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THE FORMATION OF THE SELF IN THE NOVELS OF MIGUEL DE
UNAMUNO: A KIERKEGAARDIAN READING

BY

Jan E. Evans

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Romance and Classical Languages

2001

ABSTRACT

THE FORMATION OF THE SELF IN THE NOVELS OF MIGUEL DE
UNAMUNO: A KIERKEGAARDIAN READING

BY

Jan E. Evans

This study makes two important contributions to Unamuno/Kierkegaard
scholarship based on careful examination of Unamuno's copy of Kierkegaard's
Samlede Varker, housed in the Casa Museo Unamuno in Salamanca. The first
has to do with the recurring question of the degree of Kierkegaard's influence on
Unamuno. This question is clarified by carefully differentiating between works
ascribed to Kierkegaard's pseudonyms and works written under his own name.
After showing the problems caused by inaccurate attributions of the pseudonyms
to Kierkegaard, the dissertation focuses on Unamuno's use of "indirect
communication" derived from his reading of Johannes Climacus' Concluding
Unscienfific Postscript.

The second important contribution to Unamuno/Kierkegaard scholarship is
to show how the concept of the self as achievement is conceived and worked out
in both authors. Both see the self as endowed with the ability for self-reflection
and the ability to choose authentic existence. The content of the choices for
authentic existence found in Kierkegaard's three existence spheres—the esthetic,
the ethical and the religious--are traced in Niebla, San Manuel Bueno, martin and
Abel Sénchez. These novels of Unamuno were chosen for their wide availability

to Kierkegaard and Unamuno scholars alike. The protagonists of each novel are

seen as disquieted folk who are in the process of defining their own authentic
existence, each living out one of Kierkegaard's existence spheres, though the
form of the religious life in Abel Sénchez in understood as a 'paso,‘ a step in the
process of acquiring faith rather that the achievement of faith.

Two conclusions are drawn: 1) Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works had a
profound and widespread influence on Unamuno. What is newly demonstrated is
that the creative stuff of the Kierkegaardian existence spheres did contribute to
Unamuno's own imaginative mind as he created the remarkable protagonists of
these novels. 2) The second conclusion deals with Unamuno's claim of "spiritual
brotherhood" with Kierkegaard. The dissertation argues that although Unamuno
and Kierkegaard share a fundamental view of the self as substantially self-
reflective and capable of making choices for an authentic existence, the goal for
those choices is very different for the two authors. Since they do not share
ultimate values, the claim of "spiritual brotherhood“ between the authors is

unwarranted.

Copyright by
JAN E. EVANS
2001

To Stephen

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many people to whom I am indebted for the completion of this
project. First, I would like to thank my advisor, José Colmeiro for his guidance
and careful reading of the text. Other members of the Department of Romance
and Classical Languages have also modeled scholarship, exemplary teaching
and compassionate care of their students, of which I was the fortunate
beneficiary. I am also grateful for the Merit Fellowship I received from the
College of Arts and Letters that allowed me to work full time on the dissertation in
the spring of 2001.

There is another group of scholars and teachers who have cared for me
throughout my graduate education. They are the members of the Spanish
Department at Calvin College who have accommodated my schedule, shared
resources and encouraged me through good days and bad.

I am indebted to the staff of the Casa Museo Unamuno in Salamanca who
welcomed me warmly and made Unamuno's copies of Kierkegaard's works
readily available to me in February of 2001.

Finally, I want to thank my family. i thank Kelley for her unflagging
confidence in me. I thank Lise for her interest and concern for me. I thank Chaz
for his patience and understanding. Most of all, I thank Stephen, my husband,
for combining all of those things on a daily basis. His cheerful support and
encouragement as well as his invaluable advice throughout the entire process

have made this milestone possible.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

NOTE ON DOCUMENTATION ........................................................................ viii
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER ONE

THE IMPORTANCE OF INDIRECT COMMUNICATION

The Difficulty of Determining “What Kierkegaard Said“ .................................... 16
Existential Truth and lndirection Communication ............................................. 18
Kierkegaard's Purpose in Using Indirect Communication ................................. 23
Indirect Communication and Unamuno/Kierkegaard Scholarship .................... 29
Unamuno's Understanding and Use of Indirect Communication ...................... 49
CHAPTER TWO

THE FORMATION OF THE SELF IN KIERKEGAARD AND UNAMUNO

The Self as Substance and the Self as Achievement ....................................... 62
The Self as Achievement in Kierkegaard and Unamuno .................................. 68
Kierkegaard's View of the Self .......................................................................... 73
Unamuno's View of the Self ............................................................................. 79
Harmony and Dissonance in Kierkegaard's and Unamuno's View of the Self..88
Kierkegaard's Guide for Becoming the Self: The Existence Spheres .............. 93
CHAPTER THREE

THE KIERKEGAARDIAN STAGES OF EXISTENCE IN UNAMUNO'S NOVELS
The Need to Live Disquieted Lives ................................................................. 112
Niebla: A Study in the Esthetic Life ............................................................... 115
San Manuel Bueno, mértir. A Study in the Ethical Life .................................. 145
Abel Sénchez A Study in Possibilities for Religious Existence ..................... 164
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................... 183
WORKS CITED .............................................................................................. 193

vii

NOTE ON DOCUMENTATION

Parenthetical references in the text to Unamuno’s works are by volume
and page number to the Obras Completas edited by Manuel Garcia Blanco and
published by Escelicer (Vols. 1-9, Madrid: 1966-1971). Translations of Spanish
quotations in the text are mine.

Parenthetical references in the text to Kierkegaard are to the English
translations by Howard and Edna Hong, (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1980-1999). The only exception is the Journals and Papers, also translated by
the Hongs but published by Indiana University Press, (Bloomington: 1967-1978).
The sigla used for the various titles are those used by the lntemational
Kierkegaard Comentaiy edited by Robert Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer
University Press, 1987-2000):

CUP Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’
E0, 1 Either/Orl

E0, 2 Either/0r II

EUD Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

JFY Judge for Yourself!

JP Saran Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers
PC Practice in Christianity

PF Philosophical Fragments

PV The Point of View for My Work as an Author
R Repetition

SLW Stages on Life’s Way

SUD The Sickness Unto Death

UDVS Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits
WL Works of Love

viii

INTRODUCTION

The relationship between the nineteenth century Danish philosopher and
theologian Soren Kierkegaard and the early twentieth century Spanish
philosopher, poet and novelist Miguel de Unamuno has fascinated scholars since
existentialist thought and its evolution came to prominence in the 1950's.1 That
Unamuno read Kierkegaard is indisputable. The fourteen volumes of the 1901
first edition of Kierkegaard's Samlede Vaerker that Unamuno underlined and
annotated are still extant in the Casa Museo Unamuno.2

We also know from a letter that Unamuno wrote to Clarfn in 1900 that he

was beginning to read Kierkegaard at that time, early in his career.3 How did he

 

‘ With regard to the evolution of existentialism, the works of Unamuno are of interest to both
philosophers and literary critics. In 1956 David Levi, in the philosophical journal Ethics, writes
'The Quixotic Quest for Being,” In which he says, “The existentialism of Unamuno is the
transitional link between the generation of Kierkegaard and that of Heidegger, but its sympathies
lie altogether with the former. Uninterested in essence, it is entirely concerned with man's
existence“ (135). He further explains the trajectory of existentialism when he says, "The founders
[Kierkegaard and Nietzsche] are in reality the great critics of the nineteenth century, and their
protests against rationalism are kept alive by the transitional efforts of Bergson and Unamuno to
become the foundations upon which Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel and Sartre may build" (136).
Paul life, in his Unamuno: An Existential View of the Self and Society, echoes Levi when he
points to the "spiritual fervor of Kierkegaard" and the "raging humanity of Nietzsche' as the
beginnings of existentialism and then underscores Unamuno's contribution when he says, '. . the
issues that he [Unamuno] raised concerning consciousness, anguish, death, transcendence and
personality anticipate the more systematic—and less vital—analyses of Heidegger, Buber,
Jaspers and Sartre' (4).

2 In his Introduction to An Unamuno Source Book, Mario Valdes indicates that Unamuno
purchased each of the volumes of Kierkegaard's Samlede Veerker published by AB. Drachmann
and J. L. Heiberg as they were published between 1901 and 1906. All of the volumes are marked
with underlining and notes except Volumes V and VIII (xx, n7). Volume V contains Prefaces and
Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Volume VIII contains Two Ages.

3 Jesus-Antonio Collado points out that the much quoted letter to Clarln (Menendez y Palayo 82)
cannot be used to definitely pinpoint the year in which Unamuno began to read Kierkegaard
because the letter‘s date of April 3, 1900 precedes the publication of Kierkegaard's Samlede
Vaerker in 1901. What Unamuno was sure to have read before the appearance of the Samlede
Varker was the book by Brandes about Ibsen, published in 1898, which introduced Unamuno to
the Danish philosopher (388-389). Whether Unamuno started reading Kierkegaard In 1900 or
1901 makes no difference for the purposes of this dissertation. What is important is that all of the
novels dealt with here, as well as Unamuno's most important philosophical work, Del sentimlento
trégico de la Vida, are published after those dates.

came upon this Danish author that very few Europeans would have known about
in 1900? Unamuno explains in his 1907 essay, “Ibsen and Kierkegaard“, "Fue el
critico de Ibsen, Brandes, quien me lleva a conocer a Kierkegaard, y si empecé a
aprender el danés traduciendo antes que otra cosa el Brand ibseniano, han sido
las obras de Kierkegaard, su padre espiritual, las que sabre todo me han hecho
felicitarme de haberlo aprendido" (00 III 10). (It was Brandes, the critic of Ibsen
who introduced me to Kierkegaard, and if I began to learn Danish in order to
translate more than anything else Ibsen's Brand, it has been the works of
Kierkegaard, his spiritual father, which have made me glad to have learned it.)

Though the fact of Unamuno's reading Kierkegaard is indisputable,
determining what influence Kierkegaard had an Unamuno's thought has
occasioned lively debate. The question most early scholarship tried to answer is,
“How much influence did Kierkegaard have on Unamuno?“ The conclusions
have varied greatly from hints of outright plagiarism‘ of Kierkegaard on

Unamuno‘s part to a dismissal of any substantive link at all.5 The earliest

 

‘ Antonio Sénchez Barbuda mentions twice that Unamuno should have cited Kierkegaard
more in Estudios sabre Unamuno y Machado. In the section on 'Unamuno and Kierkegaard“
Sanchez Barbuda points to a group of writers that Unamuno read after 1900 who affected his
work. Among those he underscores Kierkegaard, "j. . .] de quien se pueden encontrar
reminiscencias evidentes ya en las ensayos de Unamuno de las aiios 1903 y 1904, en los cuales
a veces incluso Ie cita, aunque tal vez menos de lo que debiera [. . .]' (65). ("L . .] about whom
evident references are found already in Unamuno's essays in the years of 1903 and 1904, and In
which he sometimes quotes him [Kierkegaard], although perhaps less than he should have
[. . .].") Later in a section called, 'Diferencia entre Unamuno y Kierkegaard“ sanchez Barbuda
quotes from the fourth chapter of Del sentimienfa trégico de la Vida and inserts, “L . .] donde
varies veces nambra 'al hermano Kierkegaard, y le cita; y piensa atras veces en él, aunque no la
cite [. . .]' (191). (“L . .j where several times he names 'brother Kierkegaard and he quotes him,
and other times he thinks about him, although he doesn‘t quote him [. . .].")

5 See Oscar A. Fasel, "Observations on Unamuno and Kierkegaard.‘ The thesis of this
author is that Unamuno and Kierkegaard are so thoroughly different that one cannot say that
Unamuno was influenced by Kierkegaard despite what Unamuno says about the Danish
phil050pher being his brother. Fasel rests his case on the two thinkers' divergent views of
Christianity and the religious life. Fasel misreads Kierkegaard as an extreme individualist who
has no interest in the church or other human beings. He says that Kierkegaard is only Interested

comparisons of Unamuno and Kierkegaard to which most other studies refer is
that of Francois Meyer entitled “Kierkegaard et Unamuno" published in 1955 and
his La ontologr’a de Miguel de Unamuno published in 1962. It is Meyer's
contention that Unamuno read Kierkegaard superficially and that Unamuno's
thought was well established before he started reading Kierkegaard. Jesus—
Antonio Collado affirms the party line established by Sénchez Barbuda and
Meyer when he says, “Unamuno busca sabre todo en la lengua de Kierkegaard
una nueva expresidn de sus propias cancepciones“ (15). ("Unamuno above all
looks for a new expression of his own concepts in the language of Kierkegaard")
However, Collado's incredibly detailed study belies that assertion, made in the
introduction of his Unamuno y Kierkegaard (15). More recent scholars like
Gemma Roberts and Pedro Cerezo Galan have dismissed Meyer's view,

stressing greater commonality in the two writers.6 These last scholars have

 

in his own private experience of God and that he holds the monastic life as an Ideal, which is not
true. Kierkegaard only saw the monastic life as preferable to the middle class conforrnist
Christianity of nineteenth century Denmark. His pseudonym Johannes de Silentio rejects the
monastic life as the highest form of the religious life in Fear and Trembling, and Johannes
Climacus in Concluding Unsclentlfic Postscript, comments that while the monastic life takes
seriously the life of inwardness, it is wrong to ldealize it because inwardness can't be expressed
through a specific act.

“ See Gemma Roberts‘ Unamuno: Afinidades y coincidencias kierkegaardianas, where she
quotes Meyer "ne touche qu'a Ia surface de cette pensée,obsédé qu'il demeure par sa
problématique propre, sensiblement différente, dans sa source, de cells do Kierkegaard" and
then says, 'Discrepo de esta opinidn del profesor Meyer en cuanto a la superficialidad de la
interpretacidn de Kierkegaard par Unamuno, Ia cual me parece sumamente penetrante y
profunda, sl bien la interesaba sabre todo a don Miguel desarrollar sus propias preocupaciones--
u obsesiones, coma Meyer las llama. . ." (21 n9). (“I disagree with the opinion of Professor
Meyer with regard to the superficiality of the interpretation of Kierkegaard by Unamuno, which
seems to me extremely penetrating and profound, even if Don Miguel was more interested in
developing his own concerns—or obsessions, as Meyer calls them")

. See also Pedro Cerezo Galan's Las mascaras de lo tragico, where he says, 'Discrepo de la
opinidn de F. Meyer de que la influencia de Kierkegaard en Unamuno se produjo tardlamente y
cuando ya estaba fraguado inequfvocamente su pensamiento. . . Par el contrario, esta influencia
se produjo en la primera década del sigla, cuando cristalizaba el pensamiento maduro de
Unamuno en tomo al slndrome tragico, y dejo por tanto profundas huellas en su obra; entre
otras, en el tema de la fe, inflexionando la primera influencia del protestantismo liberal" (369 n.

embraced the view of R. F. Batchelor who says, ”A consideration of the influence
Kierkegaard exercised on Unamuno does not seem very profitable, but what is
beneficial, I think, as with Nietzsche, is the establishing of striking similarities"
(37)

But whether looking for influences or similarities, scholars are not able to
agree. Let us take as prime examples the two most extensive studies to date,
those of Collado (1962) and Roberts (1986). Collado's goal is "L . .] primera
exponer Ia concepcion religioso-existencial del hombre en Saren Kierkegaard;
segundo, investigar la posible influencia de tal cancepcidn en el pensamiento de
Miguel de Unamuno“ (9). (j. . .] first to present the existential religious concept
of man in Saren Kierkegaard; second to investigate the possible influence of that
concept in the thought of Miguel de Unamuno.) Though this comparative study is
over forty years old, it remains a definitive work on the concordance or lack
thereof between the two authors with regard to the philosophical problem of
human existence, with specific references to knowledge, despair, anxiety, sin
and faith. It is held in high esteem by other commentators on the two authors
because of its detail, depth, and use of the actual Kierkegaardian texts that were

in Unamuno's hands.7 Nevertheless, Collado's assertion that, though the two

 

35). (I disagree with the opinion of F. Meyer that the influence of Kierkegaard on Unamuno was
produced belatedly, when his thought was unmistakably forged. [. . .] Rather, this influence was
produced in the first decade of the century when the mature thought of Unamuno with regard to
the tragic syndrome was crystallized, and it left, therefore, profound traces in his work; among
others, in the theme of faith, inflecting the first influence of liberal Protestantism")

7 To my knowledge, Collado is the only previous author commenting on the relationship of
Unamuno and Kierkegaard who has actually consulted the Danish texts that were annotated by
Unamuno. He is also the only one who could easily translate the Danish into Spanish. Other
critics like Jorge Uscatescu would have benefited from consulting those texts. Uscatescu could
have then avoided promoting the erroneous view that Unamuno learned more about Kierkegaard
from reading Ibsen's plays than by reading Kierkegaard directly (290).

authors are spiritual brothers in their “planteamiento general del problema
existencial humano,‘ (16) ("general approach to the problem of human
existence“) they diverge more than they resonate on important concepts such as
anxiety, sin, faith and God, is called into question by Gemma Roberts, a more
recent critic who sees more commonality between Unamuno and Kierkegaard.
Roberts' book, Unamuno: Afinidades y coincidencias kierkegaardianas
(1986), presents a detailed look at how the themes of Either/Or and Concluding
Unscientific Postscript are woven into Unamuno's Niebla, as well as the "huellas“
'tracks' of Sickness Unto Death and The Concept of Anxiety in Abel Sénchez.
She builds on work by Ruth House Webber who first wrote in 1964 about the
influence of Either/Or on the structure or plan of Niebla. Both Webber and
Roberts take pains to assure the reader that though there are wonderful points of
comparison in the work of the two authors, Unamuno is not an 'imitatof' but
rather makes use of Kierkegaardian texts in a highly personal and unique way.
How is it that Roberts can say unequivocally, "Que Kierkegaard influyo
sobre el pensamiento de Unamuno, sabre todo en la etapa mas tardfa de su
produccidn ensayfstica y artistica, es alga que me parece indiscutible,‘ (68) (That
Kierkegaard influenced the thought of Unamuno, especially in the later stage of
his artistic production and his essays is something that seems to me to be
indisputable.) and Collado can say, “Es cierto que todo el pensamiento de
Unamuno se cruza muchas veces con el de Kierkegaard, pero, tanto los
origenes, como la evolucion, como la tematica esencial, es en ambos distinta y

aun a veces contrapuesta" (389)? (“It is certain that the thought of Unamuno

crosses many times with that of Kierkegaard, but both the origins, the evolution
and the essential theme are distinct in both [authors] and at times are
contradictory") Both Collado and Roberts have carefully detailed studies to back
them up.

I would like to propose a mediating ground, a way to explain how these
two literary critics can both be correct (and wrong) in their observations. The
problem lies in how the entire Kierkegaard corpus is read. Neither Roberts nor
Collado takes seriously the way in which Kierkegaard asked that his authorship
be read. This is not surprising since in over a hundred years of writing about
Kierkegaard, not many scholars have taken Kierkegaard's request seriously until
the last quarter century. In "The First and Last Explanation' which Kierkegaard
under his own name appends to his pseudonymous Concluding Unscientific
Postscript, he acknowledges that all of his pseudonyms are his responsibility but
he declares his independence from them:

What has been written then, is mine, but only insofar as l, by
means of audible lines, have placed the life-view of the creating,
poetically actual individuality in his mouth, for my relation is even
more remote than that of a poet, who poetizes characters and yet in
the preface is himself the author. That is, I am impersonally or
personally in the third person a souffleur[prompter] who has
poetically produced the authors, whose prefaces in turn are their
productions, as their names are also. Thus in the pseudonymous

books there is not a single word by me. (CUP 625-626)

Kierkegaard makes this specific plea, “Therefore, if it should occur to anyone to
want to quote a particular passage from the books, it is my wish, my prayer, that
he will do me the kindness of citing the respective pseudonymous author's name,
not mine [. . .]' (CUP 627).

Roger Poole, in his article "My wish, my prayer‘: Keeping the
Pseudonyms Apart,“ demonstrates the hermeneutical importance of taking the
pseudonyms seriously by comparing the meanings of key terms like the ethical,
sin, and despair in the various pseudonymous works. According to Poole, “The
same term may have a different subjective value for different pseudonymous
authors. By using the play of what Derrida would call 'difference' across his
texts, Kierkegaard manages to avoid the fate of univocal meaning" (162). For
Poole, the "weight“ of a word like "despair” must be taken in context, and the
contexts of Judge William in Either/0r and Anti-Climacus in The Sickness Unto
Death are entirely different. Judge William enjoins the young man "A' to despair
as a way of showing him the limits of the esthetic life, his own soul and thought,
and promises him something much more beautifuluthe ethical. But when Anti-
Climacus talks of despair, it is the opposite of “choosing oneself". Despair is sin,
and the consequences of not "choosing oneself" are existential suicide. The
subjective context for the same Danish word in the two pseudonymous authors
must be taken seriously.

The reason for the elaborate set of pseudonyms is best understood in the
context of "indirect communication", a concept that is set forth by Johannes

Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (72-80, 251 -300) but that is also

claimed by Kierkegaard in his Journals and Papers (267-308) and further
elucidated as the ”maieutic ideal" in Works of Love (264-279).8 The idea at the
root of “indirect communication" is that there are some types of knowledge that
are factual and scientific, and can be conveyed directly to a bearer, while there
are other types of knowledge that have to do with self-knowledge and existence
which can only be communicated indirectly. In order for the second type of
knowledge to be conveyed, the individual must receive it in a way in which she
can appropriate it for herself. In Works of Love Kierkegaard points to Socrates
as the model for this indirect communication in his attempt to be the midwife, the
person who helps the other to give birth (276).

The pseudonyms help Kierkegaard to accomplish this maieutic ideal.
They also allow him to pose artfully and forcefully many contradictory points of
view that he could not communicate it he were writing under his own name.
Again in ”A First and Last Explanation“ Kierkegaard says,

My pseudonymity or polyonymity has not had an accidental basis
in my person . . .but an essential basis in the production itself,
which for the sake of the lines and of the psychologically varied
differences of the individualities, poetically required an
indiscriminateness with regard to good and evil, broken
heartedness and gaiety, despair and overconfidence, suffering and
elation, etc., which is ideally limited only by psychological

consistency, which no factually actual person dares to allow himself

 

° For the importance of the “maieutic ideal” to the whole of Kierkegaard's work see Paul MOIIer's
Kierkegaard's Wm Christian Ethics and the Maieutic Ideal, Trans. and eds. C. Stephen

or can want to allow himself in the moral limitations of actuality.
(625)

Kierkegaard, then, attempts to withdraw and let his individual reader see
and appropriate for herself the truths that he wishes to convey about human
existence. However, in 1851, after all of the pseudonymous works had been
published, Kierkegaard begins to question the effectiveness of the pseudonymity
as a device to realize this “maieutic ideal" because his ultimate purpose in writing
has been misunderstood. In order to explain the intricate machinery of his work,
Kierkegaard writes The Point of View for My Work as an Author, in which he
states to his single individual reader, “[. . .] that I am and was a religious author,
that my whole authorship pertains to Christianity, to the issue: becoming a
Christian, with direct and indirect polemical aim at that enormous illusion,
Christendom, or the illusion that in such a country all are Christians of sorts” (23).

Chapter One will deal with the importance of reading Kierkegaard as he
wanted to be read for the assessment of Kierkegaard's influence on Unamuno.
The first problem to be explored is separating Kierkegaard's voice from that of his
pseudonyms. A strategy for doing that suggested by Kierkegaard scholar Sylvia
Walsh is adopted and employed, as the concept of indirect communication for
existential truth is traced through the pseudonyms and Kierkegaard's own signed
writings. After establishing the importance of indirect communication for
interpreting all of Kierkegaard, the consequences of ignoring that concept will be
shown in specific commentators on the relationship between Unamuno and

Kierkegaard. Finally, the question of whether or not Unamuno understood the

 

and Jan Evans, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1993.
9

use of indirect communication in Kierkegaard will be explored. Based on
Unamuno's commentary on the writing process and his own purpose(s) in writing,
it will be suggested that Unamuno understood the importance of indirect
communication for the expression of existential truth and that he participated in
the maieutic ideal espoused by Kierkegaard in his own novels. However, it will
be shown that Unamuno did not respect the pseudonyms himself and that it is
highly unlikely that he understood Kierkegaard's overall purpose to “reintroduce
Christianity to Christendom.“

Chapter Two will focus on the theory of the formation of the self in
Kierkegaard and Unamuno. Kierkegaard has a great deal to say about the
formation of the self, while Unamuno's view is much more difficult to discern.
Unamuno constantly resisted any attempts to regularize his thought into any sort
of ”philosophy“ during his lifetime and his penchant for contradictions is
legendary.9 In order to be able to compare the two authors the chapter will

begin by exploring two different ways of understanding the self that we see in

 

9 Mario J. Valdes, In the Introduction of his An Unamuno source book, tries to do for Unamuno
what he resisted all of his literary career—define a coherent philosophy from which to interpret all
of Unamuno. Valdés, along with his wife Maria Elena de Valdés, have poured over all of the
notes made in the margins of the books which Unamuno read which are housed in the Casa
Museo Unamuno and as a result, he has put together a theory of 'enquiry' based on Unamuno‘s
interaction with the texts that he read. Based in large part on Hegel and Unamuno's reading of
Hegel, Valdés claims that Unamuno's penchant for contradiction is not fuzzy thinking but highly
intentional “opposite, correlative and dichotomous“ contradictions, the import of which is,
'Unamuno is not stating that either one of the opposites is true at any given moment, but rather
that they are both true, and that they are true only when they are present together" (xxviii). The
theory of 'enquiry"—Unamuno's way of reading—is “a dialectical method that changes the
reader's ideas by forcing him to battle with the author's structural presence. It is also a
methodology that is in itself a direct expression of the ontology of being as struggle" (xxxi).
Frances Wyers would totally disagree. For her, Unamuno's desire not to be systematlzed is
genuine, as born out in the "chaos of paradoxical affirmations and negations" in which '1. . .] all
the conceptual shifts and turns obey principles that are never enunciated. Nothing can be taken
at face value and we must search for an undisclosed fabric of meaning that the author seems to
be almost purposely obfuscating' (xvi). Although Wyer's book was published in 1976, three years

10

Western culture.10 One view is that the self is some sort of substance, a given
entity. An alternative view of the self is to see it not as a fully formed substance,
but as an achievement, something that the person becomes through credible,
responsible choice. Though both Kierkegaard and Unamuno will be seen to
hold elements of both of these concepts, it is in the view that the self is an
achievement that Unamuno and Kierkegaard can most readily be seen to be in
concert.

Paul Ilie underscores the difference between ser and serse in Unamuno's
view. Seris to exist as an animal exists. Serse is “L . .] full being in the
existentialist sense of a meaningful human condition" (9). The beginning of
serse is self-awareness. The ability for self-reflection is fundamental for both
Kierkegaard and Unamuno and part of the substance of the self that is given.
However, the two authors diverge in their understanding of the self as
substance. For Kierkegaard, selfhood is something one becomes, but the self
one ought to become is a self before God, the self that God intended at creation
and which is present as a potentiality in the actual created self. Unamuno does
not share this view, but rather sees multiple possibilities for authentic existence.

Chapter Two ends with a discussion of Kierkegaard's three spheres of
existence, the author's guide to becoming a self. Though the idea of the

existence spheres of the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious are artfully

 

after the Valdés' book, Wyers does not include It in her bibliography nor does she deal with
Valdes' theory.

'“ In this section I make extensive use of the account of Kierkegaard‘s anthropology as
developed by C. Stephen Evans in his article, 'Who is the Other in The Sickness Unto Death:
God and Human Relations in the Constitution of the Self.”

ll

drawn in the pseudonymous works of Either/0r and Stages on Life's Way and
are explained in depth by Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific
Postscript, it can be seen from his Joumals and Papers that Kierkegaard
embraced this theory as a fundamental way of viewing existence. The aesthetic
sphere is where everyone begins. Its essence is ”the moment" that the esthete
searches for in infinite variety. When a person realizes that all of her “moments“
make her a slave to the external world, she may despair. She may realize that
she lacks a self and seek to become one. To really exist as a self, the self must
choose; it must develop enduring passions. The enduring passions unify the
self so that it can become something definite. The passion that is the key is the
passion for the "eternal” which will produce the ethical life. The ethical life is a
life lived with eternal values that give the self eternal significance.

When the ethicist realizes that she cannot achieve the ethical life, that her
battle to do the good is fraught with failure, then the self is ready to pass into the
religious sphere. In this sphere, the individual sees her guilt and her need for
God. This religious life comes in two different forms: A and B. Religiousness A
is a religion of immanence, the kind of religiousness that presupposes only
natural, human religious experience. Religiousness B assumes a kind of God
that reveals himself in history, the kind of God found in Christianity.

The existence spheres as outlined above, then, will provide the basis for a
Kierkegaardian reading of Niebla, San Manuel Bueno, martir, and Abel Sénchez
in Chapter Three. It is suggested that a Kierkegaardian reading can shed light

on critical problems in reading the novels as well as provide rich sources for

12

Unamuno's creative genius from the Danish philosophers work. Extensive
reference will be made to passages that are underscored in Unamuno's copies
of the Danish Samlede Verker of Kierkegaard. These novels have been
chosen because of their place within the Unamuno canon. They are the most
frequently read of Unamuno's novels in the world at large and ones that those
who are interested in the relationship between Unamuno and Kierkegaard will
most likely know. It is Unamuno's fictional characters that demonstrate the view
of the self as achievement. Ferrater Mora states of Unamuno's characters,
”Todos son hombres, y mujeres, de contradicciones que tienen coma fin de su
vida 'hacerse un alma" (48). (“All are men and women of contradictions who
have as their end in life to 'make of themselves souls."‘)

We will see the protagonists, Augusto Perez, Joaquin Monegro and Don
Manuel as Unamuno's fictional renderings of Kierkegaard's stages of existence.
Augusto is emblematic of the esthetic stage. I will disagree with other
commentators who see Augusto as progressing through all of Kierkegaard's
stages. Rather, Augusto will be seen as a person who awakes from a
somnambulant pre-existence to choose the life of a passionate esthete. The
problem of whether Augusto's death was, in fact, a suicide will be discussed in
the context of the problem of free will and how it bears on the ability of one to
make meaningful choices. Don Manuel will be seen as embodying the sphere
of the ethical. Reading the character in this way will help resolve the discomfort
many readers of San Manuel Bueno, martir have in squaring this work with the

rest of Unamuno's writing. It will be seen that Don Manuel's lack of faith and his

13

promoting the illusion that there is life after death are difficulties that can best be
addressed within the context of indirect communication. Finally, Joaquin will be
seen as the closest of Unamuno's characters to being in the religious sphere. In
order to understand how that can be the case, it will be necessary to understand
the nature of despair as it is laid out in The Sickness Unto Death. Specific
passages underlined by Unamuno in this text will help substantiate the claim
that Anti-Climacus contributed much to the creation of this Unamunian
character.

Unamuno, then, will be seen to use the Kierkegaardian existence spheres
to experiment fictionally with stages in the development of the self as
achievement. Through this study we will see how Unamuno uses indirect
communication to convey his own version of existential truth to his individual
reader. For Kierkegaard, for a self to become the self that God intended, there
is movement through these spheres toward Religiousness B. The movement is
by no means automatic or natural. Passing from one sphere to the other is a
daily matter of choice, but there is definitely a telos to which one is moving
through the spheres. Unamuno does not share Kierkegaard's view that there is
a telos for these existence spheres Unamuno sees a rich array of possibilities in
the existence spheres for multiple forms of authentic existence and he uses
them for his own purposes. Unamuno draws characters who exemplify specific
existential decisions, but there is no telos to which his characters are growing.

There is no benevolent creator before whom a self becomes a self. Rather,

l4

Unamuno prefigures the self at Camus and Sartre that is defined by the choices
it makes and the passion with which the choices are made.

The dissertation concludes that an understanding of the pseudonymous
character of Kierkegaard's writings is essential to understanding the influence of
Kierkegaard on Unamuno. It is necessary to attribute ideas found in
Kierkegaardian pseudonyms to those pseudonyms and not to Kierkegaard, as he
asked at the end of Concluding Unscientific Postscript. In order to give a full
Kierkegaardian reading to Unamuno, one must recognize when Unamuno is
using a pseudonymous work. One can recognize correspondence and deviation
competently in the two authors only if this is kept in mind. As a clear
correspondence one can confidently point to the purpose and the use of indirect
communication by both authors. Through it Kierkegaard and Unamuno achieve
the maiuetic ideal for the conveying of existential truth.

However, claiming "spiritual brotherhood" for Kierkegaard and Unamuno is
more problematic since their views an ultimate values differ radically. Unamuno
leaves us no Point of View to guide us to the truth--the purpose for the indirect
communication--beyond waking the somnambulant reader to authentic
existence. Kierkegaard's purpose is to "reintroduce Christianity to
Christendom." Unamuno's purpose is to leave us with multiple truths, even

contradictory ones.

15

CHAPTER ONE
THE IMPORTANCE OF INDIRECT COMMUNICATION

The Difficulty of Determining "What Kierkegaard Said"

This chapter will attempt to explain the discrepancies in the scholarly
literature about the influence of Kierkegaard on Unamuno, whether that is stated
as an outright cause/effect or, more modestly, as a similarity in the two authors.
The source of the widely varied opinions of the scholars on Kierkegaard and
Unamuno, as I see it, is a problem in interpreting Kierkegaard. As noted in the
Introduction, because of the many pseudonyms Kierkegaard used, it is difficult to
determine what Kierkegaard is purported to have said on any one subject. Just
the "authors" of Either/Or are a bewildering array. The editor of the two volume
work is Victor Eremita (Victor the Hermit), who says that he found the papers that
make up the volumes in an antique desk. The papers that make up the bulk of
Either/Orl are by an author whom Victor calls A. But the author of the "Diary of
the Seducer" at the end of the first volume is put into question by A's claim that
he did not write the diary; he stole it from the desk of a friend. Still, Victor
intimates that the author may be A. Either/Or II is by yet another person whom
Victor calls B but whom we later find out is called Judge William, and who also
includes a sermon that he attributes to a priest.

In "A First and Last Explanation," signed by Kierkegaard himself at the
end of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the author asks his reader not only to
take the pseudonyms seriously, but to attribute to them and not to him the

positions and ideas of those pseudonyms. Kierkegaard emphasizes that the use

16

of the pseudonyms is not an accident but rather provides an “essential basis in
the production itself" (625). He says that each of the widely divergent
pseudonymous authors has a unique and consistent psychological make-up that
"no factual actual person dares to allow himself or can want to allow himself in
the moral limitations of actuality" (625). Does that mean that the pseudonyms do
not in any way represent what Kierkegaard thought to be true? Where is
Kierkegaard's voice in all of this?

Sylvia Walsh suggests in her book, Living Paetically: Kierkegaard‘s
Existential Aesthetics, that to discern the relation of Kierkegaard's thought to that
of his pseudonyms one must look at the texts that Kierkegaard signed with his
own name which include, "1) several direct explanations of the nature and
purpose of the authorship, 2) a number of religious writings and devotional
discourses as well as several pieces of aesthetic criticism, and 3) the voluminous
unpublished journals spanning his university years to the last year of his life"
(11). She says that, like any author, Kierkegaard's thought changes and grows
through the years, but that these writings under his own name can be taken as a
guide to his own viewpoints. She underscores the importance of the task by
saying,

_ To discern the viewpoints of the author and his pseudonyms an a
particular subject [. . .] requires a dynamic approach to his writings,
looking upon them as a progressive unfolding of thought and
staying alert to differences and modifications as well as similarities

and continuities between Kierkegaard and the pseudonyms as well

17

as between the pseudonyms themselves. Othenrvise, one may end
up with a shortsighted interpretation that does not do justice to the
total perspective of the authorship. (10)

It is my contention that some commentators about the relationship of
Unamuno and Kierkegaard have misread that relationship because they have not
respected the pseudonyms as Kierkegaard asked his readers to do and because
those commentators have not taken the "dynamic approach" advocated by Sylvia
Walsh, comparing the pseudonyms to Kierkegaard's signed writings. As a result
those commentators have perpetuated a "shortsighted interpretation" that has led
to conflicting opinions and confusion about the relationship between Kierkegaard

and Unamuno.

Existential Truth and Indirect Communication

Kierkegaard's use of the pseudonyms is linked to his concept of "indirect
communication," and it is the nature and purpose of indirect communication that
many commentators on Unamuno and Kierkegaard have missed or disregarded.
Taking my cue from Sylvia Walsh's suggested procedure above, I will first look at
what Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus has to say about indirect
communication in Concluding Unscientific Postscript and then compare that to
what Kierkegaard says about his purposes in using indirect communication in
The Point of View on My Work as An Author and several entries from his

Journals and Papers.

18

Johannes Climacus outlines the importance of indirect communication for
the communication of existential truth in a chapter entitled “Possible and Actual
Theses by Lessing," a chapter in which the famous "leap" attributed to
Kierkegaard also appears.1 There are three important aspects of indirect
communication as outlined by Climacus. They are 1) the maieutic ideal, 2) the
artistic nature of indirect communication, and 3) the lack of certainty about
existential truth requiring indirect communication, which results in constant and
infinite striving. Each of these is explained below.

To begin, an existential truth is one that is "doubly reflected" in the
subjective thinker as she first hears the truth in a "universal" sense and then
appropriates it for herself in "inwardness" (CUP 73). The appropriation of the
truth is not something that can be coerced in any way. It is something that is
done in secret—the result must not be known to the communicator, or no real
appropriation has taken place. Accordingly, the communication of such truth
must be indirect.

The secret of communication specifically hinges on setting the
other free, and for that very reason he must not communicate
himself directly; indeed, it is even irreligious to do so. This latter
applies in proportion to the essentiality of the subjective and

consequently applies first and foremost with the religious domain,

 

' Kierkegaard uses the name of an historic personage who lived in the sixth and seventh
centuries for his pseudonym. The real Johannes was a monk who wrote Scale paradisi. Jacobs
ladder, which was a "how to" book of thirty steps to spiritual perfection. Niels Thulstrup claims
that Kierkegaard did not know the actual work of Johannes Climacus but he says, "When
Kierkegaard uses the pseudonym Climacus (and later Anti-Climacus) he has in mind essentially
the meaning 'cIimax,‘ ascent and ascending, both as logical progression upwards and as the
steadily rising emphasis upon the Christian categories as distinctive from others" (148-9).

19

that is, if the communicator is not God himself or does not presume
to appeal to the miraculous authority of an apostle but is just a
human being and also cares to have meaning in what he says and
what he does. (CUP 74)
Existential truth must be communicated, then, as Socrates did, with no concern
for the "result." This is the maieutic ideal, that the communicator serves as a
midwife for the truth to be born in the individual. For Socrates that truth can be
recollected because the truth is within the person.

Secondly, the form of the communication is just as important as
communicating existential truth maieutically. "Wherever the subjective is of
importance in knowledge and appropriation is therefore the main point,
communication is a work of art" (CUP 79). Climacus goes so far as to say, "The
more art, the more inwardness" (CUP 77). That the form of the indirect
communication be artistic is essential because it may then "vary inexhaustibly,
just as inwardness is inexhaustible" (CUP 77).

Thirdly, indirect communication must be used for the communication of
existential truth because existential truth is not fixed and precise, but rather a
constant becoming. Here Climacus underscores the limitations of objective,
"positive" thinking for the existing individual. What is objective, "positive"
thinking? It is whatever the person believes gives her certainty in this world,
whether it be "sensate certainty," "historical knowledge," or "speculative result"
(CUP 81). Climacus says that sensate certainty is a "delusion," historical

knowledge is an "illusion" and speculative results are a "phantom" because they

20

do not bear on how one deals with existing as a person (CUP 81). History may
tell a person something about the world, but it tells her nothing about herself.

Climacus states that the only thing that is certain is the infinite and the
eternal that resides within each individual, but having the infinite and the eternal
existing within the temporal subject is a "prodigious contradiction" that cannot be
"rendered" in direct utterance. Why? "Because in the direct utterance the
illusiveness is left out, and consequently the form of the communication interferes
[ . .]' (CUP 82). It is direct communication that requires certainty, "but certainty is
impossible for a person in the process of becoming, and it is indeed a deception"
(CUP 74n).

The uncertainty of existential truth produces a constant striving that is the
"becoming" noted above. Climacus is careful to note that there is no end point to
this striving. There is no "goal" which once attained completes the process. The
"genuine subjective existing thinker" who would communicate existential truth to
others is described in the following way:

He is cognizant of the negativity of the infinite in existence
[Tilvarelse]; he always keeps open the wound of negativity, which
at times is a saving factor (the others let the wound close and
become positive—deceived); in his communication, he expresses

the same thing.2 He is, therefore, never a teacher, but a learner,

 

2 In Unamuno's copy of the Danish edition of Postscript he glosses the Danish word saar In this
passage with the Spanish herida, llaga. The metaphor of keeping the wound open will appear in
Vida de don Ouijote y Sancho Panza, (3: 241 ).

21

and if he is continually just as negative as positive, he is
continually striving. (CUP 85)

A little later in Postscript Johannes Climacus comments on all the
pseudonymous works written before Postscript, and he then claims that they are
the sort of indirect communication that he has been advocating. He says that the
fact that there is no conclusion in the two volumes of Either/Or shows that the
book "is an indirect expression for truth as inwardness and in this way perhaps a
polemic against truth as knowledge" (CUP 252).

Climacus points to the lack of a single, known author of the work as a
"means of distancing." Climacus applauds the use of the "imaginary
psychological construction" in Repetition by Constantin Constantius for its ability
to establish "a chasmic gap between reader and author" that "fixes the
separation of inwardness between them" (CUP 263).3 He believes that the
method of communication is purposeful. "The imaginary construction is the
conscious, teasing revocation of the communication, which is always of
importance to an existing person who writes for existing persons" (CUP 263). On
Climacus' view, all the pseudonymous authors "continually aimed at existing and
in this way sustained an indirect polemic against speculative thought" (CUP 264).

So we have the clear testimony of one of the pseudonymous authors that
all of the others have participated in indirect communication as a means to

explain existential truth. This is one part of the "dynamic" approach advocated

 

3 The Hangs have chosen to translate the Danish word ekspen’ment with the unwieldy and slightly
inaccurate phrase, "imaginary psychological construction." The sense of the text is more
accurately rendered "imaginative experiment," taking away the element of the fantastic in the use
of the word "imaginary."

22

by Sylvia Walsh that is needed to ascertain Kierkegaard's own view of "indirect
communication." But what remains is to look at what Kierkegaard wrote about
indirect communication under his own name in Point of View in order to fully

understand the importance of this concept to Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard's Purpose In Using Indirect Communication

Already quoted in the Introduction is Kierkegaard's famous declaration of
his intentions for his entire authorship found in The Point of View for My Work as
an Author: A Direct Communication Report to History where he states that he is
a religious author: "that my whole authorship pertains to Christianity, to the issue:
becoming a Christian with direct and indirect polemical aim at the enormous
illusion, Christendom, or the illusion that in such a country all are Christians of
sorts" (23). He is aware that the major interest in his work has been in his
esthetic writing. He complains that Either/0r made a great splash, but no one
noticed the Two Upbuilding Discourses published at the same time. He goes to
great pains to show that his authorship has proceeded in an even-handed way,
first a piece of esthetic writing, written by a pseudonym and then a religious one
under his own name. But his readers have not understood the whole, the plan,
and he is willing to say that not even he understood the whole, the plan from the
start. But he is sure at this point in his authorship that "Governance" has guided
the entire effort, and 'he wants to explain himself clearly (PV 77).

Kierkegaard says that indirect communication, the esthetic writings, and

the use of the pseudonyms were the only way to remove the illusion that all were

 

23

Christians. He observes that, "Every once in a while a religious enthusiast
appears. He makes an assault on Christendom; he makes a big noise,
denounces nearly all as not being Christians—and he accomplishes nothing. He
does not take into account that an illusion is not so easy to remove" (PV 42).
Kierkegaard is careful to say over and over again that he is not claiming that he
is a Christian and others are not. He says what he says "without authority,"
acknowledging his defects as a Christian and at times claiming not to be one.
What he knows is what Christianity is. In order to convey that truth, it must be
conveyed indirectly. How? By "establishing rapport" and "beginning with an
esthetic piece" (PV 44). The esthetic piece will then show the person who lives
in the illusion that she is a Christian that she really lives in the category of the
"esthetic, or at most, the esthetic-ethical" (PV 43). He knows that he cannot
compel anyone to "an opinion, a conviction, a belief" (PV 50). All he can do is
make a person aware.

The maieutic ideal established by Socrates and endorsed by Johannes
Climacus is embraced by Kierkegaard in the use of the indirect method for
removing the illusion that all are Christians. Kierkegaard calls for "gentle
treatment" in the removal of the illusion and rejects any presumption of a "face to
face" confession. Any sort of confession must be made in secret as an
existential truth must be appropriated in secret.

The latter [confession in secret] is achieved by the indirect method,
which in the service of the love of truth dialectically arranges

everything for the one ensnared and then, modest as love always

24

is, avoids being witness to the confession that he makes alone
before God, the confession that he has been living in an illusion.
(PV 43-44)

Even the issue which Kierkegaard calls the turning point of his authorship
is taken up by a pseudonym, Johannes Climacus. Kierkegaard says of
Postscript, "This work deals with and poses the issue, the issue of the entire work
as an author: becoming a Christian" (PV 31). Kierkegaard notes that Climacus
comments on all the other pseudonyms, but that Climacus himself could not
know the purpose for the whole. As an outsider, Climacus can observe what it
means to be a Christian more objectively than one who is on the inside.
Climacus makes no claims to faith. Kierkegaard does. For Kierkegaard to exist
authentically is to become a Christian. Kierkegaard describes his own strategy in
this way:

My strategy was: with the help of God to utilize everything to make
clear what in truth Christianity's requirement is—even if not one

single person would accept it.

In another sense, it is an exaggeration only when the requirement
alone is presented and grace is not introduced at all. Christianity is
taken in vain, however, when the infinite requirement is made finite
[. . .] or when it is even left out completely and grace is introduced

as a matter of course, which, after all, means that it is taken in vain.

25

What I have wanted has been to contribute [. . .j to bringing, if
possible, into these incomplete lives as we lead them a little more
truth (in the direction of being persons of ethical and ethical-
religious character, of renouncing worldly sagacity, of being willing
to suffer for the truth, etc.), which indeed is always something and
in any case is the first condition for beginning to exist more capably.
(PV 16-17)
Kierkegaard is fully aware, as he explains himself in this disclosure about his
authorship, that he has given up indirect communication and in some ways, the
maieutic ideal. He is also aware that he will even become "uninteresting" to
many when they know clearly what his purpose has been all along. Some of his
readers will say, "That what it means to become a Christian should actually be
the fundamental idea in the whole authorship—how boringl" (PV 92). But he has
come to see that there is a time to remain silent and a time to speak, and this is
the time to speak. He explains in his journals,
Yet the communication of the essentially Christian must end finally
in "witnessing." The maieutic cannot be the final form, because,
Christianly understood, the truth does not lie in the subject (as
Socrates understood it), but in a revelation that must be
proclaimed.
It is very proper that the maieutic be used in Christendom, simply

because the majority actually live in the fancy that they are

26

Christians. But since Christianity still is Christianity, the one who
uses the maieutic must become a witness.

Ultimately the user of the maieutic will be unable to bear the
responsibility, since the maieutic approach still remains rooted in
human sagacity, however sanctified and dedicated in fear and
trembling this may be. God becomes too powerful for the maieutic
practitioner and then he is a witness, different from the direct
witness only in what he has gone through to become a witness.
(JP, 2: 1957)

And so while the concept of indirect communication is the key to the
understanding of Kierkegaard's use of the pseudonyms and his authorship as a
whole, in the end he sees the need for a "direct witness." After September of
1850, when Practice in Christianity was published under the pseudonym of Anti-
Climacus, the rest of his production was published under his own name as a
"direct witness"—no less than ten more books. Kierkegaard aganized over
publishing anything about himself and his authorship, not wishing to claim
anything for himself that was the doing of Governance, but he was acutely aware
of how the pseudonyms were already being put to uses that were the opposite of
his intentions. In 1851 he allowed On My Work as an Author, a shortened
version of The Point of View, to be published, but the fuller version was not

published until 1859, after his death.

27

It is not surprising in an authorship as varied and lengthy as Kierkegaard's
that there would be misinterpretation in making sense of the whole of his work.
Kierkegaard foresaw that this could happen and warned against it in his journal,

If is easy to see that anyone wanting to have a literary mark merely
needs to take some quotations higgledy—piggledy from "The
Seducer," then from Johannes Climacus, then from me, etc., print
them together as if they were all my words, show how they
contradict each other, and create a very chaotic impression, as if
the author were a kind of lunatic. Hurrah! That can be done. In my
opinion anyone who exploits the poetic in me by quoting the
writings in a confusing way is more or less a charlatan or a literary
taper. (Supplement PV 288)

There are also postmodern interpreters of Kierkegaard who have seen the
claims of the Point of View as totally ironic, as part of Kierkegaard's total scheme
to deceive the public and himself about the purpose of the esthetic writings and
his role as a religious writer.4 I believe, along with Sylvia Walsh and a host of
other Kierkegaard scholars that would include Howard and Edna Hang, the
foremost translators of Kierkegaard, that the best way of interpreting his

authorship is to take at face value how the author himself asked that he be read,

 

‘ Among the postmodern interpreters of Kierkegaard are Henning Fenger, Kierkegaard, the Myths
and Their Origins: Studies in the Kierkegaardian Papers, Joakim Garff, "The Eyes of Argus: The
Point of View and Points of View with Respect to Kierkegaard's "Activity as an Author', " and
Roger Poole, Kierkegaard, The lndirect Communication. Sylvia Walsh rejects Fenger's and
Garff's view in her Living Poetically by saying that Fenger's reasons for non- acceptance of
Kierkegaard's claim that he was a religious author are "flimsy" and that 'Garff's argument rests on
about as much flimsy evidence as Fenger's [. . .]' (13h). For a full reading of her rebuttal to the
postrnodemists see pp. 11-15.

28

as well as his understanding of the purpose of his production.5 However,
postmodern interpreters of Kierkegaard like Roger Poole would agree with Walsh
that to read the pseudonyms as though they were Kierkegaard would be a big
mistake.6 This is crucial if we are to say anything credible about "what

Kierkegaard said" about a particular topic.

Indirect Communication and Unamuno/Kierkegaard Scholarship

With regard to scholarship on Unamuno and Kierkegaard it is my view that
1) many critics have assumed that the pseudonyms are equivalent to
Kierkegaard, and 2) many critics have not understood the use of the

pseudonyms in the whole project of indirect communication as outlined above. I

 

5 Among scholars that accept at face value Kierkegaard's claim that he was from first to last a
religious author are: Robert Perkins, the editor of the International Kierkegaard Commentary,
Stephen Dunning, Kierkegaard's Dialectic of lnwardness, C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard's
"Fragments" and "Postscript": The Religious Philosophy of Johannes Climacus, Jamie Ferreira,
Transforming Vision: Imagination and Will in Kierkegaardian Faith, and Merold Westphal,
Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard's "Concluding Unscientific Postscript." Westphal is
unique among these as he is more appreciative of the contribution postmodern writers such as
Derrida, Foucault and Barthes can make to understanding Kierkegaard, particularly in their
emphasis on the "death of the author." That an author has no privilege in relation to his text
Westphal sees as Kierkegaard's position with regard to his own writing when he claims to write
"without authority," not as an apostle but as a learner. However, Westphal is careful to note the
similarities as well as the differences between Kierkegaard and the postmodern thinkers. "There
is a similar humility in our three French writers, but it is also very different. In both cases the
author refuses to play God. But there is all the difference in the world between saying, 'There is
no God, so I am not God,‘ and saying 'There is a God, so I am not God.‘ We shall have to ask
whether this theological difference plays a role when Kierkegaard, as emphatically as either
Gadamer or the French, denies that the intention of the author governs the meaning of the text.
For him this is in the first instance an autobiographical discovery. In The Point of View [. . .j
Kierkegaard argues that his authorship as a whole, not just this book or that one. has the
character of being written by an author. In spite of its obvious diversity, it is a religious authorship
from start to finish, and it has a coherent, unified meaning. But he is not its origin. He Insists
repeatedly that he did not have the full meaning of his authorship in view at the outset but only
came to see it in retrospect, and he attributes the coherence of his writings to governance or
providence" (13).

See "'My wish my prayer": Keeping the Pseudonyms Apart," where he says, "The problems set
up by taking a quotation for example, from Viglllus Haufniensls on ‘sin', modifying it by one on
what appears to be the same thing, ‘sin’, in Anti-Climacus, and then adding In a word or two from

29

shall discuss problems in the interpretation of Kierkegaard in the work of four
commentators on the relationship between Unamuno and Kierkegaard: Jesus
Antonio Collado, Gemma Roberts, Ronald Batchelor and David Palmer.
However, the misinterpretations found in these critics are not unique to them, but
reflect common misconceptions in the critical literature on the relationship of the
two authors, which will be noted in due course.

1) As mentioned in the Introduction, Jesus-Antonio Collado’s book
Kierkegaard y Unamuno: La Existencia religiosa is considered to be a
foundational work in the comparison of the two authors. It is the most extensive
study of the philosophical "systems" of the two authors and is the only study
based on the Danish works themselves that were annotated by Unamuno.
Nevertheless, Collado is not cognizant of the pseudonyms and at times says
jarring things like the following: "Es notable la fascinacion que ejercio sobre la
fantasia de Kierkegaard la figura de Don Juan, de cuya magia diabdlica quedo
prendado a través del encanto seductor de la musica de Mozart. Kierkegaard
admira en Don Juan la genialidad sensual coma seduccidn" (217n). ("It is
notable the fascination exercised by the figure of Don Juan over the fantasy of
Kierkegaard, of whose diabolical magic he fell captive through the seductive
charm of the music of Mozart. Kierkegaard admires in Don Juan his sensual
genius as seduction") Collado cites as his reference Either/Or I, and, of course,
he is referring to the proclivities and sensibilities of A, its author, the esthete, and

not to Kierkegaard. Collado is not the first nor the last to make that mistake.

 

Judge Vllhelm on the necessity of despairing, are not only vastly in excess of what they need to
be, they are in fact lrresolvable, a prion" (157).

30

Merold Westphal notes that Mozart's biographer, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, bases
his claim that Kierkegaard "wanted to start a seat to revere Mozart, not above
others, but exclusively" on the same text in Either/0r l (8). Westphal comments,
"To attribute to Kierkegaard the enthusiasm for Mozart expressed by A is like
confusing Fyodor Dostoyevski with Raskolnikov or Arthur Miller with Willy
Loman" (9).

2) The title of the first chapter of Gemma Roberts‘ book Unamuno:
Afinidades y Coincidencias Kierkegaardianas is promising: "Los tres estadios de
la dialéctica Kierkegaardiana en Niebla" (The Three Stages of the
Kierkegaardian Dialectic in Niebla). What Roberts promises to do is to further
the study begun by Ruth House Webber on the influence of Kierkegaard on
Unamuno in the writing of Niebla. Unfortunately, Roberts does not follow
Webber's lead in the structure of her argument.

Webber is careful to show how the characters and the form of Either/Or
affect many facets of Niebla. She is careful not to attribute to Kierkegaard the
ideas of his characters. Bringing her article to a close, she quotes Kierkegaard's
"Declaration" at the end of Concluding Unscientific Postscript about the poetical
individuality of the pseudonyms and his request not to attribute to him the life-
views of his pseudonyms. Webber then makes the following conclusion, "Here
we have a precedent for, not only Victor Goti, a character in Niebla who is also
the book's prologuizer, but also for the more fundamental idea which pervades all

of Unamuno's work, that of the independent life of an author’s creations" (134).

31

Although we shall see that Unamuno probably did not read this part of
the Postscript, and therefore it is doubtful that this particular passage had
anything to do with the creation of Victor Goti, Webber's conclusion, that there is
a marked distance between Unamuno’s sense of authorship and his creation, is
a valid one resting on a sensitive understanding of the pseudonyms and their
importance in the work of Kierkegaard. On the other hand, Roberts proceeds to
point out similarities between the protagonist of Niebla and the characters of
Either/Orl and II, as well as the characters of pseudonymous works like Stages
on Life's Way and then she concludes that these similarities "demuestran una
profunda comunidad de espiritu entre las dos autores" 'demonstrate a profound
community of spirit between the two authors' (25). For example, Roberts
identifies Kierkegaard with Judge William, calling him Kierkegaard's alter ego.
The problem is that Judge William is a fictional rendering of the ethical stage of
existence. From Kierkegaard's point of view, Judge William is living in the illusion
that he is a Christian. The Judge is fulfilling the duties of a good citizen in
Christendom. Marriage does not exemplify the highest form of the existence for
Kierkegaard. For the Judge, everyone should marry because in so doing one
makes the commitments that are necessary to make life meaningful.
Kierkegaard maintains in Works of Love that the highest form of existence is to
love your neighbor; whether you marry is not important. Neighbor love
transforms all other loves, including the marriage relationship.’ Roberts points

out many interesting parallels between Judge William's view of marriage and

 

7 See Works of Love pp. 135-147 in particular where the importance of the God-relationship to
erotic love and marriage is discussed.

32

Unamuno's view of marriage, but she cannot conclude from those similarities the
"community of spirit" she claims between Kierkegaard and Unamuno.

Roberts shows that she does not understand the nature and purpose of
indirect communication when she says that both Unamuno and Kierkegaard set
out deliberate obstacles to those who would try to exegete their texts. She says,
"He tropezado con las dificultades que el mismo Unamuno y también
Kierkegaard se empefiaron en fomentar para obstaculizar la labor de sus
exégetas" (19). ("I have stumbled over the difficulties that Unamuno and also
Kierkegaard strove to develop so as to hinder the work of their interpreters")
That Unamuno reveled in contradiction is well known, and the reasons for his
celebration of contradiction will be explored in the next chapter. Kierkegaard was
aware that if his pseudonyms were not taken seriously and if readers attributed to
him the various and sometimes contradictory ideas of his pseudonyms, there
would be great confusion. He therefore took great pains to make his intentions
clear by writing the "Declaration" at the end of Postscript and by writing The Point
of View for My Work as an Author, where he expands on and embraces the
essentials of indirect communication outlined by Climacus in Postscript.

This is not to deny that the sheer size and variety of Kierkegaard's work is
not daunting, nor is it to claim that his prose is transparent. But Kierkegaard did
not set out to put obstacles in the way of the reader, though he warned that his
text would be difficult for the "hasty and curious" reader (WL 3). He cherished
"that single individual" and believed that his intention in writing could be clearly

seen, if the reader wanted to see it, "The authorship, regarded as a fatality, is

33

religious from first to last, something anyone who can see, if he wants to see,

must also see" (PV 6). He claimed that there was a movement from the

"interesting" to the "simple" because of the authorship's religious character.
Christianly, one does not proceed from the simple in order then to
become interesting, witty, profound, a poet, a philosopher, etc. No,
it is just the opposite; here one begins, and then becomes more
and more simple, arrives at the simple. This, in "Christendom," is
Christianly the movement of reflection; one does not reflect oneself
into Christianity but reflects oneself out of something else and
becomes more and more simple, a Christian. (PV 7)

3) Ronald Batchelor in his book, Unamuno Novelist, A European
Perspective, gives voice to a common misconception that Kierkegaard and
Unamuno are spiritual brothers based on their embracing of doubt as a wayof
life and/or their agonic view of life.8 Batchelor claims that for both authors,

"Existence is synonymous with doubt or anxiety" (38).9 Batchelor quotes a

 

3 A highly regarded Unamuno scholar, Carlos Blanca Aguinaga, in his article "De Nicodemo a
Don Ouijote" contributes to this misconception when in supposedly quoting Kierkegaard, he
quotes A in Either/0r l as saying "Suicidate y te arrepentiras, note suicides y te arrepentirés" (qtd.
In Blanca Aguinana 77) ("Kill yourself and you will regret it; don't kill yourself and you will regret
it."). Blanca Aguinaga thus attributes the nihilism of the esthete A to Kierkegaard. The context is
Blanca Aguinaga's discussion of how Unamuno would answer the question "aQué hacer?" 'What
to do?" during and after his crisis of 1897. Blanca Aguinaga states that Unamuno would have
responded to his vision of La Nada (nothingness) differently if he had read Kierkegaard in 1897.
Fortunately, from his point of view, Unamuno did not read Kierkegaard until after his wife. Concha,
had brought him back from the brink. But to intimate that Kierkegaard would somehow be
responsible for Unamuno's demise had Unamuno identified with Kierkegaard's pseudonym A is
unwarranted.

° In a completely different context Blanca Aguinaga in his book, El Unamuno Contemplativo, tries

to counter the "agonic" legend that Unamuno carries with what Blanca Aguinaga calls his

"contemplative" side seen in his first productions. The author recognizes that it is impossible to

disregard the agonic legend, particularly in the Unamuno writings from 1905 on. Nevertheless,

he tries to temper "la angustia" (the anguish) with some of Unamuno's poetry and prose texts
such as Par tierras de Portugal y Espafla and Andanzas y visiones which show a more peaceful

34

pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, the author of Fear and Trembling, who says,
"Anxiety and dread are the only conceivable justification that can be thought"
(qtd. in Batchelor 38). The context for the quote is an explanation of the
difference between the "knight of faith" and the "tragic hero," using Abraham as
an example of the knight of faith and Agamemnon as an example of the tragic
hero. The heart of Silentia's exploration of the meaning of faith in Fear and
Trembling is a retelling (actually several imaginative retellings) of the story from
Genesis 22 of Abraham's being called by God to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac,
on distant Mount Moriah, of Abraham's obedience to God's command, and of
God's sparing Isaac and returning him to his father.

Silentio explains that the tragic hero, while he has given up himself and
everything that is his for the universal, nonetheless has had the chance to stand
up for himself, to speak. The anxiety and dread that is felt by the knight of faith in
his loneliness before the Absolute is something quite different.10 What Abraham
cannot do is explain the taking of the life of his son so that someone else could
understand his action. In the paragraph after the quote above Silentio explains,
"Abraham remains silent—but he cannotspeak. Therein lies the distress and
anxiety" (PF 113). The quote singled out by Batchelor to justify Kierkegaard's
equating existence with doubt and dread does nothing of the kind. The passage
that Batchelor quotes refers to the anxiety and dread of the knight of faith in the

moment of testing, but does not characterize the existence of the knight of faith

 

Unamuno, content to abandon himself to "la quietud y la etemldad de la vida" "the quietness and
eternity of lite' (113).

"’ The Danish word Naden, translated in Batchelor's quote of Kierkegaard as 'anxiety‘, ls
translated 'distress' In newer translations. It has the sense of being in deep, troubling need.

35

on the whole. In the movement of faith, there is "consolation" as well, not merely
anxiety and dread.

In the passage cited by Batchelor, Silentio is explaining Abraham's two
movements, the first of which is the infinite movement of resignation in giving up
Isaac. He wants the reader to understand the anxiety and loneliness of that
decision. But Silentio goes onto describe the second movement, the movement
of faith which is Abraham's "consolation." Abraham believes, though it is absurd,
that God will give him a new Isaac. What is the role of doubt in all of this?
Silentio explains the role of doubt in this way,

But if the doubter can become the single individual who as the
single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute, then
he can get authorization for his silence. In that case, he must make
his doubt into guilt. In that case, he is within the paradox, but then
his doubt is healed, even if he may have another doubt. (PF 111)

It is true that for Kierkegaard anxiety and despair are part of coming to
authentic existence, but they are by no means the state in which one remains if
one is to be an authentic self. Much more will be said about the means to
selfhood in the next chapter. For now it is important to emphasize that while
Kierkegaard embraced uncertainty in limiting the efficacy of objective, "positive"
reason for existential truth, he is critical of doubt and considered it as rooted in an
act of the will. The cure for doubt is faith, and faith requires a decision—a leap

in the terms of Johannes Climacus—a decision in Kierkegaard's own terms.

 

36

Climacus explains in Fragments that "belief is not a knowledge but an act
of freedom, an expression of the will" (83). More specifically to the point, "Belief
and doubt are not two kinds of knowledge that can be defined in continuity with
each other, for neither of them is a cognitive act, and they are opposite passions.
Belief is a sense for coming into existence, and doubt is a protest against any
conclusion that wants to go beyond immediate sensation and immediate
knowledge" (84). We can suggest that Climacus' view is closer to Kierkegaard's
than other pseudonyms because Kierkegaard added his own name as editor to
Fragments and Postscript. We can confirm that idea when we read the following
in Works of Love. Here, doubt is replaced with mistrust.

Mistrustingly to believe nothing at all . . .and lovingly to believe all
things are not a cognition, nor a cognitive conclusion, but a choice
that occurs when knowledge has placed the opposite possibilities in
equilibrium; and in this choice, which to be sure, is in the form of a
judgment of others, the one judging becomes disclosed. That light-
mindedness, inexperience, and naiveté believe all things is a
cognition, that is, a fatuous cognition; lovingly to believe all things is
a choice on the basis of love. (234-5)

What is the proper role of doubt in the life of faith? Kierkegaard answers
that question in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses.

While the eyes of faith, then, steadfastly continue to be set on that
which is above, quietly see heaven open, the apostle would now

allow, indeed encourage, the single individual to use doubt in the

37

right way, not to doubt what stands firm and will stand firm forever
in its eternal clarity, but to doubt that which in itself is transitory,
which will more and more vanish, to doubt himself, his own capacity
and competence, so that it becomes an incapacity that is discarded
more and more. False doubt doubts everything except itself; with
the help of faith, the doubt that saves doubts only itself. (137)

To be fair, Batchelor cites as his justification of the claim that Unamuno
found in Kierkegaard "a kinsman in doubt" Unamuno's own essay, "Ibsen y
Kierkegaard." In that essay Unamuno calls Kierkegaard an "alma congojosa"
'anguished soul', and says that Kierkegaard was seized with "una desesperacién
resignada" 'a resigned despair' his entire life (3: 289). Unamuno does not tell us
on which works of Kierkegaard he bases that description, but the volumes that he
quotes in the essay are both pseudonymous works: Either/0r l and Stages on
Life's Way.

Unamuno says that Kierkegaard's doctrines on the relationship between
the sexes is found in these two books. We have already noted the multiplicity of
authors of Either/Or. Stages on Life's Way is formed in much the same way with
an editor, multiple speech makers in the first long essay, "In Vino Veritas,"
another essay in defense of marriage by Judge William, and the writer of a diary,
"Guilty?/ Not Guilty?" which is edited by still another person. It is impossible to
say what Kierkegaard thinks about love and marriage from these texts. It would
also be impossible to judge whether Kierkegaard suffered resigned despair for

his entire life. The fourteen volumes of the first edition of Kierkegaard's Samlede

38

Varker were published between 1901 and 1906. Unamuno can be forgiven if he
had not read all fourteen volumes before writing his essay on "Ibsen y
Kierkegaard" in 1907. Batchelor has the benefit of all of Kierkegaard's
authorship but ignores the non-pseudonymous works.

Reflecting a more holistic approach, Pedro Cerezo Galan in his book, Las
mascaras de lo tragico (1996), comments on the grouping of Unamuno and
Kierkegaard, as well as Hegel, as agonic or tragic thinkers and outlines their
important differences. He says,

Propiamente hablando ni Hegel ni Kierkegaard son pensadores
tragicos. Al primera lo salva el presupuesto metafisico de la
identidad; y al segundo su fe religiosa en la trascendencia.
Mediacidn dialéctica y salto en paradoja constituyen experiencias
que abren camino, par arduo que sea éste y aun bordeando el
abismo. Pero Unamuno se queda en la agonia, esto es, en el
fondo del abismo. Y en la agonfa salo florece la incertidumbre

creadora o la creacidn desesperada. (399)

Speaking precisely, neither Hegel nor Kierkegaard are tragic
thinkers. The first is saved through the metaphysical assumption of
identity; the second through his religious faith in transcendence.
Dialectical mediation and the leap into the paradox constitute
experiences that open the way, even though that way be arduous

and still close to the abyss. But Unamuno remains in agony, that

39

is, in the bottom of the abyss. And in agony only creative
uncertainty or desperate creation can flourish.

4) There are many more examples of how critics have cited
pseudonymous works of Kierkegaard and concluded erroneously what
"Kierkegaard says" from those pseudonymous authors, but I will include just one
more because the confusion produced by not citing the pseudonym results in
claiming more harmony between Kierkegaard and Unamuno than is warranted.
There are many scholars who have equated the "knight of faith" found in Fear
and Trembling by Johannes De Silentio and Unamuno's version of Cervantes'
hero, Don Quijote.11 There is no doubt that Silentio's book Fear and Trembling
influenced Unamuno as he wrote his Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, as Donald
Palmer claims in his article, "Unamuno's Don Quijote and Kierkegaard's
Abraham," but there are important differences between Unamuno‘s Don Quijote
and Silentio's Abraham that point to real discrepancies between Kierkegaard's
and Unamuno's understanding of the Cervantine character.

The first and most important difference between Don Quijote and Silentio's
Abraham, the knight of faith, is acknowledged by Palmer. After having discussed
the "divine madness" that Palmer says links the two characters he says, "But
Quijote's divine madness is much less convincing than Abraham's, for the simple
reason that Abraham's task is much more horrible than Quijote's. In spite of

everything, Quijote's mission 'remains within the ethical," as Kierkegaard would

 

" Sénchez Barbuda, in his section on "Unamuno y Kierkegaard" in "Una experiencla decisive: la
crisis de 1897" claims that Kierkegaard's "Caballero de late" (Knight of Faith) is Unamuno's Don
Quijote. "Ese «Caballero de la Fe» es el mismo romantico Quijote de Unamuno" (112n). ("That
«Knight of Faith» Is the same romantic Quijote of Unamuno”)

4o

say" (304). Palmer is right to say that Don Quijote's task remains within the
ethical, though it was Silentio he should have quoted, not Kierkegaard.

In order to understand the place of Fear and Trembling within the
Kierkegaardian authorship, one needs to understand the spheres of existence-—
the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious—which are explained and given life in
the pseudonymous works. A detailed exploration of the existence spheres is
given in the next chapter, but it is necessary to make the point now that one of
the major concerns of Fear and Trembling is to show how the religious sphere is
more than the ethical life. The religious stage requires an absolute relation to the
absolute that goes beyond the ethical boundaries of a particular society or group.
This is so because otherwise the good would be equated with the social
constructs of an extant society and could never be questioned. Silentio
underscores the difference between the tragic hero, Agamemnon, and the knight
of faith by showing that Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter, though
enormous, is understandable by his society because it can be seen that the
sacrifice of his child is decreed for the good of the state. Agamemnon only fulfills
the values of his society. Abraham, on the other hand, is required to go beyond
the ethical, beyond the norms of his society. Agamemnon was also able to
explain himself in the face of opposition, as we noted above, and that brings us
to another difference between the knight of faith and Unamuno's Don Quijote
which has to do with the ability of another to understand the mission of the

knight. While Don Quijote is also not able to explain his mission of restoring the

41

Golden Age to the dull and unbelieving goatherds, Unamuno makes much of
some of the "rational" people around him becoming "quixotized."

Unamuno calls Don Quijote a "knight of faith" while discussing the episode
in the Quijote where the dispute over whether the barber's basin is indeed
Mambrino's helmet extends to Don Fernando and Cardenio physically struggling
with the Holy Brotherhood to defend Don Quijote's point of view. Unamuno says,
"En torno a caballeros de la fe se arredilan cameras humanos" (Vida 3:139).
("Human sheep flock around Knights of Faith") The human sheep became
convinced of the case by dint of Don Quijote‘s heroism, though they really believe
in their own minds that the helmet is a basin. "Ved, pues, a los burladores de
Don Quijote burlados de él, quijotizados a su despecho mismo, y metidos en
pendencia y luchando a brazo partido par defender Ia fe del Caballero, aun sin
compartirla" (Vida 3:139). ("See, then, the mockers of Don Quixote mocked by
him, quixotized despite themselves, engaged in a struggle and fighting with all
their might to defend the Knight's faith, even without believing in it.") From the
point of view of Fear and Trembling, it is impossible for the knight of faith to
communicate his action. He is utterly alone before the absolute. He does not
have anyone flock around him. Silentio says of Abraham, "Speak he cannot; he
speaks no human language. And even if he understood all the languages of the
world, even if those he loved also understood them, he still could not speak"

(114).

42

There is no question that Unamuno equates Abraham and Don Quijote. It
seems plausible that he had Fear and Trembling in mind when he wrote Vida de
Don Quijote y Sancho as we see in the following:

Casa tan grande coma terrible la de tener una misidn de que salo
es sabedor el que la tiene y no puede a los demas hacerles creer
en ella: la de haber oido en las reconditeces del alma la voz
silenciosa de Dios, que dice: "tienes que hacer esta," mientras no
les dice a los demas: "este mi hijo que aqui veis, tiene esta que
hacer." Casa terrible haber oido: "haz eso; haz eso que tus
hermanos, juzgando por la Iey general que os rijo, estimaran
desvario o quebrantamiento de la ley misma; hazlo porque Ia Iey
suprema soy Yo, que te lo ordeno." . . . . 5N0 recordais al héroe de

la to a Abraham, en el monte Maria? (3: 80-81)

It is just as terrible as it is great to have a mission which is known
only to the person who has it and in which that person cannot make
others believe: to have heard in the depths of your soul the quiet
voice of God who says, “You must do this,” while he does not say
to the rest: “My son whom you see here must do this.” It is a
terrible thing to have heard, “Do that, do that which your brothers,
judging from the laws which govern you, will deem as delirium or a
breaking of that same law; do it because I am the supreme law and
it is I who ordains it." Don’t you remember the hero of the faith,

Abraham, on Mount Moriah?

43

Abraham and Don Quijote believe that they have a mission they alone have been
given. Both behave in ways that invite ridicule for their acts and appear crazy to
others. But Unamuno's knight of faith and the knight of faith of Silentio part
company immediately after this affinity between Don Quijote and Abraham is
declared.

Unamuno goes on to explain that because of his intimate relationship to
God, Quijote can say, "Yo sé quien soy!" (Vida 3: 82). ("I know who I aml") Even
though that is a presumptuous thing to say, Unamuno defends Don Quijote and
says what the knight means by that is that he knows who he wants to be, and
that is the only thing that matters. Unamuno says, "Te debe importar poco lo que
eres; Io cardinal para ti es lo que quieras ser. El ser que eres no es mas que un
ser caduco y perecedero, que come de la tierra y al que la tierra se lo camera un
dia; el que quieras ser es tu idea on Dias, Conciencia del Universa" (Vida 3: 82).
("What you are should be of little concern; of cardinal importance is what you
want to be. What you are is no more than a spent and perishable being who eats
of the earth and whom the earth will one day eat; what you want to be is the idea
of you in God, the Conscience of the Universe") On the face of it, this quote
sounds like Anti-Climacus' view of the self in Sickness Unto Death (which is
Kierkegaard's view, as well): The self I should choose to be before God is the
self God intended me to be from all eternity. But there is a striking difference
here between Unamuno's view of finitude and that of Johannes de Silentio.

Unamuno's knight of faith has resigned everything for the sake of something

higher, something eternal. Silentio's knight also resigns everything, but has a
different relationship to the finite.

Silentio makes a clear distinction between the "knight of infinite
resignation" and the "knight of faith." Silentio says explicitly, "The act of
resignation does not require faith, for what I gain in resignation is my eternal
consciousness" (48). The movement of faith is different.

By faith I do not renounce anything; on the contrary I receive
everything exactly in the sense in which it is said that one who has
faith like a mustard seed can move mountains. It takes a purely
human courage to renounce the whole temporal realm in order to
gain eternity, but this I do gain and in all eternity can never
renounce—it is a self-contradiction. But It takes a paradoxical and
humble courage to grasp the whole temporal realm now by virtue of
the absurd, and this is the courage of faith. By faith Abraham did
not renounce Isaac, but by faith Abraham received Isaac. (48-49)
The author of Fear and Trembling emphasizes that the knight of faith accepts his
finitude and even embraces it precisely because it is given to him through faith.
Paradoxically, Silentio says that the knight of faith "belongs entirely to the world"
(39). Unamuno's knight is entirely otherworldly, depreciating the finitude that
Silentio's knight of faith welcomes.

Palmer claims that "Kierkegaard's panegyric upon Abraham might well be

read as a panegyric upon the Cervantine Don Quijote" (301 ). It should be clear

from the foregoing discussion that Palmer's claim is not supported by the text.

45

What we have seen is that in comparison to the knight of faith described in Fear
and Trembling, 1) Don Quijote's task remains within the ethical while Abraham's
task requires movement beyond the ethical, 2) Don Quijote does have his
followers that have been won over to his cause while Abraham cannot even
speak in order to defend himself and 3) Don Quijote resigns everything for his
task, but he has not made a movement of faith that would allow him to accept his
finitude. All of these contrasting comparisons are not drawn from Kierkegaard's
work as a whole, but rather are confined to the discrepancies between the knight
of faith of Fear and Trembling and Unamuno's Don Quijote. It is a fair but
different question to ask, "What do we know about Kierkegaard's view of Don
Quijote?"

An article by Eric J. Ziolkowski, "Don Quixote and Kierkegaard's
Understanding of the Single Individual," carefully outlines what is known about
Kierkegaard's view of Cervantes' character. Ziolkowski points out that
Kierkegaard owned both a Danish and a German copy of the Quijote and that
while there are a few allusions to its main character in the pseudonymous
writings, there are more than twenty entries in Kierkegaard's Journals and
Papers that deal with Cervantes' knight. Ziolkowski states that while others have
equated the knight of faith of Fear and Trembling and Don Quijote, "It should not
be forgotten or overlooked [. . .] that nowhere in Fear and Trembling is Don
Quixote mentioned by name and that nowhere in Kierkegaard's other writings—
including, as far as I am aware, all his published works, private journals, and

papers—is Don Quijote called a 'knight of faith' or vice versa" (132).

46

Ziolkowski notes that there is a change in Kierkegaard's attitude toward
Cervantes‘ character recorded over the span of his entries in his journals from
183510 1854. In the early journal entries between 1835 and 1844 Kierkegaard
takes Don Quijote as an example of what a Christian should not be. Don Quijote
represents a person of religious conviction who has a "fixed idea" and who
withdraws from the world, refusing to entertain any intellectual challenges to his
faith. This person who is "spiritually deaf in one ear" is likened to Don Quijote
who "takes on the appearance of happy madness," who too easily "discovered
that it must have been the evil demons who always followed on his heels, [as]
when, for example, he mistakenly took windmills for giants" (qtd in Ziolkowski
134). In 1844 Kierkegaard wrote, "For a long time now rigid Ietter-of-the law
orthodoxy has reverted to being a counterpart to Don Quixote, whose ridiculous
hair-splitting sophistries will provide excellent analogies" (JP, 3: 3047). It is
important to note that Fear and Trembling was written during this early period
and published in October of 1843. It is fair to conclude that Kierkegaard himself
made no connection between Cervantes' Don Quijote and Abraham at this time,
nor would he have entertained Don Quijote as a knight of faith.

Ziolkowski maintains that the character of Don Quijote is too rich and too
complex to confine him to one of Kierkegaard's existence spheres and he states,
"Kierkegaard did not conceive of Cervantes' knight as occupying any one
particular stage of existence" (135). He points out that in his quest for fame and
glory (much applauded by Unamuno) Don Quijote is identified with the esthetic

stage. This is where Johannes Climacus situates Don Quijote in Concluding

47

Unscientific Postscript. Climacus calls the knight errant one of those individuals
who "forget themselves over their great importance in history" (CUP 140).
Ziolkowski observes that the knight errant would then be judged an esthete,
"since forgetting oneself is a primary symptom of aesthetic existence" (136). In
Don Quijote's upholding of the chivalric code, he could be seen (as noted by
Palmer above) as occupying the ethical stage.

Ziolkowski then outlines the shift in Kierkegaard's thinking through entries
in his journals from 1846 on. After the publication of Postscript there is a definite
change in Kierkegaard‘s attitude toward Don Quijote. More and more
Kierkegaard identifies with Don Quijote as his own struggle against Christendom
becomes more explicit, and his sense of being persecuted increases. In what
Ziolkowski takes to be the first instance of an analogy being made between
Christ and Don Quijote in 1848 Kierkegaard writes,

When secular sensibleness has permeated the whole world as it
has now begun to do, then the only remaining conception of what it
is to be Christian will be the portrayal of Christ, the disciples, and
others as comic figures. They will be counterparts of Don Quixote,
a man who had a firm notion that the world is evil, that what the
world honors is mediocrity or even worse. (JP, 1:317).

In 1849 Kierkegaard continues the attack,

Christianity does not really exist. Christendom is waiting for a

comic poet a la Cervantes, who will create a counterpart of Don

Quixote out of the essentially Christian.

43

The only difference will be that no poetic exaggerations will be
required at all, as in Don Quixote—no, all he needs to do is to take
any essentially true Christian life, not to mention simply taking
Christ or an apostle. The comic element arises because the age
has changed so enormously that it regards this as comic. (JP, 2:
1762)

What caused the change in Kierkegaard's perception of Cervantes'
knight? We might well ask the same question of Unamuno, who excoriated the
legacy of Don Quijote in his early writings and then apologized profusely for
doing so in Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho. We could suggest that both authors
have a common source for their exalted view of Don Quijote in the German
Romantics. But why the change in their later years? Both authors have found
the Cervantine character to embody themes that they wanted to illustrate, and
those themes changed throughout their authorship.

What is important for this study is to see that while Unamuno may have
linked Don Quijote and the Abraham of Fear and Trembling and anointed his Don
Quijote with the label "knight of faith," Johannes de Silentio's understanding of
the knight of faith was far from Unamuno's. Further, while it may be interesting to
note that both Kierkegaard and Unamuno in their later years identity to some
extent with the Cervantine character themselves and applaud Don Quijote's
heroic courage against the opposition of a dull and inhospitable society, there Is
no reason to suggest that Unamuno was influenced by Kierkegaard in his

understanding of Don Quijote as a knight of faith. Kierkegaard did not conceive

49

of Don Quijote as a knight of faith at the time of the writing of Fear and Trembling
and only came to see him as a Christian figure later in his life. In addition, the
only references to Don Quijote as a Christian figure are found in Kierkegaard's
Journals and Papers which Unamuno did not have as part of the first edition of

Kierkegaard's Samlede Vaerker.

Unamuno's Understanding and Use of Indirect Communication

The foregoing discussion of Kierkegaard's use of pseudonyms in indirect
communication has served to explain some of the discrepancies in the opinions
of the commentators on the relationship between Unamuno and Kierkegaard. It
is clear that many commentators do not respect the pseudonyms and attribute to
Kierkegaard the ideas and positions of the pseudonyms. A different, but crucial
question to ask is, "What did Unamuno understand at the indirect method and
Kierkegaard's purposes in using it?" I believe that Unamuno embraced the
maieutic ideal for the communication of existential truth described by Johannes
Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript and used it himself in the writing
of his novels. However, I contend that Unamuno did not understand
Kierkegaard's use of the pseudonyms nor the religious character of
Kierkegaard's entire authorship. Unamuno seems to be unaware of
Kierkegaard's overall purpose in using the indirect method to disabuse
nineteenth century Danes of the illusion that they were all Christians. These
ideas are confirmed through a close scrutiny of the first edition of the Samlede

Varkerin Unamuno's personal library as well as Unamuno's own disclosures

50

about the goals and processes of his writings. The fruit of Unamuno's use of the
maieutic ideal in his novels will be outlined in detail in Chapter Three.

Mario J. Valdés, in the Introduction to his An Unamuno Sourcebook,
makes much of the fact that Unamuno interacted with texts by writing marginal
notes in them. In his exhaustive bibliography of Unamuno's personal library, he
notes that all but two of the fourteen volumes of the first edition of Kierkegaard's
Samlede Varker are annotated by Unamuno. It should be said at the outset that
the marginal notes in the Samlede Vaerker are not the type of notes that Valdés
says fills every book that Unamuno read. The marginal notes are not interactions
with the text but are all glasses on Danish words, given in German and Spanish.
On a very few occasions there are summary sentences of a chapter or section.
The vocabulary glasses are, however, invaluable in judging what Unamuno read
and what he did not read, as well as what he read with care and what he read
somewhat more cursorily. This can be judged by the extent of the gloss. Of
course, one must take into consideration that Unamuno would have had to gloss
more words at the beginning of his reading in Either/Or, the first volumes, when
he had just begun to read Danish, than in the later volumes when his Danish was
presumably better. Nevertheless, when there are copious glasses in Vol. VII,
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, a book midway in the authorship, one can
reasonably conclude that the text was of particular interest to the reader.

Another indication of careful reading on Unamuno's part is his marginal
markings of specific sentences and passages. These are the equivalent of

underscoring, and they come in the form of a short, single horizontal line marking

51

a sentence or single, or double and triple vertical lines that mark passages. The
volumes that contain the most of these sorts of marginal markings are Volumes I
and II, Either/Or I and II, Volume VI, Stages on Life's Way and Volume XII,
Practice in Christianity.

The two volumes which have no notes in them at all are Volume V, which
has Four Upbuilding Discourses and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions,
and Volume Vlll which has A Literary Review and Upbuilding Discourses in
Various Spirits. All the rest of the volumes have some annotations in them, but it
is important to look carefully to see where Unamuno stopped reading in some of
the volumes as well.

This chapter began with an explanation of indirect communication for the
communication of existential truth found in Concluding Unscientific Postscript by
Johannes Climacus. It is there that 1) the maieutic ideal, 2) the necessarily artful
form of indirect communication, and 3) the "negative" (or uncertain) quality of
existence that calls for indirect communication in its inexhaustible variety are
discussed. It is clear that Unamuno carefully read all of Section I (of Part Two),
"Something about Lessing," in which these concepts are detailed. This can be
determined by the number of Danish words that are glossed in the margins,
which in this case are many. But is there evidence of these ideas in the works of
Unamuno? We have already noted Ruth House Webber's insight that Unamuno
and Kierkegaard share a distancing from their written creations, the conviction
that their texts have an independent life of their own. Unamuno practices this

"death of the author" literary analysis as well as promoting it for his own texts. In

52

interpreting the Quijote he says in Del Sentimiento tragico de la vida that it
matters not to him what Cervantes intended to put into the text. "Lo vivo es lo
que yo alli descubro, pusiéralo o no Cervantes, lo que yo alli pongo y
sobrepongo y sotopongo, y lo que ponemos alli todos" (7: 210). ("What is living
in it is what I myself discover in it, whether Cervantes put it there or not, what I
myself put into and under and over it, and what we all put into it.”)

The distance created by the author in his own text allows the reader to
appropriate its truth more readily. In the Prologue to Cdmo se hace una novela
Unamuno says,

En cuanto un pensamiento nuestro queda fijado por la escritura,
expresado, cristalizado, queda ya muerto, y no es mas nuestro que
sera un dfa bajo tierra nuestro esqueleto. La historia, Io unico viva,
es el presents etemo, el momenta huidero que se queda pasando,
que pasa quedandose, y la literature no es mas que la muerte.
Muerte de que otros pueden tomar vida. Porque el que lee una
novela puede vivirla—y quien dice una novela dice una historia—, y
el que lee un poema, una criatura—poema es criatura y poesla

creacion—puede re-crearlo. Entre ellos el autor mismo. (8: 709-10)

As soon as our thought is fixed by writing it down, expressed,
crystallized, it is already dead, and it is no more ours than our
skeleton will be one day, under the earth. History, the only thing
living, is the eternal present, the fleeting moment that keeps on

happening, and happens as it remains. Literature is no more than

53

death. Death from which others can take life. Because he who

reads a novel can live it, and whoever dictates a novel tells a story

and he who reads a poem, a creature—a poem is a creature and

poetry creation—can recreate 11. Among them [the readers and

recreators] is the author himself.

Further, Unamuno speaks about the maieutic ideal in Vida de Don Quijote
y Sancho. In his discussion of the "galeotes espirituales" "spiritual galley slaves"
based on the passage of Don Quijote where the knight is stoned by the galley
slaves whom he had freed, Unamuno says, "El mas acendrado beneficio es el
que se hace al que no nos lo reconoce portal. [. . .] Libértale, y luego que te
apedree par haberlo libertado y ejercite asf sus brazos libres, empezara a desear
la Iibertad" (3: 235). ("The purest service is the one that is done such that a man
does not recognize it for what it is. [. . .] Free him, and after you have been
stoned for freeing him and he has had a chance to exercise his newly freed
arms, he will begin to desire Iiberty.") The "not recognizing it for what it is" is
accomplished through indirect communication. Johannes Climacus says, "l. . .]
the secret of communication specifically hinges on setting the other free, and for
that very reason he must not communicate himself directly; indeed, it is even
irreligious to do so" (CUP 74).
Unamuno continues in that same passage in Vida de Don Quijote with an

example of "objective thinking" that he rejects, whose metaphor may have been
inspired by Johannes Climacus. Climacus says in a passage underscored by

Unamuno,

54

Without risk, no faith. Faith is the contradiction between infinite
passion of inwardness and the objective uncertainty. If I am able to
apprehend God objectively, I do not have faith, but because I
cannot do this, I must have faith. If I want to keep myself in faith, I
must continually see to it that I hold fast the objective uncertainty,
see to it that in the objective uncertainty I am "out on 70,000
fathoms of water" and still have faith. (CUP 204)
Unamuno tells of trying to help break the shackles of one spiritual galley slave
friend who insists on believing in hell because without it the friend believes that
he would behave immorally. The spiritual galley slave says that he needs hell as
an "objective foundation" on which to base his conduct and calls it his "plank" on
which he depends in the middle of the ocean. Unamuno counters that his friend
is the plank and that God is the ocean. "gFundamento objetivo, dices? LY que
es eso? aQuieres mas objeto de ti que tt'r mismo? [. . .] LTienes tan poca
confianza en Dias, que estando en El, en quien vivimos, nos movemos y somos
(Hechos, XVII, 28), necesitas tabla a que agarrarte? El te sostendra sin tabla"
(3: 235). ("Objective foundation, you say? What's that? Do you need more of
an object than yourself? [. . .] Have you so little confidence in God that though
you are in Him in who we live and have our being (Acts 27:28), you still need a
plank to hang on to? He will keep you afloat, without any plank") Though his
friend may feel like he is drowning in anguish, tribulations and doubt, Unamuno
says that he needs to drawn and soak up the ocean like a sponge and then float

back up to the surface. His friends says that he would then be dead. Unamuno

55

replies "No, resucitado y mas vivo que nunca" (3: 236). ("No, resurrected and
more alive than ever. ")

This is a common example of how the reading of Concluding Unscientific
Postscript works in the mind of Unamuno and makes its way into the Unamuno
text. But notice a very important difference in the two texts, as well. Unamuno
embraces Climacus' view that without risk there is no faith, but for Unamuno the
' "objective uncertainty" that must be maintained is equated with "congojas,
tribulaciones y dudas" 'anguish, tribulations and doubts' which one must
succumb to in order to become alive. Climacus' point, however, is that faith is
defined as believing in the unseen while passionately in inwardness making the
leap in spite of the anguish, tribulations and doubts. It should also be noted that
Unamuno would in no way be unhappy about the clear discrepancy between
Climacus and himself. In the "Comentario" at the beginning of Cdmo se hace
una novela Unamuno says, "Pero, [LY para qué tiene el lector que ponerse de
acuerdo con la que el escritor le dice? Por mi parte, cuando me pongo a leer a
otra no es para ponem'ie de acuerdo con él. Ni le pido semejante cosa" (8:
724). (But why should a reader be in agreement with what a writer says to him?
For my part, when I set out to read another author, it is not to agree with him.
Neither do I ask him to agree with me.")

Another example of the maieutic ideal in Unamuno is found in that same
"Comentario" that precedes Cdmo se hace una novela. It reflects the concern of
the author that his reader be about making her own existence authentic.

Unamuno says,

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Y asi cuando les cuento como se hace una novela, a sea, coma
estoy hacienda la novela de mi vida, mi historia, les Ilevo a que se
vayan hacienda su propia novela, la novela que es la vida de cada
uno de ellos. Y desgraciados, si no tienen novela. Si tu vida,
lector, no es una novela, una ficcion divina, un ensuefio de
eternidad, entonces deja estas paginas, no me sigas Ieyendo. No
me sigas leyendo porque te indigestaré y tendras que vomitarrne

sin provecho ni para mi ni para ti. (8: 726)

And thus, when I tell them how a novel should be made, or rather,
how I am making the novel of my life, my story, I do so in order that
they go about making their own novel, the novel that is the life of
each one of them. And unfortunate you are if you do not have a
novel. If your life, reader, is not a novel, a divine fiction, an eternal
fantasy, then leave these pages and do not continue to read me.
Do not continue to read me because I will give you indigestion and

you will have to vomit me without any benefit to me or you.

The thrust of this quote corresponds well with the goals of indirect

communication as outlined by Johannes Climacus. The overall project is clearly

about life, existence, being in this world. But the means of communication about

that existence will be an art form, the novel. And the only really important thing is

that the reader appropriate the existential truths set forth therein for herself and

make her own novel, her own authentic existence. It the reader is uninterested in

that sort of existence, there is no point in even beginning to read. At the end of

57

Cdmo se hace una novela Unamuno reiterates the responsibility of the reader to
be active and make herself the author of the novel. "Y todo lector que sea
hombre de dentro, humano, es, lector, autor de lo que lee y esta Ieyendo. Esta
que ahora lees aqui, lector, te lo estas diciendo tt’r a ti mismo y es tan tuyo coma
mio. Y si no es asi es que ni lo lees" (8: 761). ("And every reader who is a man
of depth, human, is a reader, an author of what he reads, of what he is reading.
What you are now reading here, reader, you are saying it to yourself and it is as
much yours as it is mine. If it's not that way, you are not reading")

It seems clear that what Johannes Climacus says about the indirect
method used to communicate existential truth resonates well with Unamuno in
his own embracing of the maieutic ideal, the artistic nature of indirect
communication and the impossibility of certainty when it comes to existential
truth. What is just as clear is that Unamuno did not understand the overall
purpose of the Kierkegaardian pseudonyms nor Kierkegaard's "direct witness"
that is contained in The Point of View. The first published explanation of how the
pseudonyms should be read is found at the end of Concluding Unscientific
Postscript where Kierkegaard appends "A First and Last Explanation" to
Johannes Climacus' text, but this time he signs his own name. It is there that
Kierkegaard asks that the opinions and ideas of the pseudonyms not be
attributed to him but to the individual authors. A careful perusal of Unamuno's
copy of Postscript shows that he stopped reading on page 494, leaving fifty-five

pages unread. On p. 546 "A First and Last Explanation" appears. We can

58

conclude that it is unlikely that Unamuno knows of Kierkegaard‘s request with
regard to the pseudonyms.

More importantly, it appears that Unamuno did not read The Point of View
for My Work as an Author in which Kierkegaard explains the use of indirect
communication and the esthetic pseudonyms as the only way to remove the
illusion that all nineteenth century Danes were Christians. It is here that
Kierkegaard states his clear purpose as a religious author from first until last and
claims that, though he did not understand the scope of his authorship from the
beginning, Governance did. He says, "The first division of books is esthetic
writing; the last division of books is exclusively religious writing—between these
lies Concluding Unscientific Postscript as the turning point. This work deals with
and poses the issue, the issue of the entire work as an author: becoming a
Christian" (PV 31 ).

The Danish volume in which The Point of View appears begins with some
newspaper articles which Unamuno stopped reading on page eighteen. The
articles have to do with nineteenth century Danish issues, and it is not surprising
that the articles did not maintain Unamuno‘s interest. Thereafter in the volume
are From the Papers of One Still Living and The Concept of Irony both of which
have significant amounts of vocabulary glosses, showing a careful reading. After
The Concept of Irony the newspaper articles begin again and it is clear that
Unamuno stopped reading on page 429, understandably bored with the content.
Having stopped on page 429, Unamuno also did not read "About my Authorship,"

"The Point of View" or "The Individual."

59

The difficulty of saying precisely what Kierkegaard believes about any one
issue given the use of the pseudonyms and the indirect method of
communication was explored at the beginning of this chapter. It was suggested
that a dynamic approach to the interpretation of the Kierkegaardian texts be
taken in order to give a credible account of what Kierkegaard says. Sylvia
Walsh's criteria for such a dynamic approach was adopted, i.e., that in order to
know what Kierkegaard himself thought, one must read 1) the works which to
which he signed his own name, 2) the specific declarations he wrote as to his
purposes and 3) his journals and papers which reveal much of his thinking as he
wrote.

Unamuno did read many of the specifically religious writings like Practice
in Christianity by the Christian pseudonym Anti-Climacus, and Works of Love
which Kierkegaard signed with his own name. Both texts are heavily glossed.
However, it seems that the works that had the greatest impact on his own writing
were the pseudonymous books, Either/Orl and II, Stages on Life's Way, and
Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Since it appears that he did not read "A First
and Last Declaration" nor The Point of View it is likely that Unamuno had little or
no understanding of Kierkegaard's plan in using the pseudonyms nor about
Kierkegaard's ultimate purpose for his entire authorship. Unamuno also did not
have access to the Papirer (the Journals and Papers) which were published later.
Given Unamuno's belief that a text is independent of its author, his having
missed "A First and Last Declaration" or The Point of View would have been no

loss from his point of view.

60

However, if one wants accurately to answer the question "How did
Kierkegaard influence Unamuno?" it is crucial to say that Unamuno found much
in Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings that corresponded resoundingly with his
own thinking and that provided grist for his creative mind. For the purposes of
this dissertation, the most important similarity in the two authors is their use of
the maieutic ideal and indirect communication to reveal existential truth. But it is
more difficult to claim the "spiritual brotherhood" between Kierkegaard and
Unamuno that many critics have voiced (along with Unamuno himself) when
Unamuno did not read the texts which are key to understanding what
Kierkegaard, rather than his pseudonyms believed. Kierkegaard declares that
there is only one significant question, "How do I become a Christian?" He does
not ever try to prove the truth of the Christian message. He demonstrates what
Christianity is and what it is not. But for him, there are only two choices, to
become a Christian or not. For Unamuno, there are multiple choices and none of
them are privileged, except the choice to care passionately about one's

existence.

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CHAPTER TWO

THE FORMATION OF THE SELF IN KIERKEGAARD AND UNAMUNO

The Self as Substance and the Self as Achievement

In order to explore the formation of the self in Kierkegaard and Unamuno I
want to lay a groundwork by examining two different ways of understanding the
self that have been present in western culture.‘ The first of these is an
understanding of the self that sees the self as a substance, an entity. There may
be many ways to describe the kind of entity that the self is, but the common
thread among all of them is that the entity is seen as an enduring thing with a
given identity. The second view sees the self as an achievement, a
characterization of the self that it possesses by virtue of the roles it fulfills. Here,
"Being a self is not being a special type of entity, but rather it is a matter of
having a special status, a status that is linked to social relationships" (Evans,
"Who is the Other?” 2). On this view, being a human, part of the homo sapiens
species, does not necessarily quality one as having a self. A human being may
become a self or may cease to be a self, depending on his/her status.

We will look first at some concrete examples from the history of western
philosophy. If it is true, as Alfred North Whitehead claims, that all of western
philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, it seems that Plato would be a good

place to begin looking at the self as substance or achievement.

 

‘ The categories used here are developed by C. Stephen Evans in his article on Kierkegaard's
anthropology entitled, "Who Is the Other in The Sickness Unto Death?: God and Human
Relations In the Constitution of the Self."

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First of all, we need to clarify that the "self" comes under the guise of
"soul" in Plato. For Plato, the soul is an entity that preexists the body and that
survives the body after death. The character of the soul is tripartite. In the
Republic Plato has Socrates explain the three parts of the soul:
One part, we say is that with which a man learns, one is that with
which he feels anger. But the third part, owing to its manifold
forms, we could not easily designate by any one distinctive name,
but gave it the name of its chief and strongest element; for we
called it the appetitive part because of the intensity of its appetites
concerned with food and drink and love [. . .1. (371)

Our ability to reason may war with our competitive, assertive nature, as well as

our appetites, but all three parts are found within every person. This tri-part

entity is universal and a given.

Aristotle's view of a human being is fundamentally the same as Plato's in
its dependence on the category of substance. However, Aristotle does not, as
Plato does, clearly teach that the soul is a substance on its own that can exist
apart from the body. Rather, for him a human being is a unity of body and soul, a
composite substance in which the soul is the "form" of the body. He describes
the human soul's distinctive properties as cognitive capacities, but both body and
soul are seen as being part of what it means to be human. In the Medieval
period, Thomas Aquinas continues to employ Aristotle's view of a human being,
although as a Christian, he allows the soul to survive the death of the body. Of

course for Aquinas, human beings, like all finite substances, are created by God,

63

a necessary being. Still, for Aquinas a human being is a "composite substance"
composed of body and soul, which is the "form" of that body.

In the early modern period Descartes defended his own existence as a
"thinking being" against the skeptical doubt he used to judge the rest of the
world. The makeup of the soul is res cogitans or thinking substance, which is
apart from and independent from the material body. The intellect that is capable
of "clear and distinct" perceptions that are free from error is a gift from God.

Many classical substance theories of the self are tied to a religious world-
view, but contemporary versions of the substance view of self are found in the
form of scientific materialism for which a creator is entirely absent. On this view,
the self is still a given entity, but it is entirely made up of matter—configured by a
complex set of genes—that is naturally occurring and evolving and that needs no
"first cause" explanation. Evans points to Richard Dawkins as a prime example
of this view (“Who is the Other?" 2). Dawkins calls the genes that are the basis
of selfhood "selfish" because they are programmed to survive, and they are all
that we need to explain the concept of self in the contemporary world.2

The view of the self as achievement, as having a special status or
relationship, has become a dominant phenomenon of the twentieth century.
Chief proponents of this view can be found in the existentialist camp. In
attempting to define an “existentialist," in order to defend the term from the
imprecision that he perceived in the wider culture, Sartre begins by stating that
what both Christian and atheistic existentialists "have in common is simply the

fact that they believe that existence comes before essence—or, if you will, that

we must begin from the subjective" (289). On this view there is no "human
nature," nothing given. Rather, "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of
himself" (291). How does man "make" himself? By choosing for himself and in
so doing choosing for all of humankind. This is a radical choosing for which there
are no a priori standards or values other than freedom itself.

For Sartre, the authentic self is in no way given, but must be achieved.
"Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes
himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but
what his life is" (300). Sartre defends his view saying that it avoids the
reductionism of materialism and that it avoids the radical individual subjectivism
of Descartes because one recognizes that the "other" is a thinking individual as
well. This is the relational side of the achievement theory. Sartre says, "The
other is indispensable to my existence and equally so to any knowledge I can
have of myself. Under these conditions, the intimate discovery of myself is at the
same time the revelation of the other as a freedom which confronts mine, and
which cannot think or will without doing so either for or against me" (303). Still, in
all, I am ultimately responsible for creating my essence by my commitments.
Sartre claims that existentialism, far from being the philosophy of despair that it is
accused of being, is actually optimistic because it is a "doctrine of action" (311).

Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher and historian of modernity, rejects
materialistic and scientific paradigms as a basis to understand what it means to
be human, and has sought to redefine man as a "self interpreting animal."

Emotions such as shame and remorse or the élan of aspiration are what

 

2 See Dawkins', The Selfish Gene.
65

differentiate the human from the animal. Such emotions are contingent on "a
certain articulation of our situation" which is dependent upon language (63).
(T hese emotions are carefully chosen because those such as fear do seem to be
shared by animals.) Taylor says,
This is what is involved in seeing man as a self-interpreting animal.
It means that he cannot be understood simply as an object among
objects, for his life incorporates an interpretation, an expression of
what cannot exist unexpressed, because the self that is to be
interpreted is essentially that of a being who self interprets. (75)
It is impossible to interpret without language, and so on this view the self is
dependent on its ability to articulate its situation through language. The import of
this view is that the self is no longer an object with properties to be observed, but
rather "our interpretation of ourselves and our experience is constitutive of what
we are" (47).

Peter Singer, the Princeton ethicist, provides yet another illustration of the
self as an achievement. Singer does not privilege humans because of their
homo sapiens species, their feelings, or their language. Instead of using the
term "human," which he equates with the species, he chooses to use the term
"person" when he refers to what we have been talking about as "self" or "soul."
The distinction between a human and a person is important for the ethical
considerations of abortion and euthanasia. Merely being part of the human
species does not provide a right to life. Persons are the only ones who possess

such a right. For Singer a person is "a self-conscious being who is aware of itself

66

as a distinct entity, with a past and future" (90). Since both an unborn fetus and
an infant do not have this self-awareness, Singer claims that there is no morally
relevant differencebetween them. Both may be killed if there are compelling
reasons to do so. Further, some non-human animals can be considered to be
persons. Though he calls it "speculation,” Singer seriously entertains the idea
that chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, dogs, cats, and mammals normally used
for food could all be considered persons on the criterion stated above.

Our motive in looking at these concrete examples from Plato to Singer has
been to see the difference between a view of the self as a substance and a view
of the self as an achievement. Though each of the views has various
manifestations, the common threads within each type make it possible to identify
the different conceptions of the self and some of the implications of those views
for living in this world. While the substance that is the self may be tripartite in
Plato, a thinking substance for Descartes, and a complex of genes for the
scientific materialist, the import of this view is that the self is an entity whose
nature is more or less fixed and given. What the varying theories of the self as
achievement have in common is that being born a homo sapiens does not
guarantee that the human being is a self but rather selfhood is a status that is
acquired overtime. In the case of Sartre, the choices one makes determine what
the self Is. In the case of Taylor, the self is dependent on the ability to articulate
emotion through language. For Singer, a self can only be seen as a person

when she is aware of herself as a person and has a sense of her past and future.

67

The Self as Achievement In Kierkegaard and Unamuno
I want to argue that there is a fundamental similarity in the way Unamuno

and Kierkegaard view the self. Both authors can be seen to hold elements of the

two ways of viewing the self that I have outlined here. Both see the self as

substantial, but not only as substantial. For both, the achievement character of

the self is of fundamental importance, and I shall focus first on this aspect of their

views? Both authors are keen to look at the self as an existing subject, one that

has choices that will make it what it is. Kierkegaard says in an entry of 1847 in

his Joumals,
Even though I achieve nothing else, I nevertheless hope to leave
very accurate and experientially based observations concerning the
conditions of existence [Tilvaeelsens]. [ . . .] Genuine decision
never happens to a man; one has to enter into decision. [. . .]
Using my diagram, a young person should be able to see very
accurately beforehand, just as on a price list: if you venture this far
out, then the conditions are thus and so, this to win and this to lose;
and if you venture out this far, these are the conditions, etc. (JP,
1:1046)

Unamuno writes in Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, "Sdlo es hombre hecho y

derecho el hombre cuando quiere ser mas que hombre" (3: 82). ("A man is only

 

3 It is my intention to look at the similarities between Unamuno's and Kierkegaard's view of self
without regard to the "influence" of Kierkegaard on Unamuno in this fundamental part of their
thought. It seems wise to follow the advice of Batchelor on this point since some of what
Unamuno has to say on the nature of the self was written before he read Kierkegaard. The
explicit influence of Kierkegaard on Unamuno will be seen in the fictional rendering of the self as
an achievement in the novels he wrote after having read Kierkegaard.

68

fully a man when he wants to be more than a man.") Later in Del sentimiento
tragico de la vida he says, "Me dicen que he venido a realizar no sé qué final
social; pero yo siento que ya, lo mismo que cada uno de mis hermanos, he
venido a realizarrne, a vivir“ (7: 116). (“They tell me I have come to realize I
know not what social and; but I feel that I, like each one of my brothers, have
come to realize myself, to live.”)

Furthermore, since both authors believe that a person is responsible for
becoming a self, their authorship is an attempt to awaken their readers to that
responsibility. Kierkegaard addresses his authorship to "the single individual."

The single individual is the category through which, in a religious
sense, the age, history, the human race must go. And the one who
stood at Thermopylae was not so secure as I, who have stood, in
order at least to bring about an awareness of it, at this narrow pass,
the single individual. His particular task was to keep the hordes
from pressing through the narrow pass; if they pressed through he
would have lost. My task at least exposes me far less to the
danger of being trampled down, since it was as a lowly servant
(but, as I have said from the beginning and repeat again and again,
without authority) to prompt, if possible, to invite, to induce the
many to press through this narrow pass, the single individual,
through which, please note, no one presses except by becoming
the single individual; the opposite is indeed a categorical

impossibility. (PV 118)

69

Each of the Upbuilding Discourses includes a dedication to this single individual
"whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader.” But in The Point of View
Kierkegaard is careful to explain that 1) the single individual is present in every
one of the pseudonymous books as well as the upbuilding ones and 2) that the
term does not exclude anyone. " The single individual can mean the most unique
of all, and the single individual can mean everyone" (115). What Kierkegaard
emphatically wants to contrast with the single individual is "the crowd" that "is
untruth" (110). The crowd here is what we might term the " herd" that is
unthinkingly persuaded of the "truth" of a matter by the numbers of people
holding that "truth."

Inducing his reader to "press through this narrow pass" was not an easy
sell in Kierkegaard's nineteenth century Denmark. Kierkegaard has Johannes
Climacus proclaim in Postscript,

The immorality of our age is perhaps not lust and pleasure and
sensuality, but rather a pantheistic, debauched contempt for
individual human beings. In the midst of the jubilation over our age
and the nineteenth century there sounds a secret contempt for
being a human being—in the midst of the importance of the
generation there is a despair over being a human being.
Everything, everything must be together; people want to delude
themselves world-historically in the totality; no one wants to be an

individual existing human being. (355)

 

‘ Here Kierkegaard says that when he talks about truth he means eternal tnrth. So that, "politics
etc. has nothing to do with eternal truth" (PV 109-110).

70

Again in Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho Unamuno says of his purpose in writing,
"Hay que inquietar los espiritus y enfusar en ellos [los prdjimos] fuertes anhelos,
aun a sabiendas de que no han de alcanzar nunca lo anhelado" (3:155). (“One
must disquiet the spirits [of one’s neighbors] and infuse in them powerful
Iongings, even in the knowledge that they will never achieve what they long for.”)
Later in the same book Unamuno also narrows the general purpose to the
individual. "Mira lector, aunque note conozco, te quiero tanto que si pudiese
tenerte en mis manos, te abriria el pecho y en el cogollo del corazén te rasgaria
una Ilaga y te pondria alli vinagre y sal para que no pudieses descansar nunca y
vivieras en perpetua zozobra y en anhelo inacabable" (3: 241). (“Look, reader,
though I do not know you, I love you so much that if I could hold you in my
hands, I would open up your breast and in the center of your heart I would make
a wound and into it I would put vinegar and salt, so that you might never rest
again, and would live in continual anguish and endless longing.")5 In “Soledad,”
Unamuno rejects the crowd as Kierkegaard did.

Nunca he sentido el deseo de conmover a una muchadumbre y
de influir sobre una masa de personas—que pierden su
personalidad al amasarse—, yo he sentido, en cambio, siempre
furioso anhelo de inquietar el corazdn de cada hombre y de influir
sabre cada uno de mis herrnanos en humanidad. Cuando he

hablado en publico he procurado casi siempre hacer oratoria llrica,

 

5 The first lines of this address of Unamuno to his reader echo Kierkegaard In The Point of View,
"I do not know who you are; I do not know where you are; I do not know your name. Yet you are
my hope, my joy, my pride, and covertly my honor" (105).

71

y me he esforzado por forjarme la ilusidn de que hablaba a uno
solo de mis oyentes, a uno cualquiera, a cualquiera de ellos, a

cada uno, no a todos en conjunto. (1: 1255)

l have never felt a desire to move a crowd of people or to influence
a mass of people who lose their personality by being part of the
crowd. I have felt, on the other hand, a furious longing to disquiet
the heart of each man and to influence each one of my brothers in
humanity. When I have spoken in public, I have almost always
endeavored to produce lyric oratory, and l have tried to form for
myself the illusion that l was talking with only one of my hearers, to
any one of them, to each one, not to all of them together.

The task of awakening was no less difficult from Unamuno's point of view
than was the case for Kierkegaard in the nineteenth century. In speaking of his
countrymen Unamuno says, "Para ellos no hay quemantes Iagrimas vertidas en
silencio, en el silencio del misterio, porque esos barbaros se lo creen tener todo
resuelto; para ellos no hay inquietud del alma, pues se creen nacidos en
posesidn de la verdad absoluta" (Vida 3: 226). (“For them there are no burning
tears shed in silence, in the silence of the mystery, because these barbarians
think they have resolved everything. For them there is no restlessness of the
soul, for they think that they are born in possession of the absolute truth”)

Before each author's view of the self as achievement is explained in
depth, I must qualify the word "achievement." For both Unamuno and

Kierkegaard, becoming a self is a task that is never fully "achieved.” As Merold

72

Westphal has it, "L . .] selfhood is the goal rather than the presupposition of my
existence" (ix). But the "becoming" that Kiekegaard speaks of and the "longing"
that Unamuno speaks of are what make existence authentic. Kierkegaard's
"becoming" and Unamuno's "longing" are complex, multifaceted concepts that

demand separate, careful explanation.

Kierkegaard's View of the Self

Since the content of what is involved in becoming a self in Kierkegaard's
view is fleshed out in his pseudonymous works, particularly Either/Or, The
Sickness Unto Death, and Concluding Unscientific Postcript, we must first
answer the question, "How can we assume this view is Kierkegaard's when he
has asked us to ascribe only to the pseudonyms what they have written?" To
answer this question fully one must refer back to the discussion of indirect
communication and its Importance to the whole Kierkegaardian corpus in the
previous chapter. Either/Or is the imaginative rendering of the aesthetic and
ethical existence spheres. The existence spheres will be explained in detail later
in this chapter, but it is important to note here that Kierkegaard claims them as
his own in the quote above from his Journal about his "accurate and
experientially based observations concerning the conditions of existence" being a
"diagram" which a young person could use in order to "see very accurately
beforehand, just as on a price list if you venture this far out, the conditions as
thus and so, this is to win, and that to lose [. . .]' (JP, 1:1046). What is at stake in

winning or losing is one's selfhood. That sort of existential truth cannot be given

73

as a "result," but must be communicated indirectly so that the existing individual
may appropriate the truth or not, depending on how much one sees of oneself in
the characters' lives as depicted in Either/Or. The truth of the existence spheres
and the need to choose between them is Kierkegaard's. The content of A's
aesthetic existence, the conduct of the Seducer and Judge William's emphasis
on marriage as the ultimate ethical task, are all lively examples of options for
existence which are not to be confused with Kierkegaard's own preferences.

The relationship between Kierkegaard and the pseudonyms for Sickness
Unto Death and Concluding Unscientific Postscript is more intimate. Since the
relationship of Kierkegaard and Anti-Climacus, the author of Sickness Unto
Death, is more straightfonrvard, we will deal with it first. Anti-Climacus is different
from all of the other pseudonyms in that he is a self-professed Christian.
Kierkegaard considered Anti-Climacus one of the "higher" pseudonyms. We
know through Kierkegaard's Journals that he had intended to put his own name
as the author of Sickness Unto Death until the very last minute. At the hour of
turning the manuscript into the publisher, Kierkegaard became convinced of his
own personal failure to live up to the ideal of the Christian life described in the
text (JP, 6:6446). He therefore invented the pseudonym of Anti-Climacus as the
author and listed his own name as the editor of the book. He explains the
relationship between Anti-Climacus, Johannes Climacus (the author of
Concluding Unscientific Postscript), and himself in the following way:

Johannes Climacus and Anti-Climacus have several things in

common; but the difference is that whereas Johannes Climacus

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places himself so low that he even says that he himself is not a
Christian, one seems to be able to detect in Anti-Climacus that he
considers himself to be a Christian on an extraordinarily high level.
[. . .] I would place myself higher than Johannes Climacus, lower
than Anti-Climacus? (JP, 6:6433)
We can safely assume, then, that we can ascribe to Kierkegaard the views of
Anti-Climacus in Sickness Unto Death, though Kierkegaard would not want us to
think that he had achieved the lofty goals of which Anti-Climacus speaks.
Kierkegaard writes explicitly to the point in his explanation of why a pseudonym
had to be used for Sickness Unto Death in the following Journal entry:

It is absolutely right—a pseudonym had to be used.

When the demands of ideality are to be presented at their
maximum, then one must take extreme care not to be confused
with them himself, as if he himself were the ideal.

Protestations could be used to avoid this. But the only sure way
is this redoubling.

The difference from the earlier pseudonyms is simply but
essentially this, that I do not retract the whole thing humorously but
identify myself as one who is striving. (JP, 6:6446)

The previous quote from Kierkegaard's Journal tells us that Johannes

Climacus is not a Christian, so more care needs to be taken when attributing to

 

‘ Howard and Edna Hang point out in their introduction to Sickness Unto Death that the "Anti" of
Anti-Climacus should not be considered "against" but rather "before" in the sense of rank (xxii).
Niels Thulstrup sees Anti-Climacus as more of an opposite to Johannes because of his Christian
commitment which Johannes doesn‘t share (149).

75

Kierkegaard what the writer of Postscript holds. In Kierkegaard’s Fragments and
PostscriQt, C. Stephen Evans explains the following three functions that this
pseudonym serves that will remain important only if the distinction between
Kierkegaard and Johannes Climacus is maintained (51-53). The first has to do
with the frame of the work as a polemic against the Hegelian view of Christianity.
Since Climacus is not a Christian, he can be seen as more of a neutral observer,
one who seeks to delineate clearly the difference between the Hegelian view and
the Christian view without being a partisan of either. The second function that
Climacus serves as a non-Christian is to point convincingly to the difficulty of the
Christian life. As we have noted elsewhere, Kierkegaard's goal is to "reintroduce
Christianity to Christendom." In order to do that, the "illusion" of Danish
Christendom—that everyone is a Christian—had to be confronted. But as Evans
notes, "It is no good to thunder at people and affirm that they are not true
Christians (thereby affirming that you are)" (52). Rather, "One must take
people's word if they say they are Christians, and then, by humbly confessing
that you personally are not a Christian, since it is so difficult, lead them to the
perception of the truth. This is what Johannes Climacus realizes" (52). The third
function that Climacus serves is that of all the pseudonyms—indirect
communication. By withdrawing as an author, Kierkegaard allows the reader the
freedom to accept or reject Climacus' distinction between Hegelianism and
Christianity.

So how should we evaluate what Climacus has to say in light of

Kierkegaard's own views? That must be done on an issue by issue basis. But it

76

is clear that what Climacus says about Christianity must be seen as an
"outsiders" view. He cannot be Kierkegaard's "definitive spokesman for
Christianity" because Kierkegaard is definitely an "insider." The outsider can still
have some very important things to say about Christianity, but the truth that he
points to is never appropriated existentially. "He understands what faith is, but he
does not understand what faith means to the believer" (Evans, Kierkegaard’s
Fragments 53).

Having established the relationship between Kierkegaard and his
pseudonym Anti-Climacus, we can begin our exploration of Kierkegaard's view of
the self with the definition that Anti-Climacus gives of the self in the first page of
‘ Sickness Unto Death, being confident that it is also how Kierkegaard views the
self. The answer that Anti-Climacus gives to the question, "What is a self?” is
legendary in its opacity. “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the
relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but the
relation’s relating itself to itself” (13). Before one tries to unpack the meaning
here, it is helpful to go on immediately in the text to what Anti-Climacus considers
to be a human being and how that is different from being a self. He says, “A
human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the
eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation
between two. Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self" (13).

Here Anti-Climacus recognizes something fundamental about our human
experience. We are made of incongruous elements. That part of us that is

infinite, eternal and free is our consciousness of possibilities, of dreams of what

77

could be. The part of us that is finite, temporal and necessary limits those
dreams by our bodily character. Anti-Climacus affirms both aspects of our
humanness and calls for a synthesis. But how is that possible? What is needed
to make this relation between the temporal and the eternal in a self is “the
positive third." This "positive third" relates to both the temporal and the eternal
and to the relation between them. Furthermore, the “positive thir ” relates to
“that which established the entire relation” (13). Anti-Climacus concludes, “The
human self is such a derived, established relation, a relation that relates itself to
itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another" (13-14). The “other" in
this equation is God. What does all this mean?

As a human being I am first and foremost defined by relations. A self
cannot be understood in isolation. I am not made up of multiple selves, but
rather I must relate different elements of myself—the self that I am and the self I
can become—through a "positive third” that relates itself to God. God is the
fundamental relation that both gives me the substance of what I am and gives me
the freedom to choose whether or not I will relate myself to Him and become the
self He intends for me to be. “God, who constituted man a relation, releases it
from his hand, as it were” (16).

A self is both a given and a becoming. Here we see that the view of the
self as a substance is just as integral to Kierkegaard's view of the self as is the
view of the self as an achievement. In Kierkegaard's view, human beings do

have an essence. Their essence is created by God and that essence is to be

78

"responsible choosers."7 What we choose is just as important as that we choose
because if we choose to relate to something that is less than God, we will not
become our true selves. The fact that God intends for me to become a particular
self does not negate my freedom in choosing to be that self. Rather, it makes my
ability to choose meaningful. Kierkegaard says in Upbuilding Discourses in
Various Spirits, "But this I do believe . . .that at every person's birth there comes
into existence an eternal purpose for that person, for that person in particular.
Faithfulness to oneself with respect to this is the highest thing a person can do,
and as that most profound poet has said, "Worse than self love is self contempt'"

(93).

Unamuno's View of the Self

There is much more to be said about the implications of Kierkegaard's
view of the self, but before going on to those, we would do well to see the
similarities and differences in an initial exploration of Unamuno’s view of the self.
"Exploration" is a word carefully chosen that does not assume that there is
unanimity on just what Unamuno's view of the self is. Collado insists that
Unamuno has no articulated view of "st mismo" as found in the pages of
Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death? Other scholars have found plenty to say an
the subject, but each takes a particular slant, depending on which texts are used.

Frances Wyers says, "Indeed, nowhere does he fully describe for his readers the

 

7 This term Is used by a. Stephen Evans in Saran Kierkegaard's Christian Psychology, p. 55.
3 Collado makes a distinction between "sf mismo" and "ya" which he identifies with
consciousness. See p. 31.

79

notion of the inner self; one must piece it together on the basis of passages
scattered throughout his work" (xviii). And since Wyers makes much of the fact
that Unamuno contradicts himself not only from essay to essay, but also within a
given essay, coming up with a definitive view of the self from Unamuno's essays
is problematic from the start. Let us see if we can make some sense of what
three well-known Unamuno scholars have said about Unamuno's view of the self:
Frances Wyers, Paul life, and Carlos Blanca Aguinaga.

All three of these scholars would accept, at least as a beginning, what
Wyers calls the "two man theory" in Unamuno. This theory sees the self as
having two warring parts, but what these two warring parts are called differs from
scholar to scholar. The overarching duality is explained by Blanca Aguinaga in
his essay, "lnterioridad y exterioridad en Unamuno." This scholar sees
inwardness or interiority as what Unamuno emphasized in the first part of his
work. According to Blanca Aguinaga, a recognition of the importance of the
external or exteriority does not come until the later works of Unamuno. The
tension between the external and the internal is between all that makes up the
inner life, the eternal, and the accidents of life, the temporal or historic.

On Blanca Aguinaga’s view, Unamuno rejected the external and prized
the inner in his early works, using neologisms like intra-historia, intra-filosofia,
and intracuantitativo to point to the true, the authentic center that everything,
even science has. As this author has it, "No se da, pues, importancia al
fendmeno. . .sino al nt'imeno; estamos ante lo esencial etemo; lo accidental

queda reducido a su esencia; la realidad es la intima" (688). (“Importance is not

80

given to the phenomenon but to the noumenon; we stand before what is
essential eternally; the accidental is reduced to its essence; reality is that which
is intimate”) This critic maintains that although Unamuno stated the duality in
many different ways, 9. g., "substantial y accidental; personalidad e
individualidad; cultura y civilizacion; eternidad y tiempo; espiritu y materia; alma y
cuerpo; espiritu y razon; locura y cordura [. . .]" ("substantial and accidental;
personality and individuality; culture and civilization; eternity and time; spirit and
matter; soul and body; spirit and reason; madness and sanity [. . .1") until the end
of his work, Unamuno made a conscious choice of the first of all of these
dualities, thus rejecting any possibility of a "unity" in the contradictions (693).
But, Blanca Aguinaga says that after Unamuno's exile he was forced to accept
his participation in time, in history. At the writing of Como se hace una novela
Unamuno then sees "L . .]la verdad que la agonfa consiste en aceptar los
contrarios en unidad de guerra" (695). ("L . .] the truth that the agony consists in
accepting the contradictions in unity of war.") Because of the realization of his
"role" outside of Spain and the legend that had become Miguel de Unamuno,
Unamuno must face in reality what he had previously rejected: that a self is also
the accidents of its history and not only inner, intra and "adentro" 'inside'. Blanca
Aguinaga says, "No es que el mundo de fuera sea igual al dentro, es que los dos
son una indestructible unidad contradictoria; Ios dos en contradicién me hacen
hombre concreto [. . .]' (699). ("It's not that the external world is the same as the
inner world, it is that the two are an indestructible contradictory unity; the two in

contradiction make me a concrete man [. . .].")

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Frances Wyers sees no discernable progression In the thought of
Unamuno on what constitutes the self. At the beginning of the first chapter of
Miguel de Unamuno, The Contrary Self, she quotes three early works of
Unamuno in which he clearly questions the validity of the inner self and seems to
choose the external self, thus negating Blanca Alguinaga's theory of a uniform
emphasis on the interior life in the early Unamunian texts. The quotes are worth
repeating here:

There is no direct intuition of the self that is worth anything; the eye
cannot see itself except in a mirror and the mirror of moral man is
found in his works, of which he is the offspring. (En tomo al

casticismo, 1895)

A man does not know himself except in the same way that he
knows others. He sees himself act and . . .deduces what he is like

. . .No one, in reality, knows himself a priori, before he acts; all of us
know ourselves in our own actions, which are often enough foreign

to us. ("Dela ensehanza superior en Espafia", 1899)

Introspection is very deceptive and, carried to an extreme,
produces a true void in consciousness. . .Because a state of
consciousness that would consist purely and simply in
consciousness contemplating itself, would not, for lack of content,

be any kind of consciousness at all . . . We learn to know ourselves

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in the same way that we learn to know others: by observing our
actions. ("EI individualismo espafiol", 1902) (qtd. in Wyers 3)

Wyers sees, as many critics do, that Unamuno is searching for his own
substantial self throughout his authorship (xviii). Wyers would agree with the
importance of the interiority/exteriority dichotomy as developed by Blanca
Aguinaga, explaining those as the inner self and the outer self. The inner self is
the intimate self at intrahistoria, the true self that cannot be known by the other,
the anlooker. Society only sees the external self, the outside shell of the person.
When Unamuno insists that the real self is the one invisible from the eyes of the
world, Unamuno is protecting his own self from the prying eyes of his public (7).
However, Unamuno needs and consciously seeks the approval of his readers--
fame--as a means of assuring his own immortality. At other times he decries the
baseness of such a need.

The inner self and the external self are further explained in relation to the
polarities of isolation and action. Unamuno's praise of solitude as the only place
where one can know oneself and one's neighbor in "Soledad" is contrasted with
Unamuno's call for action in "Sabre la soberbia" as the only way to "know"
yourself. In "Sabre la soberbia," "Unamuno tells us that we should not torment
ourselves with the agonies of self-discovery but try to learn only what we can do"
(27). These are examples of the contradictions that Wyers says constitute the
"contrary self" that Unamuno is. She sees no unity in their contradiction as does
Blanca Aguinaga. Wyers states, "Unamuno's works do not show us an 'agonic'

writer [. . .] but a person who veers ceaselessly between mutually exclusive and

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ultimately self-defeating aims" (xxi). Wyers would disagree with Blanca Aguinaga
that there is any power in maintaining the tension in the polarities because for her
the contradictions dissolve. "Contraries are resolved, not in paradox, which
would preserve the antithetical nature of each, but in verbal coalescence: you call
one thing by the name of its opposite. These reversals of affirmation and
negation characterize everything that Unamuno wrote about the self" (4).

Blanca Aguinaga and Wyers can agree on Unamuno's need for autonomy
and freedom that is the hallmark of the existentialist way of life. Though Blanca
Aguinaga wants to posit a unity in the contradictions toward the end of
Unamuno's authorship which Wyers rejects, there is no doubting that there is a

process going on in which choice is of paramount importance. Paul llie sees

 

the same "two men" in Unamuno, but he describes their relationship in yet a
different way from the first two scholars.

According Paul Ilie's book, Unamuno: an Existential View of Self and
Society, Unamuno’s view of the self is relational, much like the relational self at
Sickness Unto Death, but the relation is always in tension and never has the goal
of synthesis as it does in Kierkegaard. The self is seen as a society unto itself.
Its fragments are like Individual people talking to each other. The multiple
fragments or “selves" can observe each other, though there is one part of the self
that is not knowable, and that is the part that is doing the actual contemplation.
What IIie terms the "cogito" is a divisive agent, causing the various selves, the
contemplative self and the social self, to doubt each other. This is the same as

what Unamuno calls the "satanic” self that demoralizes all the selves as it

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questions their authenticity, thus alienating the fragments of self from each other.
The “satanic self" is absolutely necessary because without it, there would be no
challenge to our different selves and there would be no growth in self-
consciousness.

There are implications in Unamuno’s view for relating to the “other"
outside of the self. llie explains Unamuno’s “monodialogue” in this way. "T he
self divides into two separate selves, one of which is objectitied as an “other"
person. The situation is also a form of alienation, with a psychic distance forming
between the interlocutors. Thus, each fragmentary self can discourse with the
other as if they were fellow men, and gain insight into each other with remarkable
lucidity and sincerity" (55). The only way this can happen, however, is for the
person to be alone, at least for a while. Solitude is an essential element for
becoming a self. Unamuno says "No hay mas dialogo verdadero que el dialogo
que entablas contigo mismo, y este dialogo salo puedes entablarlo estando a
sales. En la soledad, y salo en la soledad, puedes conocerte a ti mismo coma
préjimo; y mientras note conozcas a ti mismo como a prdjimo, no podras llegar a
ver en tus préjimos otros yos" ("Soledad" 3: 1252). ("T here is no other real
dialogue than the dialogue that you undertake with yourself, and this you can
only undertake by being alone. In solitude and only in solitude can you know
yourself as your neighbor, and as long as you do not know yourself as a
neighbor, you will be unable to see other selves in your neighbors") So in order
to relate to society as a whole, one must have related to the inner society that is

the self. My neighbor is an "other" just like the "other" I observe in my

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fragmented selves, which makes sense of the commandment to love the other as
you love yourself.

But lest we think that this inner society of fragmented selves is some sort
of utopia, it must be stressed that in the objectification of the "other" the self is
alienated from itself. If a person is not self-reflective she will not experience
these many self fragments. Unamuno calls such a non-reflective person's
identity "fullness of self," but with a pejorative twist. Ilie states, '1. . .] as soon as
consciousness begins to operate reflexively, the loss of self is immediate"(92).
This will not sound so add to those who are used to hearing "In order to save
your life you must lose it," but Unamuno does not have in mind losing oneself in
the Universal Consciousness any more that he advocates losing oneself in
Christ. He wants to create himself through the interaction of the fragmented
selves. "L . .] el hombre mas real, realis, mas res, mas cosa, es decir, mas
causa—solo existe lo que obra—, es el que quiere ser 0 el que quiere no ser, el
creador" (“Pralogo” a Tree nave/as y un prdlogo 2: 974). (“L . .] the man who is
most real, realis, most res, most a thing, that is, most a cause—only he who acts
exists—is the one who wants to be or who wants not to be: the creator.")

So what is it that Unamuno wants? lllie says, "For Unamuno, the right to
behave inconsistently is the most fundamental prerogative" (114). Here we are
back to the freedom and autonomy of the self, also recognized in Unamuno by
Blanca Aguinaga and Wyers. Ilie claims that there can be harmony in the
multiple selves in maintaining the paradoxes—much as Blanca Aguinaga saw

unity in the contradictions. Ilie says, "L . .] paradoxes become cohesive forces

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that assemble disharmonious elements into one identifiable human condition"
(215). Wyers would only see that identifiable human condition as permanently
conflicted and ultimately self-destructive.

The emphasis here in Unamuno's view of the self has been on the
importance of "becoming," of acquiring self-consciousness through the
interaction of the fragmented selves. Is there any way in which we could say that
Unamuno's view of the self includes a substance view of the self, in addition to
the achievement view, as we saw was the case with Kierkegaard? life says that
Unamuno holds to a basic self that is given the ability for self reflection and
"basic emotional patterns" that are used in self reflection (111). In "Sabre la
consecuencia, la sinceridad" Unamuno says, "L . .] cada uno de nosotros Ileva
dentro de si muchas hombres, mas por lo menos dos: un yo profunda, radical,
permanente, el ya que Ilaman ahora muchas subliminal—de debajo del Iimen o
nivel de la conciencia——, y otra yo superficial, pegadizo y pasajero, el
supraliminal" (3: 897). (“Each one of us carries within himself many men, or at
least two: a profound self, radical and permanent, the self that many now call
subliminal—under the threshold or level of consciousness—and another
superficial self, catchy and fleeting, the supraliminal.") It is in the interaction of
these two that self-reflection occurs, and that interaction is at least a potentiality
in all. In "Civilizacion y culture" Unamuno sorts out how this works. "Yo y el
mundo nos hacemos mutuamente. Y de este juego de acciones y reacciones
mutuas brota en mi la conciencia de mi yo, mi yo antes de llegar a ser seca y

Iimpiamente yo, yo puro. Es la conciencia de mi mismo el nucleo del reciproco

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juego entre mi mundo exterior y mi mundo interior" (1: 992). (“I and the world,
we make each other mutually. And from this interplay of mutual actions and
reactions there rises in me the consciousness of my self, my self, before
becoming my pure self, sharply and cleanly. The center of the reciprocal
interplay between my exterior world and my interior world is the consciousness of
my self”) Unamuno here indicates that there is a given part of ourselves, a part
that makes self-reflection possible, that produces a sense that I am a separate
self. It precedes my "pure self." My "pure self" is the self that I achieve over a
lifetime as consciousness deepens through the struggle between the
contemplative self and the social self that is incited by the "satanic yo" described

above by tile.

Harmony and Dissonance In Kierkegaard's and Unamuno's View of the Self
In what way can the substantial self in Kierkegaard and Unamuno be
compared? What is the "deposit" that both authors say is given to a person to
begin with? Both would say that freedom and the ability to choose oneself are
essential parts of what it means to be human. The ability to chose oneself is
predicated on there being a self-reflective quality in every person as a given. But
the difference between Kierkegaard and Unamuno is the importance of what is
chosen. For Kierkegaard what I am to choose as responsible creation of God Is
to be the self that God intended that I be. To relate to anything less than the
absolute, the eternal, is not to be my true self. For Unamuno, as for Sartre and

Camus after him, one choice is not privileged above another. Whether we take

88

Blanca Aguinaga and llie's view that there is unity in Unamuno's contradictions or
Wyer's view that all of the contradictions collapse into "mutually exclusive and
ultimately self-defeating aims" there is no doubt that Unamuno declares himself
to be an autonomous chooser who will not be tied to one view or classified as
promoting one philosophy above another.

In Del sentimiento tragico de la vida Unamuno quotes Walt Whitman as
his own mantra. "L . .] as encargo que no se funde escuela o tearia sabre mi” (7:
184). (“I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me.”) Most
critics point to Unamuno's fear of dogmatism as the root of this desire not to be
categorized. Wyers claims that for Unamuno to be categorized would be to lose
a part of himself. She says, "He wanted to hide from the summary opinion that
would, to his mind, steal his self from him," and then she quotes Unamuno as
saying "Let them search for you and do not let them find you because the day
that they find you, you are no longer yourself" (qtd. in Wyers 7).

It should be noted, again, that though Kierkegaard sees the true self as
the self given by God and the one that I am to choose to become as a
responsible creation of God, this choosing is by no means easy or immediately
done, once and for all. Although Anti-Climacus, in the passage quoted above at
the beginning of Sickness Unto Death, calls for there to be a synthesis of the
"infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity,"
the synthesis is a life long task that is never really accomplished in this life. In

Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Climacus says,

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But the genuine subjective existing thinker is always just as
negative as he is positive and vice versa: he is always that as long
as he exists, not once and for all in a chimerical mediation. [ . . .]
He is cognizant of the negativity of the infinite in existence
[Tilvaerelse]; he always keeps open the wound of negativity, which
at all times is a saving factor (the others let the wound close and
become positive—deceived); [. . .1. He is, therefore, never a
teacher, but a Ieamer, and if he is continually just as negative as
positive, he is continually striving. (CUP 85)

Here "negativity" is the eternal, and what we have is a warning about any
smugness about having arrived at the synthesis. This sounds remarkably like
Unamuno's desire, quoted above, to keep open the Ilaga ‘wound’, full of vinegar
and salt, so that the anguish and longing would be endless. It is in the struggle,
in the tension, in the "becoming" that Unamuno and Kierkegaard resonate so
well. The authors also sound remarkably alike, at least on the face of it, when
they relate that "becoming" or "longing" to the "eternal." Unamuno would wake
his readers to the longing not to die. In Del sentimiento tragico he says,
"Quererse, gno es quererse etemo, es decir, no querer morirse? (7:130) ("To
will oneself, is it not to wish oneself etemal—that is to say, not to wish to die?")
In Either/Or, Judge William tries to persuade the young esthete, A, to move from
the esthetic into the ethical. The move is made possible by becoming aware of

the eternal. Judge William says, "L . .] to become conscious in one's eternal

validity is a moment that is more significant than everything else in the world"
(206).

But one must ask what the goal of the "becoming" is, and it is here that the
authors are not at all in agreement. For Kierkegaard there is a self that a
personal, benevolent God wants me to become. For Unamuno there is no such
assurance. For Unamuno, God is posited because we need to believe that he
exists so that we can go on existing eternally. Without our believing in Him, he
would not exist. He says in Del sentimiento tragico de la vida, "Creer en Dias es
anhelar que Ie haya y es, ademas, conducirse coma si le hubiera; es vivir de ese
anhelo y hacer de él nuestro intimo resorte de accion" (7: 219). ("To believe in
God is to long that he exists, and further, it is to conduct oneself as if he existed;
it is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action."). But as
Sénchez Barbuda says, "Era un deseo de Dios, un querer creer que no puede
ser confundido con una verdadera creencia" (98).9 ("It was a desire for God, a

wanting to believe that can't be confused with true belief.”)

 

9 It is Senchez Barbudo's theory that during the "crisis" of 1897, Unamuno attempted to reclaim
the faith of his childhood and failed and was forced to look full into the jaws of nothingness.
Without religion as a basis for the immortality he desired, he substituted the writing of literature as
his means of attaining immortality. sanchez Barbuda says that though the decision was made to
follow the path of literature, Unamuno was tormented by the call of religion and was pulled
between the two paths for the rest of his productive life. "Al parecer, a ralz de su crisis, vacllo
entre religidn y literatura, pues le impulsaban, atrayéndole hacia caminos distintos, ansia de fame
y ansia de salvacidn: dos polos de su personalidad del mismo afan de sobrevivlr coma er mismo
luego repitio. Falto de fe verdadera, habrfa de escoger literatura, para esta aparecerla, despues
de su decisidn, tehida de espiritu religiosa" (102). (It would seem that at the root of his crisis he
vacillated between religion and literature since they propelled him, attracting him to different
paths, desire for fame and desire for salvation: two poles of his personality but from the same
desire to survive, as he himself then repeated. Lacking a true faith, he would have to choose
literature but this literature would appear marked by his religious spirit after his decision.) There
are dissenters to sanchez Barbudo’s view, among them Armando Zublzarreta. For a fuller
discussion of religious belief in Unamuno see Armand Baker, "Unamuno and the Religion of
Uncertainty."

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The longing that characterizes the authentic self in Unamuno is a longing
for immortality that the heart desperately seeks and that reason says is
impossible. Heart and reason are essential manifestations of the "two men" or
"two selves" within each of us. They are both essential. "Razon y fe son dos
enemigos que no pueden sostenerse el uno sin el otro" (Del sentimiento tragico
7: 175). (“Reason and faith are two enemies that cannot sustain themselves,
one without the other!) Since neither can be fully satisfied, the end result is
skepticism and uncertainty. Unamuno says, "El escepticismo, la incertidumbre,
[. . . ] es el fundamento sabre que la desesperacién del sentimiento vital ha de
fundar su esperanza" (Del sentimiento tragico 7: 172). (“Skepticism uncertainty,
[. . .] is the foundation upon which the despair of the heart must build its hope")
Not only are the two selves to be kept in tension one with the other; they are to
be at war with each other. "La paz entre estas dos potencias se hace imposible,
y hay que vivir de su guerra. Y hacer de ésta, de la guerra misma, condicidn de
nuestra vida espiritual"(Del sentimiento tragico 7: 172).10 (“Peace between these
two powers is made impossible and we must live by their war. We must make of
this war, of war itself, the condition of our spiritual life.") And so it should not be
at all surprising to us as readers of Unamuno that his writings are the living out of
that internal war. Unamuno takes up the cause of reason and of desire, of the

internal and the external, of the temporal and the eternal, and he argues for all of

 

‘° Later Unamuno says, "L . .j y por mi parte no quiero poner paz entre mi corazdn y mi cabeza,
entre mi to y mi razdn; quiero mas bien que se peleen entre sf" (Del sentimiento tragr'co 7: 180).
("For my part I do not wish to make peace between my heart and my head, between my faith and
my reason—l wish rather that they struggle and fight between theml")

92

them.11 He will not shrink from speaking the unspeakable. "Creo que es
menester decir una y otra vez lo que no debe decirse" (Del sentimiento tragico 7:
185). (“I believe that it is necessary to speak the thing which must not be spoken
once and then again”) And he will not worry that someone else has said what
he has to say before him. "[ . .] cuando una idea vuelve a repetirse es que, en
rigor, no fué de veras refutada" (Del sentimiento tragico 7: 184). (“L . .] when an

idea is repeated, it implies that it was not really refuted")

Kierkegaard's Guide for Becoming a Self: The Existence Spheres

For Kierkegaard existence is about becoming a self. The primary guide
for becoming a self is the “spheres" or "stages” of existence. It is important to
remember, that though the content of the existence spheres of the esthetic, the
ethical, and the religious are artfully drawn in the pseudonymous works of
Either/Or and Stages on Life's Way and are explained in depth by Johannes
Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, it can be seen from his Journals
and Papers that Kierkegaard embraced this theory as a fundamental way of
viewing existence. Unamuno saw in Kierkegaard's spheres of existence a wealth
of possibilities that demonstrate multiple ways of existing, all of them worthy of

careful consideration and further artistic rendering. Chapter Three will be

 

" Unamuno sees the irony of taking up the cause of the irrational by using reason. "Como salo es
inteligible, de veras inteligible, Io racional, como la absurdo esta condenado, careciendo coma
carece de sentido, a ser intrasmisible, veréis que cuando alga que parece irracional o absurdo
logra uno expresarlo y que se lo entiendan, se resuelve con alga racional siempre, aunque sea
en la negacldn de lo que se afirrna" (Del sentimiento tragico 7: 184). ("Since only the ratlonal ls
intelligible, really intelligible, and since the absurd, lacking in sense, is condemned to be
incommunicable, you will find that whenever something that seems Irrational or absurd is
successfully expressed so that it can be understood, it is resolved with something rational,
although that may be the negation of that which Is affirmed")

93

devoted to showing specifically how Unamuno plumbed the depths of
Kierkegaard's existence spheres and used them for his own purposes. For now,
it is important to have a full picture of Kierkegaard's spheres of existence before
one can appreciate how Unamuno has used them for his own creative
advantage.

The esthetic sphere is where every person begins. Its complexities are
explored by A in Either/Or l. (Victor Eremita is the editor of the volume who
supposedly finds a collection of unorganized papers and ascribes the title A to
the unknown author.) A desires life to be a collection of pleasurable moments
that can be enjoyed in their immediacy. A considers Don Juan to be the
archetypal practitioner of this sort of "pure," unreflective, sensual life, and a great
deal of print is spilled on justifying why Don Giovanni is not only a great opera but
the greatest classical work of art of all time.12 But A realizes that while
immediacy is possible in a fictional character, it is unattainable in real life. Once
you see that your goal is immediacy, you have lost your ability to attain it. One
cannot self-consciously eliminate self-consciousness. lmmediacy is something
that just happens. Don Juan is no more than an abstraction.

A reasons that if immediacy is impossible, esthetic appreciation is not, and
he sets about to make his life a work of art that can be appreciated esthetically
just as a painting can thus be appreciated. The threat to the aesthetic

appreciation of life is boredom, and so A writes a complicated guide to the

 

‘2 See "The Immediate Stages of the Erotic" in Either/Orl pp. 47-135.

94

evasion of boredom called “Rotation of Crops”? In it he uses the categories of
interesting vs. boring to judge all aspects of life. There is actually an esthetic
way of keeping one’s life varied . A disparages a person who tries to evade
boredom by changing his circumstances—whether he lives in the country or the
city, America or Europe, whether he eats off of porcelain or silver. These are all
called "inartistic" methods and are likened to a farmers changing the fields for his
crops. What A advocates is a change in the method of cultivation which in
practice means a change in one's perception through the art of recollecting and
forgetting. This is a means of distancing oneself, of never getting too involved or
too affected by what is going on around you. A states, "No part of life ought to
have so much meaning for a person that he cannot forget it any moment he
wants to; on the other hand, every single part of life ought to have so much
meaning for a person that he can remember it at any moment" (EC, 1: 293).
Later he further explains, "[ . .] if a person notices that enjoyment or a part of life
is carrying him away too forcefully, he stops for a moment and recollects. [. . .]
From the beginning, one curbs the enjoyment and does not hoist full sail for any
decision; one indulges with a certain mistrust" (E0, 1: 293). Properly recollecting
and forgetting, one can select the interesting and bring it to mind.

Freedom is essential. Any entangling commitments that might ultimately
condemn one to boredom are to be avoided. The reader is cautioned to avoid

friendship, marriage and any official post, though acquaintances, affairs and

 

‘3 A says, "Boredom Is the root of all evil. . . This can be traced back to the very beginning of the
world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings. Adam was bored because
he was alone; therefore Eve was created. Since that moment, boredom entered the world and
grew in quantity in exact proportion to the growth of the population" (E0, 1: 285-286).

95

passionate aimlessness are encouraged. The goal is to be in control at all times.
"Arbitrariness is the whole secret" (E0, 1: 299). Even if one is forced to talk to a
boring person, one can concentrate on the drip of perspiration coming off of the
end of his nose and be endlessly amused. It's all in how you go about "rotating
the crops."

The prime example given of the sort of life that results from this sort of
disinterested distancing of life that spurns normal human relationships, but uses
them for sport, is found in "The Seducer's Diary." Its authorship is in question
since A says that he stole the diary from the desk of an acquaintance whose life
"L . .] has been an attempt to accomplish the task of living poetically" (EO,1:
304). A claims to know the victim of the seducer, Cordelia, as an actual person.
But the editor, Victor Eremita, intimates that A is the real author.

There are many parallels to be drawn between the "Diary" and the
beginning of Unamuno's Niebla which will be seen in due course in Chapter
Three. For now, it should be noted that the seduction described in the "Diary" is
all of a psychological and not of a physical sort. The seduction is a mind game
played by the reflective esthete to the ultimate degree of enjoyment, described as
having two stages by A. "In the first case, he personally enjoyed the esthetic; in
the second case, he esthetically enjoyed his personality" (E0, 1: 305). In other
words, he enjoyed all of the machinations required to bring about the seduction
and then glowed with the knowledge that he could accomplish such a thing. The
actual consummation of the seduction is not what matters to this esthete. There

is hardly a mention of it happening. It is the grand scheme to perpetrate the

seduction that fascinates the seducer, so that once it is accomplished, the
woman holds no interest for him whatsoever. The seducer says, "Now all
resistance is impossible, and to love is beautiful only as long as resistance is
present; as soon as it ceases, to love is weakness and habit. I do not want to be
reminded of my relationship with her; she has lost her fragrance" (E0, 1: 445).
This is the only sort of love that is interesting to the reflective esthete, and he
even thinks that he has done the young woman a favor by making her life more
interesting as well. The Seducer has only one value to which he adheres. "Has
the interesting been preserved at all times?" (E0, 1: 437-38).

Either/Orl ends with "The Seducer's Diary" and it marks one of the
boundaries of the esthetic life in its highly reflective character. The other was set
at the start with the paeans of praise given to Don Juan as the archetypal
practitioner of immediacy. Whether the esthete is content with the immediate
pleasures of life or has a more refined sense of reflection, his life is a succession
of moments with no continuity, no unified self. This is the topic of Either/Or II, as
B, the name given to the author by the editor, writes a series of letters to his
friend A to persuade him of the folly of his existence and to show him a better
way, the ethical. Later we learn that B has a name, Judge William, and that the
Judge is a public official and a married man.

The first criticism given by the Judge of A and his esthetic view of life is
that he has not chosen it consciously. A has allowed circumstance to rule his
life. To prove this to A, Judge William outlines the stages of the esthetic as he

sees them, so that A will see their futility. These range from the immediate to the

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highly reflective and include 1) the life-view that health and beauty are the
ultimate good, 2) the life-view that life is to be enjoyed according to wealth,
honor, and noble birth, 3) the life-view that seeks satisfaction in the development
of a talent, and 4) the life-view that says "enjoy life and live for your desire" at the
start. All of these life-views are shown to depend on something completely
transient such as physical beauty or something beyond the control of the
individual, such as noble birth or an inborn talent to develop. All are external and
do not bring satisfaction or happiness. The prime example given for the
bankruptcy of living for desire is that of Nero whose power allowed him to obtain
pleasures at will, but whose desperation to grasp at his desire took him to the
extreme of the burning of Rome. In other words, the person who believes
himself in control is actually controlled by the vagaries of life and is held prisoner
by them.

The Judge, however, knows that his friend A has moved on from these
life-views to yet a different level of estheticism. A knows that all of the first
mentioned life-views are vanity and has gone on to despair, but it is a despair
that is enjoyed. It is a cynical, distanced despair that laughs at those who are so
simple as to run after the ephemeral and which embraces sorrow over the
pointlessness of life. But, the judge says, "L . .] for such an esthetic sorrow
existence is just as empty as it is for every other esthetic life-view; if a person
cannot sorrow more profoundly than that, then there is truth in my saying that
sorrow passes away just as well as joy, for everything that is only finite passes

away" (EO, 2:204).

98

What the Judge wants is for A to choose and thereby take responsibility
for his despair, rather than viewing his despair as an esthetic experience. Such a ‘
chosen despair is not of the particular, the external or the "multiplicity outside
himself," and it is not "L . .] a state in which you are to remain, but [. . .] an act
that takes all the power and earnestness and concentration of the soul" (E0, 1:
208). The choice of despair will move A to become a meaningful chooser. The
Judge says,

Your choice is an esthetic choice, but an esthetic choice is no
choice. On the whole, to choose is an intrinsic and stringent term
for the ethical. Wherever in the stricter sense there is a question of
an Either/Or, one can always be sure that the ethical has
something to do with it. The only absolute Either/Or is the choice
between good and evil, but this is also absolutely ethical. (E0, 2:
166-167).

This sounds like the Judge is equating the ethical with good and the
esthetic with evil. That is not necessarily the case. What the Judge wants is for
good and evil to be the basis on which A chooses, to be the categories that guide
his life, rather than the esthetic, which is, he claims, "indifferent." The Judge is
also careful to say that the esthetic is not negated in the choice of the ethical. It

remains, but it remains as a relative value and not an absolute one." As he

 

“ The Judge says, "L . .] it by no means follows that the esthetic Is excluded. [. . .j the esthetic Is
absolutely excluded as the absolute, but relatively It is continually present. In choosing Itself, the
personality chooses itself ethically and absolutely excludes the esthetic; but since he
nevertheless chooses himself and does not become another being by choosing himself, all the
esthetic returns in its relativity" (E0, 2: 177).

99

shows in his essay, "The Esthetic Validity of Marriage," even in marriage the
immediate pleasures are "by no means repudiated but ennobled" (E0, 2: 61).

Choosing is critical. Not to choose is to allow others or circumstance to
choose for you. And there is a point beyond which real choice becomes more
difficult and even impossible if one remains in the indifferent, in the esthetic for
too long. The Judge uses the analogy of a captain of a ship that is told to alter
his course, and who knows that there is "but a single moment when it is
inconsequential whether he does this or does that" (EC, 2: 164). Since the ship is
in motion and continues in motion there is point beyond which the ship cannot be
turned. By choosing the ethical the person neither creates himself nor does he
become a different person. The self the person needs to acquire is chosen from
the "hand of God" through repentance. But continuity is essential. "He does not
become someone other than he was before, but he becomes himself" (E0, 2:
177).

The Judge chooses to contrast the models of Don Juan and the reflective
Seducer with marriage as his paradigm for the ethical life. In marriage one
chooses to commit to the person one loves. The Judge rejects the external view
of love as something that just "happens" to a person when he "falls in love."‘5
The ethical person wills to continue to love his bride. To choose to love as an act
of will is actually to choose oneself, to be the sort of person who has continuity in

one's life. To choose to love in marriage is not an overnight phenomenon that

occurs when the minister pronounces the couple "man and wife." The persons

 

'5 The male pronoun is appropriate here since the Judge works from a decidedly male
perspective.

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so committed are on a path to becoming a self. The ultimate distinction between
the esthetic and the ethical is explained by the Judge like this, "The esthetic in a
person is that by which he spontaneously and immediately is what he is; the
ethical is that by which he becomes what he becomes" (E0, 2: 178).

What the Judge does not seem to see, however, is the difficulty of the
ethical life to which he is calling A. The Judge seems to be quite content in his
middle-class, "upstanding citizen" life. With his apparently happy marriage, he
has imbued all of the values of Copenhagen's cultural and civic life and presents
himself as the model. He has equated the ethical life with his life. Another of the
pseudonyms, Frater Tacitumus tells us in Stages on Life's Way that the ethical is
"L . .] the sphere of requirement (and this requirement is so infinite that the
individual always goes bankrupt)" (476). When one realizes one's inability to
meet the requirements of the ethical life, one is ready to move into the religious
sphere. It would be a misunderstanding, however, to think that religious
conviction is not part of the ethical life. The ethical person stands before the
Eternal and chooses the ethical as she chooses herself. According to Johannes
Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, a God-relationship is always part
of the ethical life. Having begun the path of inwardness, God becomes part of
the picture naturally (CUP 243).

The difference between the ethical and the religious is the difference in
how this God-relationship is perceived. The ethical person sees the ethical task
as his duty before God and believes that he is at least in some way able to fulfill

that task. The religious person sees herself differently. The religious person

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sees the enormity of the task and her inability to fulfill the demands of the ethical.
Her relationship to God is not achieved by actualizing the ethical demands of life,
but rather her relationship to God is one of dependence, of asking God to give
her the ability to meet the demands of the ethical which she lacks on her own.
The religious life is one of repentance, but the character of this repentance is not
just the repudiation of the dissipation of the esthetic life as the Judge encouraged
A to do. This repentance is a realization of basic inadequacy and a petition to
God to remake the person in such as way as to make obedience to the ethical
task possible. This remaking is difficult and painful. That is why Climacus
characterizes the religious life as one of suffering.

The religious sphere has two stages itself and Johannes Climacus claims
that one must first pass through Religiousness A, the pathos-filled existence
described above, before going on to Religiousness B (CUP 556). The difference
between Religiousness A and Religiousness B is the source of the knowledge of
God and the way in which that knowledge impacts the individual. To take up
ways of "knowing" God may seem odd for those who have always heard "faith"
and "the absurd" in the same breath when talking about Kierkegaardian
categories. It is a commonplace that Kierkegaard is "anti-rational" and it is said
that this anti-reason stance is the most striking similarity between Unamuno and
Kierkegaard. It is important, therefore, to take a moment to discuss these
perceptions of Kierkegaard which are only partially true and in so doing, we will

understand better the relationship between Religiousness A and B.

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It is true that Johannes Climacus holds no stock in logical arguments,
especially logical arguments that purport to prove the existence of God. He says
in Fragments that a logical argument is only useful to "develop the consequences
of a concept" (49). That Climacus himself puts logical argument to that use, i.e.,
to show that the logical consequences of the Hegelian view of Christianity reveal
that it is not Christianity at all, demonstrates clearly that Climacus does not
dismiss reason altogether. What he rejects is the notion that the truth of the
premises of any argument about existence can proven by logic. Whether a
person accepts the truth of the premises of an argument for the existence of God
is something that cannot be coerced by reason. Climacus even suggests that
proofs for God's existence stand in the way of real belief (PF 53).

Climacus sees the knowledge of God as coming through knowledge of
one’s moral obligations. This view of how one knows God is also affirmed by
Kierkegaard in Edifying Discourses.16 God is the foundation of morality. He uses
the Platonic idea of "recollection" to explain how one can be aware of the Eternal
and the Eternal's claim on the person to become a self. This is a wholly natural
process that is inborn in every person. This is the immanent God one knows and
stands before in Religiousness A. Where does the leap into the absurd of faith
come, then? This comes in Religiousness B, in which the knowledge of God is
not dependent on inner "recollection," but on a transcendent God, a God who

has made himself known history.

 

‘° See "To Need God Is a Human Being's Highest Perfection," In Eighteen Upbuilding
Discourses.

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Religiousness A is characterized by a recognition of guilt in relation to an
"eternal happiness" that is the highest good. Since there is also an innate need
to deal with guilt, the person living in Religiousness A sets about to make her
shortcomings right through whatever means possible—penance, restitution, self-
denial, and self-sacrifice. There is a need to make up for that guilt, and in views
of guilt that are "lower“ than the religious life, it is assumed that we can do so.
Climacus calls this sort of effort to deal with guilt “childishness.” He also says
that this sort of effort to deal with guilt makes guilt "finite" (CUP 550).
Religiousness A is not childish in this way because it involves an energetic
struggle with the problem of guilt. Yet Climacus suggests that Religiousness A
also fails to take guilt with complete seriousness. Religiousness A "[ . .] is
oriented toward the purely human in such a way that it must be assumed that
every human being, viewed essentially, participates in this eternal happiness and
finally becomes eternally happy" (CUP 581).

Religiousness B is different because it views guilt as sin. It is the person
who has understood the depth of her guilt who is at the point where she can see
her guilt as sin, sin that cannot be dealt with from within. This person is then
open to the transcendent God, the God/man of history that is the essence of
Christianity. Climacus calls this God who is also man "the paradox," that which is
beyond human understanding. In order to believe in such a God, a leap is
necessary precisely because the paradox is beyond human reason.

But the leap for which Climacus calls is not the blind leap into absurdity

that so many have described. Climacus wants the exister to know what she is

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getting herself into. His entire book has been an attempt to define Christianity
precisely and to differentiate it from Hegelian speculation as well as from being a
good, upstanding citizen. He also has carefully brought the exister to see the
essential reason for making the leap, her guilt perceived as sin. The leap is a
choice, a personal choice that must be made in passion and with freedom. Faith
is absurd, but it is absurd from the perspective of human understanding that
cannot conceive of an eternal God becoming incarnate in time nor that this God
in history is the means by which the temporal human being becomes eternal. To
embrace this paradox one must have faith, not undisputed historical documents
or logical arguments.

In order to understand the nature of faith, one may go to Fear and
Trembling by Johannes de Silentio. Here we are shown what it means to live
beyond the ethical in the retelling of the Abraham and Isaac story. As an Old
Testament story, the object of faith is the Jewish God, not the Christ of the New
Testament, but the transcendence of God, that fact that God comes not from
within, but is a personal being without, is what is important.

Abraham upheld all of the social norms of his day; he was living the life of
the ethical according to human knowledge. But Abraham is called by God to
suspend the ethical in order to obey him. Abraham is asked to kill his son.
There is no greater societal good that will be accomplished by this act. If there
were such a social good, this would be the act of a "Tragic Hero," such as
Agamemnon. Rather, it is an act of the "Knight of Faith" that calls for more than

compliance with social norms. Abraham's task represents the "teleological

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suspension of the ethical" for the sake of the religious. Abraham's obedience is
an act of faith, not just of resignation. He is not a "Knight of Infinite Resignation"
who stoically turns his back on all natural desires and loves. He does not cease
to love his son. His faith believes that he may love his son and his God at the
same time. Faith claims the temporal and the eternal at the same time.
Remember that at the beginning of the discussion about what a self is, from Anti-
Climacus' point of view, it is this synthesis between the temporal and the eternal
that is desired.

The Knight of Faith, therefore, is not otherworldly. He has not simply
resigned the physical and the temporal as has the Knight of Infinite Resignation.
De Silentio says that the Knight of Faith looks just like a tax collector and that he
belongs entirely to the world.

And yet this man has made and at every moment is making the
movement of infinity. He drains the deep sadness of life in infinite
resignation, he knows the blessedness of infinity, he has felt the
pain of renouncing everything, the most precious thing in the world,
and yet the finite tastes just as good to him as one who never knew
anything higher [. . .]' (PF 40).

The difference between the Knight of Faith and others lies in inwardness. It is
extremely hard to understand, much less to fulfill the demands of that sort of
faith, and Johannes de Silentio is in awe of it. He sees that such a faith is much
more than what the Hegelian philosophers believe to be faith when they seek to

"go further" than faith. But it remains for others of the pseudonymous writers to

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explain more fully what that inwardness entails, especially as it is understood by
Christianity.

Johannes Climacus regards Religiousness A highly. He says, "In my
opinion, Religiousness A (within the boundaries of which I have my existence) is
so strenuous for a human being that there is always a sufficient task in it" (CUP
557). However, he goes on to say, "My intention is to make it difficult to become
a Christian, yet not more difficult than it is, and not difficult for the obtuse and
easy for the brainy, but qualitatively and essentially difficult for every human
being" (CUP 557). Why is it so difficult to become a Christian? Because at the
heart of it lies "the offense"——that I am self-deceived in my attempts to deal with
my own guilt and that I am in need of the God outside myself to reveal to me that
my guilt is actually sin. Climacus says,

The individual is therefore unable to gain the consciousness of
sin by himself, which is the case with guilt-consciousness, because
in guilt-consciousness the subject's self-identity is preserved, and
guilt-consciousness is a change of the subject within the subject
himself. The consciousness of sin, however, is a change of the
subject himself, which shows that outside the individual there must
be the power than makes clear to him that he has become a person
other than he was by coming into existence, that he has become a
sinner. This power is the god in time. (CUP 584)

It takes yet another book by yet another pseudonym to make clear how

this "coming into existence" happens and what role the recognition of sin has in

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becoming a self. We conclude this chapter where we began, in Kierkegaard's
view of the self in The Sickness Unto Death, where we learn that sin is despair.
This is not despair in the common sense that is used everyday in which one
despairs over circumstances beyond one's control. Anti-Climacus says that all
despair is rooted in a failure to become a self. Since many of the characters we
will see in Unamuno's novels are in various modes of despair, it is worthwhile to
look carefully at this concept in Sickness Unto Death.

When talking about conscious despair there are two types. The first is not
to will to be the self God intends for me to be. The second is to will to be the self
I am in defiance of what God wants me to be. The first is passive; the second is
active. The passive sort is the despair of weakness, of either not caring enough
to even begin the task of becoming a self or allowing earthly cares to put oneself
into despair. The active sort of despair is the one in which the self in despair
claims to be the creator of himself. Anti-Climacus says that in the despair of
defiance,

[. . .] the self in despair wants to be the master of itself or create
itself, to make his self into the self he wants to be, to determine
what he will have or not have in his concrete self. [. . .] In other
words, he wants to begin a little earlier than do other men, not at
and with the beginning, but "in the beginning," he does not want to
put on his own self, does not want to see his given self as his
task—he himself wants to compose his self by means of being the

infinite form. (SUD 68)

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One of the manifestations of this sort of despair is an "unwillingness to be
comforted by and healed by the eternal" (SUD 70). In this case whatever "thorn
in the flesh" a person must bare is embraced and almost celebrated because it is
the excuse the person who despairs in defiance uses to be offended by
existence itself. He thus, "wills to be himself with it, takes it along, almost flouting
his agony" (SUD 71). The more consciously a person wills himself to be himself
in defiance, the closer he comes to the demonic.

It is here that Anti-Climacus gives the famous example that many believe
was an inspiration to Unamuno, an example of the lengths to which one goes
who despairs by willing to be himself in defiance:

Figuratively speaking, it is as if an error slipped into an author's
writing and the error became conscious of itself as an error-
perhaps it actually was not a mistake but in a much higher sense
an essential part of the whole production—and now this error wants
to mutiny against the author, out of hatred toward him, forbidding
him to correct it and in maniacal defiance saying to him: No, I
refuse to be erased; I will stand as a witness against you, a witness
that you are a second-rate author. (SUD 74)
ls this the inspiration for the famous visit of Augusto Perez to his author Miguel
de Unamuno in Niebla? It is clear from Unamuno’s markings in the Danish text
that he read this passage, but it is impossible to say for certain that this passage
is a precedent for Augusto’s rebellion. For now, what is important is to see the

Kierkegaardian existence spheres clearly. As Johannes Climacus says in

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summary, "Whereas esthetic existence is essentially enjoyment and ethical
existence is essentially struggle and victory, religious existence is suffering, and
not as a transient element but as a continual accompaniment" (CUP 288).
Climacus, in his review of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works, is proud of
the fact that there is no "conclusion" given to these various modes of existence.
Either/Or ends without knowing whether A takes the Judge's advice or not. Fear
and Trembling extols the virtues of the Knight of Faith, but Johannes de Silentio
is quite clear about his not being a person of faith. Johannes Climacus says of
his own work that as an "imaginary construction" it
[. . .] does not take as its starting point a later moment in time and
relate a remarkable conflict as something past, nor does it slacken
the tension of the conflict in a reassuring conclusion, but by means
of its teaching form makes the reader even more contemporary
than he is able to become by way of a contemporary actuality and
leaves him stuck in it by not giving a conclusion. (CUP 289)
Each of the pseudonymous authors depicts an existence possibility and
advocates it, though Climacus has the advantage of commenting on all the
earlier ones. Nevertheless, within the pseudonyms there is no conclusion.
There is certainly no natural or necessary progression in the spheres.
On the other hand, through Anti-Climacus' The Sickness Unto Death and
the non-pseudonymous works, Kierkegaard makes it very clear that there is a
telos to which the spheres point, the goal of becoming a self before God. The

goal of indirect communication requires adherence to the maieutic idealnthat the

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speaker be only a mid-wife for the bearer to discover the truth on her own--but for
Kierkegaard, there is an ultimate truth. For Unamuno, these existence
possibilities provide a vehicle to express multiple and even contradictory truths
about the self and about the struggle that leads to authentic existence. How the
existence spheres find their way into Unamuno's work is the topic of the next

chapter.

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CHAPTER THREE
THE KIERKEGAARDIAN STAGES OF EXISTENCE IN UNAMUNO'S NOVELS

The Need to Live Disquieted lees
There are two key passages in Either/Or ll underscored by Unamuno that

provide a framework for seeing the protagonists of Niebla, Abel Sénchez, and

San Manuel Bueno, marlir as selves in the process of choosing their own

authentic existence. The first explains the importance of "the moment of choice.”
Then the soul has seen the highest, which no mortal eye can see
and which can never be forgotten; then the personality receives the
accolade of knighthood that ennobles it for an eternity. He does not
become someone other than he was before, but he becomes
himself. The consciousness integrates, and he is himself. Just as
an heir, even if he were heir to the treasures of the whole world,
does not possess them before he has come of age, so the richest
personality is nothing before he has chosen himself; and on the
other hand even what might be called the poorest personality is
everything when he has chosen himself. (E0, 2: 177)

What is the content of this choice? The second underscored passage gives two

of the three Kierkegaardian options for existence that Unamuno develops in the

protagonists of these three novels—the esthetic and the ethical--and reiterates

the need to choose. The passage also links the lack of choosing to an

unconcem about one's end in life.

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[. . .] the ethical, although it modestly places itself on the same level
as the esthetic, nevertheless is essentially that which makes a
choice a choice.

And this is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that
so many live out their lives in quiet lostness; they outlive
themselves, not in the sense that life's content successively unfolds
and is now possessed in this unfolding, but they live, as it were,
away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal
souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question
of its immortality, because they already disintegrated before they
die. They do not live esthetically, but neither has the ethical
become manifest to them in its wholeness; nor have they actually
rejected it, and therefore they are not sinning either, except insofar

as it is a sin to be neither one thing nor the other. (E0, 2: 168-69)

We have seen at the conclusion of both Chapters One and Two that one

key difference between Unamuno and Kierkegaard is the fact that Unamuno

does not privilege one existence sphere over another as Kierkegaard does, but

the one standard to which Unamuno holds all people is that they care about their

existence and that they choose a self with respect to the ultimate question of

their mortality. More than likely, Unamuno had formed this ultimate value before

reading Either/0r. However, when he came across these two passages, they

arrested his attention enough that he not only underscored them, but he double

underscored the sentence that says, "Their immortal souls are blown away, and

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they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are
already disintegrated before they die" (E0, 2: 168-169).

The closest thing that a reader of Unamuno has to the equivalent of
Kierkegaard's Point of View for My Work as an Author is Unamuno's statement in
Del sentimiento tragico de la vida,

Pero es que mi obra—iba a decir mi misidn—es quebrantar la fe
de unos y de otros y de los terceros, la fe en la afirmacién, la fe en
la negacién y la fe en la abstencidn y esto por to en la fe misma; es
combatir a todos los que se resignan, sea al catolicismo, sea al
racionalismo, sea al agnosticismo; es hacer que vivan todos

inquietos y anhelantes. (7: 297-98)

But it is the fact that my work, I was going to say my mission, is to
break the faith of some, and of others, and of still more, faith in the
affirmation, faith in the negation, faith in abstention from faith, and
this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to combat all those who
resign themselves to anything, be it Catholicism, rationalism, or
agnosticism; it is to make all peOple live in longing and disquiet.

We can suggest that the words of Judge William, underscored by Unamuno and
quoted above, were an affirmation to Unamuno to continue to do the work of
disquieting. We can justifiably look for the value of authentic existence (or lack
thereof) to be lived out in the characters of Unamuno's novels.

There is no question but that the main protagonists of Niebla, Abel

Sanchez, and San Manuel Bueno, martir, are disquieting folk, but Augusto Pérez,

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Joaquin Montegro and Don Manuel all are on journeys to authentic existence.
Augusto Perez will be seen as a person who at the beginning of the story is
settled into "quiet lostness" and whose immortal soul is in danger of being "blown
away." His transformation will not be seen as Gemma Roberts would have it, as
journeying through all of the Kierkegaardian spheres of existence from the
esthetic to the religious. Rather, Augusto will be seen as a person who initially
isn‘t even living esthetically, who moves from "quiet lostness" to living
passionately within the esthetic. Don Manuel Bueno will be viewed as
exemplifying the ethical life with its commitments that make life meaningful, but
without the need for religious faith. Joaquin Montegro will be seen as a person
whose spiritual development is close to the religious sphere of existence. That
is, he is the person closest to Religiousness A or B, but he diverts his well
developed passions from faith to self destruction. We begin with Niebla and

Augusto Pérez.

Niebla: A Study in the Esthetic Life

Undoubtedly, a central theme of Niebla is existence. What does it mean
to exist? How does one know that one exists? It is clear that Augusto questions
his own existence. Does he grow and acquire authentic existence through the
course of the novel? Most commentators have affirmed Augusto's own

declarations that he awakens to real life through falling in love and through the

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suffering experienced through losing that love.1 This is certainly the case of
Gemma Roberts who interprets Augusto's journey to authentic existence as
significant travel through the Kierkegaardian spheres of the esthetic in the
beginning of the novel, the ethical as he decides to marry Eugenia, and the
religious as he faces his own death. Frances Wyers, however, sees no
maturation in the character. Reacting to a quote from Blanco Aguinaga, Wyers
says, "Aside from the character's own assertions, there is no evidence
whatsoever of any 'well-eamed acquisition of consciousness” (102).

I think that neither Roberts nor Wyers are entirely right in their estimation
of the character of Augusto. There is maturation; there is clear change in
Augusto. However, he does not reach authentic existence in the Kierkegaardian
sense, because what Augusto awakens to is the esthetic life. He never really
progresses past the esthetic life to the ethical and the religious, but he does
acquire passion in Unamuno's sense of the term, and esthetic passions, though
not enduring passions in Kierkegaard's understanding of the term. From
Unamuno's point of view, acquiring passion is enough to know what it means to
exist. Unamuno is concerned about the many who "live out their lives in quiet
lostness," who are "shadows" in danger of having their immortal souls blown
away. It is as a shadow in quiet lostness that Augusto begins in this novel. On
the very first page the narrator explains Augusto's indecision about going right or

going left as he leaves his house by saying, "Augusto no era un caminante, sino

 

‘ Among these would be Carlos Blanca Aguinaga, Geoffrey Ribbans and Gonzalo Corona Marzol
who use the Kierkegaardian existence spheres to mark Augusto's progress, just as Gemma
Roberts does.

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un paseante de la vida" (2: 557). ("Augusto was not a walker through life but
rather, a stroller.")

Reflecting on his life since his mother died Augusto says, "Pues, el caso
es que he estado aburriéndome sin saberlo, y dos mortales afios. . ., desde que
murio mi santa madre. [. . .] La niebla de la vida rezuma un dulce aburrimiento,
licor agridulce" (2: 568). (“Well, it is the case that l have been boring myself to
death without knowing it—and for two mortal years, ever since my sainted
mother died. [. . .j The mist of life oozes a sweet boredom, a bitter-sweet liquor.”)
Here the metaphor for his life is the title of the book, niebla, or mist. In another
place, talking to Rosario, Augusto likens his life to sleep-walking. "Asi he vivido
desde que se murio mi madre. conmigo mismo, nada mas que conmigo; es
decir, dormido" (2: 595). ("It is the way I have lived since my mother died, by
myself, always by myself; that is to say, asleep") Looking back, after his affair
with Eugenia ends tragically, Augusto says, "Empecé, Victor, como una sombra,
como una ficcién: durante aflos he vagado como un fantasma, como un mufieco
de niebla, sin creer en mi propia existencia [. . .]' (2: 663). ("I began, Victor, by
being a kind of shadow, a fiction; for years I have wandered about like a ghost,
like a manikin formed out of mist, without believing in my own existence
[- - -l-')

ln "Unamuno's Niebla: Existence and the Game of Fiction," Carlos Blanco
Aguinaga calls Augusto, "L . .] a man who does not seem to be made of flesh

and bones; a being from the never-never world where man is somewhere

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between statue and ghost“ (190). Geoffrey Ribbans says that Augusto is one of

Unamuno's viviparous births.
Instead of creating a mature character who is already determined
by what has gone before, who is "ovfparo," born as it were into full
chickenhood, he [Unamuno] presents someone fully grown but
spiritually and ethically undetermined—a non-entity, a non-
character who will grow into a character (that is to say, a being with
passion) during the narration. (399)

It is my contention that all of these descriptions, from Augusto's self
description to the comments of the critics, are accounts of a man who has not
even reached the level of the esthetic. One might think that this is impossible.
The esthetic sphere is the state to which we are born, it is not something to be
chosen. Children are perfect esthetes, requiring their needs and desires to be
met immediately with little reflection. In general, that is the way that the esthetic
sphere is understood throughout the Kierkegaardian corpus. But in this one
place, which catches the attention of Unamuno, Judge William uses the term
"esthetic" in a somewhat special way. Here the esthetic refers to a project that a
person can adopt, the project of living artistically. Obviously in this sense the
esthetic is something that can be chosen and that one can fail to reach. Hence,
the Judge talks about the sadness of those who do not even live esthetically,
who live their lives in "quiet lostness" and "vanish like shadows" and who are

never "disquieted by the question of immortality" (E0, 2: 168-69). In this special

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sense Unamuno sees the esthetic sphere as a move toward authentic existence
and a real choice.

Take, for example, Gemma Robert's contention that Augusto is operating
at the level of the esthetic because of the boredom which he says characterizes
his life after his mother's death, as quoted above. Roberts misunderstands the
role of boredom in the life of the esthete, though she quotes from "Rotation of
Crops" in Either/Orl. According to A, "Boredom is the root of all evil" (E0, 1:
285). It is to be avoided at all costs. The effective esthete is the one who knows
how to deflect and defeat boredom artistically. At the beginning of the novel,
Augusto has no desires that are even worth satisfying. An esthete refines his
desires and spontaneously lives to satisfy them in the moment. Unamuno read
"Rotation of Crops" carefully and underlined three key passages? I believe that
Unamuno would have seen boredom as a negative characteristic of the pre-
existence that he gives to Augusto. We will see Augusto move into the "proper"
response to boredom when he moves into the esthetic. There is no doubt but
that the chance encounter with Eugenia wakes Augusto from his stupor and
boredom, but his experience with the transforming power of "love" can be

understood entirely within the context of the esthetic.

 

2 They are: rThe gods were bored; therefore they created human beings. Adam was bored
because he was alone; therefore Eve was created. Since that moment, boredom entered the
world and grew in quantity in exact proportion to the growth of population" (E0, 1: 286). "In olden
days, whoever eulogized the deceased most handsomely became the king. In our age, the king
ought to be the one who provides the occasion for the best witticlsm" (E0, 1: 288). "The word
'boring' can designate just as well a person who bores others as someone who bores himself.
Those who bore others are the plebians, the crowd, the endless train of humanity in general;
those who bore themselves are the chosen ones, the nobility. How remarkable it is that those
who do not bore themselves generally bore others, those, however, who bore themselves
entertain others. Generally, those who do not bore themselves are busy in the world in one way

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There are several critics who have already commented on the debt
Unamuno owes to the writers of Either/0r and Stages on Life's Way for inspiring
scenes and characters in Niebla. Ruth House Webber outlines the similarities
between "The Seducer's Diary" found at the end of Either/Or l and the first part of
Niebla in her article, "Kierkegaard and the Elaboration of Unamuno's Niebla."
She notes that both works begin with the protagonist on the street, alone with his
thoughts in the midst of a multitude of people. Both Johannes (the Seducer) and
Augusto come upon the woman who mesmerizes them completely by chance.
However, when the vision has vanished before their eyes and each wants to
recreate the woman in his mind's eye, neither can remember just what she
looked like. Johannes says, "Have I become blind? Has the inner eye of the
soul lost its power? I have seen her, but it is as if I had seen a heavenly
revelation—so completely has her image vanished again for me" (E0, 1: 323).
Augusto says, "aSe borrara su imagen de mi memoria? Pero zcomo es?
LCdmo es la dulce Eugenia? solo me acuerdo de unos ojos." (2: 559). ("Will
your image be erased from my memory? But what does she look like? How is
the sweet Eugenia? I only remember the eyes.") Both Johannes and Augusto
are fascinated with the name of their beloved. Both Eugenia and Cordelia are
orphans, living with aunts whom both suitors know they must win over before the
desired relationship can proceed. Both Johannes and Augusto have no trouble

in gaining the confidence of the aunts (Webber 121-122).

 

or another, but for that very reason they are, of all people, the most boring of all, the most
unbearable" (E0, 1: 288).

120

Perhaps more important than these beginning steps in the winning of the
woman are the ways in which Johannes and Augusto approach life in general.
Webber points out that both live poetically and at the command of chance
(Webber 123-124). It is said of Johannes, "His life has been an attempt to
accomplish the task of living poetically" (E0, 1: 304). Augusto says of himself in
his first letter to Eugenia, "Perdoneme la lirica. Yo vivo en perpetua lirica
infinitesimal" (2: 562). ("Pardon the poetic here. I live in perpetual, infinitesimal
lyricism") Johannes on occasion curses chance but he revels in it as much as
Augusto praises it. They both depend on chance. In a passage that Unamuno
underlines, Johannes just wants fate to work again as it has before when he
says, "Cursed chancel Never have I cursed you because you made your
appearance; I curse you because you do not make your appearance at all" (E0,
1: 326).

We see chance at work from the opening scene of Niebla when Augusto
wants a dog to come by in order to show him whether he should walk to the right
or to the left, but more importantly, fate has brought him Eugenia. Augusto says,
"Mi Eugenia [. . .] ¢Aparici6n fortuita? gY qué aparicién no lo es? aCual es la
legica de las apariciones? [. . .] jEl azarl El azar es el intimo ritmo del mundo, el
azar es el alma de la poesla" (2: 561). ("My Eugenia. A fortuitous apparition?
And what apparition is not fortuitous? What is the logic of apparitions? Chancel
Chance is the intimate rhythm of the world, chance is the soul of poetry.")
Webber is right to notice the importance that chance plays in the life of the two

characters, and she is also right to point to the passage about chance in

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Either/Orl because it is underlined by Unamuno in his Danish Either/0r. Clearly
Unamuno saw the esthetic life as one that depended on and enjoyed the
vagaries of chance. Chance makes life more interesting, and to be interesting is
the esthete's highest value.

Webber comments on two other similarities in "The Seducer's Diary" and
Niebla that are less convincing as stated. The first is the existence of the
interpolated stories in both texts, the stories within the story that at times seem to
have nothing to do with main protagonist and his quest. Webber points out that
there are no fewer than eleven such stories in "The Seducer's Diary" and that
while they are delivered with "deceptive casualness," as are Unamuno's in his
manner of "lo que salga," 'whatever comes,‘ they are actually in both cases "the
result of a carefully contrived plan" (131 ). I don't doubt that both Unamuno and
the author of "The Seducer's Diary" carefully crafted their narratives and included
the interpolated stories for significant reasons which will be explored later, but the
more obvious model for such interpolated stories for the Spanish novelist would
be, of course, Cervantes.

The second doubtful similarity is that of Johannes and Augusto being
keenly interested in every woman they see, not just the one they are pursuing.
Webber quotes several passages from both works to show that both men have
an ability for "selective observation" of the minute actions of women. This
"similarity" is not remarkable in itself, it seems to me, because taking in the
feminine scenery is something very common to males in general. However,

there may be something significant in the theory that Augusto gets from the

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outrageously satirized Spanish academic, Antolin S. Paparrigépulos, who says
that the reason that Augusto is falling in love with every woman is that all women
have a collective soul. "Cada hombre tiene su alma, las mujeres todas no tienen
sino una sola y misma alma, un alma colectiva. [. . .] Las mujeres, dice este
escritor, se parecen entre si mucho mas que los hombres y es porque todas son
una sola y misma mujer. . ." (2: 642). (“Each man has his soul, all women have
but one and the same soul, a collective soul. Women, this author says, resemble
one another much more than men and that is because they are all one and the
same woman . . .")
Paparrigopulos was supposedly quoting an obscure seventeenth century
Dutch writer whom he had discovered and whom he wants no one else to know
about until he has published his findings. Gonzalo Corona Marzol believes that
Unamuno may have been thinking about an obscure Danish writer in reality—
Kierkegaard. In his article, "Unamuno y Kierkegaard. La mujer y el amor en
Niebla," Corona Marzol says that the idea of women sharing one soul comes
from the speech of Johannes the Seducer in the banquet scene in Stages on
Life's Way. Corona Marzol underscores Johannes’ speech in "In Vino Veritas”:
The idea of woman, however, is a generality that is not exhausted
by any woman. [. . .] She is finiteness; thus she is a collective noun;
the one woman is the many. Only the devotee of erotic love
understands this, and that is why he knows how to love many, is
never deceived, but imbibes all the sensual pleasures the cunning

gods managed to prepare. (SLW 76)

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Since Stages on Life's Way is one of the books that is most copiously annotated
by Unamuno, it seems plausible that Paparrigopulos' source may have been
Danish rather than Dutch. However, there is a passage in "The Seducer's Diary,”
also in the voice of Johannes the Seducer, that Unamuno underlined that may
also have been part of his thinking when he gave Augusto this ability to love not
just one but many women.
But the god of love is blind, and if one is clever, he can surely be
fooled. The art is to be as receptive as possible to impressions, to
know what impression one is making and what impression one has
of each girl. In that way, one can be in love with many girls at the
same time, because one is in love in a different way with each one.
To love one girl is too little; to love all is superficiality; to know
oneself and to love as many as possible, to let one's soul conceal
all the powers of love inside itself so that each receives its specific
nourishment while the consciousness nevertheless embraces the
whole—that is enjoyment, that is living. (E0, 1: 361)
Since both the passage from Stages and the passage from Either/Or l, are by the
same Kierkegaardian character, Johannes the Seducer, it is easy to see that
Unamuno's Augusto shares with Johannes the theoretical basis and practical
consequence of that theory in his behavior with women. Johannes is the
esthete's esthete. Someone may object that there is a significant difference
between Johannes and Augusto in that Johannes means only to seduce the

woman, whereas Augusto intends to marry. It is my opinion that Augusto's

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inability to concentrate for more than a few seconds on any one woman shows
that though he professes to want to marry Eugenia, he is just as much of an
esthete as Johannes.

Corona Marzol makes another interesting comparison between Augusto
and a different speaker at the banquet of "In Vino Veritas," the first part of Stages
On Life's Way. He says that the first speaker, the Young Man, parallels Augusto
in his fear of love and his desire to make a study of women before making a
commitment. The Young Man sees the foolish antics of those who have said that
they have fallen in love, and does not want to appear as ridiculous as they do,
and so has refused to fall in love. When Augusto asks Liduvina how to tell if a
person is in love, she answers by saying that you know when a man is in love by
the foolish things he does. At this point Augusto has already been smitten by
Eugenia, but he doesn't think he has done anything foolish as yet. The foolish
behavior is reserved for his encounters with Rosario. After Rosario leaves him
the second time, Augusto says to himself, "Me desprecia, indudablemente me
desprecia; he estado ridiculo, ridiculo, ridiculo. . ." (2: 646). ("She despises me.
Undoubtedly she despises me. I have been ridiculous, utterly, utterly ridiculous")
So Augusto proves the Young Man's point.

But more important, it seems to me, is Corona Marzol's second point: the
fact that both theYoung Man and Augusto make Woman the object of study so
that they can avoid commitment or any decisive action. The Young Man says,
"Since I do not know what the lovable is, I simply cannot know how I am to

conduct myself in order to avoid this danger. [. . .] I shall not love anyone before

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l have exhausted the idea of erotic love" (SLW 38). Augusto forms the resolve to
make a study of Woman when he finds himself equally attracted to Eugenia and
Rosario and is further confounded by a tlitter in his heart for Liduvina, his married
housekeeper. So he first proposes two monographs dedicated to Eugenia and
Rosario, but when Paparrigépulos says that a psychological experiment with two
women would never do, Augusto decides to add Liduvina. Eugenia appeals to
his head, Rosario to his heart, and Liduvina to his stomach. So each will be the
object of this psychological experiment which is supposed to help him get clear
what it is that he is supposed to do. But the objects of the experiments turn
Augusto, the experimenter, into the “frog," and Augusto is left not only
directionless, but totally despondent. The attempts to study Woman do not bring
either the Young Man or Augusto closer to commitment. The Young Man is left
in endless speculation. Augusto is left with the disastrous consequences of not
being able to choose. Both are full-blown examples of the esthetic life.

In my mind, the Young Man is most like the pre-Eugenia Augusto when
the Young Man is described as a person who "had had nothing to do with the
world, had been neither awakened and inflamed nor disquieted and disturbed.
Like a Sleepwalker, he carried the law for his behavior within himself" (SLW 25).
When the sleepwalking Young Man by chance falls in with the other banquet
members and is called on to make a speech about erotic love, the speech is
entirely in the abstract because he has never loved. He is still an esthete
because he retains action in the realm of possibility and has never chosen one of

those possibilities over another. When the sleepwalking Augusto by chance

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meets Eugenia, he goes after her, but is ultimately confused by his many loves
and does not really choose one over another either. His one decisive act is to
take care of the mortgage on Eugenia's house, but the text plays with whether
that is a selfish or selfless act.

Augusto's proposal of marriage to Eugenia is the experiment which
Paparrigopulos inspired and Victor tells him he must do if he is to gain any "real"
knowledge about the psychology of a woman. Is the desire to gain knowledge
about the psychology of a woman the same as ethically choosing to commit to
another in love? Victor is not talking about ethical choice here, because he's still
talking about a relationship with a woman as an experiment. And whom should
Augusto make the marriage offer to? Victor says, "Césate, pues, casate con una
cualquiera de las ene de que estas enamorado, con la que tengas mas a mano.
Y sin pensarlo demasiado” (2: 648). ("Marry. Marry any of the n women with
whom you are in love. Marry the one that comes handiest. And don't think too
much about it")

Gemma Roberts believes that, in the conversation just cited with Victor
Goti, Unamuno points up the "metaphysical" nature of love to the single man and
contrasts that with the "ethical" nature of love in marriage. The difference
between the two is that marriage is something that you can't reverse. Victor
says, "El que no se casa jamas podra experimenter psicologicamente el alma de
la Mujer. El unico laboratorio de psicologia femenina 0 de ginepsicologia es el
matrimonio" (2: 648). ("He who does not marry will never be able to experiment

with the soul of the Woman. The only laboratory of feminine psychology or of

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gynecopsychology is marriage."3) Roberts says that one finds in both Unamuno
and Judge William, "L . .] el contraste entre un tipo de amor que mantiene la
individualidad al margen de la vida, y otro tipo de amor que compromete la
existencia toda del individuo. Es decir, entre la solteria estetizante que se
entretiene en experimentos eréticos y el amor conyugal como una forma de
existencia ética" (49). ("L . .] the contrast between a type of love that maintains
individuality at the margin of life and another kind of love that commits one's total
existence to another. That is to say, between esthetic singleness that entertains
itself in erotic experiments and the conjugal love as a form of ethical existence")
But choosing woman x or y arbitrarily as the object of a psychological experiment
can hardly be equated with the "kind of love that commits one's total existence to
another." This is not the sort of marriage that Judge William has in mind in
Either/Or II or the essay "Reflections on Marriage" in Stages on Life's Way. The
Judge says, "To poetize an actual human relationship by means of distancing
[. . .] is neither more nor less than to falsify the ethical in it and to give it a false
stamp as an event and an intellectual pursuit" (SLW 155). The contrast between
marriage that defines the ethical life and the marriage proposal that Augusto
makes is so great as to be comic, which is what I believe Unamuno intended.
Unamuno is well aware of Judge William's view of marriage and how
much of what is called marriage falls far short of the ethical life. Geoffrey
Ribbans interprets many of the interpolated stories in Niebla as exemplary tales

of how marriage can go wrong. Their function is to warn Augusto against

 

3 The word experimenter could also be translated "to experience" but given the entire context of
the passage I believe that "to experiment with" Is also warranted.

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marriage to Eugenia. In the story of Don Avito Carrascal, the protagonist of
Amory pedagogia admits that he did not love his wife upon marrying her and
only has come to love her after the tragic loss of their son. Don Avito's advice to
Augusto is to marry the girl who loves him, i.e., Rosario, and not the girl whom he
loves but does not love him in return, Eugenia. Judge William would agree that
in order for marriage to be an ethical, life-changing choice the two partners need
to love each other and purposefully choose each other. The Judge says,
"Marriage is the deepest, highest, and most beautiful expression of love. Love is
the gift of the god, but in the resolution of marriage the lovers make themselves
worthy of receiving it" (SLW 148).

The story of Don Eloino Rodriguez and the widow who marries him to get
the pension that he would provide her at his imminent death is the cautionary tale
against making economics the basis of a marriage. The parallel to Augusto and
Eugenia is clear. If Eugenia marries Augusto because of his ability to pay off her
mortgage and to be able to give up her piano students, this is a marriage of
convenience, not a true marriage. The Judge says that a marriage of
convenience is a marriage based on calculation. "A marriage based on
calculation is to be regarded as a capitulation of sorts that the exigencies of life
make necessary. [. . .] Consequently, the eternal, which belongs to every
marriage, is not really present here, for a commonsensical calculation is always
temporal. Therefore, such a connection is at the same time immoral and fragile"

(E0, 2: 27).

 

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Ribbans says the story of the man with two wives, Don Antonio,
foreshadows the humiliating end of Augusto's attempt to get married. Don
Antonio has "two wives" because his lawful wife ran off with another man who
was also married. The other aggrieved partner and Don Antonio come together
to console each other and to make a family forthe child who was left. "Augusto,
like Don Antonio, has been abandoned by the woman who was pledged to him,
and Mauricio, in eloping with Eugenia, left Rosario to Augusto as the seducer's
wife had been left for Don Antonio" (402). Ribbans says that Augusto should
have seen the possibility for disaster in his own situation.

Again, Ribban's point is that Unamuno uses these interpolated stories to
underscore what marriage is not. What then, is true marriage for Unamuno? It
has already been noted that there is much in common with Unamuno's view of
marriage and that of Judge William. According the Judge, marriage is certainly
not merely the erotic love that characterizes Augusto throughout Niebla. What is
the relationship of erotic love and marriage? The Judge says, "The difficulty is
this: erotic love or falling in love is altogether immediate; marriage is a
resolution; yet falling in love must be taken up into marriage or into the resolution:
to will to marry" (SLW 102). The question is does Augusto really resolve to marry
or is he just carried along with the events as they unfold? I think the text leads us
to believe that Augusto is the "victim" of the proposal to marry as much as he is
the victim of Eugenia's treachery in running off with Mauricio. Augusto himself
wonders before he goes to Eugenia's house to proceed with his psychological

experiment how he will feel if Eugenia accepts his proposal rather than rejecting

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him. "Y si mi acepta?, digo. iMe fastidia! iMe pesca con mi propio anzuelol
jESO si que seria el pescador pescadol " (2: 644). ("And what if she accepts
me? That would mess things up. What if she catches me with my own hook!
That would surely be the fisherman becoming his own prey.") When Eugenia
does accept him and the aunt and uncle seem to accept the news as a matter of
course, Augusto does not feel elated, he feels trapped. Augusto thinks, "jRana,
rana completal Y me han pescado entre todos" (2: 652). ("Frog, complete frog!
They have trapped me out between all of them.")

This is hardly the picture of a man who has resolved to will to love one
woman for the rest of his life and who in so doing has moved into the ethical
sphere, into choosing his own existence. Even Roberts, who believes that
Augusto makes a decisive choice to marry Eugenia, points out that his life is not
really changed by the proposal of marriage and its acceptance. The very next
sentence in the novel after the one quoted above, where Augusto laments his
being made the frog in this experiment, says "Empezo entonces para Augusto
una nueva vida. Casi todo el dia se lo pasaba en casa de su novia y estudiando,
no psicologia sino estética" (2: 652). ("A new life began, then, for Augusto. He
spent almost the whole day in the house of his fiancee studying not psychology
but esthetics.") The statement about his life being new is clearly ironic. Augusto
has been studying the esthetic life all along.

lf Augusto has not even achieved the level of the ethical, as I believe,
what are we to make of his own assertions to Victor Goti about his coming into

existence through the suffering he has experienced at the hand of Eugenia?

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Augusto says that the experience with Eugenia has made him father of himself.
"iSi, de mi mismo! Con esto creo haber nacido de veras. Y para sufrir, para
morir" (2: 662). ("Yes, of myself! With all of this [affair with Eugenia] I believe that
l have really been born. And born in order to suffer, in order to die.") The words
of Victor that come on the heals of this declaration would appear to echo the
stance of Unamuno in Del sentimiento tragico de la vida when Victor says, "Si, el
segundo nacimiento, el verdadero, es nacer por el dolor a la conciencia de la
muerte incesante, de que estamos siempre muriendo" (2: 662). ("Yes, the
second birth, the true one, is to be born through the pain of consciousness of
ongoing death, of which we are always dying.") But Augusto's awakening to the
reality of death does not then translate into the vitality of the struggle to live that
Unamuno advocates in Del sentimiento tragico de la vida. Augusto's suffering
remains in the realm of the esthetic.

Augusto admits that his entire conversation with Victor is, in fact,
entertaining, though it irritates him to say so. Victor's judgement is that through
his suffering Augusto has become more interesting to himself. "5T6 has
encontrado nunca a tus propios ojos mas interesante que ahora? ¢Cémo sabe
uno que tiene un miembro si no le duele?" (2: 663). ("Have you ever been more
interesting to your own eyes than you are now? How does one know if he has a
limb if it doesn't hurt him?") The category of the interesting, we will remember
from the "Rotation of Crops" essay and "The Seducer's Diary," is the ultimate for

the esthete. His motto is, "Has the interesting been preserved at all times?" (BO,

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1: 438). Victor is congratulating Augusto for his maturation in the process of
becoming interesting, a far cry from coming into authentic ethical existence.

In Either/0r ll Judge William gives a detailed account of the various life
views of the esthetic ranging from the immediate to the reflective. This range is
established in Either/Orl which begins with the immediacy of Don Juan and ends
with the highly reflective author of "The Seducer's Diary." In the immediate
category are the esthetic life views that value health and beauty, wealth and
noble birth, enjoying life and satisfying all desires. The Judge knows that A has
moved on from such pedestrian forms of estheticism to the more cerebral, those
described in "Rotation of Crops," and most importantly he has gone on to enjoy
his own despair over the fact that the immediate views of the esthetic life are
vanity. The Judge in addressing A says, "This may be the place to discuss
briefly a life-view that is so very pleasing to you [. . .]. lt amounts to nothing less
than this, that to sorrow is indeed the real meaning of life, and to be the
unhappiest one is the supreme happiness" (E0, 2: 232). The Judge explains
that for A, "sorrow in and by itself is at least as interesting as joy" (E0, 2: 233).

Augusto states, "Después de lo que me han hecho, despues de esta
burla, de esta ferocidad de burla, jahora, sf, ahora me siento, ahora me palpo,
ahora no dudo de mi existencia real!” (2: 664). ("After what they have done to
me, after this joke, this cruel joke, now I feel myself, now I touch myself, now I
don't doubt my true existence") What sort of existence has Augusto awakened
to? There is no doubt but that Augusto has come a very long way from his

somnambulant days, but the Judge would say that Augusto has not attained the

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ethical, even though he has come to know suffering. "At first sight, this view
does not seem to be an esthetic view of life, because enjoyment surely cannot
really be its watchword. But it is not ethical either; it is situated at the perilous
point at which the esthetic is to pass over into the ethical, where the soul is so
easily entangled in some formulation of a theory of predestination" (E0, 2: 232).
The proof that A's (and Augusto's) sorrow has not brought them into the ethical is
what they do with their sorrow. Real sorrow leads to repentance and the hope of
forgiveness. A is fascinated by the idea of the world's unhappiest man, and
perhaps he thinks he is this person, enjoying his odd superiority over other men.
Augusto sees no hope and believes his only alternative is to kill himself. From
the Judge's point of view, Augusto has not chosen himself, has not come into
real existence.
But can the person who has chosen himself infinitely say: Now I
possess myself; I ask for no more, and I meet all the ups and
downs of the world with the proud thought: I am the person I am?
But no means! [. . .] His basic error would really be that he had not,
strictly speaking, chosen himself; he had no doubt, chosen himself,
but outside himself; he had conceived of choosing altogether
abstractly and had not grasped himself in his concretion. (E0, 2:
230-31)
That is, Augusto has come to a great deal of self-revelation through his painful
encounter with Eugenia, and has accepted what he has leamed as part of

himself. All of that is what has happened "outside himself." In order to choose

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himself, he must undertake the self as a task. The task requires a future, and
Augusto cannot see any future. The consequence of Augusto's not having
grasped himself in, his concretion is his contemplation of suicide. The Judge
would say that he is "infatuated with himself" and that "no power is able to tear
him from himself.” The consequence is fatal. "Such a condition has not
infrequently ended in suicide" (E0, 2: 231 ). Augusto has chosen the self he is
rather than becoming the self he can become. According to the Judge, Augusto
has not come into real existence because he has not chosen himself in freedom.
"If he does that, then at the very moment he chooses himself he is in motion"
(EO, 2: 232).

But would Unamuno agree with the Judge's evaluation of Augusto, that he
has not chosen himself in freedom and so remains within the esthetic? The
answer to the question about choosing himself in freedom is bound up, I believe,
in the issue of free will and how one reads the end of Niebla. The answer to the
question of Augusto's remaining in the esthetic is a separate question which
deserves a separate answer. We will deal with the problem of freedom first, by
looking at the ending of Niebla.

At the conclusion of the discussion with Victor within which Augusto
declares that he is certain of his own existence and Victor responds, throwing
more doubt and confusion into his mind, Augusto resolves to kill himself. "Oueria
acabar consigo mismo, que era la fuente de susdesdichas propias" (2: 665).
("He wanted to do away with himself, that self that had been the source of all his

own misfortunes") But before he does, he believes that he needs to consult

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with the dramatized author of his story, Don Miguel. What transpires during the
visit is one of the most innovative chapters in novelistic history.

Don Miguel lets Augusto know that he knows why he has come, to discuss
his impending suicide. Then Don Miguel lets the squirming Augusto know that
his contemplated act of suicide is impossible because he doesn't exist. In order
to commit suicide one must first be alive, and Augusto isn't. Augusto is outraged
and turns on his author to question the author's existence. Isn't it possible that
Don Miguel is a fictitious entity who is nothing more than "un pretexto para que
mi historia Ilegue al mundo. . (2: 666)? ("a pretext for bringing my story into the
world. . .") As Don Miguel gets more and more uncomfortable with Augusto's line
of reasoning, which uses Don Miguel's own statement that as characters Don
Quijote and Sancho are more real than Cervantes and the fact that Don Miguel
has entered into conversation with him (Augusto) proves his own existence, Don
Miguel retaliates by saying that he will kill Augusto off.

Augusto is terrified and pleads for God to help him, to which Don Miguel
replies that there is no God who can help him because he (Don Miguel) alone is
the character's maker. Augusto says that he now wants to live. "Ouiero vivir,
vivir. . ., y ser yo, yo, yo. . ." (2: 669). ("I want to live, to live, and be myself,
myself, myself.") Augusto leaves, telling Don Miguel that he, too will die.

"iMorira usted, don Miguel, morira usted y moriran todos Ios que me piensenl [a
morir, puesl" (2: 670). ("You will die, Don Miguel, you will die as will all of those
who create me in thought. To die, thenl") Augusto then goes back to his home

and essentially eats himself to death. Does Augusto kill himself, or does the

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dramatized author, Don Miguel, kill off his own character? Victor Goti, the writer
of the prologue assures the reader that it was Augusto himself who brought
about his own death. Augusto's housekeeper, Liduvina, swears it was a
suicide. But Don Miguel enters the narrative to claim responsibility and to
wonder whether he should bring Augusto back to life.

There are some critics who equate the dramatized author Don Miguel with
Unamuno. Carlos Blanco Aguinaga believes that Unamuno puts himself into the
novel so that as a fictional character, he, too, can be immortal. Along with
Geoffrey Ribbans, I question Blanco Aguinaga's equation of the dramatized
author Don Miguel with Unamuno because Don Miguel is too much of an
outrageous caricature of Unamuno. Ribbans says, "Unamuno's swaggering
portrayal of himself, in which he deliberately exaggerates his own characteristics
both linguistic and ideological, is an image, of great compressed ironic power, of
the capricious God, or worse arbitrary fate, who apparently determines the life
and death of human beings" (403). Ribbans goes on to argue for the possibility
that Augusto killed himself, contrasting Augusto's telegram to Don Miguel to be
opened after his death which read, "Se salio con la suya. He muerto." (2: 674)
("You got your way. I have died."), with Liduvina's declaration, "Lo de mi seiiorito
ha sido un suicidio y nada mas que un suicidio. jSe salio con la suyal" (2: 676).
("What my master has done has been a suicide, nothing more than a suicide. He
got his wayl") At the very least, whether the creator or the character has had his

own way is ambiguous.

137

Whether or not Augusto killed himself turns, of course, on whether or not
he has the freedom to do so, whether or not free will exists. We are aware that
the question of free will is an important issue in Niebla from the start when Victor
Goti says in the Prologue, "Sin haber yo llegado al extremo de escepticismo
hamletiano de mi pobre amigo Perez, que llego hasta a dudar de su propia
existencia, estoy por lo menos firrnemente persuadido de que carezco de eso
que los psicdlogos Ilaman libre albedrio, aunque para mi consuelo creo también
que tampoco goza don Miguél de 6|" (2: 544). (Without having arrived at the
extreme of Hamletian skepticism of my poor friend Perez, who came to the point
of doubting his own existence, I am, at least, firmly persuaded that I lack what
psychologists call free will, although it also consoles me to believe that Don
Miguel also does not enjoy it.") Interpreting this statement depends on
separating the career author, Miguel de Unamuno from the dramatized author,
Don Miguel.4 Victor is certainly right that the dramatized author of Don Miguel
does not allow for free will because as he appears in the story, he is the grand
puppeteer who controls and manipulates all of his creation. However, the views
of the career author, Miguel de Unamuno, are different than those of the
dramatized author, Don Miguel.

It seems to me that Unamuno is satirizing the view of Don Miguel, based

on what we have seen of Unamuno's view of the self as achievement, his

0

" The terms used here are those developed by Wayne Booth in Critical Understanding: The
Powers and Limits of Pluralism. The career author is what is represented by "the sustained
creative center implied by a sequence of implied authors" (270). The dramatized author Is a
character who takes the voice of the author in the relation of the narrative but who is just that, a
created character who may or may not "reveal anything directly about the writer" (269). The
implied author is defined as "the creating person who is Implied by the totality of a given work
when it is offered to the world" (269).

 

138

purpose in writing and his stated distance from his own literary creation. We
have seen that for Unamuno there is a substantial self that is given that includes
the ability for self-reflection. However, the content of the self is the sell one
becomes through using the ability for self-reflection. Unamuno's statement about
a man only being a man when he wants to be "more than a man" makes no
sense without the possibility of free will. Unamuno's desire to awaken his
compatriots from their deadly slumber into authentic existence would make no
sense if they were fated to remain in that slumber. Don Miguel's desire to
manipulate and control his creation is the opposite of Unamuno's statement in
Como se hace una novela about a written work no more belonging to its author
than does his skeleton belong to him after he has died. In the same book
Unamuno invites the reader to recreate the work for herself so that she may
make the novel of her own life, and he concludes, "Nuestra obra es nuestro
espiritu y mi obra soy yo mismo que me estoy hacienda dia a die y siglo a siglo,
como tu obra eres tu mismo, lector, que te estas haciendo momento a momento
[. . .]' (8: 760). ("Our own work is our spirit; my work is myself, who I am making
day after day, century after century, as your work, reader, is yourself, you who
are making and creating yourself moment by moment [. . .]') The career author,
Unamuno believes he enjoys free will, even if his dramatized author, Don Miguel
does not allow for it.

Going beyond Geoffrey Ribban's judgement that Augusto's death is
possibly a suicide, I would claim that Augusto's death is probably a suicide, an

act chosen deliberately by a person who is free to choose his own self and his

139

own end. From Unamuno's point of view, Augusto ironically comes into authentic
existence by choosing his own death. In an article written after the appearance
of Niebla entitled "Una entrevista con Augusto Perez," Unamuno is still playing
with the ambiguity in the death of Augusto, but he has Augusto insist to him in a
dream, "Me afirmé muriendo" (8: 365). ("l affirmed myself in dying.") In choosing
his own death, Augusto acts passionately for the first time in his life.

A passage from Concluding Unscientific Postscript which Unamuno
underlined may have helped to form the character of Augusto as a "pure
thinking" individual whose logical and was suicide. The context is that the
pseudonymous author, Johannes Climacus, is talking about the difficulty of
existing, of living simultaneously in the eternal and the present, and how abstract
thinking has been substituted in the present day for the process of becoming a
person.

If it were the same with thinkers in our day, pure thinking would
have led to one suicide after another, because suicide is the only
existence-consequence of pure thinking if, in relation to what it
means to be a human being, this thinking is not to be something
merely fractional and ready to make a deal with ethical and
religious existing, but is to be everything and the highest. We do
not praise suicide, but certainly the passion. Now, however, a
thinker is a creature worth seeing, who at certain times of the day is
singularly ingenious but otherwise has nothing in common with a

human being. (CUP 308) (Emphasis added.)

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Unamuno has created a protagonist who seems "singularly ingenious" at times
and with his tendencies to "pure thinking" seems to have "nothing in common
with a human being" as he careens through life reacting to its vagaries in his
abstract way. Only in his decision to kill himself does Augusto leave the world of
contemplation and act within time. According to the passage above, the act is
not to be praised, but the passion needed to commit such an act is to be praised.

Why then are there so many conflicting signals that indicate that Augusto
did not have control over his own life? Unamuno's dramatized narrators, Don
Miguel, becomes a clear agent in the process of the narration, not a mere
observer. If, as l have indicated, the implied author's values are the opposite of
the dramatized narrator, then we can conclude that Don Miguel is an unreliable
narrator and his account of Augusto's end is in error. Augusto is free to choose
his own end as Victor indicates in the Prologo. Don Miguel contradicts his own
dramatized narrator, Victor. But neither Don Miguel nor Victor can be equated
with Unamuno.

What is going on here? I believe that Unamuno is using indirect
communication for the purpose of helping the reader to think about her own
existence. Unamuno's multiple narrators work in the same way that
Kierkegaard's pseudonyms do. They are not cover-ups for the real author.

They are characters in and of themselves with opinions and ideas that may or

may not coincide with those of the career author. They are the means by which

 

5 This is the term Booth previously gave to "dramatized author" in The Rhetoric of Fiction where
he describes more in detail the possible functions of this narrator who is the "l" telling the story.
This narrator can be in first, second or third person, an agent or an observer of his action and can
be reliable or unreliable. See pp. 152-165.

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the career author can best bring to light conflicting views on how one can exist in
this life. Booth says, "From the author's viewpoint, a successful reading of his
book must eliminate all distance between the essential norms of his implied
author and the norms of the postulated reader" (Rhetoric 157). A "successful
reading" from Unamuno's point of view requires his reader to be disturbed by his
multiple, dramatized narrators which will lead the reader to examine her own
existence.

In the last conversation that Augusto has with Victor there is a telling
exchange about the liberating effect of art. Augusto says, "Ya he oido que lo
mas Iiberador del arte es que le hace a uno olvidar que exista. Hay quien se
hunde en la Iectura de novelas para distraerse de si mismo, para olvidar sus
penas. . ." (2: 664). ("l have heard that the most liberating aspect of art is that it
makes one forget that one exists. There are those who bury themselves in the
reading of novels to distract themselves from themselves, in order to forget their
sorrows. . .") Victor replies, "No, lo mas Iibertador del arte es que le hace a uno
dudar de que exista" (2: 664). ("No, the most liberating aspect of art is that it
makes one doubt that one exists") Victor certainly is the mouthpiece of
Unamuno here (though he cannot be said to be that in all places).‘5 For
Unamuno, that his novel, his art, would make one doubt that one exists is a way
of opening up that wound and keeping it open so that the reader may be
awakened to authentic existence. In order for a self to develop into authentic

existence, that self must have the freedom to make significant choices.

 

° In the same assay, "Una entrevista con Augusto Perez," Unamuno states that Victor ls certainly
right when he says this (8: 361).

142

The question about whether or not Augusto remains in the esthetic from
Unamuno's point of view remains to be answered. Many of the characters of
Niebla live out the categories of the esthetic as outlined by Judge William.
Mauricio can be seen as the crass esthete who is non-reflective and grabs at
what is immediately at hand. He is certainly like the Don Juan of the beginning of
Either/0r l. Eugenia herself is an esthete whose disregard for Augusto sounds
like the Judge's indictment of A, "You can be more heartless than anyone; you
can make a jest of everything, even a person's pain" (E0, 2: 232). Victor's
marriage of connubial bliss before the child arrives is a form of esthetic marriage.
He and his wife did not decide to marry, did not decide to commit themselves to
love each other for the long term. They were forced to marry by their parents.

As good esthetes they have made interesting what life arbitrarily dealt to them,
as A instructs in "Rotation of Crops." Augusto is the hyper-contemplative esthete
who corresponds to Johannes the Seducer in his highly intellectuallzed approach
to life. I believe that Unamuno shares the values of Judge William in the
hierarchy of these different examples of the esthetic life. The more cerebral and
reflective, the more refined is the esthetic life.

There is no denying that Augusto himself says that he has awakened to
existence through the pain of his relationship with Eugenia, but I believe that
Unamuno understands that awakening still to be entirely within the esthetic. In
Stages on Life's Way Unamuno underlines part of Victor Eremita's speech at the
banquet of esthetes, "In Vino Veritas" Eremita says, "The highest ideality

woman can awaken in man is really to awaken the consciousness of immortality"

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(SLW 60). Eremita goes on to explain that "woman's entire meaning is negative"
because the only thing she is good for is to "awaken the consciousness of
immortality" and the only way she can do that is to be a negative influence in his
life. Fate makes sure that she arrives at precisely the right moment, just as
Eugenia arrived at precisely the right moment for Augusto. Victor Eremita
confinues,
But now comes the greatest thing she can do for a man—that is to
be unfaithful to him, the sooner the better. The first ideality will help
him to an intensified ideality, and he is helped absolutely. To be
sure, this second ideality is purchased with the deepest pain, but it
is also the greatest blessing. To be sure, he can by no means wish
it before it has happened, but this is why he thanks her that it has
happened, and since he, humanly speaking, does not have much
reason to be so very thankful, all is well. But woe to him if she
remains faithful to himl (SLW 63)
Unamuno's Augusto is the literary yet living result of Victor Eremita's advice.
Augusto is awakened to consciousness of his own mortality through a negative
relationship with a woman, but like Eremita, he remains an esthete to the end.

It may be that Unamuno even sees Augusto as being "situated at the
perilous point at which the esthetic is to pass over into the ethical" that the Judge
describes (E0, 2: 232). Augusto might have gone on to the ethical if he had
chosen to stay alive as he says he wants to do in his interview with Don Miguel.

Augusto equates living with becoming a self. Don Miguel questions Augusto's

144

ability to do that by saying, "Pero si tu no eres sino lo que yo quiera. . ." (2: 669).
("But if you are not anything more than what I want. . .") Augusto replies, "Ouiero
ser yo, ser yol iQuiero vivir!" (2: 669). ("I want to be myself, to be myselfl I want
to Iivel") Don Miguel's insinuation that only he [Don Miguel] will decide what sort
of self Augusto will be is a challenge to the contemplative esthete to act. It would
seem that Augusto's maturation has not come to the point of believing enough in
his own existence to choose to live and enter into the ethical life. But Augusto's
maturation has come to the point of wanting decisively to show that he, at the
very least, is doing the choosing, and therefore he chooses to die. The choice
here is what is crucial and what was crucial for Unamuno from the start. As long
as the choice is a real choice in freedom, then for Unamuno the person has
come into authentic existence. The category of the esthetic or the ethical is not
as important as the choice, even the choice to kill oneself. Unamuno's view is
different than that of Judge William on this point. While Judge William

recognizes a hierarchy of esthetic life views, for him real choice begins in the

ethical sphere.

San Manuel Bueno, mirth: A Study In the Ethical Llfe

Of all of Unamuno's novels, San Manuel Bueno, martir is the most
puzzling to commentators because it seems to negate much of what Unamuno
set out to do in the rest of his voluminous corpus. The story is of a rural priest
who, on the basis of his remarkable, sacrificial life and work, is about to be

canonized. The story is told as a "confession" by one of his devoted

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parishioners, Angela. It is a confession because Angela believes it is necessary
to tell the whole story of Don Manuel, the story of his inner torment and his
unbelief which he hides from all the villagers save Angela and her brother,
Lazaro. Don Manuel hides the truth, that there is no life after death, so that his
parishioners may live in their dream of immortal life and be happy. Frances
Wyers says,
The man who constantly preached strife seems hereto be
proposing not just a truce but unconditional surrender. The man
who vehemently attacked "blind faith" ("Ia fe del carbonero") seems
suddenly to be upholding the value of delusion. The Unamuno who
took it as his personal mission to awaken the sleeping here creates
a character who spends his life protecting the dreams of others. It
looks as if the agonista has abandoned the battlefield to seek
permanent solace in the countryside. (104-105)

M. Gordon, in his article, "The Elusive Self," notes that some critics,
especially A. Sénchez Barbudo, have seen in San Manuel Bueno, martira
turnabout in Unamuno's thinking, an almost complete personality change. To
see this novel as a complete reversal of Unamuno's previous thought, these
critics are "apt to assume that its eponymous hero is yet another mouthpiece or
fictional alter ego of his creator" ( 147). However Gordon goes on to show,
convincingly in my opinion, that Unamuno did not see any radical change in his
authorship in the publishing of this book, fairly late in his career. Gordon points

out that in the Prologue to San Manuel Bueno, martir y tres historias mas

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Unamuno comments on the place of San Manuel Bueno, marfir in the range of
his authorship. Unamuno is reacting to Gregorio Marar‘ton's review of San
Manuel Bueno, martir and agrees with the reviewer when he says,
[. . .] esta novelita, ha de ser una de mis obras mas leidas y
gustadas en adelante como una de las mas caracteristicas de mi
produccidn toda novelesca. Y quien dice novelesca—agrego yo—
dice filoséfica y teologica. Y asi como él pienso yo, que tengo Ia
conciencia de haber puesto en ella todo mi sentimiento tragico de

la vida contidiana" (2: 1115).

[. . .] this little novel will be from now on one of my most read and
best liked works, as it is one of the most characteristic of all of my
novelistic production. And whoever says novelistic—I add—also
says philosophical and theological. Sol think, as he [Marafion]
does, that l have consciously put in it all of my tragic sense of
everyday life.
Unamuno even seems to go out of his way in the Prologue to unite the theme of
the present works that he is publishing—"9| pavoroso problema de la
personalidad" 'the terrifying problem of personality—with his previous work.
Unamuno writes, speaking about this unifying theme,
Claro esta que no obedece a un estado de animo especial en
que me hallara al escribir, en poco mas de dos meses, estas tres
novelitas, sino que es un estado de animo general en que me

encuentro, puedo decir que desde que empecé a escribir. Ese

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problema, esa congoja, mejor, de la consciencia de la propia
personalidad—congoja unas veces tragica y otras cdmica—es el
que me ha inspirado para casi todos mis personajes de ficcién. (2:

1123)

It is clear that it [the taking up of this theme] does not conform to
some special state of mind that I found myself in while writing these
three little novels in less than two months. Rather, they conform to
a general state of mind that I have found myself in, I can say, since
I started to write. That problem, or better, that anguish of the
consciousness of one's own personality—anguish that is
sometimes tragic and sometimes comic—is what has inspired me
for almost all of my fictional characters.

If Unamuno did not see any great change in his novelistic, philosophical or
theological views embodied in this novel, how is the reader to make sense of the
"unconditional surrender" of the protagonist to the "value of delusion" which
seeks to go about "protecting the dreams of others," as Frances Wyers put it?
Clearly, viewing the hero, Don Manuel, as a mouthpiece or fictional alter ego of
his creator, as Gordon suggests others have done, is not a helpful way to begin
to understand this work. Carlos Blanco Aguinaga warns that this novel is very
complex in his article, "Sobre Ia complejidad de San Manuel Bueno, martir,
novela." This critic concludes that Unamuno has created in this novel a free,
fictitious world with so many paradoxes and contradictions that the reader is left

"sin sostén conceptual definido, como en la realidad misma impenetrable" (588).

148

("without defined, conceptual support, like impenetrable reality itself.") While
agreeing that the reader finds herself in a labyrinth of multiple meanings, I would
like to offer the following as one way to find a conceptual framework for the
novel.
I believe it would be much more helpful in the overall understanding of
San Manuel Bueno, martir if we were to understand the character of Don Manuel
as Unamuno's fictional rendering of the Kierkegaardian sphere of the ethical. It is
not a great stretch of credulity to believe that Unamuno was thinking in
Kierkegaardian categories of the esthetic and the ethical when he wrote San
Manuel Bueno, martir because Unamuno quotes from "Balance between
Esthetic and Ethical" of Either/Or II in the Prologue to San Manuel Bueno, martir
y tres histories mitts.7 Though the quote is taken out of context, it strongly
suggests a profile for Don Manuel.
It would be the consummate mockery of the world if the person who
had propounded the most profound truth was not a visionary but a
doubter. And that is not inconceivable, because no one can
present the positive truth as superbly as a doubter, except that he
does not believe it himself. If he were a hypocrite, the mockery
would be at his own expense. If he were a doubter who himself

perhaps wanted to believe what he was presenting, the mockery

 

7 In the Prologue Unamuno mentions that he has just finished reading Either/Or by his "favorite"
Saran Kierkegaard. Of course, the Prologue was written after the writing of the novel, but
Unamuno mentions Either/Or as early as the 1907 essay "Kierkegaard y Ibsen." Ruth House
Webber suggests that Either/Cris a book that Unamuno came back to again and again and that
his mentioning his having finished Either/Or at the writing of this Prologue in no way suggests a
first meeting of Kierkegaard. Perusal of the copy of the Kierkegaardian text that Unamuno read
confirms a careful, line by line reading based on the copious gloss that is included in the margins.

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would be completely objective, existence would mock itself through
him. He would present a doctrine that could explaln
everything; the whole human race could rest In It, but this
doctrine could not explain its own founder. If a person were
mad but so clever that he could hide his madness, he could make
the whole world mad. (E0, 2: 320) (Emphasis added.)
The doctrine that Don Manuel preaches and lives is the life of the ethical, doing
good. In his last sermon to his congregation Don Manuel says, "Sed buenos,
que esta basta," (2: 1149) ("Be good, that is enough,") and that is how Don
Manuel lives his life. He heals the sick and effects reconciliation between
husbands and wives, between rebellious children and their parents He goes
with the village doctor on his rounds. He participates in the feasts as well as the
funerals of the town. He make toys for the children. He loves the unlovely,
especially the village idiot, Blasillo. He does not preach against heretics or
unbelievers but rather against gossip and envy—evils that destroy relationships.
In what ways can we see that Don Manuel's life is the embodiment of the
existence sphere of the ethical?

In Either/0r lI Judge William enjoins A, the young esthete, to choose
despair in order to choose himself. To choose himself is the beginning of the
ethical life.

Choose despair, then, because despair itself is a choice, because
one can doubt [tvivle] without choosing it, but one cannot despair

[fortvivle] without choosing it. And in despairing a person chooses

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again, and what then does he choose? He chooses himself, not in
his immediacy, not as this accidental individual, but he chooses
himself in his eternal validity. (E0, 2: 211).
Despair here is understood as the realization that one has failed to become a self
because one has no focus, no identity that is grounded in commitments. It is
contrasted with doubt because doubt remains at the level of speculation and
abstraction. Despair involves the whole person who is brought to the point of
choosing and changing as a result of willing to do the good.

It is clear that Unamuno understood the difference between the abstract
doubt and the despair that brings one to a choice. He underscored the following,
"Doubt is thought's despair; despair is personality's doubt" (E0, 2: 211). The
Judge continues, "That is why I cling so firmly to the defining characteristic 'to
choose,‘ it is my watchword. the nerve in my life-view, and what I do have, even if
I can in no way presume to have a system" (E0, 2: 211). Unamuno's Don
Manuel has chosen a life based on commitments. His entering into the
priesthood is motivated by his commitment to his widowed sister and the desire
to help her support her sons. It is said that Don Manuel could have had a brilliant
career in the church hierarchy if he had wanted it, but he chooses to serve a
humble, isolated parish. In a passage Unamuno underlines the Judge says,

The person who lives ethically knows that what counts is what one
sees in each situation, and the energy with which he considers it,
and the one who thus disciplines himself in the most insignificant

life situation can experience more than the one who has been a

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witness to—indeed, been a participant in—the most noteworthy
events. (E0, 2: 252)

Don Manuel explains to Angela that he could not have stood the life of the
monastery. He says, "Yo no debo vivir solo; yo no debo morir solo. Debo vivir
para mi pueblo, morir para mi pueblo iCémo voy a salvar mi alma si no salvo la
de mi pueblo?"(2: 1135). ("I was not meant to live alone, or die alone. I was
meant to live for my village, and die for my village. How am I going to save my
own soul if I do not save the soul of my village as well?") In Concluding
Unscientific Postscript Johannes Climacus says in a passage underlined by
Unamuno, "If an individual throws himself away in order to grasp something
great, he is esthetically inspired; it he gives up everything in order to save
himself, he is ethically inspired" (CUP 390).

Ultimately, what is the life of the ethical? The Judge says, "The esthetic in
a person is that by which he spontaneously and immediately is what he is; the
ethical is that by which he becomes what he becomes" (E0, 2: 178). Augusto
Perez is a person who spontaneously and immediately is what he is. Don
Manuel, however, has taken on the task of selfhood, has chosen to become a
self by making the commitments that the esthete eschews, by willing to love and
serve his parishioners. Judge William's paradigm of the ethical life is marriage.
Don Manuel has made the parish of Valverde de Lucerna his bride.

Don Manuel clearly embodies the life of the ethical, but what are we to
make of his lack of faith? The quote from Either/Orin the Prologue to San

Manuel Bueno, martir says of the doubter who is the source of the most profound

152

truth, "He would present a doctrine that could explain everything, the whole
human race could rest in it, but this doctrine could not explain the founder" (E0,
2: 320). We can see Don Manuel's encouraging his congregation to live the
ethical life as he says, "Vivid en paz y contentos," ("Live in peace and
contentment,") but he adds, "esperando que nos veamos un dia, en la Valverde
de Lucerna que hay alli, entre las estrellas de la noche que se reflejan en el Iago,
sobre la montafia" (2: 1149). ("hoping that we will all see each other again some
day in the Valverde de Lucerna that is there, among the stars of the night that are
reflected in the lake, above the mountain.") The ethical life Don Manuel leads his
parishioners in is conducted in the context of the church whose central belief is in
"the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting," a belief which Don Manuel
does not share.

From a Kierkegaardian point of view, it is possible to move and live within
the sphere of the ethical without having religious faith. The sort of existence that
Don Manuel practices is precisely what Judge William has in mind when he talks
about the duty-relationship.

My intention, what I have tried to do to the best of my ability, was
rather to throw some light on the absolute significance of duty, the
eternal validity of duty-relationship for the personality. That is, as
soon as the person in despair has found himself, has chosen
himself absolutely, has repented of himself, he then has himself as
his task under an eternal responsibility, and in this way duty is

posited in its absoluteness. But since he has not created himself

153

but has chosen himself, duty is the expression of his absolute

dependence and his absolute freedom in their identity with each

other. (E0, 2: 270)
However, as we saw in the explanation of the Kierkegaardian existence spheres
in Chapter Two, Johannes de Silentio writes Fear and Trembling to show that
Judge William's understanding of authentic existence—making commitments like
marriage, completing one's obligations, performing one's role or one's duties in
society—is not equivalent to faith. The knight of faith, Abraham, is contrasted
with the tragic hero, Agamemnon, who is also required to sacrifice a child for the
good of the state but whose actions are understandable to the society around
him. Abraham is utterly alone before the Absolute in his willingness to sacrifice
Isaac, because such an act goes beyond the demands of the ethical, beyond the
demands of society. Such an act can only be done in faith.

In Angela's recounting of the life of Don Manuel much is made of Don
Manuel's ceaseless activity and constant desire not to be alone. "Su vida era
active y no contemplative, huyendo cuanto podia de no tener nada que hacer.

[. . .] Asi es que estaba siempre ocupado, y no pocas veces en inventar
ocupaciones"(2: 1133). ("His life was active and not contemplative, fleeing
whenever possible from being left with having nothing to do. [. . .] So he was
always busy, and not a few times invented things to do.") Angela suspects that
Don Manuel is fleeing from himself, whom he would have to confront if left alone.
In the exchange about why he didn't serve God in a monastery, Don Manuel

acknowledges, "La soledad me matarie el alma" (2: 1135). ("Solitude would kill

154

my soul") So he has chosen Valverde de Lucerna as his monastery. There he
has people around him that can support him and be grateful for his sacrifice of
serving them, as Agamemnon had those who supported his difficult task. Both
Agamemnon and Don Manuel are tragic heroes, not knights of faith. If they were
knights of faith, they would be able to be alone with the Absolute who requires
the "teleological suspension of the ethical."

In the creation of Don Manuel, Unamuno represents the ethical life as an
option for authentic existence, even if it is not accompanied by faith. The
reasons for Don Manuel's inability to believe are not spelled out clearly in the
novel, but a passage from Stages on Life's Way may help us to understand more
of the complexity of the character. In the section of Stages that is entitled
"Guilty/Not Guilty" an odd entry appears on March 5 in the diary of Ouidam, the
writer who has fallen in love with a girl and then broken their engagement. The
passage seems to have nothing to do with the failed love relationship.8 It is
entitled, "Solomon's Dream," and it is clear that it caught Unamuno's attention
because much of the short chapter is underlined. The passage talks about the
agony of being ashamed of one's father, "of the person one loves the most and
to whom one owes the most" (SLW 250-1 ).

Solomon goes to David's room at night because he hears what he thinks
are intruders, bent on banning his father. What he finds instead is "David,

crushed in spirit," and "he hears the cry of despair from the penitent's soul" (251).

 

° Kierkegaard interpreters, while careful not to equate Ouidam with Kierkegaard In the whole,
have pointed to the entries on the 5'" of the month as those that are more autobiographical.
(Kierkegaard was himself born on May 5. ) The passage may represent an attempt by

155

Aware now of his father's sin and his own birth as a result of the sin, Solomon
returns to his room. The following is all underlined in Unamuno's copy of Stages.

Faint, Solomon goes back to his bed; he falls asleep, but he does
not rest. He dreams—he dreams that David is an ungodly man,
rejected by God, that the royal majesty is God's anger with him, that
he must wear the purple as a punishment, that he is condemned to
rule, condemned to listen to the people's approval, while the
righteousness of the Lord secretly and hiddenly passes judgment
upon the guilty one. And the dream intimates that God is not the
God of the godly but of the ungodly, and that to be singled out by
God one has to be an ungodly person, and the horror of the dream
is this contradiction.

As David lay on the ground crushed in spirit, Solomon rose from
his bed, but his mind was crushed. Horror seized him when he
thought of what it means to be God's chosen one. He suspected
that the saints intimacy with God, the uprightness of the pure and
faultless man before God, was not the explanation, but that secret
guilt was the secret that explained everything.

And Solomon became wise, but he did not become a hero; he
became a thinker, but he did not become a man of prayer; and he
became a preacher, but he did not become a believer; and he could

help many people, but he could not help himself [. . .]. (251-252)

 

Kierkegaard to explain his Inability to marry Regine as a result of his problematic relationship with
his own father.

156

The result of Solomon's realization of the sin of his father and the subsequent
dream is that Solomon is crippled. He is unable to believe in the God of his
father. He is cursed with the fact that he, too, was “chosen," but he cannot
repent as his father had and therefore, "he became crushed but not raised up
again, for the power of the will had been overstrained in lifting what was beyond
the Ied's strength" (252). Don Manuel also carried the affliction of his father, and
it also seemed to crush him.

Don Manuel explains to Lazaro that his greatest temptation was his
father's greatest temptation—to take his own life. The temptation is at its
greatest when he is near the placid waters of the lake which call to him to end his
life. It is there that he explains to Lezaro,

Mi pobre padre, que murio de cerca de noventa altos, se peso la
vida, segun me lo confeso él mismo, torturado por la tentacidn del
suicidio, que le venia no recordaba desde cuando, de nacidn,
decia, y defendiéndose de ella. Y esa defense fué su vida. Para
no sucumbir a tal tentacldn extremaba los cuidados por conservar
la vida. Me conto escenas terribles. Me parecia como una locura.

Y yo Ia he heredado. (2: 1144)

My poor father, who died near the age of ninety, spent his life,

. according to what he himself confessed to me, tortured by the
temptation of suicide that came to him he didn't remember when,
from birth, he would say, defending himself from it. And that

defense was his life. In order not to succumb to such a temptation

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he went to great lengths to conserve his life. He told me terrible

scenes. It seemed to me madness. And I have inherited it.
Don Manuel goes on to talk about "Ia enfermedad de muerte," 'the sickness unto
death' that he has observed in the eyes of the simple villagers whom he has
helped to die "well." He says that the sickness unto death is the blackness of the
abyss of the tedium of living that is a thousand times worse than hunger. He
then says to Lazaro, "Sigamos, pues, Lazaro, suicidandonos en nuestra obra y
en nuestro pueblo y que suei'ie este su vida como el Iago suefia el cielo" (2:
1144). ("Let us continue then, Lazaro, killing ourselves in our work and in our
village and may the village dream its life as the lake dreams the sky.") Killing
oneself by continuing to work in and for the village is preferable to succumbing to
the waters of the lake. Doing so may perpetuate the dream that the villagers
have that they will live beyond this life, but Don Manuel calls himself and Lazaro
to the ongoing task.

This is Don Manuel's "cruz de nacimiento" 'cross of birth' which he must
somehow bear. Knowing Don Manuel's struggle to stay alive, we can better
understand his response to Angela when she asks what sin it is that everyone
has committed for which she automatically prays when she preys the Ave Maria.
Don Manuel says, "el delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido" (2: 1147). ("The
greatest sin of man is to have been bom.") Don Manuel gives the source for the
answer to that question as one of the great doctors of the church, Calderén and
his play Le vida es suefio. In answer to Angela's question about whether or not

one could ever be absolved from such a sin, Don Manuel says, "Si, al fin se cure

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el sueiio,. . . aI fin se cura la vida. . . al fin se acaba Ia cruz del nacimiento. . . Y
como dijo Calderon, el hacer bien, y el engafiar bien, ni aun en suefios se pierde
. . ." (2: 1147-48). ("Yes, the dream is atoned at the end. . .life is atoned at the
end. . .finally the cross of birth ends. . .And as Calderdn said, doing well and
even feigning good is not lost, even in dreams")

Calderdn's character, Segismundo, comes to this conclusion after his
frightful forays into multiple worlds not of his making, and he feels the weight of
his sin of having been born. But he is not crippled, as Quidam's Solomon was, or
as Don Manuel is, by the affliction of his father. In addition to Calderén's
character, I believe that Unamuno had in mind the passage quoted above from
Stages on Life's Way. Segismundo ends acting nobly and putting right all the
wrongs that had been done to him. The Solomon of "Solomon's Dream" is a
divided man. "There was a split in his being, and Solomon was like the invalid
who cannot carry his own body," (252) even though he dispensed wisdom that
impressed the Queen of the East. In this Solomon we have a clearer image of
Don Manuel who is "split in his being" by the weight of his father's temptation and
his own attempts to fight the temptation.

If Unamuno has created for his readers in Don Manuel a viable option for
authentic existence, the essence of the ethical, how are we to understand the
many indications that the priest is perpetrating a fraud, that he is duping simple,
gullible people to believe things that he himself cannot believe? One of the ways
that Carlos Blanco Aguinaga tries to reconcile Don Manuel's deception of the

people with his othenivise exemplary life is to say that he deceived them out of

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love ("Complejidad," 570). Though Unamuno delighted in contradiction he
would not condone the hypocrisy or the potential danger of purposeful deception.
Don Manuel's view of how to deal with the truth is antithetical to Unamuno's. He
says to Lazaro, "éLa verdad? La verdad, Lazaro es acaso algo terrible, algo
intolerable, algo mortal; la gente sencilla no podria vivir con ella. [. . .] Yo estoy
para hacer vivir a las almas de mis feligreses, para hacerles felices, para
hacerles que se suefien inmortales y no para matarles" (2: 1142). ("The truth?
The truth, Lazarus, is perhaps so terrible, something intolerable, something
mortal; the simple people would not be able to live with it. [. . .j I am here to
make the souls of my parishioners live, to make them happy, to make them
dream that they are immortal, not to kill them.") This hardly sounds like the
author whose goal for his reader is that the wound of life be kept constantly open.
Later, in failing health, Don Manuel tries to tell Lazaro that religion will not
solve the economic and political conflicts in society. "Piensen los hombres y
obren Ios hombres como pensaren y como obraren, que se consuelen de haber
nacido, que vivan lo mas contentos que pueden en la ilusion de que todo esto
tiene une finalidad" (2: 1146). ("Let men think and act as they will, let them
console themselves for having been born, let them live as happily as they can in
the illusion that all this has a purpose.") Nor does this sound like the Unamuno of
Del sentimiento tragico de la vida where he embraces doubt, uncertainty and
struggle as the way to live or the Unamuno who says in Vida de don Quijote y
Sancho, "L . .] si existieran de verdad, sufririan de existir y no se contentarian

con ello. Si real y verdaderemente existieran en el tiempo y el especio, sufririan

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do no ser en lo etemo y lo infinito" (3: 52). ("L . .] if they truly existed, they would
suffer and they would not be content. If really and truly they existed in time and
in space, they would suffer from not being in the eternal and the infinite.")

Did Unamuno, indeed, change his mind at the end of his life? Given that
Unamuno saw this work as containing all of his tragic sense of life, for critics to
claim that in weariness Unamuno is content to embrace a frictionless intrehistoria
as authentic existence at the end of his career is unwarranted and unfair to his
entire authorship. So what is happening here? I believe that Unamuno is using
indirect communication in order to make his reader think and appropriate
existential truth. He is practicing that maieutic ideal of which we spoke earlier.
He has chosen a complex, conflicted character to show possibilities for authentic
and inauthentic existence.

There is no question but that there is much in Don Manuel to be admired,
but what, precisely? Don Manuel has made the choice of commitment to his
people, the sort of commitment that makes life authentic and meaningful.
Unamuno admires the passion of Don Manuel. Unamuno says in the essay that
precedes the second edition of Vida de don Quijote y Sancho, "Procura vivir en
continuo vertigo pasional, dominado por una pasidn cualquiera. S6Io Ios
apesionados Ilevan a cabo obras verdaderemente duraderas" (3: 58). ("Seek to
live in continuous, passionate vertigo, dominated by whatever passion. Only the
passionate carry out works that are truly enduring") Here Unamuno is holding
Don Quijote up as an example of authentic existence. At the end of the Prologue

to San Manuel Bueno, martir Unamuno equates Don Manuel and Don Quijote.

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"Y no quiero aqui comentar ya mas el martirio de Don Quijote ni de Don Manuel
Bueno, martirios quijotescos Ios dos" (2: 1123). (And I don't want to comment
anymore here on the martyrdom of Don Quijote and Don Manuel Bueno, quixotic
martyrs, the two of them.")

Nevertheless, Unamuno's own stated desire to embrace the struggle and
keep the wound of existence open would call into question Don Manuel's attempt
to deceive his parishioners into a false sense of security. In combining the loving
deceit, as Blanco Aguinaga would have it, with the sacrificial life of Don Manuel,
Unamuno shows how seductive and attractive the movement into illusion is. It
does not follow that in making Don Manuel winsome and beloved by his people
Unamuno betrays his values. Rather, he makes clearer the pain involved in
facing one's death honestly. I don't believe that Unamuno is embracing illusion
as a way of life. Unamuno risks being misunderstood here because as a midwife
for the truth he knows that existential truth must be acquired and appropriated
indirectly in order for it to have validity. In Como se hace une novela Unamuno
says, "Con todo lo cual creo a-sistir a mis prdjimos, a mis hermanos, a mis co-
hombres, a que se encuentren e si mismos y entren para siempre en la historia y
se hegan su propia novela. IEstar conformesl IBahl; hay animales herviboros y
hay plantas camivoras. Cede uno se sostiene de sus contrarios" (8: 725). ("In
all, I believe I do as-sist my neighbors, my brothers, my fellow man, assist them
to find themselves, and to enter history forever, and to make their own novel. But
in some sort of easy agreement? Nol Some animals are herbivorous and some

plants are carnivorous. Everything sustains itself on its opposites")

162

The end of San Manuel Bueno, mertir throws doubt on the entire
confessional diary of Angela, the narrator. Throughout the story Don Manuel's
belief or lack of it has been a central tension. At the end of the narrative, Angela
questions her own recollection of the people and events she has recorded. "1,Es
que sé algo? (gas que creo algo? 5Es que esta que estoy contando aqui ha
pasado y ha pasado tel y como lo cuento? gEs que pueden pasar estas cosas?
aEs que todo esto es mas que un suef’lo sor‘iado dentro de otro suer'to?" (2:
1152-53). ("Do I really know anything? Do I really believe anything? Is it that
what I am telling here has happened and has happened just as I say it did? Is it
possible that such things happen? Is all of this more than a dream that was
dreamed within another dream?") In addition to doubts about Don Manuel's
belief, Unamuno now gives the reader cause to believe that his narrator may be
unreliable, as well. Why so many untied ends at the conclusion of this story?
Frances Wyers notes Unamuno's proclivity to "prevent his works from coming to
any conclusion" (47). I think that she is right when she says, "The unwillingness
to let go of the story might account both for his disdain for plots and for the self-
reflective structure of those fictions [. . .] in which he tries to suggest a continual,
never-ending circular relation between reader and writer" (47).

The relation between reader and writer is paramount, but the
communicator about authentic existence must maintain his distance in order to
be the midwife for truth. That distance is maintained through the lack of a tidy
conclusion here, in San Manuel Bueno, martir, as it is in so many of Unamuno's

novels. In Como se hace une novela Unamuno says, "Todo lector que Ieyendo

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una novela se preocupa de saber c6mo acaberan los personajes de ella sin
preocuparse de saber cemo acabara él, no merece que se satisfaga su
curiosidad" (8: 750). ("Any reader who in reading a novel concerns himself with
how the characters will turn out without concerning himself with his own end does
not deserve to have his curiosity satisfied") Unamuno is practicing the maieutic
ideal as explained by Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
Johannes says as he comments on the other pseudonymous works, "But the '
absence of a conclusion is expressly a qualification of inwardness, because a
conclusion is something external, and the communication of a conclusion an
external relation between a knower and a nonknower" (289). For both Unamuno
and the pseudonymous writers, the goal is inwardness, authentic existence, and
a conclusion that removes ambiguity removes the opportunity for the nonknower

to appropriate anything in inwardness.

Abel Sénchez: A Study In Possibilities for Religious Existence
There is a passage from Fear and Trembling that Unamuno underlined
and that clearly demarcates Johannes de Silentio's understanding of the three
existence spheres. It says,
No one who was great in the world will be forgotten, but everyone
was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the
greatness of that which he loved. He who loved himself became

great by virtue of himself and he who loved other men became

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great by his devotedness, but he who loved God became the

greatest of all. (16)
He who loved himself is the esthete, and he who loved other men is the person
who lives in the sphere of the ethical. He who loved God is that person who
dwells within the realm of the religious. We have seen Augusto Perez as the
character that Unamuno creates to live out the life of the esthete, even to his
unfortunate end. Don Manuel Bueno is the character who loved other men and
became great by his devotedness. Is there a character in the work of Unamuno
who can be said to have loved God and therefore became greatest of all?

To my knowledge, there is no main protagonist who unreservedly believes
in God, but Unamuno does have many characters on the road to belief in God.
Whether they get to the destination or not is not as important as their varying
degrees of proximity to the life of faith. On the basis of his inability to love
anyone, even himself, Joaquin Monegro would seem to be an unlikely candidate
to turn to as an example of a person living authentic existence near the sphere of
the religious. He is one of the most demonic of Unamuno's characters, but he is
also much closer to faith than Augusto Perez.

How can a character so consumed with envy as Joaquin be close to the
religious life? In Unamuno's view, the person who struggles the most with the
realities of life and death is the closest to God. The individual who struggles
often finds herself in despair. As we saw previously in Chapter Two,

Kierkegaard's pseudonym Anti-Climacus calls despair "the sickness unto death,"

165

but he is very careful to explain how the different forms of despair can lead to

faith or away from it. Anti-Climacus says at the end of his Preface,
Once and for all may I point out that in the whole book, as the title
indeed declares, despair is interpreted as a sickness, not as a cure.
Despair is indeed that dialectical. Thus, also in Christian
terminology death is indeed the expression for the state of deepest
spiritual wretchedness, and yet the cure is simply to die, to die to
the world. (6)

In calling despair dialectical Anti-Climacus means to point to the opposite

possibilities inherent in despair, i.e., despair can lead both to faith in God and

defiance of God. Keeping in mind this dialectical nature of despair, passages

from The Sickness Unto Death can help us see how Joaquin Monegro emerged

in Unamuno's thinking.°

Anti-Climacus sees the self as "the conscious synthesis of infinitude and

finitude that relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can be

 

9 One must at least acknowledge Unamuno's statement in the Prologue to the second edition of
Abel Sanchez where he declares that neither Lord Byron's Cain nor any other source provided
him with the material for his characters. Unamuno says that his characters do not come from
books, "sino de la vida social que siento y sufro—y gozo--en tomo mio y de mi propia vida" (2:
685). ("but from the social life which I feel, suffer and enjoy around me and from my own life.")
What Unamuno is reacting to, Ithink, is the idea of wholesale theft from one author to another.
To say that Unamuno's voluminous reading did not affect his thought and creation is absurd, but
we can understand when Unamuno wants to claim that his characters are "hijas naturales y
legitimas de su autor" (2: 685). ("natural and legitimate children of their author.")

Other critics have posited other sources for Abel Sénchez. Carlos Claveria sees the Cain and
Abel myth as foundational throughout Unamuno's work. Nelson Orringer claims that Croce and
Stapher provide the "modern" view of envy that Is contrasted with the Catholic understanding of
envy that Unamuno gleans from Ouevedo. The resulting conflict provides the tension in the
protagonist which is a metaphor for the envy that is causing the internal strife in Spain. The
article carefully documents Unamuno's having read Croce and Stapher, but the author's
conclusions are not convincing. Unamuno didn't need Quevedo to understand the Biblical view of
envy, and Croce and Stapher add little new or unique to Unamuno's already well-fanned view of
the Importance of passion In authentic existence.

166

done only through the relationship to God" (29-30). Not to become a self is to
live in despair, but there are levels of despair that bring the person nearer to or
farther from God and to being a self. If the self does not grasp the need for this
synthesis between the finite and the infinite as a task for life, if one is ignorant
that there is a disjunction between the finite and the infinite, then the person is
ignorant of his own despair. "Compared with the person who is conscious of his
despair, the despairing individual who is ignorant of his despair is simply a
negativity further away from the truth and deliverance" (44). At the beginning of
Niebla Augusto Perez is ignorant of his own despair and is a long way from "truth
and deliverance." Joaquin Monegro, on the other hand, realizes the dimensions
of the struggle and his inability to become the person he wants to become very
early in life.

Anti-Climacus goes on to describe two more levels of despair once a
person is made aware of his despair. The first is in despair not to will to be
oneself in weakness and the second is in despair to will to be oneself in defiance,
and the two are related.10 When a person despairingly fails to will to be herself,
she despairs first over externals, what life has dealt the individual, and then

despairs over her weakness, that part of the self that cannot give itself over to the

 

1° Gemma Roberts mlsinterprets the first sort of despair in Joaquin. She says that in wanting to
be Abel, Joaquin does not will to be himself in the sense that he does not accept himself for who
he is. Anti-Climacus' meaning of not to will to be oneself goes much deeper than an inferiority
complex. Not to will to be oneself is not to take on the task of becoming a self before God.
Roberts does an admirable job of bringing the text of Sickness Unto Death to bear on Abel
Senchez, but her claims of harmony between Kierkegaard and Unamuno are unwarranted. She
concludes that Unamuno is a Christian existentialist based on the Diario lntlmo which was written
during and after his religious crisis of 1897 when Unamuno tried to regain the faith of his
childhood. Sénchez Barbudo points out that Unamuno later called this return to faith through a
renewal of daily religious practice, "false," and claims that Unamuno wanted to believe but was
not, in fact, a believer (97-98). There are dissenters from Sénchez Barbudo's strong statement,

167

eternal in faith. There is a level of this despair called "inclosing reserve" or
lndesluttethed in Danish, in which the weakness one feels is very carefully
hidden from anyone else.‘1 Joaquin is clearly aware of his weakness from very
early in his life. He is jealous of Abel from their boyhood when Abel excels at
everything social that happens outside of school while Joaquin must console
himself with his success inside the school. When Joaquin learns that Abel and
Helene have become lovers he names his weakness as his loathing of Abel and
purposes to conceal it. "Con el dia y el cansancio de tanto sufrir volvidme la
reflexién, comprendi que no tenia derecho alguno a Helena, pero empecé a
odiar a Abel con toda mi alma y a proponerrne a la vez ocultar ese odio,
abonarlo, crialo, cuidarlo en lo recondito de las entrenas de mi alma" (2: 697).
("With daylight and the weariness of so much suffering, reason returned to me
and I understood that I had no right to Helena, but I began to hate Abel with all
my soul, and at the same time purposed to hide that hate, feed it and cultivate it
in the darkest comers of my soul")

The person who lives with inclosing reserve is described by Anti-Climacus
as the upright citizen who goes about his duties with no indication of his
weakness given to the outside world. If someone were privy to his weakness

and he were told that his weakness was really a matter of pride, "Alone with

 

but one can say at the very least that the Dierio lntimo is not representative of Unamuno's entire
work which carried on until 1936.

" Unamuno would have been familiar with this term from his reading of Stages on Life's Way.
Ouldem, the writer of "Guilty/Not Guilty," is also said to suffer from lnclosing reserve. However,
there is a difference in the use of the concept In Stages and Sickness Unto Death. In Stages
Ouldem thinks that his inclosing reserve is a good thing, something that is a central part of his
religious experience. It is what keeps him from marrying, but Ouldem believes that he is using his
lnclosing reserve for good. In Sickness Unto Death Anti-Climacus is clear that lnclosing reserve

168

himself, he no doubt would confess that there is something to it, but the
passionateness with which his self has interpreted his weakness would soon lead
him into believing that it cannot possibly be pride [. . .]' (65). There are moments
in which Joaquin realizes the depth of his weakness, and they affect his sense of
self. He attends the wedding of Helena and Abel with great hate in his heart for
both of them. When he hears them say "I do" his hate becomes overwhelming.
"Me senti peor que un monstruo, me senti como si no existiera, como si no fuese
nada mas que un pedazo de hielo. Y esto para siempre. Llegué a palparrne la
came, a pellizcermela, a tomarrne el pulso. 'iPero estoy vivo? LYo soy yo?‘ me
dije" (2: 699-700). ("I felt worse than a monster. I felt as though I didn't exist, as
if I were nothing more than a piece of ice. And this forever. I came to the point
of touching my flesh, of pinching myself, of taking my pulse. 'But am I alive? Am
I, I?‘ I asked myself.") Anti-Climacus points out that such a painful experience
can break through the inclosing reserve to bring a person to faith, which is the
opposite of despair, or it can intensify the inclosing reserve and bring the person
to greater despair, the despair of defiance.

The despair of defiance is the despair in which a person wills to be what
he is in defiance of what God wants him to be. Anti-Climacus describes such a
person whose inclosing reserve has been intensified into defiance. "A person in
this kind of despair will hurl himself into life, perhaps into the diversion of great
enterprises; he will become a restless spirit whose life certainly leaves its mark, a

restless spirit who wants to forget [. . .1" (65-66). He may even go back to living

 

Is a stumbling block on the road to becoming a sell before God. Rather than enhancing the
religious experience, it ultimately prevents the person from moving into the religious sphere.

169

in immediacy and sensuality, "but always with the consciousness of the self he
does not want to be" (66). Nothing could describe Joaquin more accurately.
After Helena and Abel's wedding he writes in his Confession,

Yo me hundi en mis libros, en mi estudio, en mi clientele, que
empezaba ya a tenerla. El despejo mental que me did aquel golpe
de lo ya irreparable, el descubrimiento en mi mismo de que no hay
alma, moviéronme a buscar en el estudio, no ya consuelo—
consuelo, ni lo necesitaba ni lo queria—, sino apoyo para una
ambicion inmensa. Tenia que aplastar con la fame de mi nombre
la fame, ya incipiente, de Abel; mis descubrimientos cientificos,
obra de arte, de verdadera poesla, tenian que hacer sombre a sus

cuadros. (2: 700)

I buried myself in my books, in my study, in my clients who now
began to come to me. The mental clarity caused by that irreparable
blow, the discovery within myself that I had no soul, moved me to
seek in study, not really comfort—comfortl neither needed nor
wanted—but the impetus for immense ambition. I had to crush with
the fame of my name the fame, already growing, of Abel; my
scientific discoveries, my work of art, of real poetry, had to
overshadow his paintings.

But the pursuit of fame cannot entirely consume him, and when Joaquin hears

that the artist Abel is having affairs with some of his models he thinks he should

have an open door to Helena. What marvelous revenge it would be if he could

170

seduce her! But he is emphatically rebuffed by Helena and pushed into further
despah.

Joaquin has moved from the despair of weakness into the despair of
defiance. Paradoxically, the despair of defiance is a despair that is still closer to
truth, to faith. Anti-Climacus explains that the despair of defiance is only possible
through the aid of the eternal. How is that? Only through the aid of the eternal
does the existing person realize that he can choose, that he has the freedom to
choose to be himself, but the despair of defiance is a "misuse of the eternal
within the self to will in despair to be oneself" (67). But precisely "because it is
despair through the aid of the eternal, in a certain sense it is very close to the
truth" (67). The freedom the eternal gives as part of the substance of the self can
be used through despair to bring about faith. "The despair that is the
thoroughfare to faith comes also through the aid of the eternal; through the aid of
the eternal the self has the courage to lose itself in order to win itself" (67). But in
the case of the despair of defiance, the freedom given by the eternal is used to
choose despair over faith. "Here, however, it is unwilling to begin with losing
itself but wills to be itself" (67).

In the despair of defiance there is a greater consciousness of self than in
any other sort of despair. For that reason, too, it brings the person in despair
closer to the truth. This is a despair that is "conscious of itself as an act; it does
not come from the outside as a suffering under the pressure of extemalities but
comes directly from the self" (67). Joaquin's declaration of his intention to make

ambition and fame his sole goal in life is a conscious act motivated by his

171

realization that he has no soul. Fame will be his soul, and the external cause of
this act is almost forgotten. Speaking of Helena and Abel, Joaquin says, "Haste
Ilegué a creer que los olvidaria! Ouise hacer de la ciencia un narcético y a la vez
un estimulantel (2: 700). ("I came to believe that I would forget them [Abel and
Helena]. I wanted to make science a narcotic and a stimulant at the same time.")
The person who despairs in defiance embraces his weakness and glories
in it.
He has convinced himself that this thorn in the flesh gnaws so
deeply that he cannot abstract himself from it (whether this is
actually the case or his passion makes it so to him), and therefore
he might as well accept it forever, so to speak. He is offended by it,
or more correctly, he takes it as an occasion to be offended at all
existence, [. . .] he wills to be himself with it, takes it along, almost
flouting his agony. (70-71)
At first Joaquin seems to despair over his affliction and longs for it to be taken
away. "Vi mi ciencia a través de mi pecado y la miseria de dar vida para
propagar la muerte. Y vi que aquel odio inmortal era mi alma. Ese odio pensé
que debio de haber precedido a mi nacimiento y que sobreviviria a mi muerte. Y
me sobrecoji de espento al pensar en vivir siempre para aborrecer siempre" (2:
713). ("I saw my science through my sin and the misery of giving life in order to
propagate death. I saw that that immortal hate was my soul. That hate, I
thought, must have preceded my birth and will probably survive my death. I was

overcome with fear at the thought of living forever in order to hate forever.") But

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after Joaquin has effected the marriage of Abelin and Joaquina and seems to
have the upper hand on Abel at the moment, the narrator says of the Confession
that Joaquin is writing that Joaquin hoped that his daughter or his grandchildren
would make the diary known to the world so that the world
[. . .] se sobrecojiera de admiracién y de espento ante aquel héroe
de la angustia tenebrosa que peso sin que le conocieran en todo
su fondo Ios que con él convivieron. Porque Joaquin se creia un
espiritu de excepcion, y como tal, torturado, y mas capaz de dolor
que los otros, un alma sefialada al nacer por Dios con la sefial de

los grandes predestinados. (2: 746)

[. . .] might be taken with admiration and terror by that hero of dark
anguish who passed through life without anyone around him really
profoundly knowing him. Because Joaquin thought of himself that
he was an exceptional spirit, and as such, tortured and more
capable of pain than others, a soul who was given by God the sign
of predestined greatness at birth.
Joaquin's flouting his agony and his offense at existence is seen in the

entry in his diary that comes immediately after this commentary by the narrator.
Mi vida, hija mia, ha sido un arder continuo, pero no la habria
cambiado por la de otro. He odiado como nadie, como ningun otro
ha sabido odiar, pero es que he sentido mas que otros Ia supreme

injusticia de los carinos del mundo y de Ios favores de la fortune.

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[. . .] Todos, todos me amargaron la vida. Y comprendi que el
mundo es neturalmente injusto y que yo no habia nacido entre los
mios. Esta fué mi desgracia, no haber nacido entre los mios. La
baja mezquinded, la viI ramploneria de los que me rodeaban me

perdid. (2: 746-7)

My life, my daughter, has been a continual suffering, but I would not
change it for another. I have hated like no one else, like no other I
have known how to hate, but it is because I have felt more than
others the supreme injustice of the affections of the world and of
the favors of fortune. [. . .] Everyone, everyone has embittered my
life. And I understood that the world is naturally unjust and that I
had not been born among my own. This was my misfortune, not to
have been born among my own. The low meanness, the vile

coarseness of those who surrounded me was my downfall.

Such a person who is offended by existence and flouts his agony will find it hard

to receive any sort of proffered help to alleviate the suffering. To accept help

from someone makes that someone superior, and the one helped inferior. Anti-

Climacus says there is the fear of "becoming a nothing in the hand of the 'Helper'

for whom all things are possible, or the humiliation of simply having to yield to

another person, of giving up being himself as long as he is seeking help" (71).

Joaquin refuses help saying, "—consuelo, ni Io necesitaba ni lo queria—" (2:

700). ("—comfort I neither needed nor wanted—.")

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At one point Antonie persuades Joaquin to go to church to confess as a
way of expiating his demon. Under pressure Joaquin goes to see the priest,
curious to see if the Church could cure him, even if he did not believe. But in
order to be helped by the priest, Joaquin must believe that he can be helped, that
he can change, and be willing to give up his weakness. He must accept a
paradigm for life that as a physician and scientist he has rejected. Joaquin says
to the priest, "No, no creo en la libertad humane, y el que no cree en la libertad
no es libre. No, no lo soy! iSer libre es creer serial" (2: 719). (No, I do not
believe in human freedom, and he who does not believe in freedom isn't free. I
am not free. To be free is to believe that you are freel") Though the priest tells
Joaquin that he was made free, Joaquin insists that he was born to doubt God
and to be free only to do evil. Joaquin believes of himself what he had said
previously about Cain, that God has made him envious and has abandoned him.
Joaquin, upon leaving the priest, asks why he had been born. The priest says
it's better to ask to what purpose he was born. Joaquin cannot accept the help of
the Church.

Anti-Climacus notes the consequence of Joaquin's type of suffering and
the unwillingness to give it up.

The more consciousness there is in such a sufferer who in despair
wills to be himself, the more his despair intensities and becomes
demonic. [. . .1 So now he makes precisely this torment the object
of all of his passion, and it finally becomes a demonic rage. [. . .]

Once he would gladly have given everything to be rid of this agony,

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but he was kept waiting; now it is too late, now he would rather rage
against everything and be the wronged victim of the world and all of
life [. . .]. (71-72)
After Helena rejects Joaquin's overtures a second time, Joaquin's despair goes
even deeper. Now there is no turning back. The path toward the demonic is in
place. Many times through the narrative Joaquin is referred to as a sick man, an
incurable invalid, but the demonstrations of his illness grow more serious and
pronounced.

A maid who is particularly devout comes to work in Joaquin's home. By
now he is so evil, just having the righteous maid in their home is an affront to
him. He taunts her and asks why she doesn't rebel. He calls her a hypocrite and
says that he won't be used as an occasion for her to win points in heaven. "Es
una canallada tomar las flaquezas del projimo como medio para ejercitamos Ia
virtud. Que me replique, que se insolente, que sea persona . . . y no criada" (2:
724). (It is a mean thing to do to take the foibles of someone else as a way to
exercise virtue. Let her talk back to me. Let her get insolent. Let her be a
person . . . and not a maid.") But she doesn't talk back. Joaquin calls her an
idiot and dismisses her. Anti-Climacus comments on the phenomenon of the
demonic being repulsed by the good. "Confronted by someone stronger in the
good than himself, the demoniac, when the good is described by that one in all
its sublimity, can plead for himself, can tearfully plead that that one will not speak
to him, that he will not—as he phrases it—make him week" (108). After Joaquin

dismisses the maid he worries whether she will tell everyone that he is mad. He

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asks Antonia if he is mad. She tells him not to get that way, but he insists that he
is mad and that she should have him put away. Joaquin's consciousness of his
weakness has reached a new height of desperation, but there would be even
more serious indications of his madness, including the attempted murder of Abel.

It becomes more and more clear that Joaquin is a perfect example of what
Anti-Climacus calls a self who in despair wills to be itself in defiance. Anti-
Climacus says of such a self, "Rebelling against all existence, it feels that it has
obtained evidence against it, against its goodness. The person in despair
believes that he himself is the evidence, and that is what he wants to be, and
therefore he wants to be himself, himself in his torment, in order to protest
against all existence with his torment" (73-74). And that is certainly how Joaquin
lives out his life. However, Joaquin also shows that he is ever so close to
salvation at his deathbed. Anti-Climacus says of the self who wills himself in
defiance that the person is afraid of eternity for a strange reason. He is afraid
that eternity "will separate him from his, demonically understood, infinite
superiority over other man, his justification, demonically understood, for being
what he is. [. . .] What demonic madness—the thought that most infuriates him is
that eternity could get the notion to deprive him of his misery" (72). To these
lengths, Joaquin does not go.

On his deathbed Joaquin is still wondering why he was made to be so evil.
"aOué hice para ser asi? LOué leche meme? LEra un bebedizo de odio? gHa
sido un bebedizo de sangre? aPor qué naci en tierra de odios? En tierra en que

el precepto parece ser: 'Odia a tu préjimo como a ti mismo.‘ ¢Porque he vivido

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odiandome?" (2: 758). ("Why was I made this way? What milk did I suck from
my mother's breast? Was it a potion of hate? Has it been a potion of blood?
Why was I born in the land of hate? In the land in which the main precept seems
to be, 'Hate your neighbor as you hate yourself.‘ Why have I lived hating
myself?") But then he asks for the child to be brought to him and he asks the
child's forgiveness. There are no more self-justifications about how the other
grandfather had stolen the boy's affection. There is just a request for
forgiveness. Then Joaquin says something remarkable to the assembled
company. He says that Antonia is the real victim and that she could not cure him
because he did not love her. If he had just been able to love her he might have
been saved. But Joaquin does not rail against eternity for taking away his ability
to hate. Rather, he welcomes death as a way in which the hate can stop. He
does not defiantly choose to hate into eternity, and that, perhaps, is his salvation.
I have claimed that these passages from Sickness Unto Death helped to
form the character of Joaquin in the mind of Unamuno. The efinidedes and
coincidencias, as Gemma Roberts calls them, are so striking that, as you are
reading Anti-Climacus' description of the self who in despair wills to be himself in
defiance, you believe that you are seeing Joaquin's story in outline form. But can
one claim that Unamuno had these passages in mind when he was writing Abel
Sénchez? There is no way to know that for certain, of course. Even if we could
ask Unamuno he might disavow any link just as he disavowed a link between
Abel senchez and Byron's Cain. But there are two passages which Unamuno

underlined in Sickness Unto Death which help to substantiate my claim that the

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book was formative in the creation of Joaquin. The first has to do with being able
to place Joaquin within the sphere of the religious. It says of the poet, "His
relation to the religious is that of an unhappy love, not in the strictest sense that
of a believer; he has only the first element of faith—despair—and within it an
intense longing for the religious" (78). As noted in Chapter One, Unamuno's
underscoring of text for the most part consisted of horizontal or vertical line in the
margins marking a sentence or a passage. This time, unusually, Unamuno
actually draws a line under the Danish words "hen her kun def Forsfe ef Troe:
Fortvivlelsen" 'he has only the first element of faith: despair." Unamuno
recognized despair as a first element of faith and embodied despair in the
character of Joaquin.

The second important passage that Unamuno underlined from Sickness
Unto Death has to do with the nature of Joaquin's weakness.

For what is offense? Offense is unhappy admiration. Thus it is
related to envy, but it is an envy that turns against the person
himself, is worse against oneself to an even higher degree. The
uncharitableness of the natural man cannot allow him the
extraordinary that God has intended for him; so he is offended.

The degree of offense depends on how passionate a man's
admiration is. The more prosaic people, lacking in imagination and
passion and thus not particularly given to admiration, are also
offended, but they limit themselves to saying: Such a thing I just

can't understand; I leave it alone. They are the skeptics. But the

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more passion and imagination a person has—consequently, the
closer he is in a certain sense (in possibility) to being able to
believe, MB, to humbling himself in adoration under the
extraordinary—the more passionate is his offense, which finally
cannot be satisfied with anything less than getting this rooted out,
annihilated, trampled into the dirt. (86)
There are two elements within this quote that are worthy of attention. The first is
its emphasis on passion. In order to even bring admiration to the level of envy,
one must have imagination and passion. The second is the indication once
again that the passionate one, the one who is most offended, is the one who Is
closest to being able to believe.

The offense being spoken of in the first paragraph of this quote is the
offense of Christianity. The next paragraph after these two that are underlined
shows the link between the offense and envy.

To understand offense, it is necessary to study human envy [. . .].
Envy is secret admiration. An admirer who feels that he cannot
become happy by abandoning himself to it chooses to be envious
of that which he admires. So he speaks another language wherein
that which he actually admires is a trifle, a rather stupid, insipid,
peculiar, and exaggerated thing. Admiration is happy self-

surrender; envy is unhappy self assertion.

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It is the same with offense, for that which between man and man
is admiration/envy is adoration/offense in the relationship between
God and men. (86)
Joaquin is a perfect embodiment of both these dichotomies. His passion has
turned his admiration for Abel into envy and that in turn is linked with his sense of
offense, of having been abandoned by God. The link between envy and offense
suggested by Anti-Climacus proved to be a fruitful image for Unamuno who
powerfully portrays both in his character Joaquin.

I have maintained that Augusto Pérez, Don Manuel Bueno and Joaquin
Monegro represent the esthetic, the ethical and the religious existence spheres
respectively. I have also said that Unamuno does not privilege one of the
existence spheres over the other but provides them all as possibilities for
authentic existence. Given the demonic nature of Joaquin, can it be that
Unamuno really proffers this protagonist as an example of authentic existence?
There is no question but that Unamuno's sympathies lie with Joaquin. In the
Prologue to the second edition he writes, "Y ahora, al releer por primera vez mi
Abel sanchez para corregir las pruebas de esta segunda—y espero que no
ultima edicién, he sentido Ia grandeza de la pasidn de mi Joaquin Monegro y
cuan superior es moralmente a todos los Abeles" (2: 686). ("And now upon
rereading for the first time my Abel senchez in order to correct the galleys of this
second, and I hope not the last, edition, I have felt the greatness of the passion
of my Joaquin Monegro and how superior he is morally to all of the Abels.")

Unamuno claims that Joaquin is morally superior to Abel, and that is also clear

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from the unfolding of the story. Abel's motivation for the art that he produces is
base—money—though he claims later that it is also his religion. Abel does not
love his wife but uses her as much as she uses him. He is unfaithful. He has no
interest in his son and doesn't even care enough about him to discipline him. But
in the quote cited above none of those things are mentioned. Rather, Unamuno
focuses on the moral superiority of Joaquin based on his passion. Abel is the
one who can be swayed to anyone's opinion as long as he remains the popular
one in the process. He refuses to take a position that will cause an argument.

He seems incapable of either love or hate. But Joaquin is passionate. It is
Joaquin's passion that leads him to envy so deeply, but it is his passion that also

leads him closer to truth and to belief.

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CONCLUSION

It is safe to say that questions about the substance, nature and functioning
of the self are still very much with us today. The novelist Walker Percy has
written a book about the self entitled Lost in the Cosmos to which he mockingly
appends the subtitle, The Last Self-Help Book. It is a compendium of alternative
ways of perceiving ourselves expressed through artfully contrived multiple—choice
quizzes. One of his first points is that our knowledge of ourselves is not like any
other knowledge that we have of our world (5-13). Kierkegaard and Unamuno
would agree, though they lived and wrote more than a half century apart and
though they never reached the "advanced" culture of the twenty first century.
Those still seeking answers to questions about the meaning of existence would
do well to look to both of these authors for their insights into the substance,
nature and functioning of the self.

In this dissertation I have read Unamuno's novels through a
Kierkegaardian lens. Of course, it is not the only way in which to read these
multi-voiced texts. However, I have shown that a Kierkegaardian reading is both
justifiable and profitable. We have seen that in evaluating the relationship
between Kierkegaard and Unamuno scholars have disagreed about the extent of
the influence of Kierkegaard on Unamuno and/or the unanimity in their views. I
have chosen to focus on the understanding of the self in these two authors as a
way to clarify the issues and problems involved in comparing them, but I have
also chosen the concept of the self because I believe it is central to the

authorship of both of these writers.

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The first problem that muSt be addressed when trying to compare the
thought of Kierkegaard and Unamuno is being clear about what Kierkegaardian
thought really is, as differentiated from the thought of his pseudonyms. The key
to understanding Kierkegaardian thought is understanding his concept of indirect
communication and his purpose in using the pseudonyms. Kierkegaard believed
that to communicate existential truth, a writer must be a midwife for that truth
through an artful, indirect communication that would allow for the uncertainties of
existence to be presented to the reader with sufficient distance to allow that
single individual to appropriate the existential truth into her life. The pseudonyms
provide Kierkegaard with the opportunity to say things that he would not say with
his own voice and provide the reader with the distance from the author that is
necessary for the appropriation of existential truth. However, Kierkegaard says
clearly in "A First and Last Declaration" and The Point of View for My Work as an
Author that the purpose for using the elaborate scheme of indirect
communication and the pseudonyms was to "reintroduce Christianity to
Christendom" and to dispel the illusion that all are Christians. The existential
truth Kierkegaard seeks to communicate is the truth of the Christian gospel.
When he sees that his project of indirect communication has been
misunderstood, he decides that from that point on in his authorship, he will be a
"direct witness" to the truth of Christianity.

Though Kierkegaard asked that the ideas and opinions of his pseudonyms
not be attributed to him, the scholarly community, including the commentators on

the relationship of Kierkegaard and Unamuno, has largely ignored his request

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until the last twenty-five years. We have seen the difficulties of Collado's
equation of the esthete A with Kierkegaard, Roberts equation of Judge William
with Kierkegaard, and Batchelor's and Palmer's equation of Johannes de Silentio
with Kierkegaard. That Unamuno read these pseudonymous writers and in some
cases incorporated their views is an important contribution to Unamuno
scholarship, but the critics' conclusions about whether or not Unamuno is in
agreement with Kierkegaard cannot be based on these pseudonymous writers.

We can reasonably hypothesize that Unamuno understood the concept of
indirect communication for the expression of existential truth based on the
evidence that he carefully read Concluding Unscientific Postscript, where
Johannes Climacus outlines the need for such a method. The heavy gloss of the
Danish words into Spanish and German, plus the extensive underscoring, show
that Unamuno was interested in the text. There are also a number of quotes
from Postscript throughout Unamuno's work. The hypothesis is further
strengthened by evidence that Unamuno practiced indirect communication by
distancing himself from his own text and thereby fulfilling the maieutic ideal of
being the midwife for the truth. The reader is free to make of his writings her own
novel and is not coerced in any way with dogmatism.

However, though Unamuno understood and practiced the indirect method
and the maieutic ideal as outlined by the pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, he
seems not to have read, and therefore not to have understood, Kierkegaard's
explanation of his use of the indirect method, i.e., "to reintroduce Christianity to

Christendom." It is seems highly probable from the complete lack of gloss in the

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Danish text that Unamuno stopped reading before he came to Kierkegaard's "A
First and Last Declaration" at the end of Postscript, so he would not have known
of Kierkegaard's request to carefully ascribe the views of his pseudonyms to
them and not to him. The same lack of gloss stands out by contrast in Volume
XIII where From the Papers of One Still Living and The Concept of Irony are fairly
heavily glossed while the newspapers articles in which Unamuno got bogged
down show a decreasing number of vocabulary words glossed and finally stop
before The Point of View for My Work as an Author. It is in the Point of View that
Kierkegaard specifically explains the need to dispel the illusion that all are
Christians with indirect communication and where he declares, so that there is no
misunderstanding, that from the first to the last he is a "religious author." If
Unamuno's declaration that Kierkegaard is his "spiritual brother" cannot be
construed as affirming Kierkegaard's singular task "to become a Christian" found
in the Point of View, is there another way in which the two authors can be seen to
hold similar views?

It is my contention that it is Kierkegaard's view of the self with which
Unamuno most resonated. We began the study of the self by differentiating
between two views of the self, the view of the self as substance and the view of
the self as an achievement. The view of the self as substance is that view which
perceives the self as a given, an entity which is determined at birth whether what
is given at birth Is construed as a material being, as a thinking being, or as a
being that is a combination of the material and spiritual. The view of the self as

achievement is that view which perceives the self as formed by the choices one

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makes and the status one acquires, for example, the status of self-understanding
as a prerequisite for personhood. We have seen that both Kierkegaard's and
Unamuno's fundamental view of the self is the latter type of view, the self as
achievement, but there are elements of the self as substance view as well.
Kierkegaard addresses the single individual and challenges her to see the self as
a task, a becoming that one chooses. Unamuno's view of the self is less clear,
but whether writing or speaking he says that he also addresses the individual
listener/reader. Unamuno sees the self as fragmented, internal and external
selves that are kept in constant tension through monodialogue with the goal of
keeping the contrarios of life in constant tension so that the wound of existence
can remain open. In both authors, there is an assumption that the individual is
free to choose, that there is something fundamental to personhood about self-
reflection and the ability to act based on self-reflection.

The goal of the becoming is different in the two authors, however. For
Kierkegaard, that task of selfhood is one that is accomplished before God. God
is the fundamental relation that both gives me the substance of what I am and
gives me the freedom to choose whether or not I will become the self He intends
for me to be. For Unamuno, the goal of the becoming is acquiring self-
consciousness that takes seriously the problem of immortality that the heart
desperately seeks and that reason says is impossible. The self-consciousness
deepens through the struggle between the fragmented selves and living

passionately, but there are no solutions to the problem of immortality. The two

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warring sides of the person must be kept in constant, creative tension. For
Unamuno, there is no single choice that a person has, but many.

I believe that the Kierkegaardian existence spheres—the esthetic, the
ethical and the religious—represented rich possibilities for authentic existence for
Unamuno. They are explained in depth by Johannes Climacus in Concluding
Unscientific Postscript but come to life in other of the pseudonymous works as
characters embody the different modes of existence. A, Don Juan, Johannes the
Seducer, and the speakers at the banquet in "In Vito Veritas" all live the life of the
esthete. The esthetic is where most people begin, in immediacy, in desiring
passionately and fulfilling those desires without regard to other people or other
commitments. There is a range in the esthetic that goes from the immediate to
the highly reflective but the esthete always seeks immediate satisfaction.

Judge William is the ethical, married man who tries to persuade A to leave
the esthetic life because it depends on extemals. The Judge enjoins A to choose
himself by choosing the ethical, making commitments such as the commitment of
marriage and fulfilling those commitments and duties as the only meaningful way
in which to live. Abraham provides the model for the person of faith who has
gone beyond the ethical. Abraham does something that no man could do by
himself. He exemplifies the utter dependence on God for faith that is the
characteristic of Religiousness B. Although there are no conclusions drawn
about the spheres in the pseudonymous works, Kierkegaard sees the spheres as
progressing toward the goal of becoming a self before God. The progression is

by no means natural or inevitable. At every step there is a choice, a decision that

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needs to be made. Unamuno finds in the spheres a wealth of possibilities for
existence. For Unamuno, there is no hierarchy of values represented in the
spheres, because in each of them life can be lived passionately, struggling with
the problem of immortality.

What we see in the protagonists of Niebla, San Manuel Bueno, martir, and
Abel Sénchez are three persons doing just that, living life passionately while
struggling with the problem of immortality. They each are living out one of the
Kierkegaardian existence spheres, but they are all agents of their own authentic
existence. Augusto Perez, the protagonist of Niebla, is seen as living in a pre-
esthetic state at the beginning of the novel. He is the somnambulant transient
who hasn't even acquired enough self to have desires that are worthy of
satisfying. For Unamuno, Augusto's move into the esthetic life is a choice,
though Kierkegaard would not see it that way. Once Augusto is smitten with
Eugenia, his life acquires passion. He believes that he wants to marry, but he is
distracted by multiple love interests. He suffers at the hand of Eugenia and
awakens to his own mortality as a result, but he remains within the esthetic. His
death is his means of affirming himself, that he has a choice in existing or not.
Unamuno's use of various dramatized authors are a means to bring to light
multiple, conflicting views of existence which the reader can then evaluate for
herself. In so doing, Unamuno practices the art of indirect communication and
maintains the maieutic ideal.

Don Manuel, the protagonist of San Manuel Bueno, martir, is seen as

living in the ethical sphere, though also still struggling with the problem of

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immortality. Don Manuel embodies the ethical in his dedication to his parish,
healing the sick, reconciling husband and wife, errant child and parents, and
helping his parishioners to die well. He is a man of commitments, commitments
which define meaningful existence. The problem with interpreting the novel has
been in Don Manuel's apparent lack of faith in the beliefs that he promotes for his
parishioners. This is less of a problem if we understand the ethical sphere in the
Kierkegaardian sense where we can see that the ethical life is not equal to the
religious life, i.e., a person can live out the ethical life without having faith. But
the conflicted nature of the protagonist and the lack of conclusion in the novel are
more ways in which Unamuno uses indirect communication both to confront the
reader with existential possibilities and also to maintain authorial distance to
allow the reader to make her own judgments.

Joaquin Monegro, the protagonist of Abel Sénchez, is seen as the
character closest to being able to live within the religious sphere, closest to a
relationship with God because of the depth of his struggle with the weakness of
envy. The weakness of envy is seen as a mode of despair, the despair
described in Sickness Unto Death as the despair not to be oneself before God.
With the intensification of inclosing reserve as Joaquin hides his weakness from
others and cultivates it, he progresses to the ultimate despair, the despair to be
oneself in defiance of God wants one to be. Even in that ultimate despair
Joaquin has the best possibility of breaking through to faith because there is a
greater consciousness of self. Whether or not Joaquin on his deathbed truly

asks for forgiveness or feels forgiven is again ambiguous. Unamuno's focus is

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on Joaquin's passion and on his struggle with God as a result of that passion, not
on any facile resolution.

I have read Unamuno's novels through a clear Kierkegaardian lens that is
not distorted by the problem of the pseudonymous character of Kierkegaard's
authorship. That is, I have plainly differentiated between the voices of the
pseudonyms and the voice of Kierkegaard. There is no doubt that Unamuno
gained much from his close reading of the texts, but it should be just as clear that
he absorbed and appropriated more from the pseudonymous writings than from
Kierkegaard's Christian writings, the ones to which Kierkegaard affixed his own
name. Unamuno's understanding of indirect communication, the existence
spheres and the maieutic ideal came from the pseudonymous texts. All of these
Unamuno skillfully used to communicate his own vision of authentic existence for
the freely chosen self. However, we have seen that Unamuno's ultimate vision
for authentic existence is radically different from Kierkegaard's.

The problem with claiming "spiritual brotherhood" for these two authors is
that with that term one would expect unanimity in ultimate values. It is impossible
to know what was in the mind of Unamuno when he claimed "spiritual
brotherhood" with Kierkegaard, but as we have seen, Unamuno seemed to be
unaware of Kierkegaard's (though not his pseudonyms') values. Kierkegaard
saw his entire authorship as an attempt to answer the question, "How do I
become a Christian?" Kierkegaard believed in the singular truth of Christianity.
While sensitive to Unamuno's desire for his thought not to be regularized, one

might say that his entire authorship was an attempt to answer the question,

191

"What does it mean to exist?" The answers that Unamuno gives to that question
are multiple and contradictory because in his view, that is the essence of
existence—contradiction. If there is one value to which he holds without
contradiction it is that of living passionately, always struggling with the problem of
immortality. We have seen his novels as portrayals of just such passionate living
within the context of the Kierkegaardian existence spheres. The existence
spheres enrich Unamuno's possibilities for authentic existence, but none of them

has an ultimate value over the other.

192

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