reason; the conflict between
the two forms the basis for Unamuno's tragic sense wherein he finds
the true status of human beings. Life and reason are compelled to seek
association and mutual support, and this involves struggle.43 I will not
make peace between my head and my heart, cries Unamuno; rather

let the one aS;rm what the other denies . . . I shall live by contradiction.
Unamuno erects himself on the ground, if ground it may be called, of
uncertainty, doubt, perpetual wrestling with the mystery of our final
destiny, mental despair, and the lack of any stable foundation. If it is
a solution, it is the solution of despair.44 tJnamuno's hope against
hope, his belief against belief, is, in more than one way, a representative

position of our time. His credo quia abszzrdum est states the troubled
feeling of our age. In his tragic sense of life there moves the fear of

41 Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, p. 32.
42 Ibid., p. 34.

43 See the introduction by Flitch to Unamuno's Essays and Soliloquies (New York,

1925), pp. 23-24.

44 Flitch, o p. cit.

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152 MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

annihilation which tortures so great a part of contemporary mankind.
Unamuno expressed the loneliness of Western man as like that of the
first born son who trembles at having lost his birthright. Constantly
torn between rational pride and cosmic submissiveness, his importance
in the universe has diminished in direct proportion to his knowledge of
itS laws. He can no longer believe himself to be God's favorite son,
and even less the lord of creation; he is, he feels, only an apparently
meaningless by-product of cosmic forces which have initiated his life
and will in turn destroy it. Pascal expressed a similar feeling when
he spoke of being terrified by the silence of infinite space, and Kierke-
gaard went so far as to say that the rational interpretation of life would
of necessity lead to suicide. Unamuno frequently quotes Senancour's
Oberman, who observed, "Man is perishable, but if we have to perish,
if nothingness awaits us, let us not act as if that were justice."46

In so openly and desperately stating the metaphysical deadlock
into which man has maneuvered himself, Unamuno touched our time
to the quick. "It is my task to plunge all life into unquiet and long-
ing," he is quoted as saying} and in The Tragic Sense of Life he has
indeed gone a long way toward his goal. He was one of the first to
point to the insoluble antinomies of life which later in Jaspers' work
achieved such significance. The final objective, then, was unattain-
able according to Unamuno, yet man could not give up the pursuit.
Here again his Spanish background breaks into his philosophy:
Unamuno feels that, though he speaks for all mankind, he expresses
essentially the philosophy of his own people, the philosophy of Don
Quixote.4t "My religion is to seek truth in life and life in truth, even
though knowing full well that I shall never find them as long as I
live; my religion is to wrestle unceasingly and unwearyingly with
mystery; my religion is to wrestle with God from nightfall until the
tbarineaabklei."n4g7 of the day . . . and at all hazards I seek to scale the unat-

Unamuno's comprehension and appreciation of man's tragic position
were more resportsible for making him one of the first of the existen-
iialists than the solution he proposed for man's escape from his dilemma,
since his solution will inevitably strike many as obsolete. For
Unamuno, the longing not to die, the hunger for personal immortal-
ity, the effort whereby we tend to persist indefinitely in our own

4465 IUbinda.,mpu.n3o0,9.The Tragic Sense of Life, pp. 11, 43, 115.

47 Unamuno, Essays (Trs. Flitch), pp. 156-157.

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GERHARD MASUR 153

being, is the effective basis of all knowledge. He therefore remains a
prisoner of the self. " 'I, I, I, always I,' some reader will exclaim, 'and
who are you?' I might reply in the words of Oberman . . . 'For the
universe, nothing-for myself, everything.'"48 The salvation of man
thus becomes the center of Unamuno's emotions and thoughts, but a
salvation not so much from sin as from death. His philosophy re-
mains steeped in Catholicism, but it is heretic not dogmatic Catholicism.
From his agnostic preoccupation with death he appeals to Christianity,
but his Chrisiian faith is vacillating and heterodox.49 His imaginative
anticipation of death, his desire to get, so to speak, a preview of it
already here in life, seems yet another eminently Spanish trait. Just
as the Spanish soul can never resign itself to the finality of death, just
so does Unamuno rebel against it. Despair, "the master of impos
sibility," becomes the instrument, not so much for a sacrifice of the
intellect as for an intellectual volte face. Love is the answer,
Unamuno's answer. "Love is the child of illusion and the parent of
disillusion: love is consolation in desolation; it is the sole medicine
against death for it is death's brother.... And desiring God's exis-
tence . . . is the means whereby we create God, that is, whereby God
creates Himself in us, manifests Himself to us, opens and reveals Him-

self to US."54

The traglc sense of life, then, is for Unamuno the foundation and
the only proof of God's existence. To many Unamuno's speculaiion
will seem inadmissible; his insistence on the survival of the ego may
appear almost childish in view of the certainty of physical dissolution.
Yet many others will admire and uphold the courage which caused
Unamuno to become a witness to man's desire to be immortal, to
eternalize himself, a desire which is so deeply rooted in man's mind
that, once exiled from its religious abode, it takes refuge in such sub-
stitutes as fame, family, humane eSorts, or patrioiic acts. At least
don Miguel would not settle for ersatz solutions, and he will be re-
membered, if for nothing else, as having voiced man's yearning for
immortality with the true ring of a heretic who would not renounce
hope and a mystic who was not willing to decry reason.51

It would seem appropriate here to mention Unamuno's last book,
separated by twelve years from The Tragic Sense of Life: Lol Agon

48 Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, pp. 36, 11.
49 Julian Marias, Miguel de Unmmuno (Madrid, 1943), pp. 21-22, 156-157.

50 Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, pp. 132, 194.
BlFor the criticism of Unamuno's religious contradiciions, see Curtius, Mora, and

Marias, opera citata; see also Baria, Op. cit., p. 68.

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154 MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

del Christia7zismo.52 Although it is less coherent and less convincing
in its argument, it reveals a position similar to the one taken in his
previous book. The agony of Christianity represents the agony of
Unamuno's own perturbed soul where he found no simple or clearcut
alternative, but where he did discover faith in the midst of doubt,
struggle in the midst of peace, life in the midst of death. We observe
the same violent encounter between two divergent tendencies of
Unamuno's mind, the inclination toward traditional religious faitl
and the impulse toward the analytical rationalism of modern thought.
But a final consequence of his position is revealed to the observer in
this book. The tragic sense of life does not cause him to become
pessimistic or resigned. On the contrary, the feeling of uncertainty
that overcasts life produces a spirit of desperate combat and heroic
activity. To believe is to create, and it is in the process of human life
that this creativity unfolds itself. Man is not born with a soul; he
dies having one if he has made himself a soul. The goal of life is to
give oneself a soul, a soul that is one's own work.53

Thus we have come full circle, and return to Unamuno's initial
effort-to arouse Spain. His audience had grown to include the whole
of the Occident, but he remained what Giordano Bruno had wished
to be, an awakener of sleeping souls, a man who continued to comfort
the restless and provoke the indolent.54

THE POLITICS OF UNAMUNO

The figure of Unamuno may not be relinquished without a brief
mention of his role in Spanish politics. He was a nationalist in the
same way that Fichte was one. He wanted Spain to be the vessel of
those supreme values in which he himself believed. He once ad-
dressed his countrymen as Africans, and at their protests, assured them
that it was better to be first-rate Africans than to be second-rate
Europeans. But he also defended the British right to hold Gibraltar,
and during World War I he sided with the Allied Powers. He was
not less outspoken about Spain's domestic aSairs, and in 1901 drew a
prison sentence for his criticisrns. The lenient Alfonso XIII later
suspended the judgment, but the dictator, Pnmo de Rivera, was less
willing to overlook Unamuno's vagaries, and in 1923 exiled him to the
Canary Islands. - After living there for a short time, Unamuno made

52Unamuno, La agonta del Cristianis7no (Madrid, 1931); first published in French
(Paris, 1930).

5w3 Baria, op. cit., pp. 96-97.
54 Flitch, op. cit., pp. 96-97.

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GERHARD MASUR 155

his escape and went to Paris where he forrned a close association with
Duhamel, Valery and Jacques Chevalier. The European conscience
had not yet hardened to the outrages of dictatorship and Unamuno's
case was a matter of general concern to the intellectuals of Europe.
What he himself missed most in exile was the contact with the minds
of students, and a casual encounter with the students of the Ecole
Normal Superieure brought him to tears.55 After the fall of Rivera he
was allowed to return to Spain and quite naturally became the symbol
for the rising Spanish democratic movement which finally deposed the
king. When the republic was proclaimed in 1931, Unamuno hailed
it as the fulfillment of the dreams of his generation. He was showered
with honors, reinstated as rector of Salamanca, became a member of the
Cortes, and an honorary citizen of Spain. This dawn of national
renaissance, however, was soon recognized as an illusion.

The aging don Miguel was in reality out of sympathy with most of
the trends that characterized the rising twentieth century. He had
never been attracted by Marxism, and often remarked that while
everyone spoke of the means of production, little consideration was
given to the means of consumption. For Freudianism he had some
mordant apercus.56 But what really dismayed him was the attitude
of the liberals who, he felt, were betraying their ideals for petty
gains, while communists and anarchists were using democracy as a
screen to sow chaos.57

His wntings became increasingly pessimistic. Spain was once more
"God's widow." He looked at the contemporary scene with inl-
patience and sometimes with despair. He foresaw the Spanish civil
war, and one might almost think that he welcomed it.58 Although he
had previously rejected Fascism and even more racism, he threw his
lot in with the Nationalists in 1936. He thought at first that Franco
was defending Christianity and that this civil war was really a struggle
between barbarism and civilization. But the civil war soon became an
"incivil war" in the great dress rehearsal for the final catastrophe, and
Unamuno saw that ignorant brute force, fanaiicism, and violence were
recruits of the Nationalist and Loyalist forces alike. The most pro-
found of all his disillusionments came when he perceived that a
nationalist victory would carry with it the suppression of all liberal

56 Cuademos de la catedra Miguel de Uuno (Salamanca, 1948), pp. 7-8.
56 F. Madrid, Op. Cit., p. 80; Unamuno, Ensayos, III, 23.
57 GuZlermo de Torre, "The Agony of Unamuno," New Menco Q=nerly Rewew,
XVIII (Summer, 1948), 150.
58 Unamuno, La ciadad de Henoc (Mexico City, 1940), pp. 79, 84.

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156 MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

thought.59 Once more he rose in protest, and Franco demoted him
from his position as rector of Salamanca and forbade him to leave his
house. "De aqui saldre para ir a la carcel o al cementerio," he said
to a friend. As it happened, the bars of his next prsson were forged
by no human hands, and death, whom he had so often entertained in
1h9i3s6.speculations, received his still protesting spirit on December 31,

Cuando me creais mas muerto, GERHARD MASUR
retemblare en vuestras manos.
Aqul os dejo mi alma-libro,
hombre-mundo verdadero.
Cuando vibres todo entero,
soy yo, lector, que en ti vibro.60

Sqveet Brier College?

Seet Briar, Virginia

69 G. de Torre, loc. cit.

6° Cuadernos de Za catedra Miguel de Unzmuno, p. 126.

When you think me most dead,
I shall tremble again in your hands.
Here I leave you my soul-the book, the man-a world in truth.
And if you vibrate in all your being,
It is I, O reader, who vibrates in you.

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