Poetic Reason: Identity in the Midst of Mysticism and Philosophy

The irrationalist and vitalist options in the philosophy of the early twentieth century find in María Zambrano a liminal proposal. The author proposes a double movement: archaizing in order to renew the model of a philosophy saturated with formulas and without experiential content. To do so, she reads Plato, the father of Greek rationalism, through her acute hermeneutics to demonstrate that the birth of philosophy is methodologically congruent with mystical experience. Both philosophy and mysticism are models of liberation of the soul in search of truth, understood as transcendent reality. Both start from the multiplicity of being to coincide in the unity of the permanent. Both are also sources of knowledge for the common man who can approach the divine by means of his decision and will. Thus, in her main texts we find the arguments to recover the lost spirituality and to move into the experience of the sacred through the articulation of poetic reason.