Miguel De Unamuno

Miguel de Unamuno, in full Miguel De Unamuno Y Jugo (born Sept. 29, 1864, Bilbao, Spain—died Dec. 31, 1936, Salamanca), educator, philosopher, and author whose essays had considerable influence inearly 20th-century Spain.

Unamuno was the son of Basque parents. After attending the Vizcayan Institute of Bilbao, he entered the University of Madrid in 1880 and in four years received adoctorate in philosophy and letters. Six years later he became professor of Greek language and literature at the University of Salamanca.

In 1901 Unamuno became rector of the university, but he wasrelieved of his duties in 1914 after publicly espousing the Allied cause in World War I. His opposition in 1924 to General Miguel Primo de Rivera’s rule in Spain resulted in his forced exile to the CanaryIslands, from which he escaped to France. When Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship fell, Unamuno returned to the University of Salamanca and was reelected rector of the university in 1931, but in October1936 he denounced General Francisco Franco’s Falangists, was removed once again as rector, and was placed under house arrest. He died of a heart attack two months later.

Unamuno was an earlyexistentialist who concerned himself largely with the tension between intellect and emotion, faith and reason. At the heart of his view of life was his personal and passionate longing for immortality.According to Unamuno, man’s hunger to live on after death is constantly denied by his reason and can only be satisfied by faith, and the resulting tension results in unceasing agony.

Although he also wrotepoetry and plays, Unamuno was most influential as an essayist and novelist. If his vigorous and iconoclastic essays have any common theme, it is that of the need to preserve one’s personal integrityin the face of social conformity, fanaticism, and hypocrisy. His first published work was the essays collected in En torno al casticismo (1895), in which he critically examined Spain’s isolated and...