María Zambrano

Works

• 1939Philosophy and Poetry

  Traces the split between philosophy, which seeks the whole through method, and poetry, which stays with what is given, from Plato’s expulsion of the poets onwards.

• 1955Man and the Divine

  Describes how the sacred and the divine appear in human history, from the experience of the gods to their withdrawal in modern nihilism.

Position

Zambrano is on the map for her “poetic reason”, a development of and departure from Ortega’s vital reason. In “Philosophy and Poetry” (1939) she traces a split that goes back to Plato: philosophy seeks the whole through method and abstraction, poetry stays with what is given and with the person who suffers it. A reason that shuts out feeling, dream and the sacred becomes, in her view, unable to understand human life; poetic reason is meant to bring such experience to light without dissolving it into concepts. In “Man and the Divine” she describes the history of the sacred from the experience of the gods to modern nihilism, and in later books such as “Clearings in the Forest” (1977) her writing comes close to mysticism. Exile, which lasted forty-five years, became for her a condition of thought. She wrote on Seneca and on Unamuno and drew on Spanish mysticism and the Spanish novel. Because her work moves between essay, poetry and religious meditation, some readers doubt whether it belongs to philosophy in the strict sense; others see in it a deliberate critique of systematic rationalism. Long little known in Spain, she has been widely read and studied there since her return, and also in Latin America and Italy.

Life & context

María Zambrano was born on 22 April 1904 in Vélez-Málaga, the daughter of the teacher Blas Zambrano, a friend of Antonio Machado, and grew up in Segovia. From 1924 she studied philosophy in Madrid with Ortega y Gasset, Xavier Zubiri and Manuel García Morente and later taught at the university as an assistant. She took part in the student opposition to the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, published “Horizon of Liberalism” in 1930 and supported the Republic. In 1936 she married the historian Alfonso Rodríguez Aldave and went with him to Chile, but returned to Spain in 1937 and worked for the Republic in Valencia and Barcelona. In January 1939 she crossed into France and went into exile: first to Mexico, where she taught at the University of Michoacán in Morelia, then to Havana and Puerto Rico. From 1953 she lived in Rome, from 1964 in La Pièce in the French Jura and from 1978 in Geneva. She received the Prince of Asturias Prize in 1981, returned to Madrid in 1984 and in 1988 became the first woman to be awarded the Cervantes Prize. She died in Madrid on 6 February 1991.

Further main works

• The Living Thought of Seneca (El pensamiento vivo de Séneca, 1944)
• Person and Democracy (Persona y democracia, 1958)
• The Tomb of Antigone (La tumba de Antígona, 1967)
• Clearings in the Forest (Claros del bosque, 1977)