Background
Zambrano, Maria was born in 1907 in Vélez-Málaga, Spain.
Zambrano, Maria was born in 1907 in Vélez-Málaga, Spain.
University of Madrid.
Professor of Philosophy, 1939, Universidad de Morelia. 1941-1953, Professor, Universidad and Instituto de Altos Estudios, Havana: lived in Rome (1953-1954) and then Jura devoted to study.
There are three primary preoccupations in the work of Maria Zambrano and all can be traced ineluctably to her status first as understudy to Ortega y Gasset in the University of Madrid, and secondly to that of her active Republicanism and later exile. The first, chronologically, is her elaboration of the notion of ‘poetic reason’, that faculty allowing the spirit to penetrate secundum quid in the essence of things by virtue of the recognition of coexistence. This forms part of Zambrano's search for a new type of knowledge able to penetrate the mysteries of the soul and which would bring in its train a reform of our spiritual procedures, a central feature of this being reason’s acceptance of distant or even hostile forms of knowing. Second, and due to this notion, ancient Greek and Roman philosophy can be substantially reinterpreted. In a primary stage of animism confusion and lack of things rules. The second stage of development brings an appearance of things in slow configuration, displaying ‘certain uniformity’, together with the slow dawning of their resistance to being. This assumed, the establishment of logic and dialectic takes place, reflecting now though on things—concepts—rather than on things themselves. This signifies a marking of distances, of the constitution of ethics as the arbiter of rational conduct. At this moment, given the deconstruction of the world, solitude takes over, the absence of gods/God forms a vacuum in which being realizes itself as a mere thing. Christianity is ready to fill the void created by such disquiet. Seneca’s ‘mediatory reason’ provides the palliative to this situation, whilst Ortega’s theory of generations fills the narrative space between the extinction of one faith and the wait for the next. The search for the sacred, explained dialectically in the framework of the characteristic dimensions of time: whilst modern paganism celebrates the yet-to-be where everything is predictable, authentic religious liberation will open up the future, the unpredictable, domain of infinite hope, and in this way being passes from the sacred to the sacrifice, and from the sacrifice to the divine. Third, a phenomenological-existentialist streak describes all the imaginable disturbed states experienced by being, as well as their remedies, prime amongst them being the access to hope. The archetypal figures in this inverted Huis clos being Antigone, pure conscience and radiant piety. Zambrano’s work, particularly those aspects to do with ethics and religion, have influenced a whole generation of moral philosophers, mainly her contemporaries, such as Aranguren, Ferratcr Mora and Savater.
