1) His Biography:
The first thinker of the 20th century to arrive at an existentialist perspective on man and the world was the Spanish philosopher and author Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864–1936). The entire focus of Miguel de Unamuno’s thought was “the man of flesh and bone”—the physical person with his or her interests, desires, dreams, and fears as the environment in which human thinking and speech take place. Unamuno was particularly interested in “the agony of Christianity”, which is the issue of faith in contemporary society.
He came to the conclusion that reason could not mend the rift between faith and reason, and between the heart and the head, and that modern man must continue to live in the paradoxical and agonising tension between faith and doubt, his religious beliefs remaining nothing more than passionate hopes in the face of scepticism. Unamuno, known as the Spanish Kierkegaard, vividly experienced this contemporary dilemma of faith in his own life.
On September 29, 1864, Unamuno was born in Bilbao. He was nurtured and educated in the traditional piety and rural learning of 19th-century Spanish Catholicism. He studied at the Instituto Vizcaino de Bilbao from 1875 to 1880. He enrolled in the University of Madrid in 1880, where for the first time he was thrust into a multicultural environment of stimulating and sharply varying ideas. He earned a baccalaureate in philosophy and literature in 1883 and a PhD in that same year.
Unamuno gave up practising his Catholicism while he was in college and adopted the scientific attitude and practises that he had discovered in the writings of the top European philosophers of the time. In order to read novels in their native languages, he also started learning other languages about this period.
After moving back to Bilbao in 1884, Unamuno spent six years looking for a position as a professor there. He started producing essays during this time in his professional field of philology, but he was also starting to delve into philosophical issues. Unamuno and Concepción Lizárraga, his childhood sweetheart, courted for a long time during this time, but he couldn’t get married until he had a job lined up at a university. At this point, he started to seriously doubt whether scientific positivism was a sound philosophical perspective and started to lean towards an existentialist direction.
He discovered that the vocabulary of love employed by the real “man of flesh and bone” simply could not be reduced to scientific categories. He has always placed language at the centre of his work. He arrived at a philosophical outlook and method that was entirely focused on the concrete human and his vast vocabulary of wishes and meanings, of which the language of science was only one, as the great existential limitation of love and of life. Even more vividly, this was the result of his intensely personal contemplation of death.
Unamuno obtained a position as a professor of Greek language and literature at the University of Salamanca in 1890. The following year, he married Concepción and moved to Salamanca right away to begin his academic responsibilities. He experienced a significant religious crisis in 1897 that led to his return to faith, though not to the traditional Roman Catholic teachings. Instead, he engaged in a deeply personal, lifelong religious struggle that drew inspiration from both the Spanish mystics and the great Protestant spiritual figures Martin Luther and Soren Kierkegaard.
Salamanca provided Unamuno with years of extremely fruitful study. His Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, which examined the literary character Unamuno believed to represent the “spirit of Spain”, was released in 1905. The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in Peoples, his best-known work, was published in 1913.
Unamuno presided as rector of the University of Salamanca from 1901 until 1914. He lost his job because he openly supported the Allies during World War I. He was always politically vocal, and in 1924, his vehement opposition to Miguel Primo de Rivera’s military dictatorship in Spain led to his exile to the Canary Islands. Unamuno succeeded in getting to France. He was later pardoned, but he steadfastly refused to go back to Spain.
He first resided in Paris before moving to the border town of Hendaye around 1925. Unamuno composed The Agony of Christianity while he was in Paris, and it was published in 1925. It discusses the modern man’s agony of faith and doubt and offers numerous variations on one of his favourite Gospel passages, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:23).
Unamuno returned to Spain in 1930 and was rehired at the University of Salamanca after the ousting of Primo de Rivera. His official acquittal and election as a member of the new Parliament coincided with the proclamation of the Spanish Republic in 1931. He was in Falangist territory when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936.
He remained silent for a while and was permitted to keep serving as rector. However, in October, when Francisco Franco’s representatives utilised a ceremonial gathering at the university to spread vile political propaganda, Unamuno publicly criticised the Falangist for having only sheer power on their side rather than “reason and right”. He was promptly fired as rector and placed under house arrest, where he remained until his heart attack-related death on December 31, 1936.
2) Main Works:
Life of Don Quixote and Sancho:
Published in 1905, this is an analysis on the literary character, who Unamuno believed to represent the “soul of Spain”.
The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in Peoples:
It was published in 1913 and is his most well-known piece. In it, he investigated the “hunger of immortality” of man, which, according to him, could not be justified or satisfied on the basis of purely rational arguments but rather required a paradoxical and passionate affirmation of God and eternity by a faith and hope that was constantly in contradiction with doubt and hopelessness.
The Christ of Velásquez:
A wonderful example of a contemporary Spanish poem, this is a study in poetic form of the great Spanish painter.
Abel Sanchez:
The most well-known book by Unamuno is Abel Sánchez, a contemporary retelling of the biblical tale of Cain and Abel that focuses on the agonisingly conflicted desires of the character that represents Cain.
Love and Pedagogy:
In the novel Amor y pedagogia (“Love and Pedagogy”), a father makes an unsuccessful attempt to nurture his son scientifically, leading to the youngster’s destruction.
Nibela:
Miguel de Unamuno published the book Nibela (Mist) in 1907. The protagonist of the story is Augusto, a wealthy, intelligent, and reserved young man. The word “mist” in the title refers to how Augusto perceives his life. A lot of minor, almost imperceptible things happen in Augusto’s world—some of them pleasant, some of bad—and they all blur his vision.
3) Main Themes in his Writings:
Philosophy:
Unamuno’s philosophy was not organised; rather, it was a denial of all organised thought and a proclamation of faith “in itself”. His intellectual growth was influenced by positivism and rationalism, yet when he was younger, he penned essays that made obvious his support for socialism and deep concern for the circumstances in which he found Spain.
Intrahistoria was a key notion for Unamuno. He believed that studying the brief biographies of unremarkable individuals will help us better understand history rather than concentrating on significant occurrences like wars and political agreements. Some writers downplay the significance of intrahistoria to his way of thinking. According to those authors, an ambiguous metaphor is preferable to a precise understanding. The phrase originally appeared in the 1895 work En torno al casticismo by Unamuno, but he quickly dropped it.
Unamuno suffered a religious crisis in the late nineteenth century and abandoned the positivist school of thought. He then developed his own philosophy, influenced by existentialism, towards the start of the 20th century. Unamuno claimed that the knowledge that we will die makes life tragic. He explains that a large portion of human activities is an effort to continue existing in some way beyond death. “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”, Unamuno stated in his personal tenet.
He stated: “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”. In his most well-known work, Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida (The Tragic Sense of Life, 1912), he offers an engaging exploration of the distinctions between religion and reason.
From his early years as a paperfolder to his final, difficult days, Unamuno had a significant impact on history. In several of his works, he humorously expressed his philosophical views on Platonism, Scholasticism, Positivism, and the “science vs religion” debate using “origami” figures, particularly the traditional Spanish pajarita. He created the term “cocotologa” (“cocotology”) to characterise the practise of paper folding because he was also a linguist (a professor of Greek). Following the conclusion of Amor y pedagogia (Love and Pedagogy, 1902), he added “Notes for a Treatise on Cocotology” (“Apuntes para un tratado de cocotología”) to the collection, attributing it to one of the characters.
The novella San Manuel Bueno, mártir (Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr, 1930) by Unamuno and his lengthy essay La agonia del cristianismo (The Agony of Christianity, 1931) were both included on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum along with The Tragic Sense of Life.
Unamuno’s adolescent sympathies for socialism faded as he became more liberal. Unamuno’s definition of liberalism, as developed in articles like La esencia del liberalismo in 1909, tried to balance a high regard for individual freedom with a more interventionist state, moving him toward a position more in line with social liberalism. Unamuno exhorted the clergy in a piece he wrote about the Church in 1932, during the second Spanish Republic, to stop criticising liberalism and instead embrace it as a method to resurrect the faith.
Poetry:
Unamuno used poetry as a means of communicating his spiritual issues. His poetry and other fiction shared the same themes: spiritual sorrow, the suffering caused by God’s silence, time, and death. Unamuno was always drawn to conventional meters, and although his later poetry began to rhyme, his earlier poems did not.
Drama:
The theatrical work of Unamuno shows a development in philosophy. In La esfinge (The Sphinx, 1898) and La verdad (Truth, 1899), issues like personal spirituality, faith as a “vital lie” and the issue of a dual personality were at the forefront . He published El hermano Juan o El mundo es teatro (Brother Juan or The World is a Theatre) in 1934.
Unamuno avoided artifice and concentrated solely on the conflicts and passions that have an impact on the characters in his schematic theatre. Greek classical theatre had an impact on this austerity. He understood the novel as a means of learning about life, thus what mattered to him was the presentation of the drama occurring inside the people. Unamuno’s theatre paved the way for the revival of Spanish theatre that was carried out by Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Azorin, and Federico Garcia Lorca by representing passion and establishing a theatre austere in both word and presentation.
4) His Legacy:
Unamuno was likely the greatest Spanish expert on Portuguese history, literature, and culture during his lifetime. He thought that knowing the great names of Catalan literature as well as those of Portuguese literature was crucial for a Spaniard. Although he openly opposed any kind of Iberian Federalism, he thought that Iberian nations should unite via the exchange of spiritual manifestations. In the end, Unamuno is significant because, together with Julien Benda, Karl Jaspers, Johan Huizinga, and José Ortega y Gasset, he was a prominent interwar intellectual who opposed the infiltration of ideology into Western intellectual life.