Communication as a Dialectical Engagement with Becoming and the Last Lesson of Don Miguel de Unamuno

Abstract

The present essay includes the only extant translation of a famous address given by Don Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, at the University of Salamanca’s annual, course-launching ritual. Given that the event’s festivities would include his formal resignation from the school’s rectorship on that day, followed by his honorary appointment as Lifetime Rector, Unamuno composed his speech to sum up his soul’s literary journey through this world. In it, the scholar and poet effectively renders his chosen life as a rhetorical vocation— consequently, he makes claims such as “man is the animal that speaks,” (a claim that resonates with Kenneth Burke) and “the spoken word is action” (a claim which is at the heart of a 100-year tradition in speech act theory). This being so, scholars of communication might be stimulated by his ideas and influenced by his relevance to rhetoric and communication. A prefatory essay, “Communication as a Dialectical Engagement with Becoming” is provided by the translator along with a copy-corrected version of the open-source Spanish original of the Unamuno translation in an Appendix.