The relational dimension of the person in María Zambrano’s philosophy

Abstract

María Zambrano is among the most influential voices in the philosophical landscape of the 20th century. Her thought, which came to light slowly and with delayed recognition, is still highly topical today. Of great interest is her reflection on the idea of democracy in Europe, which represents an anticipatory look at many contemporary issues. As a Spanish exile and witness of the Second World War, Zambrano is, to all intents and purposes, a European citizen who recounts the agony that her distant Europe is experiencing with great passion. The attention she pays to that decadent and diseased body, as she calls it, captures an additional dimension to the historical-political one, which is nevertheless central. In describing the violence of those years, she reaps the seeds that made the emergence of a common European ground possible, and that must be nurtured again. It is not only a matter of rediscovering the cultural roots - philosophical thought and the Christian message – but also of understanding the causes of that history that became sacrificial. It is, therefore, a matter of rethinking the human in virtue of its creatural and transcendent dimension and rediscovering the common origin that makes every human being a part of the same humanity.

Keywords:

• People
• democracy
• ethics
• pietas
• relationship
• human

Preface

A premise that I consider appropriate to the present reflection concerns the approach that has guided me in developing, within a limited space, some of the salient features of María Zambrano’s anthropological-political vision.

To synthesize the variety of philosophical-conceptual nodes around which her perspective on the human revolves, I have necessarily refrained from delving into themes of great philosophical weight, which the Andalusian intellectual brings to maturity during a long and tortuous personal and speculative journey. First and foremost, the concept of the person, which is at the center of an extended research project of mine, has found substance – among other ways – in a dedicated publication entitled Experience, politics, and anthropology in María Zambrano. The concept of the person (Del Bello 2017). In this monographic essay, I enter a detailed analysis of the construction of the idea of the person, starting from the experiential datum – an indispensable element of Zambrano’s philosophizing – and then arriving at a political perspective of a democratic nature, which passes through the concepts of transcendence, relationality, hope, pietas and natality, and takes shape in a specific historical and social context, conditioned moreover by the initiatory element of exile.

The idea of this brief contribution is, therefore, to provide some valuable hints to frame the figure of a 20th-century thinker, capable of looking beyond her present, of anticipating a philosophical vision capable of making room for a subject different from the one traditionally embodied by the dominant thought, of searching for new forms of expression and of rethinking concepts trapped within a patriarchal dimension incapable of grasping the richness of otherness and of that creaturely condition that History has too often ended up forgetting.

My linguistic style derives from the desire to make this reflection as usable as possible, leaving it open even to those who are not directly linked to the world of philosophy, to stimulate that curiosity and astonishment which, as ancient philosophical thought teaches us, are the very spark of our desire for knowledge.

Introduction to María Zambrano

For a long time considered too distant from a systematic vision of philosophy and, therefore, not considered a philosopher in her own right; read, instead, above all through the lens of poetry, María Zambrano is to be counted among the most fertile intellectuals of the 20th century.

A philosopher in Spain – and, we suggest, that could be extended to Europe – in the 1920s and 1930s is considered a heretic, a circus phenomenon, she declares. For someone who, like her, would have wanted to be a Knight Templar since childhood without renouncing her womanhood (Del Bello 2017, 105–112), making a space for herself as a philosophical voice in a landscape traditionally dominated by the presence of men is already in itself the expression of a philosophical quest that, as we shall see, will always be oriented towards attention to the other, the acceptance of diversity, the acceptance of what cannot be traced back to a single, self-referential subject.

Relationality, caring, listening, responsibility, and pity are some of the central concepts of the Zambranian universe, the traces of which still give us current and contemporary reflections.

After an initial contextual and biographical focus, this in-depth study touches on the author’s historical-political vision, giving centrality to the theme of Europe through a critique of the totalitarian phenomenon and analyses of the democratic experience and the concept of the person, the cornerstone of democracy, evidently explored through her perspective.

Further emphasizing the centrality of a relational way of thinking open to differences is the theme of exile, experienced in the first person, and the linguistic dimension that finds its most significant expression in the idea of poetic reason.

A vision, therefore, that of María Zambrano, deeply linked to life, where the experiential element, always present within her reflection, is never separated from speculative evaluation because if – as she emphasizes – life cannot be given in a system, then thought finds its meaning if oriented by experiences, by emotions, by the concreteness that accompanies our daily being in the world, as unique and relational individuals, that is, as persons.

The roots of Zambranian thought

The developing ground on which María Zambrano’s ideas take shape is the Europe of the 1920s and 1930s. I find it interesting to emphasize the influence that context can exert on thought, pushing it in one direction or an opposed one.

I want to start from this premise to develop a reflection that touches on some aspects of Zambrano’s vision, paying particular attention to the European theme and everything that relates to it, always within her perspective. The outcome is to understand how much is still current in her considerations, in the light of a different context, but one that inevitably finds its roots in what preceded it.

The uniqueness of Zambrano’s philosophy thus has its starting point in a socio-historical and intellectual dimension steeped in different elements. Firstly, the youthful years are characterized by the intense political activism of republican faith, marked, among other things, by participation in the Liga de Educación Social and, with the outbreak of the civil war, in the Alianza de Intelectuales para la Defensa de la Cultura.

To be present, to be there, and to contribute to social change are aspects that the philosopher from Vélez-Málaga considers an integral part of her intellectual activity and, in general, of her life. Her paternal upbringing contributes significantly to this – she will always consider her father, Blas Zambrano, one of the teachers of her life – from whom she learns the value of culture as an indispensable instrument to guarantee the emancipation of the people at the margin. Here the foundations are laid for profound attention to those who belong to intrahistoria, which crosses through the ‘viscera’ (a typical Zambranian expression to indicate the deep interiority) and, differently from History with a capital letter, does without high-sounding names: the one that interests Zambrano, that history of ethical renewal to which – as she declares – the time had come to give shape, in a Spain annihilated by a monarchical regime unsuited to the times and suffocated by a military dictatorship incapable of promoting social freedom (Del Bello 2017, 17–25).

The political perspective, which the philosopher embraces, goes beyond her nation’s borders. Encouraged by the pro-European outlook of Ortega y Gasset – another of her key teachers – María Zambrano will always cherish her Europe, which she will carry with her even in her long wanderings as an exile.

It is interesting how the thinker describes the European phenomenon. She starts, in fact, from a personification of Europe whose symptoms and diagnosis she tells.

Let us start with a brief background premise: between the two world wars, the values that had inspired the main currents of modern European thought, starting with positivism and idealism, were being questioned. Europe’s identity crisis will lead to schools of thought increasingly oriented towards the individual and his inner world, from existentialism to personalism to phenomenology. Faced with this panorama, we find Spain suffering from a cultural inertia that, for historical reasons, has prevented it from progressing at the same speed as many of the surrounding European countries. The '98 generation and the School of Madrid will express the will and the need to rethink the Spanish context philosophically and intellectually.

It is within this dimension – inspired by the thought of Unamuno, that of Ortega, and the poetry of Machado – that the Zambranian universe is nourished.

From the initial social commitment that would lead her, together with the young people of her generation, to the proclamation of the Second Republic, to her choice to leave her homeland – as a rejection of any compromise with the Franco regime – politics, even when less evident, run throughout her philosophizing, which is guided by profound attention to the human.

Thus, within a vision where politics represents ‘the root that tinges with its substance all the activities that feed on it’ (Zambrano 2007, 83),¹ María Zambrano’s gaze is oriented by a liberal-socialist perspective – capable of overcoming a liberalism that, in her opinion, has sacrificed ‘the exaltation of the human person’ (Zambrano 2009, 16) in the name of an alleged ‘differentiating and unjust freedom’ (Zambrano 2000, 220) – and by a Christian-type community idea. According to the thinker, the ‘hyper-liberal ethic has deprived us, paradoxically, not only of hope in another world but also of the full experience of this one’ (Ferrucci 1995, 13).

Brief biographical note

María Zambrano, during her existence, went through various historical moments that were significant for Europe at the time.

Of Andalusian origin – she was born in Vélez-Málaga in 1904 – she lived through the years of political and social fervor of a Spain that, as mentioned, now considered Alfonso XIII's monarchical regime anachronistic. Zambrano’s youthful commitment directs her speculative gaze toward a vision of democracy, which will be at the center of all her philosophical-political reflections.

After the initial victory of the Republican front, with the proclamation of the Spanish Republic in Madrid in 1931, the Iberian Peninsula experienced the tragic violence of the Civil War. In the face of the Franco regime, the thinker matured the painful decision to leave her homeland in January 1939, together with other exiles like her. A heartbreaking choice that would lead her towards a 45-year exile and that would shape her philosophical vision: from a political will, it would take on the contours of her existence, so much so that she would no longer be able to do without it, as she would declare at the end of this tragic and necessary wandering (Del Bello 2017, 202–214).

After an initial stop in France, she lived mainly in Latin America – Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico – and then moved to her beloved Rome between 1953 and 1964, where she frequented the historical cafés of the antifascist intellectual world of the time. There, she met personalities such as Elena Croce, Cristina Campo, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, and Elémire Zolla, directing, among other things, the Spanish section of the magazine Botteghe Oscure.

At the end of this Roman period, which she will always keep as one of the most precious moments of her life, she will move to La Pièce, Switzerland, where she will experience the painful death of her beloved and fragile sister Araceli.

It was only on 20 November 1984 that she returned to her homeland, the one that – by her admission – had never stopped accompanying her: ‘[…] I did not return because I never left. I always took Spain with me’ (Zambrano 2003, 7).

The European gaze

This premise introduces us to what Europe represents for Zambrano: rediscovering the roots that have allowed its development is the necessary starting point for understanding the antidote to the evil which afflicted it.

In the famous L’Agonia dell’Europa, the philosopher dwells on the causes that have made the old continent an agonizing body in the grip of extreme violence that rages from many sides: it is the absolutizing will of modern man and his absolute claim to dominion that has led to the destruction of the human by the human.

Before proceeding further with the brief excursus on Zambrano’s vision of Europe, it is interesting to give space to the thread that links Zambrano to de Unamuno through the agonic concept of existence, which the latter philosopher applies to the European crisis:

The agony of my dying homeland has shaken in my soul the agony of Christianity. […] I feel the agony of the Spanish Christ, of the agonizing Christ. And I feel the agony of Europe, the civilization we call Christian, the Greco-Latin or Western civilization. And the two agonies are but one. […] And the agony of my Spain is the agony of my Christianity. (de Unamuno 2012, 259, 271)

The concept of agony, as pointed out, can also be found in the historical-philosophical analysis that the thinker from Vélez-Málaga develops concerning the crisis of European man – an aspect that will be explored further – in the light of the context, which she defines as deadly, typical of her contemporary Europe. In analyzing the relationship between the two intellectuals, the most striking aspect concerns the focus on the individual’s existence, an element long ignored by idealism and positivism, incapable – according to the two Spanish philosophers – of grasping the contact between thinking and life. Zambrano writes about the Basque thinker:

Unamuno’s work is tragic because it represents the tragedy of existence. […] his entire oeuvre [is] bent on the existence of himself (Zambrano 2003, 97).

[Thanks to him for having saved] Spanish life from its hermeticism (Zambrano 2003, 37).

[…] Who was Miguel de Unamuno? […] All men are persons, that is, a transcendent life project above the reality of the individual, that visible corporeal reality that is our physical presence. But not all are persons in the same way, nor with the same intensity. […] some are exceptional, revealing their genius in being a person. Well, Unamuno was one of these […]. (Zambrano 2003, 183).

‘The importance assigned to feeling, to the introspective dimension and the singularity of each individual are elements that are strongly present in Unamuno’s thought’ (Del Bello 2017, 35), and a strong trace of them can also be found in Zambrano’s speculative horizon, within which each piece will later take on an original and unique form.

Returning to the historic-philosophical analysis of Europe, Zambrano’s critique is primarily aimed at the extreme individualism we have ended up at, where we have lost sight of our condition as limited beings, assuming instead that we can bring the diversity of reality under our blinding reason. A universalistic individualism has led to the disappearance of the dialogical space of encounter and relationship. The latter is an aspect on which we will dwell later when we address the Zambranian historical perspective. A ‘destructive individualism […] which, taken to the extreme, leads to political anarchy’ (Zucal 2009, 95).

Focusing on the origins of that annihilating action that undermines European health is a necessary step to understanding the centrality that the philosopher assigns to Europe’s cultural principles and values:

To search for what Europe really was is for us nothing other than to discover what is inseparable from it. […] It is also a matter of gathering that the European element is still in place and force, at least in some consciences, in those not prepared to cling to the triumph of force just because it is force.

But in trying to find the essence of what we call Europe […] we will also seek the principle of its possible resurrection. (Zambrano 2009, 29–30)

All this implies a return to the origins, which the intellectual traces in an emblematic figure, as representative of the union between the various European spiritual and cultural souls: Saint Augustine, the one who allowed ‘the transit from the ancient world to the modern world’ (Zambrano 2009, 55). He realized the encounter between ancient and Christian hope, granting space to human interiority and opening to a perspective of transcendence because, through confession, he revealed to us the path ‘[…] between the obscure self and the one that has reached its unity in transparency’ (Zambrano 2009, 65).

That which, however, passes through contemporary Europe is ‘the dark night of the human’ (Zambrano 2009, 89), in which the human has become waste, residue, where space has been left for the ‘God who devours and who wants to be devoured’ (Zambrano 2009, 92) because – Zambrano argues – European man has believed he can replicate the creative act, imagining himself divine and therefore without limits. But the resulting outcome has been a theatre of violence of which European agony is precisely the expression, where ‘man has withdrawn from the world, leaving only the simulacrum of himself’ (Zucal 2013, 187).

History between human and divine

For the Spanish philosopher, understanding what it means to be European involves a necessary reference to her historical vision. A brief overview is necessary to grasp the connection between European humanity and the Christian message.

The first element to consider is that the human being – as a historical being (Del Bello 2017, 146–157) – has always lived in relation to the divine. A term with which Zambrano historically refers to four phases: the relationship with what is incomprehensible and takes the form of the sacred; the relationship with the deities, that is, how one tries to give shape to the obscure and, therefore, to the sacred; the relationship with the revealed Christian God, who shows himself in his human face; and finally, the last phase that consists in the act of self-divinization. The latter is the core of Zambrano’s interpretation of the European socio-political crisis. Since Christianity represents, for the thinker, one of the cornerstones of Europe’s cultural and spiritual terrain, so modern man nevertheless bears the responsibility for having reinterpreted it erroneously, imagining himself divine and therefore capable of bringing the whole of reality under the filter of his exclusive rationality:

One of the effects of ‘deification’ is taking possession of greater space than we can take control of, exceeding the limits of the human, of which the limitation imposed on us by having a body and being in it is the norm and model. Limiting the human will inevitably entail making room for the divine. (Zambrano 2009, 18–19)

As I recount elsewhere, the absolutizing will – to which Zambrano gives the name absolutism – is characteristic of modern man and is attributable to the inability to grasp his constitutive finitude. This reflection is also linked to Zambrano’s criticism of modern rationalism, which the philosopher traces back to the claim of completely clarifying reality, ignoring what is not completely clear.

The condemnation is towards a rationalization – as opposed to its razón poética – that has lost contact with the viscera of existence, that aims to silence the chiaroscuros of life, that does not admit anything that cannot be assimilated to a unique and absolute model: the typical sin of Western history that has made possible the development of a history that imposes the sacrifice of the human being on the divine altar, where the latter is now identified with the human itself.

I would add, in fact, that:

For the philosopher, the sacrificial structure characterizes the societal dynamic even in modernity, even where the human has taken the place of the divine, occupying the empty space. Men continue, in fact, to be sacrificed in the name of other men, according to a violent and destructive logic […]. (Del Bello 2017, 165–6)

What makes overcoming a logic centered on sacrifice and the denial of one’s limits possible? The move towards an ethical foundation of history – in the Zambranian perspective – requires a relational gaze. It is the person – on whom we will dwell briefly below – who is the unavoidable pivot around which her historic-political vision revolves. It is the element capable of unraveling that skein that has prevented the human being from seeing himself and discovering himself in his humanity, in his constitutive dependence on the other, in his limitation.

The metaphor of Oedipus and Antigone – which the philosopher uses to narrate the opposition between two political-philosophical models at the antipodes – clarifies this sense (Del Bello 2017, 105–126; Del Bello 2021, 239–249). Oedipal blindness is, in fact, the exact opposite of the Greek heroine’s capacity for vision. Not only. The latter is also the one who exposes herself to the gaze of others without hiding from them. One of the central themes of Zambrano’s idea of ethical history emerges here: ‘The human condition is such that it is enough to humiliate, deny or make a man suffer – oneself or someone else – for every man to suffer. In every man there are all men’ (Zambrano 2000, 86). Making history concretely ethical is, therefore, a gesture of responsibility because each of our actions implies a consequence towards the other, which means ‘taking responsibility for what we decide and do, and also for what we do or find already done’ (Zambrano 2000, 146), since

the existence of history depends on the fact that, since there is a society, the past exists, and since man is a person, the future exists. […] That is why historical knowledge, the capacity to live, […] in an inverted sense, to go through the facts of life in an inverted sense, is indispensable. (Zambrano 2000, 154)

In contrast to Oedipus – entrenched in his dream of power, in that absolutizing will that Zambrano describes as proper to a history hegemonized by the male gaze, incapable of recognizing the different otherness of which existence consists – Antigone is the mirror in which every man and every woman has the possibility of looking at themselves and the others.

In other words, there is no other condition for rethinking politics, society, and the historical fabric than tracing each of these dimensions back to the person who, as such, is also characterized by his fragilities, limitations, and constitutive being in relation.

The anthropological vision

One of María Zambrano’s best-known quotes, relating to the concept of the person, states that the person is more than the individual.

We find these words within the pages of her most mature and accomplished philosophical-political work, Persona e democrazia. La storia sacrificale, dating from 1958 and written during her stay as an exile on the island of Puerto Rico.

After Orizzonte del liberalismo, Gli intellettuali nel dramma di Spagna e scritti della guerra civile, L'agonia dell’Europa and L'isola di Portorico – the Spanish intellectual’s politically oriented texts – Persona e democrazia contains the most systematic analysis of her philosophical-political reflection on human society and nature.

In the preface to this essay – written in her hand in the 1987 re-edition – it is the author herself who highlights its profound meaning and necessity:

To be ‘a testimony, yet another, of what history could have been, of what it could have been, a sign of sorrow that the glory of being alive, of the creative action of life, even so, on this small planet, could not avoid vanishing.’ (Zambrano 2000, 3)

And history finds its raison d‘être precisely in the person who, with his choices, his judgements, his actions, determines the collective historical path: ‘Humanity, conceived and thought of relationally and its creaturely dimension, is a starting point for her reflection’ (Del Bello 2022, 361).

The person is, moreover, for Zambrano, transcendence, that is, the capacity that beings must end in one another; it is the coincidence with an opening; it is the ‘passing […] through one’s limits without abandoning them’ (Zambrano 2008, 149). We are persons to the extent that we welcome what is external to us into our interiority.

Echoing a personalist vision – with which, however, Zambrano’s reflection does not entirely coincide (Del Bello 2017, 61–65) – the idea of the person is resolved in the concept of the relational individual, which, by its essence, is a point of contact between the self and the other than itself. After all,

reality cannot be isolated […]. Transcendence is nothing other than the capacity that beings have to go outside themselves, going beyond their limits, leaving the imprint of another being, producing an effect, acting beyond themselves, as if the being of each thing ended in another; […] this thirst for transcendence must have, it seems, a certain support and also a certain horizon, a contact or communion with what surrounds us. (Zambrano 1996, 85)

The person is, therefore, such because he cannot live in an unrelated way without losing the capacity to know how to be in contact with himself in his interiority (Del Bello 2017, 143). As Pareyson puts it, ‘the individual is never one among others […] but is always one with others’ (Pareyson 2002, 190–2). Or, as Mounier writes, ‘the person is not an object: on the contrary, it is precisely what in every man cannot be treated as an object’ (Mounier 2004, 9).

Picking up the threads of the discourse on the Zambranian idea of history – briefly described in the previous paragraph – there is, therefore, a profound link that intertwines the latter with the vision of the human person and that is substantiated in the concept of responsibility: that is, knowing how to extend historical consciousness (Zambrano 2000, 8), giving an account of one’s actions in front of others, because in every man there are all men, paraphrasing the author herself.

Or, to put it differently, we come into the world with the responsibility of seeing and being seen – Zambrano writes – which puts us, and must put us, in the condition of acting with the awareness of being parts of the same common dimension. It is the public space of encounter and relationship, confrontation and dialogue; it is the world of the in-between that Arendt speaks of when she reminds us that the most properly political category is precisely birth, in which our capacity for action and thought is rooted in an ontological way, which takes shape in the place of being together and separates at the same time – the world, in fact – which welcomes us when we are born and from which we move away when we die. That world to which we should show ourselves grateful and indebted.

Caring for the world, and thus for oneself and others, is the founding premise of an ethical-political vision central to Zambranian thought, as well as that of many of her contemporaries – such as Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Edith Stein (Muñoz and Fernando 2009, XXIX; Boella 1999, 132) – called upon to share a historical moment of destruction and negation – marked by the Second World War, totalitarian regimes, exile, ideological persecution – but, at the same time, stimulated by this same condition of tragicness to seek another way of thinking, such as to welcome and accept the other in his unique diversity.

For a democratic politics

If, to paraphrase Zambrano, the other is the companion every human needs, politics cannot renounce this basic assumption. Democracy is, after all, the regime that finds its foundation in recognizing the value of the person and of the diversity of persons; it is the social-political dimension that rests on those precious differences of which each person is the bearer.

The concept of the person, in Zambranian vision, refers primarily to the Augustinian idea of ordo amoris (Del Bello 2017, 65–75), which defines the human being in his transcendence. An order that rests on love towards the Other from us and pushes us in one direction or another: ‘love moves and is moved, it is a restlessness that does not find on this earth an object adequate to its immensity and that therefore begins to seek it again and again’ (Bodei 2005, 91–2).

For the Andalusian philosopher, too, there is an internal emotional order – here, the reference to Max Scheler’s perspective is also strong – that binds the person to a further end, such as to lead him outside his own individual dimension. Being a person is, as mentioned, something more than the individual; it is solitude within cohabitation; it is being connected to a proposition of absolute meaning; it is feeling part of a broader reality that encloses us by putting us in relation with one another.

To deny it means – in the Zambranian perspective – to fall back into the error of that sacrificial history of which Europe was a victim in its time, which led to the destruction of human life, passing through a massification of society that annihilates the individual, denying his specificity, his capacity for dialogue, his responsibility for his actions:

To say people – [a concept opposed to mass] – is like saying ecce homo but not as an individual, but in all its complexity and concreteness of man on his land, in his time, in his community. […] The substratum of every story. The subject on which every structure rests and every change takes place; the matter of every social and political form; the capital of human life available for every undertaking; in a word, the substance. (Zambrano 2000, 161)

[We are not] […] persons just because we are born. […] He who is a person only because he is forced to be a person fears reality […]. Instead, for the one who has accepted himself as a person, […] reality is life.

[…] But it is impossible to choose oneself without simultaneously making the same choice for others. And the others are all men [and all women]. (Zambrano 2000, 198)

Democracy, therefore, represents, for the philosopher, the regime that, by its very nature, favors the complete unfolding of the person as described above. By its very being, dynamic and in continuous movement, the democratic system – capable of stopping in front of the integrity of the person, as the Andalusian thinker reminds us – bears within itself the possibility of renewing itself in the face of every possible crisis, in a way completely opposed to every form of absolutism and totalitarianism, which instead thrives on its own static and impermeable nature: ‘For Zambrano, in fact, politics is a creative and participatory process, insofar as it is an expression of the continuously nascent character of the person, which constitutes its founding and constitutive element’ (Del Bello 2019, 37).

The ultimate foundation of any democratic reality is, moreover, the principle of equality, to be understood as openness to all differences because there is no democracy where there is no room for the recognition of all diversities: a concept far removed from the idea of uniformity and homologation around which totalitarian forms revolve.

Here, Zambrano’s philosophical-political analysis is strongly conditioned by the European socio-historical context of those years in which, although far from her homeland, she questions – and she will do so both during and after the end of the war – the origins of the authoritarian and totalitarian regimes that have taken root and taken shape in Europe, preventing the full development of the person.

Her reflection, therefore, always retains sight of the concept of the human. Even in the comparison between the people and the masses, which Zambrano develops in describing the democratic regime (Del Bello 2020, 335–341), her attention is always directed towards the idea of human relationality: the masses are such because they cannot understand the other who is not assimilated to them; because they are the spokesmen for a language that is meager, empty and incapable of resonating; because they are molded in the image and likeness of those who hold the reins of the demagogic yoke: ‘When […] the acceptance of human plurality is replaced by the pure and straightforward homologation and standardization of differences, the result is a massification of the people, deprived of their intrinsic nature’ (Del Bello 2020, 340).

Instead, the people – as previously mentioned – is such precisely because as it is made up of human faces and voices, capable of expressing themselves through a straightforward and truthful language, which is born of mutual confrontation, acceptance of diversity, and a deep awareness of one’s responsibilities:

Being a person is proper to every man well before his inclusion in a class, and today, this is the most decisive and, for us, the most relevant thing; […]. The man of the people is simply the man. And his figure is the first appearance of the human person, free of any character or mask. (Zambrano 2000, 160- 161)

Zambrano’s critique of totalitarianism – which presupposes the annulment of the person – is, therefore, a critique of the human incapacity to understand oneself in one’s constitutive limitation and, therefore, in being ontologically bound to others. It contains within itself that condemnation of the absolutizing will of which modern rationalist reason – a central theme in Zambrano’s philosophical vision – has been the expression: without going into the details of this reflection, it is essential to emphasize how, in the wake of a broader European theoretical debate that influences Zambrano’s point of view, even for the Spanish intellectual, western modernity has taken shape around an idea of human reason that is totalizing and unlimited (Zambrano 2008, 100–101). In her opinion, the latter is the child of a way of thinking – traceable above all to Descartes and Hegel – that is entrenched in itself, not at all capable of perceiving the mutability of reality, its shadows, its chiaroscuro.

The creaturely condition can be […] permanent birth […] because it is supported and willed by unknown love. However, […] the history of love has had to undergo many forms of misrecognition; in particular, Western modernity, especially with idealism and positivism, has attempted to [see in man] […] the only actually existing subject. (Mancini 2012, 121)

Hence the need to renew the presuppositions of this reason, to expand its boundaries and foster a thought capable of supporting that dialogical and relational terrain mentioned above.

The poetic and maternal reason to which Zambrano refers moves precisely from such presuppositions and will be, not by chance, one of the critical concepts of her philosophy.

For this discourse, what we are interested in emphasizing above all is Zambrano’s capacity to give voice to every single aspect of existence, even starting from a language and philosophizing inclusive of the heterogeneity of life and of what cannot be illuminated by a totally illuminating reason. In other words, that thirst for transcendence, of which the person is constitutive, finds expression precisely in feeling part of a dimension that is broader than the individual dimension, in which, however, unique diversities find space and where even that which remains in the shadows finds its raison d‘être.

Therefore, there is not that detachment between reason and life, thought and action, feeling and understanding, which marked modern philosophy for a long time. Instead, in her opinion, there is a need to recover this original bond that exemplifies the human person, of that openness to the transcendence we have spoken of.

Respecting and embracing the person in his integrity, as a being that unites interiority and exteriority, rationality and emotionality, viscera, and intellect, means re-founding the social and political fabric. And it also means recognizing each person’s responsibility, because acting in concert, in the place of human plurality, which is the world – to use Hannah Arendt’s words – cannot be separated from being aware of one’s actions towards those who, like us, share the same space of which we are all an integral part. ‘If the philosophical vision of the Andalusian thinker moves from a profound attention to the human, then ethics is the key which shapes her historical-political universe’ (Del Bello 2021, 122).

The exile perspective

The ability to open one’s gaze beyond oneself, to grasp and fully embrace the diversity that surrounds us, is one of the main characteristics of María Zambrano’s philosophical vision. And it is undoubtedly also conditioned by the experiential dimension she experienced.

In this sense, the experience of exile plays a decisive role: as described above, the Andalusian thinker experiences 45 years of distance from her homeland. From an initial act of political condemnation towards Franco’s dictatorial regime, the uprooting from Spain will become a condition of an existential nature, tragic on the one hand and necessary on the other. It is the author herself who delivers it to us in this dual guise. The same profound ambivalence that is – as Zambrano herself likes to emphasize – characteristic of the reality in which we live, given the impossibility of enclosing in a single vision the heterogeneity and multiple varieties of which life consists.

Thus, exile is an essential dimension, which it becomes impossible to do without, but Zambrano writes that she hopes it will never happen to anyone.

The tragedy is attributable to losing one’s firm roots; being thrown out of the safe haven that is our origins; to finding oneself deprived of social, political, historical, and geographical identity.

On the other hand, the exiled person is also the one who experiences the possibility of being born a second time, experiencing the condition of abandonment, but who, deprived of everything, can look at life with a different, more authentic outlook: ‘the exiled person is as if born […] as if rejected by death, as a survivor’ (Zambrano 2006, 21). On the margins of history, stripped of his certainties, a survivor, the exile – as happens at the end of long suffering – undertakes a journey of true and proper initiation, at the end of which he rediscovers himself more authentically than before, since ‘these moments have the virtue of making everything that the person who lives them, considered important, suddenly disappear’ (Zambrano 2008, 112). Or, as another exile contemporary to her, Hannah Arendt, writes:

It is easy to love life outside, in foreign, foreign places. One is never so much master of oneself as when nobody knows us, and life is in our hands. In the impenetrability of foreign places, all that is individual and personal disappears. When everyone does not know one, it is easy to overcome the unhappiness that cannot magnify to the point of shame and is not reflected by infinite mirrors, and multiplied does not affect us. (Arendt 1988, 78)

The perfect embodiment of exile is the Antigone mentioned above, who, as noted, represents the symbol of Zambranian ethical-political vision. Like the exiled Zambrano, the Greek heroine is uprooted from her own life and consigned to the earth’s viscera because she is buried alive in the tomb. And Antigone is also the representation of the human conscience, obfuscated and silenced in each of us; she asks to be awakened so that women and men may exercise the capacity to perform conscious actions with responsibility for what they do toward others. Exiles are, in fact, ‘Souls in purgatory […]because [they] have descended alone into the hells […] of [their] history, to redeem from them the redeemable […] memory. Memory that redeems. […] Memory of what was in Spain’ (Zambrano 2006, 143).

Giving back a voice to these souls in purgatory means extending historical consciousness and giving space to that humanity of ‘survivors, left without a place […] without any mask, without the protection of a definite name’ (Zambrano 2000, 217) who, similarly to the Antigone recounted by Zambrano, are buried alive but do not cease to be there, to be an expression of their country, wherever they are in the world. To have memory means to account also for those who are always an integral part of collective history, even though they were forced by it to live on the margins.

A linguistic choice

Attention to otherness and diversity also takes shape through the search for a language that is revelatory of a thought that is open, plural, heterogeneous, and as close to existence as possible.

Anticipating many of the characteristic elements of later feminist reflection, the philosophy of María Zambrano (Del Bello 2021, 244–249) – who, following her constant refusal to accept labels, will declare that she was not feminist but rather feminine – wants to be the expression of a subject that has long been silenced; an issue that cannot be merely identified with the one always feared as universal, but declined in an exclusive masculine way by a thought hegemonized by male philosophers.

The feminine question ‘is, in fact, a question to which she pays careful attention, which comes to have great relevance in the genesis of her thought, and which constitutes a contribution of considerable influence in what, for lack of another name as she used to say, we could take as a hypothetical feminine philosophical tradition’ (Revilla 2011, 93).

This search for another way of thinking and writing about life takes shape through expressive possibilities that place Zambrano’s philosophy between poetizing and philosophizing.

Zambrano’s philosophical language, metaphorical and allusive, recounts her vision: there has always been a lost point of contact between the poet and the philosopher, understanding and feeling, and recovering this original dimension means restoring to philosophy its constitutive openness also to ‘that which in its obscure throbbing creates clarity’ (Zambrano 1997, 17). On the one hand, predisposing oneself to listen, making oneself empty, which is proper to poetry – ‘a practice of relating to the world’ (Buttarelli 2004, 36) – and, on the other, being constantly in search of answers, attempting to illuminate every aspect of the real, which is instead specific to philosophy, are the two souls of tireless philosophical thought.

It is the razón poética, the modality through which to traverse the different dimensions of reality, capable of welcoming that original feeling, that knowledge of the soul that is proper to living and its constant dynamism. A reason that, according to Zambrano, derives from ‘the need for a new and more complete critique of human judgment and reason, [due to] the impossibility of reason’s penetration into the unfathomable zones of the irrational’ (Zambrano 1998, 137). El saber del alma ‘is ‘the order of our interiority.’ […] [it is] taking care of the emotional sphere of existence. For to live is above all to feel’ (Mortari 2006, 19).

This brief reference to the linguistic dimension – although hinted at – further enriches the present overview of Zambrano’s philosophical vision, where relationality, otherness, and openness to differences represent fundamental constants that run through the entire speculative universe.

A compassionate and ethical vision

I want to close this reflection – which has touched on those elements of María Zambrano’s philosophy that are useful in giving us a brief insight into her ethical-social perspective – through the theme of pity.

Indeed, pietas, ‘which informs the multiple manifestations of man’s affective life’ (Bombaci 2007, 218), takes on, within her horizon, a solid ethical-political valence of which, moreover, Antigone – whom we briefly mentioned earlier – represents one of the most effective expressions.

Far from the idea of tolerance, compassionate love is revelatory of the ability to know how to treat the other appropriately, respecting him for what he is and renouncing any claim to assimilate him to something identifiable in a pre-established model. It is the possibility of exposing oneself to otherness by discovering oneself in one’s nakedness: like Antigone (Del Bello 2021, 246–249), who – in Zambranian rewriting – sinks into her cave, in which she is buried alive by Creon’s will, to be reborn to herself and to allow the members of her lineage to continue their incomplete birth. It is a self-conscious journey, Antigone’s, which presupposes the capacity to meet one’s ‘viscera’ – quoting a typical Zambranian expression, already cited before – while at the same time paying attention to the other: ‘You, Antigone, buried alive, will not die, but you will go on like this, neither in life nor in death […]’ (Zambrano 2001, 70).

Antigone’s journey thus lives on a confrontation open to dialogue, a constant openness to the diversity of perspectives, and finds its indispensable foundation in listening to oneself:

According to Sophocles’ account, Antigone hanged herself in her mortuary chamber. As much as we are intimidated by respect for the author of her poetic existence, we can’t accept such an end. No; Antigone, the pitiful one, knew nothing about herself, not even that she could kill herself […] and before she came to it, […] she had to wade through a long tunnel of moans, to become prey to innumerable delusions; her soul had to reveal itself and still rebel. It had to awaken its unlived life. (Zambrano 1997, 82)

The heroine of our human conscience buried in every human being, María Zambrano’s Antigone tells us a story that is both individual and collective and hinges on the ideas of responsibility, ethics, and pity. ‘The task assigned to her by Zambrano is that of mediatrix, which is resolved by bringing the living into dialogue with the dead, shadows with light, interiority with exteriority’ (Del Bello 2021, 246).

Antigone is, moreover, the expression of a fertile and generative love that clashes, instead, with a dimension of power willing to renounce the latter because it is exclusively conditioned and obsessed by the dream of domination, which finds expression in being able to crush the other, silencing those voices that are not an echo of one’s own. The men of her lineage, Creon, Oedipus, Eteocles, and Polynices, expressed this.

To give an account of one’s actions and words means, instead, to live with the responsibility of being part of the same dimension, the one to which – recalling Arendt once again – we must show our gratitude. And this entails ‘humanizing history and personal life. Being able to convert reason into an instrument suited to the knowledge of reality, first and foremost of this immediate reality that for man is himself, so that living reality, our reality, begins to become accessible to us’ (Zambrano 2000, 102), with the aim of extending historical consciousness to contribute to a compelling ethical and human history.

Conclusions

The Zambranian perspective, of which we have only briefly explored a few concepts, is still full of suggestions for our present day. It is, in fact, an invitation to dialogue, to listening, to accepting one’s fragility, to building a community social fabric: an openness towards what is different from us, welcoming diversity, abandoning any homologizing pretense.

The philosophical reflection of the Andalusian thinker is, moreover, always strongly linked to the experiential dimension, to the point that it is never resolved in a mere theorization of concepts but is the constant encounter of thought and experience, which is characteristic of female philosophical thought. Like the thought without a railing that Hannah Arendt speaks of about her reflection, Zambrano’s also turns out to be a passionate thought, in love with life, grasped in all its dimensions and its constitutive and inescapable ambivalence: a ‘reality that reason cannot comprehend,’ writes the author herself, ‘but which can be grasped in another way’ (Zambrano 1996, 44). A different modality takes shape, as we have seen, through the search for a new methodology: a method repeatedly defined as a-methodical because capable of probing the irrational zones of reality while having total respect for it, by renouncing the pretension of imposing a totalizing and centralizing vision. For Zambrano rationality is, in fact, capable of welcoming what cannot be the object of immediate comprehension; it can embrace las entrañas, the viscera that are the expression of our interiority. A maternal and poetic rationality that respects what escapes the light.

Even thanks to specific stylistic choices, María Zambrano thus aims to put her philosophical vision into practice by entrusting, for example, female characters – such as Antigone, Eloisa, Nina of Galdós, Diotima, Saint Teresa of Avila – with her message, or by choosing to follow linguistic paths that, as we have seen, are capable of accommodating difference and do not flatten the subject into a single, universal model.

Pivotal to her entire vision is, then, the idea of the person, of which she does not provide a complete definition – as is like her philosophical style – but which represents the fulcrum of her philosophizing and a political conception inspired by the founding values of democracy: plurality, equality, dialogue, community, acceptance of diversity. These are values that Zambrano traces back to European culture as the fruit of the contact between two key historical-intellectual dimensions: Greek thought and the Christian vision. The philosophical question and its twist towards human interiority – of which St Augustine represents ‘the saint who illuminated the ancient world by following a new measure and who presents us with the design of the new faith’ (Zambrano 2009, 39) – are the foundations on which, according to the Spanish thinker, modern Europe took shape, only to then forget its origins and be reduced to that theatre of unprecedented violence that the first half of the 20th century has known.

The Zambranian thought reveals a vision that is, in many ways, anticipatory. A drive to overcome that logic of success at all costs, dominant today, which has led towards the extreme of an individualism incapable of grasping and recognizing our constitutive dependence on one another – which I like to define in Zambrano’s words – such that life cannot close itself within a system because it is always constitutively and irremediably surrounded by otherness: ‘today’s humanism is the exaltation of the reality of man without renouncing his limitation’ (Zambrano 2012, 52). This is a limitation that the philosopher from Vélez-Málaga tends to emphasize strongly, highlighting its centrality and demonstrating complete openness towards it.

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Sara Del Bello

Sara Del Bello Ph.D. in Political Studies and Political Philosophy at Sapienza University and Post-Master’s Degree in Philosophical Counselling and Cultural Mediation at Roma Tre University. Specialized in women’s philosophy focused on María Zambrano, collaborating with the main research centers in Spain and the principal scientific periodical dedicated to Zambrano, Aurora (published by the Universitat de Barcelona). Final dissertation published by Mimesis in 2017: Esperienza, politica e antropologia in María Zambrano. La centralità della persona, presenter at many events, such as RAI Radio 3. Former Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at the Pontifical University Urbaniana, and currently part of the Editorial Staff for the periodical Per la filosofia. Since 2013, philosophical speaker at conferences dedicated to women’s philosophy in Italy and Spain. Project creator and Director of the Philosophical Festival “FiloCivita” in Bagnoregio (Viterbo) in 2022. Author of articles for Italian and foreign scientific periodicals, such as, “Lo sguardo misericordioso del cinema neorealista. Gli ultimi della storia”, in Aurora (24), 2023. Author of the following chapters in collected volumes: “La perspectiva antropológica de María Zambrano como punto de partida de su visión filosófico-política,” in Mujer y filosofía en el mundo iberoamericano (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2022); “L’immaginario,” in Per la filosofia (Pisa-Roma: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2021); “Los pasos del exilio,” in Bajo Palabra (Madrid-Roma: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Real Academia de España en Roma, 2021); “La cura dell’anima. Comunicare, educare, pensare,” in Per la filosofia (Pisa-Roma: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2021); “II concetto dì democrazia in Maria Zambrano. Una visione ancora attuale,” in Democrazia e verità. Tra degenerazione e rigenerazione (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2020); “Note sulla filosofia politica di María Zambrano” in Radici teologiche della filosofia di María Zambrano (Bergamo: Moretti&Vitali, 2018). Also, Supervisor Content Manager specializing in Digital Corporate Communication. Under this role, she participated as a speaker in events and master’s classes, such as “Relevance & Listening” at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross.

Notes

1 All translations from Zambrano are by the author.