ABSTRACT
The Wittgensteinian title of this chapter is perhaps over-ambitious. Unamuno was not an analytic philosopher, his temperament being wholly unsuitable to such a profession. He was well aware of his limitations for sustained systematic deliberation, but this did not deter him from tackling important areas of human thought in his own inimitable way, questioning, challenging, overturning conventional ways of thinking and valuing the intuitive and heartfelt over the rationalistic and discursive. Unamuno’s was always a philosophy in the making, never a completed system. To systematize meant to impose an artificial order which risked negating the inherent contradictions in man. Reason is a tool of our being, and behind it lies a driving force that is non-rational and of which we have little comprehension. Even the rationalist pursuits of analytic philosophers are sustained by something in their nature that is outside reason:
La filosofía es un producto humano de cada filósofo, y cada filósofo es un hombre de carne y hueso que se dirige a otros hombres de carne y hueso como él. Y haga lo que quiera, filosofa, no con la razón sólo, sino con la voluntad, con el sentimiento, con la carne y con los huesos, con el alma toda y con todo el cuerpo. Filosofa el hombre.
(DSTV, X, 297)