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These last few days I have been quite busy and I haven't had much free time to post something with a minimum of value and that you might find interesting. As I have already expressed in my presentation I studied philosophy and that has motivated me to write an essay that has phenomenology as its center, which is one of the topics and ways of approaching knowledge that most attracts my attention, and with phenomenology, I have approached the thought of Maria Zambrano (my favorite Spanish philosopher) and also to relate it to the thought of Merleau Ponty about feeling.
So I divided the essay into two parts, today I want to leave you the first part.
"And poetry, suffering the martyrdom of lucidity, approaches reason."
ZAMBRANO, MARIA Filosofía y poesía Fondo de Cultura Económica. Mexico, 2006.
Source: https://ethic.es/2021/02/el-exilio-de-maria-zambrano/
- Feeling as a reflection of sensibility on itself.
María Zambrano and Merleau-Ponty have devoted a great deal of effort to elaborate a philosophy of feeling and the search for the original. Life is the compendium of what can be expressed and on the other hand that for which there are no words. In the words of Cortázar "Words are not enough to express that which overflows the soul". In the feeling dwells a hidden logos. But the efforts to unveil feeling like the home of a tacit logos cannot be aimed only at our two leading thinkers. Throughout history, there have been people interested in these vital issues. Perhaps, a traditional view of philosophical genesis has been to separate myth from logos. As if from their rupture and split, the attempt to give a reason for the world and life has risen to a higher level. But in Greek antiquity itself, Plato shows that knowledge is not a matter of pure reason. One example that can be mentioned although particularly a path of which there are seas of ink, it is not a matter of which it has been said in its entirety what can be detached from it. In the dialogue the Banquet*, Plato speaks using as a resource the voice of a sorceress of Mantinea named Diotima. For her, pain constitutes certain steps by which we can arrive at contemplation. And our first concern about feeling, in this case, about "the painful must be rethought.
It is known that thanks to Gadamer, each epoch can make its own reading of the classics, and although we can delve deeper into hermeneutics, it is not a subject that needs to be addressed now. But turning to Plato's Banquet, we see how there can be a difference between the logos and the body in matters of the realm of contemplation. By the senses, we grasp beautiful things, which the bodies of Beauty share are what can be felt of it, but Beauty as a non-corporeal reality, there is no eye that sees it or scent that manifests it for what it is. The contemplation of Beauty corresponds to the soul, to the logos, to the incorporeal that we have submerged in our corporeality. That is to say, feeling, in this case, pain, is presented as a propaedeutic, as a path to be traveled. The transit in the corporeal opens the way to a contemplation of the soul. The duality of body/soul is not a duality that prevents communication. That is to say, the corporeal is presented as a threshold between the sensible and the intelligible. "... beauty, as seen in the Phaedrus, is a threshold, a sort of frontier between the sensible and the intelligible that is able to "enter through the eyes" thanks to its brilliance that, in a mysterious way, expands between the human and the divine. "***
This sort of corporeal threshold in which poets dwell without fear has served to bring a sort of light to those things that seem to dwell in darkness. But neither poetry, which has been rejected for wandering in the corporeal, nor philosophy, which has sought Truth from the split logos, can only be accessed through the mystical rapture. But, there is no way to reach this kind of mystical gift. It has been wrong to proceed by dissociating philosophy and poetry, body and soul. In Merleau-Ponty, feeling is not a passive passivity, but the feeling is feeling like an object and subject at the same time. Aristotelian logic here does not fulfill its task. And Zambrano manifests it from another point of view, to feel is to probe things from another side, in the dark dimensions of life is where philosophy must delve. "All knowledge is installed in the horizons opened by perception. "**** Feeling is imposed on conscious thought, in short, the feeling is thinking from the feeling, feeling is reflection turned in itself. And for both our Spanish Pythoness and her French contemporary, the feeling is affection and action of the subject.
- Feeling not as a faculty, but as a mode of being.
An indication of the way of being of feeling has already been shown, affirming its denial of being a faculty, we will then start from its way of being, which is none other than an active passivity that allows openness. An opening to the other, relating to the absent. Feeling (Aisthesis) becomes not a state of consciousness, but an original experience. Here we could locate an outline of what María Zambrano conceives as the poetic reason. To recover philosophy as logos not separated from life. To make of feeling a force that in its inhabiting interiorities of the sensible, seeks and has a purpose to be the action of the soul that unifies the body and the conscience. Capacity to be affected by the nonmeaning, a vital strangeness, the mysteriousness of a feeling that perhaps causes a lump in the throat. Making unspeakable something dark in the interiority, but, that tries to come to light. For this reason, the feeling is affirmed as a feeling interpreting. Life turned in itself trying to say itself without words, the dream. Poetry tries to say without concepts, art to express as corporeity what at first is only affection and logos tries to give a reason for what is around it.
As an example, we can mention the origin of philosophizing. As a discipline, philosophy is born when metaphysical problems (Beauty, Order, God, Time) leave the temple. To make faith secular without abandoning the gods altogether, something like when Socrates seeks through Maieutics to make logos, to give light to that which in the interior inhabits the dark. Merleau-Ponty becomes the thinker of the unthinkable, seer of the invisible, he tries in another way, to make maieutics from Husserl's phenomenology, to return to the things themselves. And Zambrano, with his poetic reason, becomes the mediator between philosophy and poetry, both try to navigate the flow that lies in the middle of dichotomies.
So far this first part, there is still the second part that I intend to share with you very soon. I hope you found it interesting, I really enjoyed the reflective process, reading, writing down ideas, and then expressing my thoughts in these lines, I do not plan to write a kind of conclusion because we are halfway through.
Goodbye, dear friends.
