Background
Miguel de Unamuno was born on September 29, 1864 in Bilbao, a port city of Basque Country, Spain, the son of Félix de Unamuno and Salomé Jugo.
(Unamuno, known as novelist, poet, essayist, and philosoph...)
Unamuno, known as novelist, poet, essayist, and philosopher, was also passionately interested in the political development of Spain, and devoted much time to expressing his political ideas in thousands of articles for the Spanish and foreign press. Most of these were omitted from both editions of his Complete Works, and although several editions of articles have appeared in recent years, there is still a great deal of material which is still unavailable. The articles in this volume reflect both the persistence of Unamuno's campaign against politicians and royals and the complex picture of political, regional, and social tensions in post-bellum Spain. The original articles are in Spanish, the introduction, notes, and appendices in English.
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Miguel de Unamuno was born on September 29, 1864 in Bilbao, a port city of Basque Country, Spain, the son of Félix de Unamuno and Salomé Jugo.
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. At this time he also began learning a number of languages in order to be able to read books in their original language.
In 1890 Unamuno secured an appointment as professor of Greek language and literature at the University of Salamanca, and the following year he went immediately to Salamanca to assume his scholarly duties.
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.
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 December 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).
(Unamuno, known as novelist, poet, essayist, and philosoph...)
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.
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 Soren Kierkegaard.
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.
Quotations:
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 the 1921 war with Abd el-Krim in what was then Spanish Morocco.
Unamuno: "Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself. "
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. "
He said, "Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those who possess this tragic sense of life. I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, René, Obermann, Thomson, Leopardi, Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard—men burdened with wisdom rather than with knowledge. "