María Zambrano: Philosophical and Cultural Context
Historical Context
María Zambrano, born in Vélez-Málaga, was a disciple of José Ortega y Gasset, a professor at the University of Madrid and contributor to publications such as Revista de Occidente, Cruz y Raya, and Time of Spain. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), she participated in humanitarian aid and cultural committees and went into exile in Mexico in 1939, later moving to Havana (Cuba). She lived in France, Italy, and Switzerland before her final return to Spain in 1984. In 1981, she was awarded the Prince of Asturias for Communication and Humanities, and in 1988, the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious award in Spanish literature.
The life of the philosopher María Zambrano (1904-1991) falls within a period when the world was historically divided into two major blocks: the capitalist West and the communist Soviet Union. This period also saw two internal and two world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Chinese Revolution. Additionally, the Spanish Civil War resulted in the exile of many intellectuals, including María Zambrano. Her life and thought were largely shaped by her experience in exile, which she eventually transformed into a philosophical, metaphysical, and spiritual category of the human being stripped of their historical and cultural circumstances. In this state, one reaches an experience of their relationship to the cosmos in its entirety, a perspective that echoes traditional religious beliefs and interprets human life as an exile.
Although Zambrano continued to address historical issues and reflect on the sociopolitical situation of her time, she was primarily interested in the deep layer of our being that is not circumstantial or historical, whose revelation is the task of poetic reason.
Cultural Context
Culturally, Zambrano’s time saw increased access to education for all citizens, the active presence of women in all sectors of society, and cultural enrichment through contact and openness to other peoples. In the scientific field, major developments occurred due to the invention and application of new technologies. Moreover, the theory of relativity by Einstein and quantum mechanics by Max Planck provided a new image of the world.
Philosophical Context
In the philosophical field, vitalism, existentialism, and phenomenology were prominent. Phenomenology, in particular, applies its own method, which, while not questioning existence, tries to describe the structure of consciousness, which is shown (phenomenon) as the essence of things. Other streams of thought included hermeneutics (the science of interpretation), critical rationalism, and postmodern thought, which emerged as a reaction to any claim to totalizing explanations of reality.
The environment in which Zambrano developed her thinking was that of the intelligentsia during the first half of the 20th century in Spain. This period was marked by the impact of colonial losses in 1898, the Generation of 98, the philosophical influence of Unamuno and Ortega, the School of Madrid (to which Zambrano belonged), and the importation of ideas prevalent in Europe, such as Krausism, historicism, and the cultivation of a peculiar mode of philosophical expression. The Generation of ’27, which used poetry to express intellectual interests, also played a role.
Ortega’s positioning of European philosophy, breaking its traditional idealistic content with vital and historical reason and discovering the richness of reality through perspectivism, among other ideas, contributed to the atmosphere in which María Zambrano’s philosophical beginnings developed. A true reflection of this environment is her work Philosophy and Poetry, written in 1939 in Mexico, where the seeds of her subsequently developed philosophy are found: its anti-rationalism and her choice of poetry. Alongside this work, there are conferences that consider Poetry and Thought in Spanish life. The book begins with the chapter “Thought and Poetry,” which is the text being analyzed. It poses philosophy and poetry as facing each other throughout our culture and as appearing today as two insufficient forms, two halves of man: the philosopher and the poet.
For Zambrano, philosophy is one of the most radical “happenings” to humans, not just a problem. Supported by this conception of philosophy, she thought that philosophical problems are not just technical problems, but mysteries and symbols that we need to reveal. These mysteries locked in philosophical problems must address the crucial issues of transcendence, the great mysteries of human life, and man’s relationship with the divine. Thus, philosophy should be the task of constructing and interpreting symbols. Hence, one of its key issues lies in the analysis of what she calls “poetic reason” and in the literary tone of many of her writings, which seem remote from traditional technical analysis in philosophical inquiry.