Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

It has been said that with the Catholic Kings and the beginnings of national unity the course of our history was turned into another channel. It is certain that since then, with the discovery of America and our intermeddling in European affairs, we have been drawn into the current of other peoples. Spain entered into the strong current of the Renaissance and our mediæval soul began to be obliterated. And the Renaissance was in its essence just this: science, above all in the form of humanities, and life. And thought dwelt less upon death and the mystical wisdom gradually disappeared.

It has frequently been said that the Spaniard is too much preoccupied with death; and we have been told, in a variety of ways and especially by those who deal in platitudes, that the preoccupation with death prevents us from living like moderns and like Europeans. The blame even for our death-rate and for our squalor and for our lack of health has been thrown upon our so-called cult of death. And it seems to me, on the other hand, that we think too little about death, or rather that we only half think about it.

And we half think and half meditate about death because we pretend to be European and modern without ceasing to be Spaniards, and that is impossible. And we have made an infamous commixture of our classic wisdom and exotic science, of our innate deep feeling for death and a borrowed solicitude for life. And we have thought we were keenly interested in progress whereas in fact we trouble very little about it.

“You deceive yourself,” a foreign friend of mine once said to me, thinking that although I was a Spaniard I was also European and modern, “you deceive yourself—Spaniards in general are incapable of civilization and refractory to it.”

And I left him cold with stupor when I replied: “And is that a fault?” The man looked at me as one looks at someone who has suddenly gone mad; it must have seemed to him as if I had denied a postulate of geometry. He began to reason with me and I said: “No, don’t attempt to give me reasons. I think I may say without boasting, and yet without the hypocrisy of modesty, that I know all the reasons you can bring forward on this point. It is not a question of reasons but of feelings.”

He insisted, attempting to talk to me about feeling, and I added: “No, my friend, no, you know all about logic, but it is not logic, but passion, that governs feelings.” And I left him and went away to read the confessions of the great African of the ancient world.

Is it not perhaps true that we Spaniards are, in effect, spiritually refractory to what is called modern European culture? And if this be so, ought we to be distressed about it? Is it not possible to live and to die, above all to die well, without this fortunate culture?

And by this I don’t mean that we are engulfed in inaction, in ignorance and in barbarism—no, not that. There are means of augmenting the spirit, of exalting it, of enlarging it, of ennobling it, of making it more divine, without having recourse to this same culture. We can, I believe, cultivate our wisdom without accepting science except as a means to this end, taking due precautions against its corrupting the spirit.

Just as love of death and the feeling that it is the principle of our true life ought not to lead us to a violent renunciation of life, to suicide—for life is a preparation for death, and the better the preparation, the better the thing prepared for—so neither ought love of wisdom to lead us to a renunciation of science, for that would be equivalent to mental suicide, but to an acceptance of science as a preparation, and as nothing more than a preparation, for wisdom.

For my part I can say that if I had never made excursions into the fields of some of the modern European sciences, I should never have taken the delight that I have taken in our ancient African wisdom, in our popular wisdom, in what scandalizes all the Pharisees and Sadducees of intellectualism, that horrible intellectualism that poisons the soul. It is hearing hymns in praise of them that has made me view science and life with distrust, perhaps with horror, and love the wisdom of death, the meditation which, according to Spinoza, the free man, that is, the happy man, does not meditate.