SOURCE: Earle, Peter G. “Unamuno and the Theme of History.” Hispanic Review 32, no. 4 (October 1964): 319-39.

[In the following essay, Earle provides readings of Unamuno's En torno al casticismo, Abel Sanchez, San Manuel Bueno, mártir, and Paz en la guerra, among others, to suggest that in Unamuno's conceptualization of history, the destiny of peoples is inextricably linked to the destiny of individuals.]

“¿Es la eternidad que pasa o el momento que se queda?”

The emphasis which Unamuno repeatedly placed on romantic, spiritual anxiety and on the enigmatic notion of intrahistoria has tended to obscure his permanent interest in the theme of history itself. Intrahistoria, antihistoria, sotohistoria, metahistoria: precisely because of his stylistic inclination to emphasis (a trait which reminds us of his enthusiasm for other writers of the “emphatic school”—Carlyle, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard), it might appear that Unamuno was expressing opposition to everything in a historical context, that truth was something limited to the single souls of men, and that venerable Spain—la invertebrada of Ortega y Gasset, that of the marasmo described by Don Miguel, or that of the absolute decadence condemned by the youthful Azorín—was scarcely worthy of intellectual salvation. “¡Utopías! ¡Utopías! Es lo que más falta nos hace, utopías y utopistas,” was the battle cry of 1898 in Unamuno's first chapter of the book written in collaboration with Ganivet.¹ “La historia, la condenada historia, que es en su mayor parte una imposición del ambiente, nos ha celado la roca viva de la constitución patria. … Hemos atendido más a los sucesos históricos que pasan y se pierden, que a los hechos sub-históricos, que permanecen y van estratificándose en profundas capas.”² The phrase “imposición del ambiente” expresses a mood shared almost equally by others of the Generation of 1898. But the meaning usually attributed to history in Spain at the turn of the century was something closer to “tradition” than to history.³ It would soon become clear that Unamuno was not “against” the idea of history, and that his essential notion of it lay in the distinction between “hechos” and “sucesos.”

Many historians, particularly since the advent of the theory of evolution, have viewed with impatience a common tendency among non-historians to usurp the topics of history for literary, scientific, or philosophic purposes, beclouding the issues with extravagant metaphors, personal idiosyncracies, and misleading statistics.⁴ Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, for example, deplores the mockery which history has often suffered at the hands of scientists, businessmen and politicians. The scientist claims that it is he—the scientist—not the historian, who holds the secret of nature and life; the businessman considers history either as something useless or detrimental to the energies and activities of the present; and the politician exploits history in order to support some selfish contention, or scorns it as an obstacle to progress. But particularly irresponsible, says Sánchez Albornoz, are certain creative writers:

Y hasta algunos prosistas y poetas que juegan libremente con las ideas y con las imágenes, que cubiletean con las metáforas, que crean de la nada sus castillos de naipes y sus palacios encantados, se atreven a juzgar de la historia con el sonriente desdén con que lo hizo, hace tiempo, Azorín en su “Alma de Castilla,” y con que lo ha hecho, hace años, Pío Baroja, o con la injustificada desestima con que la ha tratado Santayana, para no citar sino connacionales.⁵

One senses an injustice in this professional scolding of amateurs. Noticeably, Sánchez Albornoz has singled out a common attitude among the members of the Generation of 1898, the “smiling disdain” of Azorín and Baroja, as the main object of his criticism. But, paradoxically, it was Azorín and Baroja who, together with Unamuno and Ganivet, did more than any other writer or group of writers in Spain until 1900 to create a historical consciousness. The vigorous but isolated protests of other times, in Quevedo, Saavedra Fajardo, Gracián, Tomás de Iriarte, Larra, and Pérez Galdós were at that time strengthened and given a new meaning in the light of the so-called Disaster of 1898. The “smiling disdain” which Sánchez Albornoz deplores had been directed not against “history,” but, precisely the contrary, against what nineteenth-century Spanish thought lacked in historical penetration.

On the other hand, Sánchez Albornoz is probably right if he means to imply that the traditionally Hispanic view of history tends to elude its fundamental circumstances and to relegate history as a process to an ontological speculation on the distinctive phenomena of individual Spanish character. Thus Spanish history becomes, as Spanish literature has often appeared to be, a philosophic exercise in which the authority of symbol contends with the authority of fact, and in which the acts and episodes chosen—like the history of an unfinished cathedral in the Prologue to Azorín's La voluntad—are presented as symptoms of unchanging Spanish character rather than as the vital agents of historical evolution.

It is this emphasis on character, manifested in scores of essays on the peculiarities of the individual and collective Hispanic mind (“Más sociabilidad!,” “La dehesa española,” “El Caballero de la Triste Figura,” “Sobre el fulanismo,” “Don Quijote y Bolívar,” etc., etc.) that Unamuno in his earlier works brings to bear on Spanish history. And, notably, some of his most important recurring themes, such as that of Hispanic envy, serve him in the double function of historical interpretation and of novelistic material.⁶ After pointing out that many modern and ancient historians have a “novelistic” appeal superior to that of novelists themselves, he suggests “que acaso el papel más hondo que a la novela ha cabido en el proceso literario ha sido el de impulsar el género histórico hacia una forma más imaginativa.”⁷ The division of influences which Sherman H. Eoff has noticed in Baroja between Nietzsche (“the Nietzschean call to positive action”) and Schopenhauer (“the stronger, more hypnotic Schopenhauerian inducement toward anesthesia”)⁸ seems clearly reflected by Unamuno in his distinction between the effect produced by novels and by books of history: “Me parece que por regla general, las novelas nos llevan a la vaga e inactiva soñación, a la indeterminación de propósitos, a la misantropía, y las historias a la acción viril.”⁹ “Vaga e inactiva soñación” and “indeterminación de propósitos” are the meditative moods associated by readers and by Unamuno himself with the nebulous but ever-present notion of intrahistoria. “Acción viril,” inspired in Don Quijote, San Ignacio de Loyola and the heroic concepts of Carlyle, takes the form of spiritual anguish. It is in this alternation of contrary, yet complementary moods, that Unamuno's congeniality with the other leading members of his generation is most clearly seen. In Azorín it is abulia and voluntad; in Baroja, adventure and abject passivity; in Valle Inclán, the systematic use of comic deformity to express “el sentido trágico de la vida española.”¹⁰ But Baroja, Valle-Inclán and the early Azorín, concentrating on the theme of historical decadence, were generally less concerned than Unamuno with the spirit and significance of Spanish history.

I

“Para llegar, lo mismo un pueblo que un hombre a conocerse, tiene que estudiar de un modo o de otro su historia … ; el ojo no se ve si no es con un espejo, y el espejo del hombre moral son sus obras, de que es hijo.”¹¹ Thus spoke Unamuno in the second essay of En torno al casticismo. And Del sentimiento trágico is not simply applicable to life in general, but to “men and peoples,” individuals and nations: “… la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos.” While it is true, as Carlos Blanco Aguinaga has demonstrated, that there is a more-or-less constant “alternation”¹² of two spirits—agonizing and contemplative—in the literary existence of Unamuno, the distinction between historia and intrahistoria is much less clear. It is only very seldom that his work is free of obsession with history. Considering it in its totality, or more precisely, as an evolution from En torno al casticismo to San Manuel Bueno, mártir—that is, from his first, nationally recognized statement of concern for the cultural destiny of Spain to his culminating, symbolic work on the relationship between the individual soul (religiously considered) and human destiny (historically considered)—we can see that history is a theme of growing significance. If historia and intrahistoria at first represented (in En torno al casticismo) the active-exterior and the contemplative-interior aspects of Hispanic life, Del sentimiento trágico is proof that for Unamuno historia and intrahistoria were essentially and substantially one. This is particularly evident in the conclusion (“Don Quijote en la tragicomedia europea contemporánea”), in which he gives to the Tragic Sense the triple force of a philosophic, poetic and historical interpretation. In this incredibly dense chapter, in which the author analyzes culture from the standpoints of Spain, Europe, the Renaissance, Reformation and “Revolution” (18th century), and of course, Don Quijote,¹³ it is the persistence of historical analogy (typical of so many other of Unamuno's reflective moments) that impresses us: an analogy between the soul of Spain and his own soul in Paz en la guerra; the collective personality of Bilbao in a moment of historical crisis and the individual personality of the intra-historical, meditative Pachico; between philosophy and philology (“Toda filosofía es, pues, en el fondo, filología”)¹⁴; between the Inquisition of the 15th and 16th centuries and “otra más trágica Inquisición” which he or any other modern European might find within himself: “mi razón, que se burla de mi fe y la desprecia”¹⁵; and other comparisons too numerous to mention. Significantly, in each of the three analogies just mentioned, history is the dynamic, unifying force; according to Unamuno, history brings together the individual and the national spirit; history converts language (“la palabra viva” not “la letra muerta”) into philosophy; and history—over a period of about four centuries in Spain—reverses the roles of faith and reason in relationship to each other.

But before interpreting the theme of history in certain representative works of Unamuno, it will be necessary to clarify his notion of intrahistoria in the light of modern European culture.

II

Intrahistoria implies two points of view, which we shall call ideological and psychological. The ideological point of view leads us to the object itself, to what Unamuno habitually called the “substance” of history (“Acaso la eternidad es la sustancia del tiempo. …”)¹⁶ and the motivating spirit of the present, which is, or ought to be, tradition. In short, a non-historian's idea of what is authentic and vital in history. The psychological point of view leads us not to the object itself, but to the subject, not to the possible motivations in history but to the motivations in Unamuno. After calling Unamuno's idea of history a “recapitulation” but at the same time an “opposition” to three basic “historical intuitions”—the Oriental, the Greek and the Christian—¹⁷ Ferrater Mora concludes that because of its personal or “inner” consequences, intrahistoria is intravida and that because of personal motivations Unamuno adapts the theme of history to his first novel and to the most important of his late novels:

El Pachico de Paz en la guerra, el que escucha la “silenciosa canción del alma del mundo” y goza de una especie de “vida de la muerte,” describe, así, un mundo que volverá a encontrarse, tras la tensión casi insoportable que revelan los otros personajes de Unamuno, en el universo profundo de San Manuel Bueno, mártir. En ambos se hace vida la historia y adquiere ésta tanta realidad como, lo que es más importante para Unamuno, plenitud.¹⁸

The ideological point of view is the rough equivalent of a romantically conceived Volksgeist, which Unamuno frequently identified as tradición eterna, whereas the psychological point of view constitutes a Weltanschauung. The first is the assimilation of history by the self, the second is the projection of self into history.

The phenomenon of intrahistoria, of course, contains little that is new. Those thinkers whom historians commonly classify as “metahistorians” have much in common with Unamuno, for surely the metahistorian, whether he be the exponent of a single dogma (e.g. Marx), of a universal system (e.g. Hegel), of bold generalizations (e.g. Spengler), or of aesthetic or moral principles (e.g. Rousseau), tends unconsciously to relegate history to a largely instrumental role, making it subservient to personal convictions and visions.¹⁹ But the frequency with which it has been interpreted, since the 18th century, in the light of idealistic thought, especially since Herder, Rousseau and Goethe, can leave little doubt that metahistorians do not intend to minimize history, but, rather, to exalt it. History in the 19th century, under the impulse of the Enlightment, the French Revolution, Naturalism, and a social turbulence which grew steadily stronger, became something to think with rather than about, an enhancement of the past with a view to activating the present. The writers of 1898, metahistorians in the most literal sense, carried their intensification or enhancement of the past far beyond the realm of fact and tradition, convinced, as authentically romantic thinkers have always been convinced, that spiritual regeneration in the present is necessarily preceded by an imaginative reconstruction of the past.

Clearly, the psychological point of view in intrahistoria exalts history by removing, insofar as possible, the sense of mental distance between present and past, a process which ironically strives to nullify the past. In his discussion of the varieties of “Reflective History,” Hegel seems almost to be describing the romantic procedures of Azorín and Unamuno:

In dealing with the past and occupying ourselves with a remote world, there opens up for the mind an actuality which arises out of its own activity and as reward for its labor. The events are many, but their universal idea and their inner connection are one. This nullifies the past and makes the event present. Pragmatic reflections, no matter how abstract, belong indeed to the present, and the stories of the past are quickened into present-day life. Whether such reflections are really interesting and full of life depends on the spirit of the writer.²⁰

But Hegel recognizes not only the psychological (subjective) point of view, so obvious in the “intrahistorical” thought of Unamuno, but also the ideological (objective) point of view:

To begin with, we must note that world history goes on within the realm of Spirit. The term “world” includes both physical and psychical nature. Physical nature does play a part in world history. … But Spirit, and the course of its development, is the substance of history. We must not contemplate nature as a rational system in itself, in its own particular domain, but only in relation to Spirit.²¹

The two quotations illustrate what Unamuno permanently retained. from Hegelian thought: spirit is “substance”; the past becomes “present.”

The metahistorical approach in history has its counterpart in literature and is analogous to William Blake's description of the romantic imagination, in which we find the same basic division between the finite and the infinite, the historical and the intrahistorical, that we encounter in Unamuno: “This World of Imagination is Infinite and Eternal, whereas the world of Generation, or Vegetation, is Finite and Temporal.”²² But the division becomes also an association, since the dynamic, and complementary relationship of opposites is one of the inevitable conditions of the creative mind.²³ Unamuno will always associate the temporal and eternal, the finite and the infinite in the theme of Spain; in this sense too, he has followed the example of Hegel: “It is the concrete spirit of a people which we must concretely recognize. And because it is spirit, it can only be grasped spiritually, through thought.”²⁴ The “concrete spirit” is none other than history (sustancia, tradición eterna). If indeed it is concrete, it is so because of each people's predetermined role, says Hegel, to move toward ultimate freedom.

At this point—the hypothetical achievement of freedom—Unamuno departs from the Hegelian way, or more precisely, transforms Hegel's idea of a world spirit “returning into itself,”²⁵ into an intensely personal thing. When the Spanish thinker says “¡Seriedad, y no gravedad! Y sobre todo, ¡libertad, libertad!, pero la honda, no la oficial,” in En torno al casticismo,²⁶ and on the following page condemns the hypnotic effect of “el pensamiento nacional, trabajando hacia sí” (Unamuno's italics), he is rejecting Hegel's conclusion that the course of history leads inevitably to impersonality.²⁷ By contrast, Unamuno's mystique of the spirit of history works not for its own sake, but for the tormented subject and supreme object of all civilization and culture: “¡Un hombre!, un hombre es la más rica idea, llena de nimbos y de penumbras y de fecundos misterios.”²⁸Un hombre, at all costs. Unamuno represents, at least in one respect, an advance over the romantic solitaries of the 19th century whom he so greatly admired—Sénancour, Amiel, Leopardi, Carducci: he consciously and consistently portrays his own solitude and religious anxiety as symbolic of modern civilization. It was clear to him that self-obsession and deliberate isolation were detrimental to a national group as well as to an individual. The final essay of En torno al casticismo expresses an exact analogy. First the individual:

Cuando un hombre se encierra en sí resistiendo cuanto puede al ambiente y empieza a vivir de sus recuerdos, de su historia, a hurgarse en exámenes introspectivos la conciencia, acaba, ésta por hipertrofiarse sobre el fondo subconciente. Este, en cambio, se enriquece y aviva a la frescura del ambiente como después de una excursión de campo volvemos a casa sin traer apenas un recuerdo definido, pero llena el alma de voces de su naturaleza íntima, despierta al contacto de la Naturaleza, su madre.

Then the nation:

Y así sucede a los pueblos que en sus encerronas y aislamientos hipertrofian en su espíritu colectivo la conciencia histórica a expensas de la vida difusa intrahistórica que languidece por falta de ventilación; el pensamiento nacional, trabajando hacia sí, acalla el rumor inarticulado de la vida que bajo él se extiende. Hay pueblos que en puro mirarse al ombligo nacional caen en sueño hipnótico y contemplan la nada.²⁹

However, the almost entirely romantic background of the theory of intrahistoria is an undeniable fact. Sénancour's Obermann, who aspired to a life “toujours la même,” did not concern himself with history except in the most incidental sense, but beneath his façade of radical egoism Obermann revealed—repeatedly—an innate generosity and communal spirit which Unamuno admired and adapted to his Sentimiento trágico … “in men and peoples.”³⁰ Concretely, Unamuno considered Obermann symbolic of the mal du siècle which he was to define as the crucial, 19th-century equivalent of the loss of faith in immortality and in “la finalidad humana del Universo.”³¹

Carlyle, a spirit more akin to Unamuno, concludes his essay on “Characteristics” (1833) with a reflection on history which clearly anticipates “el presente eterno” of the Spaniard: “Consider History with the beginnings of it stretching dimly into the remote Time; emerging darkly out of the mysterious Eternity: the ends of it enveloping us at this hour, whereof we at this hour, both as actors and relators, form part.”³²

Rousseau, who in Emile (Book IV) distinguishes between intuitive knowledge (or conviction through feeling) and scientific knowledge; Pascal, who used the pre-Unamunian paradox of the reasoning heart; Chateaubriand, whose René represented a sentimental, “intrahistorical,” nostalgic type of Catholic faith;³³ Wordsworth, whose The Prelude and other reflective poems appealed permanently to Unamuno (“Wisdom and Spirit of the universe! / Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought, …”)³⁴ these are a few of the scores of romantics or romantically-inclined writers who contributed sentiment to Unamuno's spiritual life and to his idea of intrahistoria.

Finally, the Portuguese poet Antero de Quental, spiritual and suicidal brother of other great desesperados esteemed by Unamuno,³⁵ may have contributed more than any one writer to Unamuno's tragic sentiment and to his constant concern with history.³⁶ In an autobiographical letter in 1887, Quental remembers himself as a youth, “pobre criança arrancada do viver quase patriarcal de uma província remota e imersa no seu placido sonho historico, para o meio da irrespeitosa agitação intelectual de um centro, onde mais ou menos vinham repercutir-se as encontradas correntes do espirito moderno.”³⁷ The similarity between this experience of Quental's (at the University of Coimbra) and Unamuno's sojourn in Madrid (1880-1884) is obvious. Each, at this point, began his life of historical consciousness. And Quental, like Unamuno, was part of a radically new generation (“Achei-me sem direção, estado terrivel de espirito, partilhado por quase todos os da minha geração, a primeira em Portugal que saiu decidemente e conscientemente da velha estrada da tradição.”). Not simply because of his sudden exposure to Krausism, rationalism and German and English idealism, was Unamuno's cosmopolitan experience of the 1880's so decisive, but also because of the sentimental pattern established by his move from the native province to the capital. In a large sense his historical consciousness is built upon the image of a tradition abandoned but recollected (Paz en la guerra; De mi país: Recuerdos de niñez y mocedad) in continual juxtaposition with cosmopolitan circumstances. This juxtaposition is particularly evident in En torno al casticismo (1895), in which Unamuno calls for renovation through the assimilation of new and foreign ideas, but at the same time tries to describe and define “eternal tradition” as the spiritual heart of Spanish history. Sánchez Barbudo has stressed the importance of a sentimental conversion (in 1884, year of Unamuno's return to Bilbao) which was not a religious conversion but a kind of “Chateaubrianesque” recollection of the comforts of his childhood faith.³⁸ Scholars interested in knowing the “true” religious position of Unamuno have snatched at what meager shreds of evidence have existed in print—such as the vaguely mentioned or suggested circumstances (in the May 31, 1895 letter to Clarín, and in a passage of Paz en la guerra)³⁹ that accompanied Unamuno's abandonment of formal worship; the even more enigmatic “crisis” of 1897 (discovered and first analyzed by Sánchez Barbudo and reinterpreted by Armando F. Zubizarreta, who discovered a personal diary);⁴⁰ and the varying shades of religious emotion in such works as El Cristo de Velázquez and La agonía del cristianismo.

The religious emphasis prevalent in much of what has been written about Unamuno is essential to the great biography which has not yet been written. However, there has been an unavoidable tendency on the part of the average reader to allow his mind to shift from the infinite world of his essays and fiction to a colorful limbo where the legendary Unamuno dwells, doling out curios of his thought in the form of paradoxes, spectacular aphorisms, symbolic public gestures, and enigmatic little crosses in the upper left-hand corner of his letters.⁴¹ The consequences of this efectismo have tended to obscure the intellectual position and creative process of Unamuno the writer. Although the religious position of don Miguel is of permanent interest, the serious scholar must beware of the religionists and all the varieties of doctrinaire moralists who inevitably are more interested in their own purposes than in the work of Unamuno per se. It is misleading to conclude that Unamuno made literature primarily out of his lack of faith, because the sentient Unamuno is counterbalanced by the Unamuno of intellect, and there is greater reason to admire him for his inquiring spirit than for his more spectacular moments of private anguish. Unamuno is important to his generation and to posterity, not because of his private religious anxiety, or by reason of his individualistic role in society and in the academic world, but because he was the living compendium, at a critical moment in the history of modern culture and civilization, of the whole Hispanic heritage. Accordingly, the crucial phases of Unamuno's career—1880-1884 (his indoctrination in European idealism and rational thought); 1895-1898 (the crisis of Spanish culture); and 1923-1930 (exile, and the pessimistic reappraisal of civilization)⁴² are significant not primarily because of their effect on his religious conscience or professional status, or even because of the increasing magnitude of his personality. Each of these phases is significant inasmuch as it adds a new perspective to his view of the problems of men and peoples in modern civilization. Clearly, the new perspectives reinforced, in his mind and in his most meaningful works, the importance of history.

III

History for Unamuno, as we have seen⁴³ was a matter of recognizing fundamental realities (“hechos sub-históricos” rather than events, “sucesos”). This is the frame of mind that brings together into one philosophical view the concepts of history and intra-history. Unamuno differs from the other members of his generation by the growth of his historical interest—in his literary reflections as well as in his political involvement. Azorín, at first a revolutionary fired with the desire to reform and renovate, and obsessed with the national “disease” of abulia, shifted from the historico-critical mood of La voluntad to the far gentler evocations of Los pueblos and La ruta de Don Quijote; Valle Inclán, who with the exception of Tirano Banderas and Luces de Bohemia, is more concerned with the grotesque in tradition than with vitality in the past; Baroja, historically inspired but figuratively asphixiated in a nihilism so bitter that it ultimately destroyed his originally historical interest in Spain—none of these three develops the theme of history to the extent that Unamuno does. For Unamuno time has dynamic meaning, it is not the “todo pasa y todo queda” of Azorín but the imaginary projection of the self beyond all the limits of credibility: “… extenderme a lo ilimitado del espacio y prolongarme a lo inacabable del tiempo.”⁴⁴ Originality, he reminds us, consists not in “singularity,” (“no es la mueca, ni el gesto, ni la distinción”) but in lo originario, the creative spirit of humanity within history (“de lo inorgánico, de lo que gira en torno de lo eterno como cometa erático”).⁴⁵ After attacking traditionalism and the “historical” approach to history in the first essay of En torno al casticismo (“La tradición eterna”)—a poetic essay in which the author recalls Schopenhauer's disdain of history⁴⁶—Unamuno concedes in the second (“La casta histórica: Castilla”), the need for studying history “de un modo o de otro.” Here he recognizes “el castellano” (language, region, people and spirit) as the prime mover of Hispanic history. Castellano and Castilla are, in their historical context, synonyms of casta, or lo castizo: the spirit and collective will which acted both to unify Spain and to expand it.⁴⁷ For Unamuno lo castizo, in its truest sense, is that which molds but does not petrify.

La casta, lo castizo, are revealing signs of the decisive and formative nature of this second essay of En torno … in Unamuno's historical thought. “La casta histórica” is to his sense of history what “La tradición eterna” is to his sense of time. Before coming to grips with the character of Spain and its heritage, it was necessary, in the first essay, to establish a philosophy of time. This Unamuno did in the formula, “En el fondo del presente hay que buscar la tradición eterna.” That is, “la eternidad viva, que no está fuera del tiempo sino dentro de él.”⁴⁸ An observation by Xavier Zubiri might help make this concept clearer, even though he is not referring to Unamuno's idea, but to the idea of history as it was generally conceived of in the 19th century:

Esta manera de entender la pervivencia del pasado en el presente se acusa más claramente al tratar de entender la preexistencia del presente en el pasado: es el problema del futuro. En ambas concepciones, la biológica y la lógica, el presente está virtualmente precontenido en el pasado, y el futuro en el presente, al modo como el árbol está precontenido en la semilla, o una virtud científica en las premisas de un razonamiento.⁴⁹

But even this theory of time (el presente eterno which leads back, or more precisely, inward to la tradición eterna) is Unamuno's way of expressing, in February, 1895, an image of universal man: “La tradición eterna es el fondo del ser del hombre mismo.”⁵⁰ From this philosophical point of departure, Unamuno proceeds to involve himself in the particular questions of history in perfect accordance with a basic tenet of Dilthey's, that man can have consciousness of his being only to the extent that he can experience it in history.⁵¹ This progressive involvement brings Unamuno eventually into conflict with Hegel, but only, as we have already noted, after he has permanently assimilated the latter's ideal of “reflective history.” Past becomes “present”; the Spirit is “substance.”⁵² It brings him also, as the most casual of readers will have noticed, into conflict with the cogito ergo sum of Descartes. When Unamuno reverses the rationalistic dictum, he is, in effect, replacing a philosophical principle with a historical one. Man thinks because he is: i.e., he begins thinking only upon experiencing his existence in history. Unamuno was quite aware that Descartes wrote his mechanistic philosophy in an era for which history was not yet a vital preoccupation.

The second essay of En torno … is a consideration of the character of Castile through its individuals, historical and fictional, as well as its spirit, its casta espiritual. Further proof of Unamuno's inevitably historical thought is found in his remarks on language: the Romanization of Spain is evident in the Castilian language “en el que pensamos y con el que pensamos,” a Roman “nucleus” which later becomes the Castilian nucleus of collective Spanish character. The individuals, or representative men, of Spanish history are also Castilian: the Cid, Queen Isabella, Ignacio de Loyola, Don Quijote and Sancho, Quevedo and Calderón, casticistas all, but whose sentiments and energies are brought into the mainstream of European history because of the effort and ambition of Carlos V. In this essay even nature has a narrative, historical function—as it so frequently will in future works of Unamuno—a nature which has no “harmonic continuity,” which does not awaken “sentimientos voluptuosos de alegría y de vivir,” which does not offer “communion” with human beings. It is, in short, the background and symbol of “una casta de hombres sobrios, producto de una larga selección [Darwinian, of course] por las heladas de crudísimos inviernos y una serie de penurias periódicas, hechos a la inclemencia del cielo y a la pobreza de la vida.”⁵³

The third essay (“El espíritu castellano”), the middle chapter and ideological nucleus of En torno al casticismo, purports to show the militant individualism of Spanish character (exemplified chiefly in the theater of the Golden Age and its anti-romantic honor code, and in the unsentimental warriors from the time of the Cid to the defensive war against Napoleon). According to Unamuno, the “dissociative” nature of the average Spaniard had caused religion—ever since the early 16th century—to assume the function of a “lazo social” in both Spain and America. But out of the intolerant Spanish religion of the 16th century grew a “mística” (i.e., a “mystique” as well as mysticism). The 16th century of Carlos V, Ignacio de Loyola and Pizarro was a historical point of convergence, in which the two driving forces of the Castilian spirit, individuality and unity, became one: “Afirmaba el alma castellana castiza con igual vigor su individualidad, una frente al mundo vario, y esta su unidad, proyectada al exterior. …”⁵⁴ Beneath the “mystique,” however, grew a “mysticism,” the ideal of harmony and peace of a nature-loving pacifist, Fray Luis de León. The fourth essay (“De mística y humanismo”) equates the spirit of Luis de León with the hidden substance of history, which contains “personalidad castiza” in diametric opposition to the separatist, “individuating” nature of the more artificial “conciencia histórica nacional.” Unamuno here reaffirms the first principle of his historical thought (first stated in the opening sentence of “La casta histórica”): “la personalidad castiza, … la vida plena de que alienta la Humanidad, toda en todos y toda en cada uno.”⁵⁵ That is, the soul of a people, like the soul of a human being, is eminently personal in character. Again we think of Hegel, because it is absolutely clear in both this essay and in the final essay of En torno al casticismo (“Sobre el marasmo actual de España”) that Unamuno is thinking of history in terms of a quest for freedom. It now becomes clear that mysticism, the spirit of the Renaissance (whose most distinguished Spanish representative was Fray Luis de León), and in general “lo castizo,” are the agents of this quest. Unamuno himself states it concisely:

Aun así y todo [i.e., despite the fact that men and peoples are never the same in any two successive moments of their lives], he intentado caracterizar nuestro núcleo castizo; cómo en la mística trató la casta castellana de levantarse sobre sus caracteres diferenciales, sumergiéndose en ellos, y cómo el ambiente del Renacimiento levantó al maestro León a la verdadera doctrina liberadora, ahogada en el oleaje inquisitorial de concentración y aislamiento.⁵⁶

“El marasmo” is the crisis of the moment, a recurrence of the old, divisive, inquisitorial spirit in modern trappings. It is the decisive beginning of Unamuno's preoccupation with the historical destiny of his generation (that of 1898), of Spain, of Europe, and of humanity in general. This preoccupation finds its clearest expression in Del sentimiento trágico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos.

IV

Del sentimiento trágico contains all the Unamunian rhetoric of philosophy, but its substance is history. Del sentimiento trágico is, in a sense, a serious, concrete sequel to the farsical, abstract novel Amor y pedagogía. More than a Hegelian, don Fulgencio de Entrambosmares, in the latter work, is a travesty of Hegel, as Unamuno suggests in his Epilogue. Like don Avito and Marina and their suicide son Apolodoro, he was a creature of “los limbos de la inexistencia,”⁵⁷ who lived in a realm of formulas and pure speculation. As Geoffrey Ribbans has observed,⁵⁸ Don Fulgencio is not simply a Hegelian but also a kind of caricature of Unamuno himself, as the latter testifies in his Prologue: “Diríase que el autor, no atreviéndose a expresar por propia cuenta ciertos desatinos, adopta el cómodo artificio de ponerlos en boca de personajes grotescos y absurdos, soltando así en broma lo que acaso piensa en serio.” Apparently enticed by the notion of producing a novelty, but without wanting to appear frivolous, Unamuno revealed to Ilundain, “Quiero hacer una rechifla amarga, y fundir, no yuxtaponer meramente, lo trágico, lo grotesco y lo sentimental.”⁵⁹ In this clear anticipation of Valle Inclán's esperpento, Unamuno had intentions that were perfectly serious, rooted in his distrust of Spencerian “cientificismo.” But these artificial spirits from the limbo of “non-existence” were little more than premonitions of the historical “hombre de carne y hueso” of Del sentimiento trágico.

It is quite possible that Ganivet's theory of the “virginity” of the Spanish soul, which he thought could have an allegory in the dogma and drama of the Immaculate Conception, helped motivate Unamuno's permanent return to “Quijotismo” as the “natural religion” of Spain. But Unamuno's historical intuition turned out to be deeper and more liberal than that of Ganivet, who—had he outlived the first years of the crisis of 1898—might well have had second thoughts about his policy of cultural isolationism, adapted from St. Augustine: “Noli foras ire; in interiore Hispaniae habitat veritas.”⁶⁰ Unamuno's view in “Sobre la europeización” (1906) that the most genuine Spaniards are actually those of the most “exotic,” Europeanizing spirit, is intensified and expanded in Del sentimiento trágico, especially in the first two and final three chapters, and, generally, throughout. One can open the great essay at virtually any page and find that the “authorities” for Unamuno's interpretation of Hispanic cultural history are predominantly non-Spanish. Yet the spirit, temperament and perspective of the work are substantially and intimately Spanish. Unamuno attributes, furthermore, a unifying characteristic to his European intellectual heroes indispensable for our comprehension of his historical outlook, which affirms that the historic, moral role of Western culture as seen in the light of the fetishism of the pre-Christian era, the Christian ethic of St. Paul, and the romantic-fatalistic ethic of Sénancour, is to give “finalidad humana al Universo.”⁶¹ It explains, among an infinite number of other things in Unamuno's philosophy, his notion of a historical (personal and local) Christ and historical apostleship which—much more than the doctrinal problem of disbelief—is at the heart of his San Manuel Bueno, mártir; it explains his open and permanent distrust of every exponent of abstract reason (one cannot drink distilled water, etc.). Accordingly, Unamuno has to minimize all that is impersonal or abstract in the Logic of Hegel (“gran poema metafísico”) and the Ethics of Spinoza (“un desesperado poema elegíaco”)⁶² and it is not Kant's “reason,” pure or practical, that appeals to Unamuno, but his “imperative”—poetically felt and historically perceived: the categorical command of conscience to act “as if the maxim of our action were to become by our will a universal law of nature.”⁶³ The subjunctive, contrary-to-fact clause is, in itself, suggestive of the tragic sense of life, and of the idea—so enthusiastically reiterated by Unamuno—that humanity “whether in thine own person or in that of another,” must in every case be treated as an end rather than a means.⁶⁴ In a word, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel interested Unamuno to the extent that he could make human, i.e., historical use of their philosophies. “Tomad a Kant, al hombre Manuel Kant, que nació y vivió en Koenigsberg a fines del siglo XVIII y hasta pisar los umbrales del XIX …,” that is the Kant who, like Kierkegaard, makes the leap (before Unamuno and before Ortega) from pure reason to historical reason,⁶⁵ the Kant whom we remember against the background of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the crisis of Reason.

Del sentimiento trágico can scarcely be called a dispassionate essay on human culture in the West, because Unamuno, “el verdadero hermano,” spoke emotionally, in behalf of men as well as about them. In Américo Castro's sensitive view, he was “llamado a los otros yo, tributarios del mismo pathos.”⁶⁶ But there is no reason why pathos should deceive us, because Del sentimiento trágico has logic, precise logic, around which his idea of history is built and which is well summed up in this passage from Chapter VI:

Al cristianismo, la locura de la cruz, a la fe irracional en que el Cristo había resucitado para resucitarnos, le salvó la cultura helénica racionalista, y a ésta el cristianismo. Sin éste, sin el cristianismo, habría sido imposible el Renacimiento; sin el Evangelio, sin San Pablo, los pueblos que habían atravesado la Edad Media no habrían comprendido ni a Platón ni a Aristóteles. Una tradición puramente racionalista es tan imposible como una tradición puramente religiosa. Suele discutirse si la Reforma nació como hija del Renacimiento o en protesta a éste, y cabe decir que las dos cosas, porque el hijo nace siempre en protesta contra el padre. Dícese también que fueron los clásicos griegos redivivos los que volvieron a hombres como Erasmo a San Pablo y al cristianismo primitivo, al más irracional; pero cabe retrucar diciendo que fue San Pablo, que fue la irracionalidad cristiana que sustentaba su teología católica, lo que les volvió a los clásicos.⁶⁷

This, indeed, has been the historical relationship: the Hellenic tradition of rationalism has not diminished Christianity; nor has Christianity rejected Hellenism. Rather, each has made the historical survival of the other possible. The struggle between mind and heart creates a “tragic sentiment,” but does this amount to actual tragedy? Ernst Cassirer reminds us that Goethe (like Unamuno) felt the conflict between belief and disbelief to be “the deepest, indeed the only, theme of the history of the world and humanity.”⁶⁸ But whereas Goethe concluded that epochs in which belief predominates are the brilliant and fruitful epochs and that the reverse is true of the times of unbelief, Unamuno remained conspicuously neutral, quoting Browning to show it:

                    All we have gained then by our unbelief
Is a life of doubt diversified by faith,
For one of faith diversified by doubt.(69)

In conclusion, it is not difficult to see that Unamuno's concept of the history and destiny of peoples—a history and destiny (past and future) inseparable from that of individual men—had a fundamental effect on his idea of the dilemma of single souls. The tragic sentiment cannot be considered totally tragic, because life, to the end, is unbroken tension, “eterno acercarse sin llegar nunca,”⁷⁰ and Unamuno, for whom love was always more important than truth, had the consolation of universal human company.

Notes

1. El porvenir de España (Madrid, 1912), p. 46. It first appeared in El Defensor de Granada, 1897.

2. Ibid., p. 106.

3. E.g., Unamuno: “Así como la tradición es la sustancia de la Historia, y la eternidad lo es del tiempo, así la Historia es la forma de la tradición como el tiempo lo es de la eternidad.” (En torno al casticismo [Madrid, 1902], p. 58. This passage is garbled in both Ensayos, [Madrid], 1951, I, 39 and Obras completas (Madrid, 1950), III, 17. Subsequent references to the Aguilar edition of essays are by the letter E, volume and page number.)

4. In the period of his strongest interest in science and the metaphorical usage of its terminology, from about 1895 to 1910, Unamuno tends to think of history in terms of natural evolution, geology and biology, a fact which explains his passing interest in Herbert Spencer and his permanent interest in Darwin. The concluding descriptive passage of Paz en la guerra, he recalls, “me fue sugerido por la lectura de un tratado de geología” (E, II, 38), and he prophesies (in September or October of 1900, Dr. Manuel García Blanco has informed me), “… llegará día en que los grandes principios científicos modernos de la conservación de la energía, de la unidad de las fuerzas físicas, de la evolución de las especies orgánicas, etc., sean dogmas religiosos, fuente de consuelo y de conducta para los hombres” (Fragment of a letter to B. G. de Candamo, E, II, 60).

   For Unamuno's appreciation of Darwin, see “El materialismo popular,” E, II, 527; “Darwin,” Obras completas, 15 vols. (Madrid-Barcelona, 1950-1963), X, pp. 95-97 (hereafter: OC, volume and page number); “Discurso en el homenaje a Darwin,” OC, VII, 786-809, and “Sueño y acción,” OC, V, 48-50.

   In “Sueño y acción” we find the historical significance of Darwin in the term misticismo darwiniano, “entendiendo por el más apto el más inglés,” i.e., the collective will to national survival. Civilization, observes Unamuno (OC, V, 49), is never static, and develops according to an evolutionary law which brings Hegel into agreement with Darwin (“De donde resulta cierto aquello de Hegel de que sólo es estable la inestabilidad.”).

5. España, un enigma histórico (Buenos Aires, 1956), I, 22.

6. E.g., Abel Sánchez, “Ciudad y campo,” “La ciudad de Henoc,” and many other writings identified by Carlos Clavería in “Sobre el tema de Caín en la obra de Unamuno” (Temas de Unamuno [Madrid, 1953], pp. 93-122).

7. “Historia y novela,” E, II, 1208.

8. The Modern Spanish Novel (New York, 1961), p. 183.

9. E, II, 1210.

10. Luces de Bohemia (Opera Omnia, XXIV [Madrid, 1924], 224-225).

11. E, I, 47 (my italics).

12. El Unamuno contemplativo (México, 1959). Cf. Azorín's description of “el hombre-voluntad” and “el hombre-reflexión” in La voluntad (Madrid, 1939), pp. 217-218.

13. “Y el quijotismo no es sino lo más desesperado de la lucha de la Edad Media contra el Renacimiento, que salió de ella” (E, II, 1015).

14. E, II, 1006.

15. E, II, 998.

16. E, II, 547 (Soliloquios y conversaciones in 1911). Sixteen years before Unamuno had said the same thing; see note 3.

17. “El ‘oriental’ vivía para desvivirse. El griego existía para renovarse. El occidental cristiano ha vivido en la conciencia de que lo experimentado es único y de que es imposible borrar o destruir, por el fuego, la ley o el olvido, lo que alguna vez ha acontecido” (Unamuno, bosquejo de una filosofía [Editorial Sudamericana, 1957], p. 79).

18. Ibid., p. 81.

19. For a discussion of the problem of the perils and temptations confronting the objective historian—especially the superimposition of “interpretation” on “history,” see Alan Bullock, “The Historian's Purpose,” in Hans Meyerhoff (ed.), The Philosophy of History in Our Time (Doubleday Anchor Books, New York, 1959), pp. 292-299. Bullock attributes the term metahistory to Saiah Berlin.

20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Reason in History. A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History, Robert S. Hartman (Library of Liberal Arts, No. 35, Bobbs-Merrill [New York 1954], p. 7 [my italics]).

21. Ibid., p. 20 (my italics).

22. “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” in Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 4th ed. (London, 1939), p. 639.

23. “Of all relations, the most universal is that of contrast or opposition. Every condition of thought or of things—every idea and every situation in the world—leads inevitably to its opposite, and then unites with it to form a higher, more complex whole,” writes Will Durant with Hegel in mind (The Story of Philosophy [New York, 1954], p. 295).

24. Hegel, op. cit., p. 87.

25. Ibid., p. 94.

26. E, I, 132.

27. “If Hegel had developed this kind of man more [the hero], he could have inserted spontaneous individuality into the course of history. But he did not do it. The course of history is impersonal. From this it follows that the historic hero himself becomes impersonal and rides roughshod over ‘less historical’ individuals. Hegel is pained by this, but there is the overriding necessity of the logical development of the Idea” (Robert S. Hartman, Introduction to Hegel's Reason in History, p. xxxvii).

28. E, I, 76. Also, of course: “El hombre es un fin, no un medio. La civilización toda se endereza al hombre, a cada hombre, a cada yo” (E, II, 738).

29. E, I, 137.

30. “Je n'aime, il est vrai, que la nature: mais c'est pour cela qu'en m'aimant moi-même je n'aime point exclusivement, et que les autres hommes sont encore, dans la nature, ce que j'en aime davantage” (Etienne de Sénancour, Obermann [Paris, n. d.], p. 41: “Letter IV”).

31. E, II, 996.

32. Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (New York, 1904), III, 176. Cf. A. N. Whitehead, who says of the present that it “holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity” (The Aims of Education and Other Essays [New York, 1949], p. 26).

33. See Antonio Sánchez Barbudo, “Una conversión ‘chateaubrianesca’ a los veinte años,” Estudios sobre Unamuno y Machado (Madrid, 1959), pp. 15-29. Unamuno has Pachico (Paz en la guerra) read Chateaubriand and “los demás divagadores del catolicismo romántico” (OC, II, 67). Throughout Unamuno's works Sánchez Barbudo perceives a combination of the “desesperación grave” of Sénancour and “la desesperación literaria, exhibida y saboreada, de un Chateaubriand” (op. cit., p. 27). Sánchez Barbudo has said much about the “intimate” Unamuno and his alleged attempts to create fictional faith out of real atheism, and has incited much thought about Don Miguel's personal motivations. But the necessarily speculative nature of many of his conclusions about Unamuno's personal religious history and problems (e.g., the extremely obscure circumstances surrounding the “conversion” of 1884) and the vagueness of his critical analysis (e.g., “desesperación grave” vs. “desesperación literaria, exhibida y saboreada”) sometimes result in compounded error (e.g., his totally erroneous interpretation of Pachico's mystic experience at the end of Paz en la guerra by equating the “verdad de inmensa sencillez” with total nothingness—“que no hay secreto” (op. cit., pp. 33-35).

34. The Prelude, Book I, lines 401-402.

35. See the Prologue to Niebla (OC, II, 679).

36. See Julio García Morejón's informative article, “Unamuno y el sentimiento trágico de Antero de Quental,” Cuadernos de la Cátedra Miguel de Unamuno, XI (1961), 27-65.

37. Letter (May 14, 1887) to Wilhelm Storck, quoted by Morejón, op. cit., p. 29 (my italics).

38. Sánchez Barbudo, op. cit., pp. 15-29.

39. Epistolario a Clarín (Madrid, 1941), p. 53.

40. See Zubizarreta, “Aparece un Diario inédito de Unamuno,” Mercurio Peruano (Lima), no. 360 (abril 1957), pp. 182-189; also the same author's two articles “La inserción de Unamuno en el cristianismo: 1897” and “Miguel de Unamuno y Pedro Corominas” in Tras las huellas de Unamuno (Madrid, 1960).

41. In Unamuno's own words, “Y luego la anécdota, la horrible anécdota, ha matado la confidencia íntima. No hay modo de conocer a un hombre por anécdotas, y lo único que debe importarle a un hombre es conocer a otro hombre, conocer a los demás hombres. Porque los demás hombres son espejos nuestros y sólo conociéndolos llegaremos a conocernos” (OC, X, 772-773).

42. “De noche, a solas y a oscuras, es como puede uno llegar a darse entera cuenta de como la vida es sueño; la historia, pesadilla; y el mundo, destierro,” wrote Unamuno in 1926 (OC, X, 773).

43. See p. 319.

44. E, II, 764.

45. En torno al casticismo, E, I, 40.

46. E, I, 42-43. And Schopenhauer: “History, which I like to think of as the contrary of poetry (ἱsτορούμενον—πεποιήμενον), is for time what geography is for space; and it is no more to be called a science, in any strict sense of the word, than is geography, because it does not deal with universal truths, but only with particular details” (The Art of Literature, transl. by T. Bailey Saunders, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1960, p. 58). The contrast between “universal truths” and “particular details” corresponds to the distinction drawn by Unamuno in El porvenir de España between “hechos sub-históricos” and “sucesos históricos” (see p. 319).

47. E, I, 54.

48. E, I, 39.

49. Xavier Zubiri, Naturaleza, historia, Dios (2a. ed., Madrid, 1951), p. 304.

50. E, I, 40.

51. “Was der Mensch sei, erfährt er nur durch die Geschichte.”

52. Hegel, Reason in History …, pp. 7, 20.

53. E, I, 64.

54. E, I, 97.

55. E, I, 118 (Unamuno's italics). Cf. “Para llegar, lo mismo un pueblo que un hombre, a conocerse …” (E, I, 47): “… hallar lo característico y propio de un hombre o de un pueblo …” (E, I, 122.) Américo Castro has given emotive testimony of the complexity of human relationship—personal and historical—for Unamuno: “Lo que aquí deseo evocar es otra relación de su yo, de ese yo trágico, ávido, imperioso y recalcitrante, con los otros, con el prójimo. Y esta relación se me apareció, más que en su obra, en su comportamiento de hombre y en ese espectáculo humano que me ofrecía su comercio, su amistad. Asistía, pues, y con una indecible emoción, a este espectáculo de un hombre que vive su pensamiento, su pensamiento trágico, que vive su persona, su persona desgarrada. Su agonía. E identificada a esta agonía, otra se me aparecía, la de España en él, hombre civil, hombre político. … Entonces otro movimiento aparece, que no es alivio sino simpatía. Llamado a los otros yo, tributarios del mismo pathos. Hermanos de guerra y de pasión. Y aquí no estamos ya en esas sutiles dialécticas de la persona que soy, que sueño, que pienso, que piensan o sueñan los otros. Sino en el solo pathos, en la única y esencial tragedia de la persona desgarrada que, en su más cruel desgarramiento, lo reconoce en los demás e inicia un diálogo” (“Las castas y lo castizo. En torno al casticismo de Miguel de Unamuno,” La Torre, IX [julio-diciembre 1961], núms. 35-36, p. 91).

56. E, I, 122.

57. OC, II, 410.

58. “The Development of Unamuno's Novels Amor y pedagogía and Niebla,” Hispanic Studies in Honour of I. González Llubera (Oxford, 1959), pp. 11-12.

59. Revista de la Universidad de Buenos Aires (1948), p. 354.

60. Idearium español (Madrid, 1944), p. 151.

61. See Del sentimiento …, E, II, 857, 859, 892-894, 925, 935, 956, 965 and 996.

62. E, II, 757.

63. Critique of Practical Reason (London, 1909), p. 139.

64. Metaphysics of Morals (London, 1902), p. 47. For Unamuno's adaptation of this idea, see references in note 62.

65. E, II, 731.

66. For the more extensive quotation from Castro, see note 55.

67. E, II, 830-831.

68. Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, tr. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, 1951), p. 136.

69. E, II, 831.

70. E, II, 958.