The Existentialist Dimension of the Philosophy of the Spanish Language

Works by a plethora of 20 th -century Spanish thinkers, such as Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, and Salvador de Madariaga, have played an important role in the history of world philosophy. Philosophical thought in Spain has always been contemplative, characterized by polemical sharpness of judgment and a special rhetorical style. Spanish philosophers did not propose any doctrine as dogma, nor did they seek to create schools; still, their concepts had a holistic approach to the evaluation of phenomena, which is now commonly referred to as interdisciplinarity. Their style of philosophical thinking bore the hallmarks of psychological, sociological, and hermeneutic analysis when it comes to revealing the existential essence of events. This style was marked by a philological depth of understanding of the relationship between language and national consciousness. The Spanish fully inherited the interest in language and speech, which were considered a form of art in antiquity, and lent new perspectives on language in the first editions of Spanish grammar published in late 15 th century (the first Spanish grammar was published by Antonio de Nebrija in 1492). Speech as an art and a reflection of the national peculiarities of a people’s life, its instinct (intuition) are ideas in the works of the 16 th -century Spanish humanists Juan Luis Vives and Juan de Valdés that were centuries ahead of the European linguistic thought. Language philosophy in Spain in the 19 th century developed in line with German idealism, which had the strongest influence on Spanish philosophy in general. The philosophical thought concerning language acquired a new and truly original dimension in the works of Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset, as it gained an ethnopsychological element and took on an existentialist approach to the description of the facts of language and speech production. The views of these philosophers on language manifested themselves in their art as well. The aim of this study is to show how the existentialist dimension of the philosophical thought of Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, and Salvador de Madariaga helped to reveal the profound mechanisms of speech production, determined the dominant features of national linguistic consciousness, and demonstrated the interdependence of speech behavior and national character. The author uses metalinguistic, psycholinguistic, and ethnosociological methods in the analysis and interpretation of works by these authors.