Miguel de Unamuno

He is considered as a great philosopher of his time and was also known as a distinguished Literary personality of Spain. He is believed to have led the movement called “Generation’ 98”  a group of the great literaric intellectuals of his time.    



Unamuno’s mother tongue is Basque but he wrote in Spanish. In the year 1884 he got his Ph D from  the University of Madrid in Philosophy. His thesis was the origin and prehistory of his Basque ancestors. In his youth he was very religious but when he was in Madrid he also studied the books of liberal writers, adding to his knowledge the diversity about God and religion.



Unamuno mastered fourteen languages and wrote many books of essays, novels and poetry. His poetical Novel “Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr” (1931) is an interesting book in which he writes about a country priest and his disbelief in afterlife.



Unamuno started his career as a private tutor in BIlbao and later taught Greek at the University of Salamanca. In 1891 he married Concepción Lizárraga Ecénnarro and they had ten children. In 1901 he became the rector of the University and held this post off and on until his death in the year 1936. In the year 1924 he was exiled to Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands because of his opposition to the then Military regime of General Primo de Rivera.



Most of his writings are philosophical in nature as is seen from the following excerpt: "The man of flesh and blood; the one who is born, suffers and dies - above all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the man who is seen and is heard; the brother, the real brother." (from The Tragic Sense of Life, 1913)



In the year 1896-97 he went through a crisis within himself to find a reasonable explanation for God and the life of man. The important themes in his works are the conflict between reason and the Christian faith, religion and freedom of thinking, and the certainity of man’s death, where reason provides no comfort.



Unamuno had his own perception about theology and faith as is seen from the following excerpt from his work “Ways of Escape Greene”, "The Catholic solution of our problems, of our unique vital problem of the immortality and eternal salvation of the individual soul, satisfies the will, and therefore satisfies life; but the attempts to rationalize it by means of dogmatic theology fail to satisfy reason. And the reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of life."



A few months after the Spanish civil war broke out, he died in Salamanca on 31st December 1936.





Bio Information Courtesy: coloquio.com and kirjasto.com  



Photo from: Rich Geib’s Heros site