The phrase became controversial through the writings of
José Ortega y Gasset, who between 1906 and at least 1912 discussed the issue of the "Europeanization of Spain or the Spanishization of Europe". In this context he gave the idea an increasingly polemical interpretation, describing what he called the "Africanist deviation of the professor and Salamancan
morabite", and concluding with the accusation that "Don Miguel de Unamuno, energetic Spaniard, has failed the truth". For Unamuno – who in his intellectual maturity reacted against his earlier
positivism – modern "European scientific orthodoxy" and what he called a "scientific inquisition" were incompatible with what he described as "Spanish science", which he associated with mysticism and idealism. He wrote that it was preferable to be a religious ancient African than a scientific modern European. "Science removes wisdom from man... the object of science is life and the object of wisdom is death." The phrase is given a distinct, though related, meaning in a letter from Unamuno to Ortega dated 30 May 1906. The expression appeared again in July of the same year in
El pórtico del templo, an article written in the form of a dialogue between two characters: Ortega later declared that he intended to launch a polemic against what he saw as Unamuno's "Africanist deviation". Years later, in 1911, speaking over the tomb of
Joaquín Costa, Unamuno argued that the regeneracionist leader had not been a Europeanizer but rather a "great African", or "Celtiberian", whose followers placed him under the banner of Europeanization while merely popularizing the term. In the epilogue to
The Tragic Sense of Life in Man and in Peoples (1912), Unamuno wrote: To support this idea, he cited
Joseph de Maistre (in a letter to a Russian minister): He then continued with a challenge: In the final lines of the epilogue he referred directly to Ortega's campaign in favor of Europeanization: The Unamunonian
Quixotism, assumed by Unamuno himself comparing his polemist with the Bachellor Sansón Carrasco, other of the permanent themes of his literary production, and like the science and progress, confluent in his conception of
Ser de España. ==See also==