Miguel de Unamuno

Works

• 1913The Tragic Sense of Life

  Argues that the human being of flesh and bone longs not to die, that reason cannot justify this hope and faith cannot give it up, and that life must be lived in this conflict.

• 1914Mist

  A “nivola” whose protagonist, Augusto Pérez, visits his author Unamuno to tell him of his plan to end his life and ends up disputing with him about his own existence – a novel about freedom, fiction and the reality of the self.

Position

Unamuno is on the map as a thinker of the conflict between reason and the longing for immortality. “The Tragic Sense of Life” starts not from humanity in the abstract but from “the man of flesh and bone”, who does not want to die. Unamuno links this hunger for immortality with Spinoza’s conatus, reads Pascal and Kierkegaard, whom he studied in Danish, as kindred spirits, and holds that faith lives only together with doubt, as “agony” in the original sense of struggle. He pursued the same questions in novels he called “nivolas”, in poems and in essays, often in deliberate contradiction with himself, and is often counted among the forerunners of existentialism. In 1909 Ortega y Gasset attacked his scepticism towards a Europeanisation of Spain through modern science; María Zambrano wrote a book on him in 1940 (published 2003). Politically he moved from early socialism to opposition against the monarchy and the dictatorship and, in July 1936, to support for the military uprising; on 12 October he clashed publicly with General Millán-Astray. The sentence “You will win, but you will not convince” is known only from later accounts, above all Luis Portillo’s “Unamuno’s Last Lecture” (1941), whose author was not present; its wording and the course of the scene are disputed in recent research (Severiano Delgado; Colette and Jean-Claude Rabaté).

Life & context

Miguel de Unamuno was born on 29 September 1864 in Bilbao. He studied philosophy and letters in Madrid and took his doctorate there in 1884. In 1891 he won the chair of Greek at the University of Salamanca, to which he remained attached for the rest of his life, and in the same year married Concepción Lizárraga. In the mid-1890s he belonged for a few years to the Socialist party; a religious crisis in 1897 turned him towards the questions that dominate his work. He was rector of the university from 1900 until his dismissal in 1914. His attacks on King Alfonso XIII and the dictator Primo de Rivera led in 1924 to his banishment to Fuerteventura; later that year he went to France and lived in Paris and Hendaye until the dictatorship fell in 1930. Under the Republic he sat in the Constituent Cortes in 1931 and became rector again; on his retirement in 1934 he was named rector for life. In July 1936 he publicly supported the military uprising; the Republican government removed him as rector, and the Junta in Burgos reinstated him. After a confrontation with General José Millán-Astray in the main hall of the university on 12 October 1936 he was removed again and placed under de facto house arrest. He died in Salamanca on 31 December 1936.

Further main works

• The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho (Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, 1905)
• The Agony of Christianity (L’agonie du christianisme, 1925; Spanish 1931)
• Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr (San Manuel Bueno, mártir, 1931)