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Thinkers

Miguel de Unamuno

Existentialist · Europe · 1864 to 1936

Spanish writer and rector who wrote of the hunger of real people for life beyond death, though reason cannot promise it.

What it is

Miguel de Unamuno (1864 to 1936) was a Spanish writer and thinker. He was born in Bilbao, in the Basque Country, became a professor of Greek at the University of Salamanca and served as its rector. He wrote essays, novels and poems, and is often counted among the early existentialists.

His central subject is the wish of real people to go on living after death, and the tension between that wish and what reason can offer.

The main ideas

  • The tragic sense of life. The title of his main essay names his theme: the feeling of life as tragic, set against the wish to live on.
  • Hunger for immortality. The longing to live on after death is at the heart of his view of life.
  • Faith and reason. He wrote about faith and reason, and about the tension between what a person longs for and what reason can promise.

What it looks like in practice

Picture someone who lies awake at night with the thought that one day they will no longer exist. A tidy argument that death is nothing does not help. Unamuno would treat the unease as a real part of being human and the question as worth taking seriously. This is an illustration of the idea, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • The Tragic Sense of Life (1913) is his main philosophical essay.
  • Niebla (Mist, 1914) is one of his key novels.
  • Abel Sanchez (1917) is a modern retelling of the story of Cain and Abel.
  • San Manuel Bueno, martir is one of his later works of fiction.
  • 1924 is the year General Primo de Rivera removed him from his posts and sent him into exile, after he criticised the dictatorship. He returned when it fell.
  • 1936 is the year he was removed as rector a second time, after speaking against Franco's side. He was kept under house arrest and died on the last day of the year.

Questions and criticism

  • Feeling or argument. His case rests on what people feel, and it is fair to ask how far a feeling can count as a reason.
  • Where he stood. He opposed a dictator in 1924 and, in 1936, a general's side in a civil war, and it is fair to ask what these acts say about his thinking.
  • His death. Accounts of how he died differ.

Close neighbours

The pages on Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre show other thinkers of the existentialist family to which he is often said to belong.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Søren Kierkegaard · He learned Danish to read Kierkegaard and took up his stress on the single person facing faith and doubt.

Other Existentialist thinkers

Sources we used

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