Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 345 The book offers a well-annotated bibliography of Berdyaev's writings. We don't have to read all of the awesome collection to feel we have some adequate understanding of the man and his message. DONALDH. RHOADPS The School of Theology at Claremont, California Unamuno: Creator and Creation. Edited by Jos6 Barcia and M. A. Zeitlin. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1967. Pp. xii+253. $6.50) Unamuno: An Existential View o/Sell and Society. By Paul Ilie. (Madison, Milwaukee, and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967. Pp. xi+299. $7.50/60s.) Professor Am6rico Castro, the famed Spanish hispanist, is not the only one who has wondered of late "whether Unamuno is not closer today to our human worries than he was fifty years ago when many regarded him as an intellectual eccentric, primarily interested in confusing his readers with paradoxes and contradictions." For this reason the two recent books under review, Unamuno: Creator and Creation, and Unamuno: An Existential View of Sell and Society, are a welcome addition to the growing interest in the thought of this Spanish Basque who fancied himself the embodiment of the very personage of Spain, a sort of Don Quixote of the intellectual world. Unamuno: Creator and Creation contains, for the most part, the lectures delivered at the University of California (Los Angeles) symposium on November 6, 1964 as part of the program commemorating the centennial of the birth of Miguel de Unamuno. Introduced by the opening remarks of the chairman, Professor Castro, the essays may be grouped as follows: those on Unamuno the person (by Jos6 Rubia Barcia and Walter Starkie) and the thinker (by Alfred Stern, Carlos Blanco-Aguinaga and Paul Ilie); those dealing with Unamuno the novelist (by Leon Livingstone and Alexander A. Parker) and the playwright (by Ricardo Gullon); those comparing him with other writers (with Clarfn by Franco Meregalli and with Cervantes by C. P. Otero) and evaluating him as literary critic (by Anibal S~inchez-Ruele0 and as politician (by Stanley Payne); and, finally, an essay on his significance to our times (by Jos6 Ferrater Mora). Students of Unamuno will recognize that some of the contributors bring with them impressive credentials of previous work on the personage under consideration. Due to limited space and the nature of this Journal, this review will consider only those essays most directly bearing on Unamuno's philosophic thought. These, of necessity, must include the essays of a biographical nature for, as Professor BlancoAguinaga reminds us: "With Unamuno, as with Kierkegaard, biography enters the realm of thought and makes itself into, as he put it, the object and supreme subject of all philosophizing" (p. 51). Both Professor Rubia Barcia's essay on "Unamuno the Man" and Professor Starkie's "Epilogue" contain recollections of their personal contacts with the Spanish thinker. (Professor Starkie's brief remarks seem to be extracts from his longer essay on his memories of his friendship with Unamuno, an essay that constitutes the "Introduction" to Our Lord Don Quixote, the vohime devoted to a new English translation of Unamuno's Life of Don Quixote and Sancho and related essays and which is the third volume in a projected nine volume series on the Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno being published as the Bollingen Series LXXXV by Princeton University Press.) From these recollections it is seen that the twin motivations , perhaps even obsessions, of the life of Unamuno were a deep terror at the prospect of death as nothingness and a tremendous thirst for immortality. These feelings 346 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY are expressed by the Spanish "creator" through the actors of his literary "creations," which abound with his own human experiences and anguishes reworked into literature. We may rightly inquire, as does Professor Ferrater Mora, whether Unamuno's personality and the vision of the world emanating therefrom are antiquated today. Unfortunately , and despite his contribution's excellence, Professor Ferrater Morn does not answer his query. I felt especially disappointed because I approached his "Unamuno Today" hoping to find the essay to be the missing final chapter in Unamuno's presentday influence and relevancy that should have been included by Juli~in Marias in his...