Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

I don’t know how it may be elsewhere, but here in Spain the man, the individual man, irritates us. And as I believe that the great battle is how to win respect for man, respect for individuality, I for my part irritate the myriad-headed, anonymous multitude. Let them respect me. Thus they will learn to respect every individual, to respect themselves as individuals.

Yes, yes, it is quite right to use one’s knowledge with discretion, just as it is quite right to use one’s wealth with discretion. But neither knowledge nor wealth is one’s self; they are something annexed, something that comes and goes, that can be taken or left. But I cannot make a discreet use of myself. If I am deprived of a shilling or a dollar I can submit to it, but I cannot easily submit to being deprived of an arm or, still less, of a piece of my soul. A shilling or a dollar I can give away discreetly, but an arm or a piece of my soul, these I can only tear off and give away passionately, that is to say indiscreetly. And I do not give ideas, I do not give knowledge—I give pieces of my soul. The ideas that I expound matter to me less, far less, than the way I expound them.

It is not the shilling that I give you that counts, but the warmth that it carries with it from my hand.

These antipathies that I provoke proceed—as well I know, in spite of whatever those who see only the surface may say—from the fact that I am not an intellectual but a man of passion. Almost all the things that I have said, hundreds, thousands, have said before me. I am neither erudite nor a savant. There is no great originality in my ideas. Whence, then, the potency which, thanks to God, I have attained? Whence these antipathies and sympathies, and how is it that I am able to say, thanks to God, that I am seldom read with indifference?—It is due to passion, to the tone of my voice.

Yes, I know it, I am antipathetic to many of my readers, and one of the things that makes me most antipathetic to them is my aggressiveness, my sometimes morbid aggressiveness. I don’t deny it. But the truth is, my friend, that this aggressiveness is directed against myself. When I attack others I am attacking myself. I live in a state of inward conflict. I imagine that I am misinterpreted? Very likely, since I myself do not always succeed in interpreting myself aright. The ideas that crowd in upon me from all quarters are always battling together in my mind and I fail to make peace between them. I fail because I don’t even try. I need these battles.

And, moreover I am not anxious for a reputation among scholars, for I am not a scholar, I am not what is called a scholar. Nor even among men of culture, although I am always preaching culture. But by culture I understand the most intense inner life, the life of intensest battle, of intensest disquietude, of intensest desire. I come of a race which some people say is still, in its essence, in a state of savagery, a race of a turbulent and taciturn spirit, a race of which Salmerón said that it had not yet adapted itself to European civilization. And so far as I myself and my own branch of the race[4] are concerned, I accept this judgment and I accept it with pride.

No, no, friend, I am not a philanthropist. The hunger and thirst for God are too strong within me for me to love men in the philanthropic way. Needs must be sown among men germs of doubt, of distrust, of inquietude, and even of despair—why not? yes, even of despair—and if thereby they lose what they call happiness, since it is not really happiness, they have lost nothing.

And above all and before all, none of this living in peace with all the world! Living in peace with all the world—horrible, horrible, horrible! No, no, no, none of this living in peace. Peace, spiritual peace I mean, is usually a lie and is usually stagnation. I do not wish to live in peace either with others or with myself. I need war, inward war. We all need war.

Truth before peace. That is my watchword. And to give it greater brilliance I will write it in Latin: veritas primus pace. And it goes without saying that the war that I need as the sustenance of my life and of the lives of others is a spiritual war, not war with gun and sword.

All the rest—in spite of whatever the champions of the central current of culture and of disciplined solidarity and of respect for the so-called definitive conquests of the human spirit may say—all the rest I understand and I am even ready to applaud it if you like; but it is not my concern, it is not my lot to put myself at its service.