Miguel de Unamuno

Basque philosopher, writer and university rector (1864–1936), born in Bilbao, professor of Greek and later rector of the University of Salamanca, a central figure of the Generation of '98 and one of the most original existential thinkers in early twentieth-century Europe, though his work remained largely outside the academic philosophical mainstream. A man of vast erudition — fluent in several languages and having deeply studied Protestant theology, Hegelianism and positivism before rejecting them — he suffered throughout his life a radical, never-resolved existential anguish between the visceral desire for personal immortality and the rational impossibility of believing in it, a tension that is the nerve of his philosophical masterwork, The Tragic Sense of Life (1913): 'we want never to die,' he writes there, and it is precisely this irreducible 'hunger for immortality', rather than any rational argument, that sustains the religious faith of a modern man aware of his own contingency. He coined the term 'nivola' to describe his experimental narratives, such as Mist, in which characters question the authority of their own author, and he wrote Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr (1930), the short novel recounting the drama of a parish priest who has lost his faith but continues preaching it so as not to deprive his people of a consolation he himself can no longer feel. Removed twice from his rectorship — under Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, and later arrested and placed under house arrest by the Francoist side following his famous verbal confrontation with General Millán-Astray in the Great Hall of Salamanca in 1936, where he answered the cry of 'Long live death!' with 'You will win, but you will not convince' — he died a few months later, alone and disillusioned, at the start of the Civil War.

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11 works

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