Don Miguel, filozof melancholii. O dwóch dziennikach Unamuna

The main purpose of this essay is to present the thought of Miguel de Unamuno as the philosophy of melancholy. "Melancholy" is here considered as a recognition of an essential lack of reality, which determines all the Unamuno's philosophy and manifests itself especially in his diaries: Intimate Diary and Manual de quijotismo, also called an "ex-timate diary". His first diary originates from the experience of nothingness, the loss of any positive source of the reality and meaning. If the melancholy is a kind of condition, in which both, the meaning of the world and the substance of the self, are indefinable, Unamuno's Intimate Diary is its most tragic expression. In this period Unamuno described (and experimented) a crisis of the self, divided into the "social" and "eternal self. The first one is the reflected self, constituted by the social relations and deprived of authenticity and substantiality. It is the domain of the theatrical tricks, opposed to the human essence, the "eternal self. Considering that it resulted impossible to establish such a positive foundation of individual identity in a rational way, Unamuno defined it in the categories of the will and faith, expressed in his sentence: "I believe in myself. Manual de quijotismo can be treated as a consistent continuation of the philosophy of melancholy, which means that Unamuno resigns a claim to find an internal essence (substance) of the self and affirms a melancholic, dispersed subjectivity. The human being is an actor - his existence depends on the representations that have no other source than the subjective will or desire, transformed into an ideal, and the external forms or arguments that are to be repeated. The lack of the substantiality is no more the cause of the despair but an impulse to the redefinition of the human existence taken as the role playing or projecting, of "being out" as the only way to "being in".