Unamuno's Theory of the Novel

C. A. Longhurst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351538206
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) is widely regarded as Spain's greatest and most controversial writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Professor of Greek, and later Rector, at the University of Salamanca, and a figure with a noted public profile in his day, he wrote a large number of philosophical, political and philological essays, as well as poems, plays and short stories, but it is his highly idiosyncratic novels, for which he coined the word nivola, that have attracted the greatest critical attention. Niebla (Mist, 1914) has become one of the most studied works of Spanish literature, such is the enduring fascination which it has provoked. In this study, C. A. Longhurst, a distinguished Unamuno scholar, sets out to show that behind Unamuno's fictional experiments there lies a coherent and quasi-philosophical concept of the novelesque genre and indeed of writing itself. Ideas about freedom, identity, finality, mutuality and community are closely intertwined with ideas on writing and reading and give rise to a new and highly personal way of conceiving fiction.

CHAPTER 1
❖
Physical and Mental Worlds

Body and Mind

With typically playful but pointed provocativeness Unamuno reversed the Cartesian ‘cogito, ergo sum’. One doubts, however, if Descartes would have seriously objected to Unamuno’s ‘homo sum, ergo cogito’ (DSTV, X, 519), since such a reversal does not negate the Frenchman’s contention that being fully aware of his own thinking provided the certainty that he needed in order to convince himself of his existence. Whether such conviction comes from awareness of our own thought processes or simply from an in-built instinct makes little practical difference, and in some respects Unamuno remains a Cartesian. When in ‘Civilización y cultura’ he writes ‘hay un ambiente exterior, el mundo de los fenómenos sensibles, que nos envuelve y sustenta, y un ambiente interior, nuestra propia conciencia, el mundo de nuestras ideas, imaginaciones, deseos y sentimientos’ (VIII, 381), he is making essentially the same well-known distinction that Descartes made between res extensa and res cogitans, even if for Unamuno the dividing line between the two is rather more blurred than for the Frenchman. For Descartes, the mind (or soul), res cogitans, is a thinking entity, and a thinking entity is its thoughts and has no existence separate from those thoughts. The body, res extensa, is a physical entity, and as such it must have dimension (or measurement, or shape or volume), whereas thoughts do not have dimension. Descartes’s distinction can scarcely be more commonsensical, whatever explanation we then go on to favour for the appearance of mind rather than accept his circumstantially ‘safe’ explanation that God allows it to be self-standing and perduring. But as we shall see, Unamuno’s apparent rejection of Descartes is not based on his having found a better explanation for the human person as a thinking being.

Of Unamuno’s reversal of Descartes Pedro Cerezo Galán has written: ‘Unamuno ha emprendido su propio camino de pensamiento, lo que le permite enfrentarse a Descartes con una agudeza y originalidad incontestables’ (Cerezo Galán, 1996: 392). But there is a flaw in Unamuno’s confrontation with Descartes which Cerezo Galán fails to mention, namely that the phrase ‘homo sum’ already contains the concept ‘man’. In order to say ‘I am a man, therefore I think’, one has to think of the idea of man. The problem with Unamuno’s approach is that he insists on giving priority to sentir over pensar, or indeed in employing the former verb where the latter would have been employed more conventionally. In practice the difference between saying ‘I feel myself to exist’ and ‘I think of myself as existing’ is nil, since both expressions reduce to self-awareness. If properly understood, the sense of the Cartesian cogito (‘I do not doubt that I am thinking, and if I am thinking I must be alive’) is simply incontestable, and Unamuno’s and later Heidegger’s strictures on Descartes smack of self-serving sophistry.¹ Even worse, when Unamuno insists that ‘pensamos porque vivimos’ (DSTV, X, 480), he is descending to the level of platitude. Such, however, is his distrust of the unbridled supremacy of reason that he misses no opportunity to remind his readers that they are sentient beings and not merely rational ones. Unamuno’s insistence that thinking cannot be abstracted from our total human circumstance is of course a perfectly respectable stance to take, since our intellectual faculty is but a part of our make-up alongside our many other faculties, sensory, motor, emotive, imaginative, or ethical. Thus while Descartes is comfortable in separating his self from his body (the body as res extensa is not part of the self but is possessed and moved by it), Unamuno, like Schopenhauer, is not prepared to make such a distinction: ‘Es mi cuerpo vivo el que piensa, quiere y siente’ (DSTV, X, 342). This is another apparent reversal of Descartes: not a case of my immaterial mind or self possessing a body but of my material body possessing an immaterial self as its centre of operations, something which brings Unamuno right up into orthodox twentieth-century views of the mind–body problem. While this view clearly implies that human existence cannot be considered apart from the body, and in this sense is rather different from Descartes’s theistic explanation of the reality of things, nevertheless Cartesian dualism is still present in the mind–matter or mind–body distinction.²

Reversing the Cartesian cogito, as most of the existentialists do, does not reverse its implications. ‘I am, therefore I think’ is as much an epistemological statement as an ontological one. I am = I know that I am. The starting point may be different, since for both Unamuno and the existentialists existence is prior to thinking. But as Wittgenstein reasoned in the Tractatus, if meaning is to exist, logic must precede experience. Since existence is experience, it follows that logic, our disposition to reasoning, must precede existence. What appears to characterize human beings is precisely a heightened awareness of existing. Being and thinking are so closely intertwined that in practice reversing Descartes’s reasoning is little more than a tactical shift. The only useful distinction is that in Descartes the self is seen purely as subject and in existentialism the self is seen as agent. But whether this overcomes the Cartesian subject–object dualism, as Heidegger and some others have claimed, appears doubtful. Even if man is seen as a psychosomatic unity, the mind–body problem remains, if not as a dualism then at least as a problem of consciousness, because there is no adequate explanation of consciousness. A body remains a body without consciousness, so we cannot simply equate the two.³ And this is so despite the existentialists’ attempt to subsume all categories including epistemological ones under the single status of ‘being-in-the-world’. If we cannot account for consciousness, we cannot account for the mind as we can account for the body. Nevertheless we can observe a significant difference of emphasis between a Cartesian and an existentialist approach, seen at its clearest perhaps in the treatment of the body. To exist is not simply to have a body but to be a body. When you do not entertain a dualist stance, argues Unamuno, you do not even need a name to refer to the body: ‘Tendrá uno que hablar de su cabeza, de sus brazos, de sus manos, de su pecho, de su vientre, de sus pies, de su corazón, de su hígado, de su estómago, y así; pero su cuerpo es él mismo, mi cuerpo soy yo’ (Alrededor, 57).⁴

Does this make of Unamuno some kind of physical monist? In fact, despite saying that ‘I am my body and its states of consciousness’, Unamuno was no physicalist in the sense that mental states are seen as simple attributes of a physical entity. For Unamuno the self (strictly the ‘yo’ or my own self-awareness) is not a physical entity even though it is wholly dependent on such an entity to manifest itself. What Unamuno posits is a dependence rather than a congruence: the mind can only exist as long as the body exists; there is no disembodied ‘I’. But if Unamuno does not take up the Cartesian position whereby body and mind are completely different things, neither does he take up the diametrically opposed position of modern neuroscience that holds mind to be no more than the activity of brain cells. If the ‘I’ is the brain, then the brain is capable of a wide range of states, a happy state, a fearful state, an aggressive state, a relaxed state, a distressed state, and so forth, and it is also capable of states of belief, of expectation, of regret, and so on. How can a physical entity experience and sustain such states? It simply is not known. Moreover the brain can recognize what sort of state it is in, which makes the proposition brain = self even more of a conundrum. The mental is irredeemably subjective; but we cannot explain how subjectivity can inhere in a purely material object. The physiological explanation of the self is for Unamuno no more acceptable than Descartes’s view of it. While Unamuno does not accept the free-floating Cartesian ego, neither does he reduce the self to the brain, because such a reduction would be entirely materialist, and what interests Unamuno in human beings are their aspirations and hopes. Could he, then, be occupying that position later to be described as ‘neutral monism’, one that rejects dualism, materialism, and idealism preferring to see the mental as a transphysical brain state?

Again there is no conclusive evidence that Unamuno subscribed to this kind of monism. He dismisses what he pejoratively labels ‘engañifas de monismo’ (DSTV, X, 312), but this only really refers to monism as the doctrine of the indestructibility of matter taken as a pointer to personal perdurance. Unamuno, like St Thomas Aquinas, cannot conceive of existing without a body, so being transformed into some other kind of substance such as divine energy is no consolation. If that makes him a materialist, he says, so be it. But it is entirely a materialism based on the hope that God will conserve the reality and integrity of his self-consciousness, since personal survival without self-consciousness is meaningless. It seems likely that Unamuno’s anti-Cartesianism developed under the influence of Spinoza, whom he mentions in passing on a number of occasions. At times he does seem to blur the distinction between mind and matter, as when he says ‘Nuestro espíritu es también alguna especie de materia o no es nada’ (DSTV, X, 312), which is strongly reminiscent of Spinoza’s ‘the mind and the body are one and the same individual, which is conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension’ (Spinoza, 1996: 48). Spinoza rejected Descartes’s two distinct and separate kinds of substance (res cogitans and res extensa, though it would be more correct to say that Descartes was referring to properties rather than what we understand by substances) in favour of two ways of apprehending the objects of nature, and Unamuno’s position is very close to this. In the sentence just quoted, the phrase ‘some kind of matter’ is unhelpfully vague, but the statement does seem to suggest that there are not two fundamental ingredients to existence but only one. On the face of it, therefore, Unamuno may be reverting to Spinozism and proposing the ultimate identity of mind and matter, just as in Spinoza thought and extension are two different expressions of a single being or nature, a view that is a clear forerunner of the neutral monism favoured by modern philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Thomas Nagel, namely that mind cannot be reduced to matter nor matter to mind but that both are the result of a common, as yet unidentified, agent. Unamuno appears to agree with Spinoza that body and soul are the same thing looked at from different perspectives. Unlike Spinoza, however, he does not say that mind and matter are different modes of manifestation of an underlying reality, call it God or Nature. What he does say is that they are not separable; but not how one gives rise to the other or a third to both.

In Unamuno, then, as in philosophy and psychology at large, the perennial problem of consciousness essential to the concept of mind remains prominent and unresolved. Consciousness does not fit in comfortably within a physical world, despite being an essential aspect of our existence. Until we understand what it is or how it comes about we will be unable to solve the mind–body conundrum or provide a satisfactory alternative to Cartesianism. One wonders what Unamuno would have made of later twentieth-century materialist theories of the mind which either identify a mental state with a neural state (type-identity theory), or even more radically discard so-called mental events, beliefs, desires, anxieties, etc., as nonsense (eliminativism). At any rate we can safely say that Unamuno was no epiphenomenalist: for him mental events were certainly produced via a bodily entity, but belonged to a self-conscious entity capable of exercising control over the body.⁵

It is possible that Unamuno’s concept of mind was to a degree influenced by Plato, familiar as he necessarily was with this classical thinker through his professorship of Greek at the University of Salamanca. We need to remember Plato’s well-known distinction between desire and reason. The mind, though usually moved by rational thought, can overcome the desires of the body if it sees fit to do so without need of a rational or known motivation for so doing. It is free to act of its own accord. In the Theaetetus Plato presents Socrates arguing that the mind, far from being subservient to the body, has the capacity to follow its own path. The sensory perceptions that we receive through our body and the knowledge or judgments that occur in our mind need have no connection (Plato, 1997: 182, 203–07). The mind can consider aspects which do not come to us through the senses. So it can work in tandem with the body or independently of it, discovering things in which the body has no interest. This was a point grasped by Descartes and developed into a full-blown distinction between our bodily self and our thinking self. In Descartes a person is therefore a result of an interaction between a material entity and a non-material entity, though the nature of this interaction is not really explained. In Unamuno, however, a person is a material substance capable of non-material states, of which he consistently emphasized querer, amar, sentir, and their corresponding nouns voluntad, amor, and sentimiento. These were for Unamuno transcendental states that go beyond bodily pains, pleasures, and appetites. Among his favourite words are alma, espíritu, and verdad (the last not with a logical but with a moral sense, having more to do with sincerity than with logic), words which he used (and abused) not just when discussing religious matters, but just as often when discussing historical phenomena, thereby revealing an aspiration to penetrate the phenomenological veil. Where Unamuno really does differ from Descartes is in not accepting the latter’s view that one’s self is revealed by introspection. Too much introspection, according to Unamuno, reveals precisely nothing. We do not have an objective view of our own selves. ‘I’ appears to be a form of identity as are ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘she’, or ‘they’. What we can attach to this ‘I’ by way of characterization comes not from within but from what we observe outside of us. The reason why Unamuno does not see himself as a Cartesian is that he believes the ‘I’ to arise from a reciprocal I–You system. In Descartes the ‘I’ is self-standing; in Unamuno the ‘I’ exists in relation to the ‘You’. By recognizing that others are aware of me I become aware of myself, as well as contributing to others’ awareness of themselves. Naturally this mutual reinforcement requires that there be a strong mind–body association, since what others see in me and what I see in others is first of all a body, and in that body we recognize a state of consciousness. An identity is thus a communal, not simply an individual, phenomenon. ‘Yo y el mundo nos hacemos mutuamente’ (VII, 381) is one of the key statements that Unamuno several times made in his essays. There is no clear dividing line between the inner and outer worlds. Each is a product of the other.

The inner world, then, is in part produced by the outer world; but that outer world is of course composed of other people, who will have their own inner worlds. Unamuno appears to be a materialist and an idealist all at the same time, tending towards one or the other depending on his particular comments. His attempt to source the ‘I’ in either the mental or the physical realms is inconclusive. What he is left with is an inter-subjective relationship in which identity or self is made up of an I-in-you or mirror-phenomenon, my ‘I’ being founded on my reaction to others’ views of me. We do not grasp our nature a priori, but only as part of a network. But this, as we shall see, is not without its problems.

In part at least, Unamuno’s uncertain position between dualism and monism, and between materialism and idealism, is due to his overriding interest in personality, in what makes us what we are or the way we are, and the idea of person is inextricably connected to the question of mind and cannot simply be a matter of physiology. It is also a matter of judgment. It was Schopenhauer who pointed out (in his Essay on the Freedom of the Will) that we tend to judge persons by what they are rather than by what they do: ‘The deed together with the motive is regarded here merely as evidence of the character of the doer; it is looked upon as a sure symptom of the character by which the latter is established irrevocably and for all time’ (Schopenhauer, 1999: 94). We judge a person by his or her actions in the broadest sense because to these actions, comportment, or attitudes, we ascribe intentions. The problem now becomes how to reconcile intentions with the physical, since the intentional state does not readily appear to be attached to material states, indeed can arise from false, therefore non-factual, assumptions. The concept of pers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• A Note on the Editions Used
• Introduction Unamuno’s Ideas on the Novel
• 1 Physical and Mental Worlds
• 2 The Author
• 3 The Word
• 4 The Reader
• 5 The Person
• 6 The Double
• 7 Philosophical Investigations
• Conclusion: A Theory of the Novel?
• Select Bibliography
• Onomastic Index
• Subject Index