Xavier Zubiri

Works

• 1962On Essence

  Develops essence not as a universal definition but as the physical structure of “notes” that makes a reality what it is “de suyo”.

• 1980Sentient Intelligence

  A trilogy (1980–83) arguing that sensing and intellection are a single act: intelligence apprehends things directly as real.

Position

Zubiri is on the map as the main systematic metaphysician of 20th-century Spain. Starting from Husserl and Heidegger, he moved from phenomenology to a philosophy of reality: what things are “de suyo”, of their own, comes before their being and before their being understood. In his view Western philosophy since Parmenides has separated intelligence from the senses and treated it as a faculty of concepts and judgements; against this he argued that human intellection is sentient, a single act in which things are apprehended directly as real. In “On Essence” he criticised the Aristotelian notion of substance and described essence as the physical system of constitutive notes. His concept of religation, the human being’s bond to the power of the real, opened a philosophical approach to the question of God. Zubiri wrote in a dense technical vocabulary and published late, so that his work long remained little known outside the Spanish-speaking world. His student and collaborator Ignacio Ellacuría used it for a philosophy of historical reality and for liberation theology in Central America; Diego Gracia carried it into bioethics. Some readers see a scholastic streak in his system; others value it as an independent realism after phenomenology.

Life & context

Xavier Zubiri was born on 4 December 1898 in San Sebastián. He studied philosophy and theology in Madrid, Louvain and Rome, where he took a doctorate in theology, and was ordained a priest in 1921. In the same year he received his doctorate in philosophy in Madrid under Ortega y Gasset with an essay on a phenomenological theory of judgement, published in 1923. In 1926 he obtained the chair of the history of philosophy at the University of Madrid. From 1928 to 1930 he studied in Freiburg, where he attended the lectures of Husserl and Heidegger, and in Berlin, where he also followed physics and biology. In 1936 he left the priesthood with a dispensation from Rome and married Carmen Castro, the daughter of the historian Américo Castro; he spent the Civil War in Paris. After a short period as professor in Barcelona he gave up university teaching in 1942. From 1945 he taught private courses in Madrid that drew a wide educated audience, and only in 1962 did he publish his first large systematic book, “On Essence”. The trilogy on sentient intelligence followed in 1980–83. He died in Madrid on 21 September 1983.

Further main works

• Nature, History, God (Naturaleza, Historia, Dios, 1944)
• Man and God (El hombre y Dios, posthumous, 1984)
• Dynamic Structure of Reality (Estructura dinámica de la realidad, posthumous, 1989)