Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

The only way of entering into vital relations with another is the aggressive way; only those succeed in mutually penetrating one another, in forming a spiritual brotherhood, who strive to subjugate one another spiritually, whether in the case of individuals or of peoples. It is only when I strive to put my spirit into the spirit of my neighbour that I receive my neighbour’s spirit in mine. The apostle is blessed in receiving in himself the souls of those whom he converts; in this consists the nobility of proselytizing.

No, none of this laissez-faire and laissez-aller—don’t let us shrug our shoulders at the ideas, still less at the feelings, of others, but rather try to wound them. It is thus and only thus that they will wound ours and keep them awake within us. For my part I know that those to whom I owe most are those who have acted as if they rejected, who have wished to reject, what I offered to them. The deep moral life is a life of aggression and mutual penetration. Everyone must endeavour to make others in his own image and likeness, as God is said to have made us in His image and likeness.

The condemnation of him who tries to mould himself upon another lies in the fact that he will cease to be himself without succeeding in being the other whom he takes as his model, and so he will be nobody.

Unquestionably there is something, there are many things, in modern European culture and in the modern European spirit that it behoves us to receive into ourselves in order that we may convert them into our flesh, just as we receive the flesh of various kinds of animals into our body and convert it into our flesh. With the brains of oxen I nourish my brain, with the ribs of hogs I make my heart beat, with fish and birds I feed my body so that my spirit can plunge into the deeps and swim in them and ascend to the heights and fly there. And must we not eat the modern European spirit? Yes, but we first kill these oxen, hogs, fishes and birds, upon which we nourish ourselves, imposing our will upon them, and we must deal with this spirit in the same way before eating it.

I am profoundly convinced, arbitrarily of course—the more profoundly, the more arbitrarily, as is always the case when truths of faith are concerned—I am profoundly convinced that the real and deep Europeanization of Spain, that is to say, our digestion of that part of the European spirit which it is possible to convert into our spirit, will not begin until we strive to impose ourselves upon the European spiritual order, to make the Europeans swallow our spirit, that which is genuinely ours, in exchange for theirs, until we strive to Spaniardize Europe.

And to-day—I say it with shame and sorrow—when a Spaniard seeks to enter into the European world, that is to say, in the case of men of letters, when he wishes to be translated, all that he is concerned about is to deform himself, to de-Spaniardize himself, to leave the translator nothing to do but to translate the letter, the external language. And thus it is that one hears remarks like that which a Frenchman made to me the other day, when, speaking of the translation of a contemporary Spanish novel, he stated that it was better in French than in Spanish. To this I replied that it had been translated back into its original language.

Each human faculty has its method, that is to say, its procedure, its mode of action. That which we call logic is the method of reason, the way of discovering conclusions satisfactory to reason. In this way science is made. But when it is a question neither of addressing nor satisfying reason, there is no need of logic. And for my part, I rarely, very rarely, address myself to the reason of those who hear or read me, and when I do so, it is not I myself who speak or write, but rather an artificial self—and because artificial, therefore detachable—which those who hear or read me impose upon me.

It has been said that the heart has its logic, but it is dangerous to call the method of the heart logic; it would be better to call it cardiac.

And there is also the method of passion, which is arbitrariness and which must not be confounded with caprice, as often happens. It is one thing to be capricious and another very different thing to be arbitrary.

Arbitrariness, the brusque affirmation of a thing because I wish it to be so, because I need it to be so, the creation of our vital truth—truth being that which makes us live—is the method of passion. Passion affirms and the proof of its affirmation is founded upon the energy with which it is affirmed. It needs no other proofs. When some poor intellectual, some modern European, opposes ratiocinations and arguments to any of my affirmations, I say to myself: reasons, reasons, and nothing more than reasons!