Miguel de Unamuno’s “The Practical Problem,”

chap. XI in Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch

(New York: Dover Publications, 1921), pp.260-96.

For a philosopher to say that you should participate in society in order to dominate it, that you should impose your ideas upon others, that you should overpower your neighbors, and that there is more humanity in war than there is in peace, makes us imagine a new monster.  These are the thoughts that we would like to ascribe to the terrorists, to Hitler, to every dictator our history has seen.  These are not the sentiments that we want to hear from an extremely devout Catholic moral philosopher, nor from an ethic that can be positively implemented today.  These are the words of Miguel de Unamuno in his work, Tragic Sense of Life.

Unamuno’s frantic and vivid book, spanning religious analysis, moral theory, and socio-political commentary, offers to us a new vision of ethics in this era when neither democratic nor standard neo-liberal codes are without problems (wherein, by “democratic” we can narrowly understand a system of majority rule, and by “neo-liberal,” the contemporary state wherein classic liberalism has subsumed both liberal and conservative factions, and is differentiated from modern (more leftist) liberalism and from conservatism proper, although incorporating aspects (and people) from these).  His new ethical design gives us an alternative for an ethical code that can be implemented and can directly impact the cultural-political atmosphere.  He leads religious writing to territories of hostile anarchic language.  But his “ethic of invasion” is still a religious ethical code.  It is a method of creating faithful community and instilling hope in the individual that there is a way to create an afterlife.  Unamuno is talking directly about people in their communities and societies—he does not philosophize about the possibilities of a disembodied being; instead, it is the specific being who is in time, and has memory, therefore has the continuity and unity of actions and intentions; this specific social human being is differentiated from any other being (Unamuno, 11).  He is explaining a way to create community and hope on the basis of irreplaceabililty through strife.  Or, as Unamuno himself says, “The most fruitful ethic is the ethic of mutual imposition” (Unamuno, 278).

With his desire for an applicable and concrete philosophy, he says that all his predecessors, the philosophers, must be seen as humans of flesh and bone.  In order to understand what a philosopher has to say, according to Unamuno, one must know that thinker’s background.  So let’s look briefly at Unamuno’s background: 

On Miguel de Unamuno:

He was born in Bilbao to Basque parents in 1864, and had a long life of political intrigue, until his death in Spain, under house arrest, in 1936.  He witnessed Spain’s great political chaos, from the Spanish-American War (1898), to Rivera’s reign as dictator (1923), to the rise of the Falangists’ fascist regime (1933).  His political activity began when he was 12 with an angry letter to King Alfonso XII arguing about unjust laws that stripped away the rights of the Basque for supporting what was deemed the insubordination/rebellion of Don Carlos and the “Law of 1876.” 

He went to the University of Madrid to study languages and philosophy (earning a PhD in 1884 for a dissertation on the origin and history of the Basque) and, likewise, his revolutionary study began, too, when he was in his twenties, stopped attending Mass, and decided to become a Marxist Socialist.  Around this time, he joined the “Generation of ‘98” radical literary intellectual group dedicated to the renewal of Spain after the fall of its monarchy founded by José Martínez Ruiz. 

Ten years later, however, he became an anti-Marxist, sometime in between finding religion (despite having been raised by his very Catholic mother and grandmother—his father died when he was six, his grandmother, too, while he was still young—and declaring, at 11, that he wanted to be a priest, or, really, a saint.  His love for a childhood sweetheart and later wife, Concepcion, however, kept him from the cloth, as did, likely, his radical politics and unorthodox take on Christian ethics).  His spiritual discovery and religious aspirations and their peculiar development, however, account for the title frequently ascribed to him: “Religious Catholic Atheist.”  (He is also known as “The Arouser of Spain,” for his politics, and his later nickname, “The Owl,” hearkening both the bird associated with knowledge and his beakish nose, pointy beard, and biting eyes.) 

While a philosopher (and best known here for Tragic Sense of Life), Unamuno is perhaps better known for his translations (fluent, variously, in Basque, Castilian, Spanish, German, French, Italian, English, Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Danish, etc.), essays, novels (including Abel Sánchez: The History of a Passion, a modern rewriting of the Cain and Abel biblical story), poems, and plays, as well as being a professor of Greek at the University of Salamanca and, later, the rector there.  His rectorship was granted him by royal decree, but the position was always tenuous (often censored, then pardoned, only to repeat) given his outspoken criticisms of the monarchy.  On one occasion, when awarded a Cross of Alfonso XII, Unamuno accepted it saying he deserved it, to which the King replied, “It is strange, the other recipients of the cross all assured me that they did not deserve it,” to which Unamuno hastily and firmly replied, “and they were right.” 

More seriously, in 1924 he was banished for six years from his post, his family, and his country because of his opposition to Primo de Rivera.  He achieved international recognition during this political exile, and returned to his country in 1930.  Just six years after his return, Franco came to power and had many of the leading intellectuals killed; the 73 year old Unamuno spoke out vehemently against this.  He claimed, “… I am unable to remain silent. …  At times, to be silent is to lie,” he continued, saying, “Just now, I have heard a necrophilous and senseless cry: ‘viva la muerte!’  To me it sounds the equivalent of ‘Muera la Vida,’—To Death with Life!’  And I, who have spent my life shaping paradoxes which aroused the uncomprehending anger of others, I must tell you, as an expert authority, that this outlandish paradox is repellant to me.”  He wasn’t finished; he proceeded to charge the fascist General Milan-Astray, one of Franco’s leading generals, that “You will win because you will have enough brute force.  But you will not convince.  For to convince you need to persuade.  And, in order to persuade, you would need what you lack: Reason and Right.”  To this, the General reportedly shouted “Death to intelligence!  And long live death [viva la muerte],” his men cocked their weapons at Unamuno, and he was only saved because Franco’s wife promptly escorted him away.  Franco immediately ordered his execution, but was convinced that they could not risk the political backlash from the international community, and instead confined him to house arrest until his death later that year. 

Death, however, was something he obsessed over from youth.  Writing an odd love letter to Concepcion before their marriage, “One night there lowered into my mind one of those dark, sad, and mournful dreams which I cannot banish from my thoughts, even during moments of happiness during the day.  I dreamed that I was married, that I had a child, that this child died, and that over its body, which seemed to be made of wax, I said to my wife: ‘Behold out love!  Shortly it will decay: this is the way everything ends.”  (He and Concepcion did marry and have eight children, the third died in youth from meningitis, causing Unamuno to succumb to a deep depression that only sated after his wife, one night, awoke at his crying and, as he described it, “In a moment of supreme abysmal anguish, wracked with superhuman weeping, when she saw me in the claws of the Angel of Nothingness, she cried out to me from the depths of her maternal being, superhuman and divine: ‘My child!’”  This experience led him to propose the religious argument that any relation to the divine must be done through intimate, personal relation.) 

Textual Review: Miguel de Unamuno’s “The Practical Problem,”

chap. XI in Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (New York: Dover Publications, 1921), pp.260-96.

OUTLINE:

1.Contradictions (esp. of the heart and head) (260-

1. a.Despair can be the basis of an ethic (261)
   

2. b.Heart’s truth = desire for immortality (263)
   

2.Pessimism and Optimism (264-

1. a.All deserves eternalization (264)
   

2. b.3 Types of Pessimism (265)
   

3.Catholic Ethic and Error (266-

1. a.Ethic: to eternal life
   

2. b.Error: how to get it
   

3. c.Dilettantes and Pedants (267)
   

4.Ethic of Invasion (Why?) (268-

1. a.Make injustice of nothingness; fight Quixotically 268)
   

2. b.Dominate is Christ-like (268-9)
   

3. c.Make Self irreplaceable (268-9)
   

5.Vocation / Work (270-

1. a.Luther Banishes the Cloister (270)
   

2. b.Religious Attitude: Make what work you have your vocation; change only as last resort (271)
   

3. c.Mostly not chosen freely (271)
   

4. d.Deceivers (justification of laziness) & Passionless work (272-3)
   

5. e.Become indispensible (274)
   

6. f.Unions (274-5)
   

7. g.Need religious sense in work (275)
   

8. h.Work not punishment (276)
   

9. i.Raise work from ethical through aesthetic to religious stage (276)
   

10. j.If work IS punishment, make punishment its redemption (277)
    

6.Ethic of Invasion (of Mutual Imposition) (278-

1. a.Dominate others … this is solidarity (278-9)
   

2. b.Inquisitor vs. Merchant (279)
   

3. c.War and Peace (279-80)
   

4. i.Cain redeemed (280)
   

5. ii.Civilization began in domination (280)
   

6. d.Anarchic Individualism: wrong and misguided desire for self-preservation (280-1)
   

7. e.Individual in Society (281)
   

8. f.Vs. Sloth (281)
   

9. g.Spirit and Matter (281)
   

10. h.Aspire to the impossible (perfection) (282)
    

11. i.Charity = domination (282)
    

12. j.Awaken the sleeper (282-3)
    

13. k.Domination = Generosity (283)
    

7.Ways of Dominating (284-

1. a.Passive way: passionate patience and passionate resignation (284-5)
   

2. b.Not egoism, but its cure (286)
   

3. c.Submission must be paradoxical (286)
   

4. d.Sin and Redemption both collective (287)
   

8.Eternal is Not angelic, but human (287)

1. a.Ethical life = life of action
   

9.Ethic of the cloister (288-

1. a.Longing for liberty, but won’t find it in cloister (289)
   

2. b.Anarchism = ethic of cloister (290)
   

10.Guilt (290-

1. a.Collective (291)
   

2. b.Evil (291)
   

11.Virtue as knowledge? (292-

1. a.No, Passion (292-4)
   

2. b.Religious roots of ethics (294-5)
   

3. c.Catholicism is tragic (295)
   

Very Rough Notes ... polish and clarity to come soon ...

p.260-267: Contradiction and immortality:

260- Unamuno is one who affirms contraries.  The unity of his life is in contradiction. 

261- think in order to live.  Form of thought corresponds to form of our life.  Doctrine is justification of our action.  Despair and doubt are basis for our ethic.

262- “conduct, practice, is the proof of our doctrine, theory.”

Praxis is proof of theory.

263- Our heart’s truth = immortality.  What is its moral proof?  Act so that you may merit eternity.

267- Intellectual world = dilettanti and pedants. 

A pedant is “one who pays undue attention to book learning and formal rules without having an understanding or experience of practical affairs, [or] one who exhibits his learning or scholarship ostentatiously” (“Pendant,” in The American Heritage Dictionary, second college edition, 1985, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.).

Compare to Plato- where philosophers are best. 

Compare true thinking to “intellectual world” -- 

Modern man resigns himself to truth and is content to be ignorant.  What kind of truth is this? 

Savages are not content.  Who or what are these savages?

p.292-296: Reason, Knowledge, Virtue:

292- Plato, virtue, knowledge.

ETHIC OF INVASION: p.267-270

We need to incorporate all voices within ourselves and make others accept our voice. 

We need to fight against dying and disappearing completely because we long for everything that is irrational: we long for the immortality of our soul. 

In the fight we will act; our action is in order to make ourselves irreplaceable: 

“...[I]n impressing our seal and mark upon others, in acting upon our neighbors in order to dominate them, in giving ourselves to them in order that we may eternalize ourselves so far as we can.  Our greatest endeavor must be to make ourselves irreplaceable; to make the theoretical fact … that no one else can fill the gap that will be left when we die, a practical truth” (Unamuno, 298-9).

Here is, in essence, the “why” of the ethic of invasion; namely, the need to alleviate our suffering in life by securing our living after life’s end. 

ETHIC OF INVASION: p.279-285

The “how” of the ethic is more severe. 

Unamuno prophesizes that “He who does not lose his life shall not find it.” 

To explain this, he offers us a new vision of Hegel or Nietzsche’s conception of the realization of another consciousness—though, he would despise these characterizations, as he rails frequently against both philosophers.  He says to realize another is to affirm the self, so that to realize the other we must dominate him/her and let him/her dominate us.  This is not a one time struggle where one conquers the other in a master slave dichotomy, but more a constant mutual imposition (Unamuno, 278-9).

He tells us that to live this ethic each person must: “Give yourself then to others, but in order to give yourself to them, first dominate them.  For it is not possible to dominate except by being dominated.  Everyone nourishes himself upon the flesh of that which he devours” (Unamuno, 279).

The ethic of invasion is the ethic of mutual imposition.  It preaches domination in order to achieve irreplaceability, an irreplaceability within which an immortality is realized.

*******

The ethic of imposition places the self as primary.  The idea that the community is created and sustained by domination might strike the modern reader as authoritarian, although this is not the case.

Mutual domination creates dependence in its most positive sense.  While it is individualist to the extent that it is motivated by a desire for immortality, this immortality does not exist in a disembodied soul, but rather in the memory, words, and feelings of others. 

If other people do not depend on us in life, then people will not miss us when we are dead.  Passionate work impels us to leave our mark on our neighbors.

“The feeling of solidarity originates in myself; since I am a society, I feel the need of making myself master of human society; since I am a social product, I must socialize myself, and from myself I proceed to God-- who is I projected to the all-- and from God to each of my neighbors” (Unamuno, 279).

Unamuno upholds the Biblical command of “love thy neighbor,” although he interprets the concept “love” as a wish to obliterate the other as independent (Unamuno, 279).  He offers us the shocking comparison of the humanity of the inquisitor and that of the merchant.  The inquisitor has more humanity because it is s/he who treats me as a human, “…and if he molests me it is from a charitable wish to save my soul …” (Unamuno, 279).  The merchant, on the other hand, sees me solely as a customer, s/he is indifferent to the destiny of my person or soul.  The inquisitor, by imposing him/herself on me recognizes me as an end; the merchant sees me only as a means.

Here Unamuno is sounding distinctly Kantian, promoting a deontological metaethics, saying it is our duty to treat humans as the ends instead of as the means to an end.  This reflex is throughout the Tragic Sense of Life, but Unamuno stretches Kantian metaethics to say that it is therefore logical that war has more humanity than peace—though, while Kant does say that war can be sublime, it is  hard to support the claim that he would see it as showing more humanity.  For it is only in war that we are collided together both with our country people and with our enemies.  He declares that there is “no purer embrace …” than this collision together, and that it was war that began civilization (Unamuno, 280).  (Unamuno says that we must recognize that war is santified homicide, but that even this “purified hatred” is fruitful because it is through such that civilization began, and that by which we can perpetuate community, cf., pp.280-1.)

This is unlikely to be a popular declaration, that war is good. 

Just as Augustine said that evil is a privation of good, that evil has no substance in itself, some views of war refuse there being a concrete enemy--the enemy is only a regime, an ideology, and never a people.  Unamuno, on the other hand, is saying that in the standoff of two or more enemies in war this confrontation embodies a greater show of humanism, of respect for human life, because in it we do not ignore that which indeed does exist: the other as separate as evil. 

Unamuno mimics the medieval mystics who employed both affirmative and negative theology (e.g., God is both being and not being, because He creates beings and transcends being), thereby assuming a both-and-neither position.  Unamuno’s ethic is any political position and transcends them all by not being a single one (cf., pp. 281-2 for his use of religious mysticism).  He affirms the contradictions by being leftist and fascist, by being a classic liberal, a modern liberal, and a conservative.  He promotes charity (cf., pp. 210, 214) and liberty within the laws (cf., pp. 280-90) and he is at the same time against individualism (cf., p. 291).  He is every voice.

ETHIC  OF THE CLOISTER:  P.270-1; 286-291

This quixotic fight does not give us a moral code.  A sharp distinction is made between his ethic and a standard moral code he calls the “ethic of the cloister.”  For Unamuno, “moral” is not synonymous with “good.”  Instead, the moral position is a religious code that embodies passive submission to mortality. 

He says: “we assert that everything that exists deserves to be exalted and eternalized, even though no such fate is in store for it.  The moral attitude is the reverse of this” (Unamuno, 264).

To be submissive to mortality implies that after death there will be a removed, abstract life for the soul.  Instead, our real desire is for a practical everyday immortality where we will live forever in the persistence of human memory. 

He is saying that everything in existence should be exalted.  The moral position would say that only the good should be exalted.  For Unamuno, everyone who passionately works at the ethic of invasion will persist, not just the hermits and saints of the world. 

Everything deserves immortality, exaltation, and eternalization, even evil (Unamuno, 264).

This is not an entirely unique position; for example, this idea can be compared to the multi-voiced society proposed by Feyerabend. (Cf., Paul Feyerabend, “How to Defend Society Against Science,” 156-67.) However, I believe that Unamuno’s formulation of this claim avoids a standard problem Feyerabend’s falls into.  In Feyerabend’s system, everyone can have a voice within a society and so mutually agreed upon constructs are set up for the implication of any ideas that may form from the great multi-voiced body.  However, in Feyerabend, while evil is allowed a voice, there is no recourse to take if that voice refuses to participate in mutual discussion.  There is no accounting for the voice that is not formed in the public sphere.

 

I use Deleuze and Guattari’s explanation of the minoritarian groups that remain minortarian by having neither permanent structure nor name as an example of a voice that would never be able to be forced to talk to Feyerabend’s body (Because, if any minoritarian group was identified (named), then it would yielded its power and be subsumed under the prevailing state machine (called the war machine or worldwide axiomatic).  See Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus on minoritarian groups (vs. the war machine) (422, 469-71).  Now, in Unamuno’s ethic, the voices do not need to be voiced in a public sphere.  Even evil will be exalted, although evil doesn’t have a say in the matter if it wants to participate in forming society.  Unamuno’s ethic has a person dominate evil and let evil also dominate him/herself.  It is imposition and not invitation.  Therefore the voice that does not want to participate is still dominated and incorporated through other people.  Every person involved becomes him/herself multi-voiced, so to speak, instead of creating a hyper-real outside forum of many voices.

VOCATIONS   AND   UNIONS   p.271-278

We must live this ethic both passionately and through passionate work.  Again borrowing from Hegel, Unamuno exalts work. 

To work hard and passionately at what one does is to create an environment where you will be missed when you are dead.  Being missed allows us to achieve immortality. 

Despite the exaltation of work, and despite Unamuno’s Marxist socialist background, Unamuno is against Labor Unions.  This is a main point of criticism against his writings because many do not understand his motivation, and declare this ethic entirely impractical. 

I will address these two charges.  First, he sees union activity as an inhibition to pure-hearted hard work, saying unions provide a scapegoat from responsibility and essentially inhibit impassioned work.  He says that even if our work is our punishment, we must passionately embrace punishment (Unamuno, 271-7).

In union activity, the worker unites with the group because s/he is being oppressed or exploited by an employer, or because of poor working conditions, or lack of a voice in the work place, or unfair wages, etc.  All of this takes the worker’s mind away from passionate work.  The worker should instead, according to Unamuno, be passionately focused on the production of his or her work. 

Here is a story of impassioned work that elucidates his argument.  The work of a cobbler is to make shoes, but we should equate the “work of” to the “desire to.”  A cobbler’s ultimate desire should be to create the most amazing pair of shoes.  A pair that surpass beauty and utility, they should be the embodiment of the ultimate pair of shoes, almost reaching the perfection contained in the Platonic Idea of shoe. 

The cobbler will work hard and feverishly, with his whole heart, to create these shoes and then sell them to you who will utterly appreciate their ultimate beauty and utility, and proclaim passionately that these are the most wonderful shoes in the whole world.  The cobbler wants to infect you with the amazement of his or her work.  And when the cobbler dies, you, the customer, will feel the ache of his or her death.  Until the day that you die, you will think and talk about the amazing cobbler.  The cobbler achieves legend status and therefore achieves immortality through you and all who you infect with passion for the shoes. 

Unamuno’s ethic allows the creation, one’s reputation, to give each of us an everlasting name. 

The second charge leveled is that this is, in today’s world, entirely unrealistic; that while the theory is nice that we could each have a profession where we would feel utterly impassioned to work, that there are too many social, political, and economic reasons why this cannot work.

Although, really, we do still see this passion despite reason today, albeit mainly at the fringes of main steam society.  For example, the cliché of the artist living in an impoverished flat who makes art for the amazing self-desire of the process and the product.  This artist may choose to never “sell-out.”  The artist denies playing into the capitalist game and lives despite the difficulty for hope that the receptive buyer will come. 

While this may sound like an ethic of a commune, or of socialism, it is not.  In a commune, all of the worker-inhabitants produce goods in order to sustain and improve the conditions of the whole.  In Unamuno’s ethic, the improvement of the self, immortality, is the essential aim.  It is an aim for the self to persist despite reason and despite death.  The improvement of the community is secondary to, but almost contingent on the improvement of the self.  The community is required in order to have a place where one will live on after death, although the motivation is purely in the self. 

More ... coming soon ...