What is man? Unamuno, Life 1.1
The
first modern author I will translate here is
Miguel de Unamuno,
a Spanish philosopher from the turn of the twentieth century
(†).
This
is the beginning of one of his best essays, Life
in the Tragic Sense (Del
sentimiento
trágico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos,
published 1913). You can listen to me read it <here>.
Homo
sum: nihil humani a me alienum puto,
dijo el cómico latino. Y yo diría más bien, nullum
hominem a me alienum puto; soy
hombre, a ningún otro hombre estimo extraño. Porque el adjetivo
humanus me es tan
sospechoso como su sustantivo abstracto humanitas,
la humanidad. Ni lo humano ni la humanidad, ni el adjetivo simple, ni
el sustantivado, sino el sustantivo concreto: el hombre. El hombre de
carne y hueso, el que nace, sufre y muere--sobre todo muere--, el que
come y bebe y juega y duerme y piensa y quiere, el hombre que se ve y
a quien se oye, el hermano, el verdadero hermano.
"I
am human: I deem nothing human strange to me," said the Latin comic
(‡). I would rather say, "I deem no human being strange to me." I am a human being, so I judge no other human being strange. On its
own, the adjective human is as suspect to me as the abstract
substantive humanity. I do not trust what is human, nor what
they call humanity—neither the simple adjective, nor the adjective
rendered as a noun. Instead I want a concrete noun: human being,
or man. A man
of flesh and bone, who is born, suffers, and dies—the dying is
very important. A man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and
thinks and loves. A man who is seen and heard. A brother, a real
brother.
---
(†)
Miguel
de Unamuno y Jugo was
born to a Basque family in 1864, in Bilbao, and grew up to become a
professor of Greek and a
prolific author in the Generation
of 98, which sought to reimagine Spanish culture in light of
modernity. His
political position led to repeated conflict with authorities. Primo
de Rivera exiled him from the University of Salamanca to
Fuerteventura in 1924. When Rivera's government fell in 1930, Unamuno
returned to Salamanca, only to die there under house arrest in 1936,
after a
famous confrontation with the fascist
general José
Millán-Astray y Terreros.
Between
Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Unamuno, I am spending a lot of time
thinking with Iberians these days.
(‡)
Unamuno refers to Terence, i.e. Publius Terentius Afer (floruit
2nd century BCE). The quotation is from the comedy Heautontimoroumenos,
line 25.