¡Que inventen ellos! (English: Let them invent!) is a lapidary quote by Miguel de Unamuno expressing disdain and even contempt for invention, science, and technology. It has become a shorthand for the stereotype of Spanish people being anti-scientific, or for science and technology being a "marginal reality in Spain in its organization and social context". The repeated use of the phrase has produced a motif or cliché, either rejected as offensive to the Spanish national character, or sometimes re-affirmed with pride.Three examples of periodistic utilization:
The quote is also paraphrased in a feminist sense, revindicating the work of women in science: ¡Que inventen ellas! (Let [feminine] them invent!).
History 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".
Spanish Lo europeo moderno o lo africano antiguo... ¿por qué no ser africano como lo fue San Agustín? Translation The modern European or the ancient African... Why not be African as Saint Augustine was?
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.
Spanish Yo me voy sintiendo profundamente antieuropeo. ¿Que ellos inventan cosas?, invéntenlas Translation I am coming to feel profoundly anti-European. Are they inventing things? Let them invent.
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:
Spanish Translation
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.
Spanish Translation
In the epilogue to The Tragic Sense of Life in Man and in Peoples (1912), Unamuno wrote:
Spanish Translation
To support this idea, he cited Joseph de Maistre (in a letter to a Russian minister):
Spanish Translation
He then continued with a challenge:
Spanish Translation
In the final lines of the epilogue he referred directly to Ortega's campaign in favor of Europeanization:
Spanish Translation
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.Miguel Ángel Rivero Gómez: Este donquijotesco don Miguel de Unamuno
See also África empieza en los Pirineos
References