Maria Zambrano never wanted to be in the spotlight. She had hoped that her name would disappear: she only wanted to write and exist for her friends and for all «those with an open heart». Still, after reading her writings, so full of wisdom and knowledge, anyone would agree that to indulge her shyness would be detrimental for all humanity.

Born in a family of schoolteachers in sun-scorched Andalucia – a land where Jews, Arabs and Romani people lived close to each others –, Zambrano was a philosopher through and through: she believed that all she could do in the world was «live and think» - and, one might add, to do so “as a woman”, that is, looking at things «through her soul».

In 1921, Zambrano enrolled at the Universidad Central in Madrid to pursue a degree in philosophy. From 1931 to 1936, she worked as a TA for the Metaphysics class. Her academic journey was heavily influenced by lectures of Zubiri, Garcia Morente, and – most importantly – Ortega y Gasset, who would become a true mentor to her. Still, Zambrano managed to carve her own path far from his shadow, even if with some difficulty. An independent path, for her philosophy could not be boiled down to imitation or repetition of someone else’s words, but rather be an interpretation stemming from her own personal experience. While still at university, her philosophy and her political thought intertwined: first, she published pamphlets advocating for the Republic, and then – with Franco in power – against his dictatorship. It’s telling that her last piece of writing, published in November 1990, was titled Los peligros de la paz («Dangers to Peace») and was written when faced with the horrors of the Gulf War. She was persecuted by Franco’s regime and lived most of her life in exile: she left Spain in 1939 and lived in different countries during the course of the following 45 years. In 1936, in Santiago (Chile), she married the diplomat Alfonso Rodriguez Aldave – they would divorce ten years later.

Only in 1984, she could finally make her way back to Spain. She didn’t ask for a formal welcoming; all she needed was her friends. Being exiled had been a traumatic experience, filled with worry for her loved ones and never enough money to live by, but Zambrano found a sense of revelation in it, something that shaped her body and mind. With nothing to her name, not a place to live and not even her freedom, it appeared to her that she was able to connect with the true form of human nature: each and every one of us is born «half-formed», an incomplete being that never truly finished evolving in the womb. Still, even if this tragic reasoning was akin to a living death, she found strength within herself to resist: she felt a certain «hunger to fully be born», which pushed her soul forward with a hope for regeneration.

Now at home again, she worked relentlessly, surrounded by friends and colleagues. In 1987, she was bestowed an honoris causa doctorate from the University of Malaga, and the following year she was awarded the prestigious Cervantes Award. In 1989, the Fundación María Zambrano was established, an organisation which, to this day, bears her name. In 1991, only two years later, Zambrano passed away in a hospital in Madrid. Honouring her wishes, her tombstone carries a quote from the Song of Songs, which encompassed her belief in rebirths, a theme we can find in all her philosophical works: surge, amica mea, et veni («Arise, my friend, and come»).

This multifaceted thinker approached many different themes throughout her life, which can be divided into three main categories: politics, religion, and theoretical philosophy.

Zambrano criticised contemporary philosophy for severing the connection between logic and existence. She was convinced that «everything which is true, rational, and all-encompassing must seduce life, must make it fall in love». Philosophy without a tangible connection to the real world is empty, sterile, and suffocating, and life without words giving it light and strength, enhancing it or stating its failures, loses meaning and withers away in nonsense. Such an embodied way of thinking gets to the essence of things and articulates itself between activity and passivity without retaining any trace of dualism: it doesn’t shield itself from the world, but lets itself be wounded and changed by the realities it encounters, no matter how small or trivial; and it’s precisely (and paradoxically) thanks to this adherence to the phenomenon that it develops its active side and creates an imbalance which muddles up and polarises reality, creating cracks and openings that were previously unthinkable. Zambrano’s philosophy sought a sense of poetry – as thought lives «by the flesh» and is not detached from material things nor from their origin – and held a sense of maternity as it can give up dialectic and abstraction in order to adhere to the welcoming and generative reality. This way of thinking led Zambrano towards the sacred, the obscure and visceral matrix of life. On the one hand, the sacred is attractive because it can save; on the other, it is terrifying because it can destroy. Trying to get a hold of this unsettling ambiguity, philosophy oscillates between distancing itself from it, and a nominalist strife towards making the sacred divine, to make it somehow approachable. Zambrano wrote that the West does not undertake this endeavour anymore: people narrate their histories, examine their present, and sketch out their future without taking God, or any form of excess, into account. At the most, they retain but a pale idea of the Christian God, focusing strictly on his almighty and powerful aspects and never on the altruistic one which led God to offer himself to humanity as a meal. By thinking of being able to obtain such power, men have rejected their creatureliness in order to reshape the world according to man’s image. By rejecting their status of children of God, they have suffocated their humanity and devoted themselves to a destructive destiny, leaving Europe agonising and scarred, having achieved democracy only theoretically.

Maria Zambrano entrusted to the West a demanding task: the shaping of a truly democratic world, where people can truly be human, since it is through being human that «the future can make its way to us». Our future should be akin to a symphony, a careful harmonisation of our differences, so that they won’t be half-heartedly put up with but instead fully embraced. To do this, we must look at each other with compassion, or «knowing we are about to connect with something different, so far removed from ourselves».

What Maria Zambrano truly left us is a philosophy of hope: knowing – truly knowing – about life was a source of long-lasting pain for her, but she remained convinced to the end that this knowledge «can – and should – be borne out of joy and happiness».


Translated by Arianna Premoli.