Background
Unamuno y Jugo, Miguel de was born in 1864 in Bilbao, Spain.
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Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo
Edit ProfileAnalyst of the human condition
Career
Spent almost all of his adult life, from 1891 onwards, at the University of Salamanca, first as Professor of Greek and then as Rector. This way of life was punctuated by six years of political exile (1924-1930), enforced by the government of Primo de Rivera as a result of Unamuno’s republicanism.
Views
Miguel de Unamuno, Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. Rudd, Margaret Thomas (1963) The Lone Heretic, Austin: University of Texas Press. Unamuno was perhaps not a philosopher in the sense in which Russell or Wittgenstein were, and was not concerned with either the construction of systems or the analysis of technical problems. Yet his thought, though unsystematic, has a reach and penetration which make it impossible not to classify it as philosophical. It centres around a number of profound themes: immortality religion, the role of reason, human nature and the human predicament, and how to live in a world in which reason does not appear to cohere with or satisfy the deepest of human needs. Unamuno was also concerned with some specifically Spanish themes: the nature of the Spanish character, the place of Spain in Europe and the right form ol government for his country. These concerns are expressed not only in Unamuno’s primarily religious or philosophical works, but also in poetry and novels. The basis of Unamuno’s thought is his view of human nature and the human predicament. He objects strongly to the conception of human nature espoused by academic philosophers, a conception which overemphasizes our rationality and the value of reason while at the same time ignoring the most important aspects of our situation. For Unamuno, a human being is not an entity whose primary and distinctively valuable attribute is the capacity for rational thought but rather an individual of flesh and blood, faced with the fact of mortality and agonizing internal conflicts—this stress on individuality, concreteness and angst is one of a number of elements in Unamuno’s outlook which make it more akin to existentialism than any other. Consonant with this basic premise is his repeated attack on rationalism, especially in its scientific form. For reasons which will become clear, he regards reason as the faculty which leads us to despair, and rationalism falsifies the human condition by failing to deal adequately with our deepest needs. His attack on what he termed ‘wretched logic’ begins in his Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905) and is a major theme of his most important philosophical work, De! sentimiento trâgico de la vida (1912). Reason leads us to despair, Unamuno argues, principally because its conclusions contradict the deepest of all human desires, the hunger for personal immortality. Above all things, human beings wish to continue to be themselves indefinitely, though without the experience of pain. Moreover, our wish is not for an immortality of angelic contemplation or merging with an absolute but for the resurrection of the body, and for a life of perpetual action. The whole tendency of rational investigation is to indicate that this deepest of wishes is in fact frustrated, and there is therefore a profound tension at the heart of the human condition: ‘to live is one thing and to understand is another.. there is between them such an opposition that we can say that everything vital is anti-rational and everything rational anti-vital. And this is the basis of the tragic sense of life'. Our deepest wish is to live forever, whilst our reason tells us we are faced with annihilation. This painful contradiction is the tragic sense of life, and never leaves us: human consciousness, Unamuno concludes, is therefore best characterized as a lifelong illness. Granted that we have no belief in personal immortality, how is it appropriate for us to behave in this condition? Unamuno argues that an authentic life is possible, a life informed by adherence to an ideal based on a passage in Senancour’s novel Obermann (1804): if annihilation is what is reserved for us, let us make it an injustice. We must strive to become fully ourselves, to make ourselves irreplaceable. We must fight destiny, even if we know we have no hope of victory, in a Quixotic manner. Our only ‘practical solace’ for having been born is work—Unamuno notes that Adam and Eve were set to work before the Fall—and so in practical terms we must seek full personal realization and irreplaceability via our work. We must so work as to leave our mark on others, to dominate them: ‘The true religious morality is at bottom aggressive, invasive’ This ‘domination’, however, is not to be thought of as a crude political ascendancy or attaining of worldly power, but rather a making of ourselves unforgettable, and this can often be done as well passively as actively. In the course of elaborating this outlook Unamuno develops a number of other ideas of philosophical interest. As might be expected, granted his view of human nature and the place of reason in it, Unamuno has an appropriate philosophy of belief. Our fundamental attitudes to life are not the consequence of rationally worked out beliefs, but spring instead from features of the personality which are not rational: ‘It is not our ideas which make us optimists or pessimists, but our optimism or pessimism, derived as much from physiological or perhaps pathological origins, which makes our ideas’. The tragic sense of life is no exception: it is universal and prerational, though it can be corroborated by rational beliefs. Further, Unamuno’s outlook leads him to a particular conception of the activity of philosophizing itself. Philosophy is not a detached, rational pastime nor an academic or scholastic discipline, but a way of coping with the human predicament: we live first, then philosophize. We philosophise either to resign ourselves to life, or to find some finality in it, or to amuse ourselves and distract ourselves from our griefs.
