artistic philosophy and philosophical art: vitalism in
TRANSCRIPT
Artistic Philosophy and Philosophical Art: Vitalism in María Zambrano, Henri Bergson, and José Lezama Lima [Forthcoming in Madeline Cámara (ed.), María Zambrano: Between the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. This is a draft, please, do not cite without the author’s permission.]
Adriana Novoa
University of South Florida
In this essay I will analyze how philosophical vitalism is crucial to understanding
the way in which cultural dilemmas derived from Darwinian ideas were addressed in
Spain and Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century. I will analyze vitalism in
the work of Henri Bergson (1859-1941), María Zambrano (1904-1991), and José Lezama
Lima (1910-1976), whose relationship with Zambrano is well known.1 My intention is to
show how in the first half of the twentieth century their philosophical approach became
the source of an intellectual renewal that reconstituted philosophical humanism in the
context of modernity. The study of these ideas reveals exchanges that addressed
pervasive questions about identity, origins, and the existential resolution of challenges
posed by biological racism.
Bergson was a central figure in the cultural politics of Spain and Spanish America
during the first half of the twentieth century because, among other things, he implied a
notion of modernity associated to “a subject of action, centered upon the dynamic body”
(Guerlac i). This attention to passivity and action also appears in the work of Zambrano
and Lezama Lima, particularly as related to their interest in the intersection between
philosophy and poetry. I will show how their development of this connection is
concerned with a different way to do philosophy that is similar to Bergson’s, who
believed that the artist had a role in philosophy, and that a new way to understanding
consciousness had to be linked to artistic practice. As we will see, this approach opened
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up a reflection on the relevance of the knowledge originated by the arts, and the search
for a new form of knowing. Bergson believed that our perception of things had to be
widened and that this should be accomplished through a philosophy “where nothing in
the data of the senses or the consciousness would be substituted for the rest ostensibly to
explain it.” It was for this reason that philosophers needed to look at the work of those
who for centuries had worked with a more amplified perception, the artists. According to
Bergson, art “would suffice then to show us that an extension of the faculties of
perceiving is possible” (Perception, 113).
The poetic reason of Zambrano and the philosophical grounding of Lezama
Lima’s poetry were also part of the same attempt to re-signify modernity through a vital
artistic force that helped to transform notions of cultural identity and agency. It is
important to clarify that I will not follow a top-down model of reception of ideas; quite
contrary, what I propose is that all the intellectuals analyzed were searching for similar
things around the same time, and that they have common motivations, but also some that
were related to their local reality. I will discuss the work of Zambrano, Lezama Lima, and
Bergson in a horizontal field of exchanges that imply that they all should be taken as
equally valuable to the understanding philosophical ideas related to vitalism and their
connection to poetry.
Vitalism, Philosophy, and Art
Before the stir originated by the publication of Ariel by José Rodó in 1900, the
intellectuals of Spanish speaking countries experienced a great deal of difficulty
reconciling philosophical ideas and scientific thinking after Darwin. José Martí (1853-
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1895) harshly attacked intellectual passivity, and the interest that intellectuals from the
region had in derivative and imitative philosophical systems during the years that
preceded his death in 1895. At the time, racist and deterministic ideas saw in the so-
called inferior races the inability to compete successfully for a place in the future. In both
the Americas and Europe, science seemed to corroborate the impression that certain
human populations had diverged enough to have different evolutionary paths. Latin races
were presented as if they were in the process of degeneration, while the Anglo-Saxon
race was the expression of humankind’s future. This was a widespread vision that can be
found in scientific and popular literature among conservatives, socialists, and liberals in
Europe and the Americas. For example, in the United States, the magazine The Nation
published in 1896 an article entitled “Are the Latin Races Doomed?”, in which there is a
discussion of this possibility according to the ideas that were popular at the time.
Those who were part of this “doomed” population became less interested in
science and found in philosophical idealism a new way to understand the meaning of
humanity. This movement was popular by the 1890s in Spain, France and Spanish
America. In these areas thinkers developed a mixture of idealism and vitalism to create a
philosophical renewal that contradicted biological determinism, questioning the
understanding of humans in scientific terms only. In 1911, the Peruvian diplomat and
writer Francisco García Calderón (1883-1953) described this situation mentioning the
influence that the French philosopher Alfred Fouillée (1838-1912) and his “philosophy of
hope” had had in Spanish America. According to him, by “its noble idealism, by its
admirable wealth, its serene rationalism, and its essentially Latin character, the
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harmonious system of M. Fouillée has won considerable popularity among the youth of
America” (278).2
García Calderón also related this renovation to the aesthetic influence of French
philosopher and writer, Jean-Marie Guyeau (1854-1888), who had been Bergson’s
teacher.3 This “young poet” was the “professor of idealism to two generations of
America. In Ariel José Enrique Rodó has enlarged upon his finest metaphors; and a
Peruvian thinker, Gonzalez Prada, has popularised [sic] the suggestions of this Platonic
thinker upon death” (278). Rodó (1871-1917) was very influential in his call for a
connection between poetry, philosophy, and vitalism; the latter through his understanding
of the work of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).
This was the first stage of the reaction against dogmatic positivism, which had led
by the 1910’s to a period of “dissolution and criticism”, in which “all the new doctrines
[were] making their way: pragmatism, Bergsonism, the philosophy of Wundt and Croce,”
and “the philosophy of contingency” (279). This change made García Calderón hopeful
that from “this variety of imitations perhaps an American system” would arise in the
future (Ibid.). Meanwhile, it was clear to him that in “accepting influences” coming from
English, German, and French sources, “the old faith in science, in Comte and Spencer,
[was] evaporating. Two young philosophers, Antonio Caso in Mexico and Henriquez
Ureña in San Domingo,” had contributed to this analysis inspired “by the ideas of M.
Emile Boutroux”, who had attacked the narrow interpretation of scientific laws (279).
Boutroux (1845-1921) was an important figure in the spreading of vitalism,
together with Nietzsche, the pragmatist William James (1842-1910), and Henri Bergson.4
Under the term vitalism there were many contradictory ideas that by the 1910’s provided
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an umbrella for those attacking the dominance of the science linked to Darwinist
thinking, which created a philosophical debate in both the Americas and Europe. In 1911,
for example, the journal Science, published in the United States, explained that every
person who had studied the controversy around vitalist ideas had to confront “the lack of
either clear or generally accepted definitions of the terms (“vitalism” and “mechanism”)
used to designate the opposite doctrines under discussion” (Lovejoy 610). This article,
written by the philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy (1873-1962), points to the main problem
intellectuals faced at the time regarding the understanding of the origins of life, and the
supremacy given to materialism by evolutionary thinkers.5
On the contrary, “vitalism” implied that “organisms not only have unique laws on
their own,” but that these laws “cannot even be stated in terms of the number and
arrangement of the organism’s physical components” (ibid., 612). This questioned two
basic tenets of positivist thinking; first, the possibility that some biological phenomena be
shown to be autonomous; second, that this phenomena could be shown to have parts
“existing in the organism or cell” at the moment in which the former took place (ibid.,
613). The German biologist and philosopher Hans Driesch (1867-1941) had proposed
these ideas, changing the understanding of how human organisms worked. But, this neo-
vitalism achieved its most known philosophical expression in the work of the French
philosopher Henri Bergson.
In 1889 Bergson’s Time and Free Will was published, followed in 1896 by Matter
and Memory, and in 1907 Creative Evolution. According to him, it was wrong to assume
that the same laws applied to all organisms. The idea that “the living body might be
treated by some superhuman calculator in the same mathematical way as our solar
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system” should be abandoned (Creative, 20). This implied, as Lovejoy recognized at the
time, the existence of a discontinuity “between the “laws” or modes of action of matter
dealt with by biology and the “laws” of all the sciences of the inorganic” (614). The key
concept introduced by Bergson was “élan vital,” which was understood to imply that
“something absolutely new and novel came into the world when living beings came, and
that this came as a special force, or principle, or factor” that was “not material” (Ritter,
438).
Bergson’s writings became popular in Spanish America by the 1900’s because he
was rightly perceived as a follower of ideas that were developing in the area before his
work was known. He was interested in a science that was still evolutionist while, at the
same time, contradicted previous ideas on three important grounds. First, mechanism
“does not explain certain observed characteristics of growth and regulation in
organisms”; second, “conscious introspection demonstrates that voluntary choice in
human beings is not mechanistically determined”; third, the “adaptative character of
behavior is not fully described in mechanistic terms” (Warren 600). His “doctrine of
organic autonomy” eliminated many of the limitations and constraints placed by
positivist ideas, which connected his work to racial ideas, since it involved the limits of
the materiality of the body and the same understanding of humanity.
Donna V. Jones has explained in her study of Negritude that those who applied
Darwinists ideas to social policy “insisted that as the truth of living beings is bio-logical,
only physical race could sustain the social bond, and society was the theater of human
animals’ struggle of all against all and the domination of one group of subspecies over
another” (8). As it was the case in the Caribbean, Bergson’s work was viewed in Spain
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and its ex-colonies as the first post-positivist philosophical project that had a “categorical
importance to European aesthetics and social thought, including its disturbing racialism”
(20). Jones’s claim that vitalism is connected “not only to European racism but also to the
defensive racial forms of African and Caribbean self-understanding” also applies to the
cases of Spain and Cuba (21). In these two countries Bergson’s vitalism was used to
address concerns about a science that reinforced the primacy of the material forces of
evolution, while his defense of intuition and downgrading of Cartesian rationality was
important in the world of the arts and literature.
Bergson also provided a culmination to the French philosophy that had been
influential among Spanish American intellectuals since the 1890’s. From the vitalism of
Emile Boutroux and Jules Lachelier (1832-1918) to Jean-Marie Guyau’s interest in
aesthetics and the expansion of vital forces through creation, Bergson seemed to
condense their work into a new way to understand philosophy and humanism. Gilles
Deleuze’s explanation of the role of philosophy for Bergson can be used to understand
his influence in Spain and its ex-colonies. According to him, “To open us up to the
inhuman and the superhuman (durations which are inferior or superior to our own), to go
beyond the human condition: this is the meaning of philosophy” (28). If the end of the
nineteenth century was characterized by the philosophical devotion to the study of natural
law and the survival of the fittest, Bergson’s work brought a radical change to this view
of humanity through his different understanding of nature. According to him, nature
“warns us by a clear sign that our destination is attained. That sign is joy.” This
experience is different from pleasure, which “is only a contrivance devised by nature to
obtain for the creature the preservation of its life, it does not indicate the direction in
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which life is thrusting.” But the experience of enjoyment “always announces that life has
succeeded, gained ground, conquered.” This was a triumph that exalted vital forces,
which were visible because “wherever there is joy, there is creation; the richer the
creation, the deeper the joy” (Mind-Energy, 29).
The restoration of this particular notion of humanism is very important to
recognize the context in which Zambrano and Lezama Lima conceived their work on
poetry and philosophy. As we will see, while the materialists saw intelligence and the
logos exclusively as the result of material processes, vitalist ideas circulating in Spain,
France and Spanish America started to debate the importance of spiritual forces in the
development of the will, freedom, and agency. Bergson’s critique of the philosophical
approaches of his time also affected literature, particularly poetry, which explains why
many ideologies of racial renewal came from literature in the first half of the twentieth
century. In Spanish America this attitude had roots in Modernismo, a literary movement
that had made literature the core of Spanish American thought by the end of the
nineteenth century.
Robert Haas has explained how in Time and Free Will (1889) and Laughter: An
Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900), “Bergson rejects the idea that there is a clear
correspondence between sensation and expression [...] Words, like numbers,
measurements, or concepts, are discrete units of thought that organize a stream of
constantly changing sensations.” But, even when ”words help us communicate ideas
efficiently, they nevertheless distort consciousness by fixing qualitative differences into
vague generalizations” (164). This explains why the work of poets “should release us
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from the various conventions that condition our quotidian perception and restore us to a
primordial consciousness that lies beneath the surface of ordinary awareness” (164).
According to Hass, a modernist aesthetic related to the stream-of-consciousness,
and their subordination of “the objective world to the dream-like processes of the mind
and their rendering of constantly changing subjective states serves as a kind of ideal
model for a Bergsonian aesthetic” (165). The access, then, to the flow of life, the actual
source of the élan vital, might be seen as related to the work of artists and poets that
disrupted the linear progression of events. Bergson “disparaged the intellect as an
instrument of analysis, one that is unable to capture the mobility of changing experience--
--although, of course, vitalism, like all philosophies, relies on discursive procedures of
the intellect to convey its particular claims to truth” (Moses 170). This possibility to go
beyond rationality fit perfectly in areas where the realm of reason seemed to be divorced
from local reality, as it was the case in Spain and Spanish America.
Philosophy and Vitalism in Cuba and Spain
The philosophical connection between Cuba and Spain predates Zambrano, and
she was one of the individuals who benefitted from this link through the work of José del
Perojo (1852-1908), born in Santiago of Cuba, but educated in Spain and Germany. He
lived in Madrid and became the most important philosopher of his time. He is considered
the first neo-Kantian philosopher from Spain, and with the creation of the Revista
Contemporánea in 1875 responsible for the spread of a German philosophy that
combined kantianism and positivism (Mülberger 161). He had studied philosophy in
Heidelberg and translated books by Kant and other important German-language
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philosophers who were not well known in Spanish-speaking areas. He was also a
participant in the discussion of Cuban coloniality, and politics related to this issue. His
work aided the neo-Kantianism that coexisted with the reception of Bergson’s work, and
drew attention to the connection between the German and French thoughts. Del Perojo
also provided Zambrano with the roots of a discussion that was very important both in
Spain and Spanish America, the possibility of a national philosophy and national thought
(Mora García 1064).
Both Spain and the nations that emerged from its colonies labored under the
certainty of their peripheral status in European culture. As Stephen D. Gingerich has
explained, “Spain had a consciousness—documented in literature, the arts, and popular
discourse—of being on the margins of Europe, of never quite fitting in with the rest of
the continent” (193). By the end of the nineteenth century, those who belonged to the
peoples deemed “degenerate” or marginal by comparison with northern Europe began to
look into German thought for sources that connected Kantianism, the works of Nietzsche,
vitalism, and the Greek classics, into a project of racial regeneration. This project dealt
with the development of a philosophy that connected the notions of being and becoming
with artistic practice.
María Zambrano shared with Spanish American intellectuals an understanding of
her country as a space of not-being, of lack, deprived of a modern identity that structured
the understanding of the future. As noted, this act of meditating about the meaning of the
country had its roots in Del Perojo, but it had become an important component of the
ideas of the Generation ’98 through the writings of Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936),
“who began his series of essays back in the 1880s” (Gingerich 57). Unamuno’s work was
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very important in Spanish America because it shared the same concerns expressed by
Rodó and those who adhered to the principles of literary Modernismo. It also allowed the
possibility of thinking about circumstances and locality. Between the years 1906 and
1911 there was an active epistolary exchange between Unamuno and the Cuban scholar
Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969). This exchange reveals how the latter saw in the former’s
work, particularly in his take on Don Quijote, a way to wake up from passivity, the
“modorra tropical,” that afflicted Cubans. This emphasis on agency and will was
connected to a more active historical subject that was very important among the members
of Ortiz’s generation. They all followed the ideas of the “regeneracionistas” with interest,
as is shown in this Ortiz’s comment from Entre Cubanos:
No podrá germinar la cultura en Cuba sin que todos, así los grandes del
pensamiento y de la acción, como los pequeños humildes laborantes, nos
brindemos a la tarea regeneradora, nos consagremos al trabajo para roturar el
virginal terruño de nuestra psicología... (qtd. in Serrano, 301).
This sense of generational renewal was also connected to Bergson’s ideas in his
emphasis on action, agency, and becoming. His work was used to affirm the existence of
free will, and the development of sentiments and perception. In 1906 the writer Luis
Baralt (1849-1933), founder of the “Ateneo de la Habana,” gave a talk at the Cuban
Academy of Sciences, drawing attention to the increasing importance of the education of
sentiments and the will. According to him, such education was another factor that favored
evolution, together with “heredity, the cosmic environment, and the circumstances” that
surrounded the individual. Education, according to Baralt, “was the only thing that could
neutralize and defeat the law of heredity” in its creation of a new and superior population
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(159). But he immediately added that he was not interested merely in the intellectual
fruits of educational efforts. Following Spencer, Guyau, Fouillé, Le Bon, and Bergson,
among others, Baralt made it clear that he was against the domination of sentiment by the
intellect. The “supreme goal of education” was the formation of character, which was
primarily organized by sensibility and will (159).
Baralt described will as “a sentiment” and an active component of psychic life
(160). The most sublime such sentiment was love. Love for the truth gave rise to science,
love for beauty to the arts, love for family to the “patria” and humanity, and love for
social solidarity to morality and religion. Love brought together human sympathy,
compassion, pity, and tenderness. Only through love could a truly worthy action occur, in
a series that progressed from love to good feeling or sentiment, desire, resolution, effort,
and finally, the unselfish act. Baralt’s ideas belonged to the sphere of moral philosophy
which strove to increase “this special force that allow us to put behind personal wishes
and interest in the name of collective ones that reflected ideals” that were each day
“higher and most powerful, subjecting animal instincts, selfish by nature, to the orders of
reason and consciousness” (160).
This capacity to feel, to empathize, to love others, is what characterized the Latin
races in the writings of Rodó, Vasconcelos and most post-positivists in Spanish America
by the 1930’s. Moral law replaced Darwinian natural law, and this moral law opened the
door to connect spiritual and natural life. Drawing on Herbert Spencer’s 1902 Facts and
Comments, a text quite critical of the consequences of progress, Baralt placed at the
center of civilization sentimental action based on the “knowledge of the psychological
laws of human nature,” which in time would give Cubans “the victory” (163). The result
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of this victory would end up being future survival through a harmonious life created by
the individuals’ will and actions.
Baralt’s speech captured the main vitalist ideas circulating at the time, including
those of Bergson. According to the latter, “the sources of morality and religion are always
a matter of love.” This is not romantic love, but a love that “expresses what is creative
and evolving; this love responds to attraction----wholeheartedly, if you will----and
“aspires” to moral progress,” which made morality less related to evolutionary outcomes.
In addition, this kind of aspirational love was characteristic of “progress”----the
exceptional, the “evolving,” the creative, the open” (Kelly 77). This is a superior emotion
that “expresses time-flowing in the person and the social “ (ibd. 76). It also “has no object
because it will create a new object, a new idea, because it is pregnant with it. It is all
activity, all free movement that responds to the appeal of love of humanity rather than the
pressures of social conscience” (ibid. 81).
In Spain, where, as we have seen, a similar process of regeneration had been
taking place since the 1890s, the work of José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) contributed
to a new philosophical current connecting German and French traditions. Zambrano’s
generation saw in his work the beginning of a process that redefined the importance of
human agency and action. In 1927 the publication of his Rebellion of the Masses created
a stir similar to the one Rodó had provoked with Ariel. As Zambrano described it, it was
a statement for the youth, and one that implied the important role of vitalism after the
pessimism that dominated the end of the nineteenth century:
[Ortega] was one of those rate writers who allow a reader to believe he
himself has written what he’s reading. I believe this is what many Spaniards felt
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as they read him; they believed they were the authors. “Vitality, soul, spirit”:
didn’t write this myself, wasn’t perhaps mine? [...] I believe that each of us had
written it, each of us young people.
Yes, reading Ortega made you want to live. You saw that life is something
good, intelligent in itself, that life is intelligent---or more so---qua “intelligence,
as what you had thought was intelligence, reason: you saw that life is reason and
sticks to reason, its own reason deep within life itself. Ans this enable you to love
life, to want to live it with faith, hope, and joy (Zambrano 59).
Jaime Ferreiro Alemparte has explained how José Ortega y Gasset defended
rational knowledge, but not as an independent and abstract reality. He was in favor of a
rationality understood as a dimension and manifestation of human life as such, which
meant as a historical process. His defense of these ideas continued with the foundation of
the Revista de Occidente in 1924. Its publication made works published in German
available to Spanish speaking audiences, among them those of Max Scheler and Georg
Simmel. As it was the case in Spanish America, Zambrano’s generation used abundant
and eclectic sources in an effort to answer their own philosophical questions. But
Bergson was an important reference in her reconstitution of vitalism and his work a
constant companion during her time at the university in the 1920’s (Laurenzi 23).
Ortega knew the different notions of philosophical vitalism circulating at the time,
including Bergson’s, and used them for both philosophical and political reasons. He
linked the affirmation of action and will with their role in the cultural and social
transformation of the individual, for example. According to him the decisions we take are
key to understanding the connection between past and future, and the process of making
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oneself. His “razón vital” was similar to Bergson’s “good reason,” a commonality that
Ortega characterized in this way:
Lo llamado por Bergson “buen sentido” es lo que yo he llamado formalmente
“razón vital”, una razón más amplia y para la cual son racionales no pocos objetos
que frente a la vieja raison o razón conceptual o razón pura son, en efecto,
irracionales (327).
But Ortega’s vital reason may be contrasted with the poetic reason of Zambrano,
who argued with her teacher about this precise issue. Zambrano’s poetic reason has a
different take on passivity, and in its connection with mysticism emphasizes a different
subjectivity. She said in an interview that her work had always stood between the rescue
of passivity and receptivity, and that her poetic reason had remained the same since it had
appeared in her essay “Hacia un saber sobre el alma”, published in Revista de Occidente
in 1934. At the beginning she had thought that she was following Ortega’s vital reason,
but after a while she understood that her work was departing from her teacher’s.
Zambrano recalled showing this essay to Ortega. After reading it he said, “we are still
here and you wanted to jump ahead”, which made it obvious to her that while he had
directed his reason to historical reason, she was directing hers to poetic reason (Quoted in
Lapiedra Gutiérrez, 66-67).
Philosophy and Poetry in Zambrano and Lezama Lima
Like most thinkers of her time, Zambrano was concerned with the meaning of
modernity, and its relationship to ways to define humanity. She was interested in a
philosophy that not only developed an independent and omnipotent subject, but one who
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also set the limits of existence. Guillermo Lapiedra Gutiérrez correctly captures the
difference between Ortega and Zambrano in two essential issues: “passivity and
transcendence.” For Zambrano, “being born means that life is a path between two
absolutes; one of more passivity, which is the sleep; and transcendence, which is given in
love and hope” (68). While Ortega focused, like many Spanish American thinkers, on
action and immanence, Zambrano was interested in the opposite. According to Ortega,
the relationship between what surrounds the subject and the subject itself explains our
decisions and how we act. Everything we know is in relation to life, to immanence, and
nothing can be done outside it. Zambrano, on the other hand, paid attention to receptivity,
to the possibility of stepping out of oneself to leave space for the other.
According to Roberta Johnson, Zambrano disagreed with leaving the study of the
soul to psychology, which was only interested in its connection with scientific ideas. For
her the soul “is the key to the process of bringing external political and ethical matters
into the realm of the individual subject, because it situates itself in that central and
facilitating space between “the I and the natural exterior”” (228), which explains why
literature became for Zambrano “the ideal intermediary between the external self and the
socio-political world, because it participates equally in the public and private spheres”
(Ibid.). Creative writing was very helpful in conceiving a different way to think
philosophically because it is “uniquely situated to unite the individual emotions with
public political life in Zambrano’s “poetic reason”” (ibid.).
Zambrano’s interest in the relationship between poetry and philosophy was also
important in Latin America since the 1900s, as it was mentioned. Poetry and the
philosophy of Bergson were articulated to negate the traditional understanding of
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rationality by means of a process organized around creativity. The Mexican philosopher
José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), for example, did not limit his contributions to the
emergence of the cosmic race. One of his main interests was aesthetics, and, as in the
case of Zambrano, he based many of his ideas on this subject in the reading of Greek
texts and the function of rhythm to experience the flow of life. Vasconcelos’s study of
Pythagorean ideas in music, for example, was published in the journal Cuba
Contemporánea in 1916, among other studies that searched for the relationship between
philosophy, poetry, and the exploration of a new subjectivity.
In Spain, Zambrano trod the same path. But her approach led to a way of finding
that is not structured around conscious, mental, active, and controlled processes, but
around passive ones related to an affectivity that limited the dominance of reason.
According to her, the deification of humanity, its occupying of otherness, had made men
experience solitude, a process that had to be reversed via the limitation of reason and the
restoration of a difference that she called “the divine” (Zambrano, 1987, 29).6 Our
relationship with “lo divino” had to be restored in order for us to recover our humanity,
and our sense of otherness. It is in the process of this recovery that passivity becomes a
necessity and pure action, the act of occupying everything, is limited. Zambrano
connected poetry to space and philosophy to time. As a result, poetic space is related to
myth, while the time of philosophy is that of history. Poetic reason intersects both, and is
also the point of origin that preceded reason.
Zambrano gives a larger role to reception, and in her work this concept is much
more relevant than in most of other philosophers or intellectuals interested in vitalism.
Her mystic ex-tasis, her interest in a state of not-being and the denial of self, makes her
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quite different to others who saw in the “élan vital” a possibility of enhancing the self.
Obviously she does not see the mystic act as sadomasochistic, but, to contrary, as an
attempt to experience difference in order to know it. The point at which we transcend our
humanity is the point at which we know what humanity truly is.
The act of mysticism is not, then, a religious expression, but a deeply humane
one. In a letter written to a theologian friend she noted her interest in “opening reason,
uniting reason and devotion, reason and fundamental sentiment, philosophy and poetry”
(Quoted in Morán, 13). Following the model of Greek philosophers, Zambrano saw in the
search for the divine a way to achieve true knowledge. In the work of the Spanish mystic
and poet San Juan de la Cruz (1542-1591) she found a perfect example of poetic reason.
According to her, his writings showed that “his being is finally able to manage not to be,”
but he received this state not as an act of death, but “as an imperative that came from life
itself. The mystic’s revolution is in complete self-alienation, in becoming other, in the
complete destruction of self, putting self aside so that another comes to exist in the
mystic. Having consumed all the dimensions of being, mental, moral, and so on, all that
remains is ‘all-consuming love’” (ibid.). The possibility of evolutionary death seems to
be transcended in this analysis of Zambrano, since the negation of self seems to be related
to life and not to death.
Zambrano went to live in exile after the defeat of the Spanish Republic in 1939.
She stayed in Cuba from 1940 through 1946, and from 1948 through 1953. She knew the
country already, having visited it in 1936 with her husband. Her arrival was received with
enthusiasm among the youth, since the philosophical topics that concerned Zambrano
were also, as we have seen, similar to those already being discussed in Cuba, and
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everywhere in Spanish America. The philosopher Medardo Vitier, father of Cintio, noted
in his book about philosophy in Cuba that Zambrano’s “influence among a reduced group
of young people was considerable. She might ignore it herself. All of them had rekindled
their philosophical interests” (qtd. in Dosil Mansilla, 143). Among them, José Lezama
Lima became one of her closest intellectual companions. This connection was helpful to
both of them in many respects, but for the purpose of this essay I will confine myself to
the analysis of the poetic in its relationship with philosophy.
In Cuba the interest in a poetry that dealt with philosophy was incubating before
Zambrano’s arrival, finally emerging in a group that gathered around the publication of
Orígenes from 1944 to 1956. This publication reflected an interest in exploring questions
related to identity, nationality, and modernity, with an editorial philosophy that reflected
the preoccupations of Lezama Lima’s generation. Like Zambrano, Lezama was also
interested in finding a way to eliminate the dualisms that resulted from rationalism, such
as material/immaterial, sensual/spiritual, or sacred/secular. According to him, through
poetry one can access the world of mystery, and the function of the poet was to resignify
the world through a perception that transcended the ordinary, which connected him to
Bergson’s intuitionism. Cintio Vitier, another member of the group Orígenes, put it in
very Bergsonian terms when he explained that the voice of poetry was better heard in the
space of the written than in the sequential temporality of the spoken word.
These poets, called “transcendentalists” by the critic Roberto Retamar, searched
for a way in which they could leave behind the knowledge that came through the
materiality of the body, since according to many the limitations imposed by such form of
knowing explained Cuba’s political failures. As we saw, the narrative of racial inferiority
20
in Spanish America was based on racist and scientific accounts that emphasized
materialism, so this new poetic approach wanted to transcend the latter as a way to
establish the country’s existence. Lezama Lima’s understanding of the poetic was related,
as it was in Zambrano, with the ability to be removed from oneself, to be receptive to a
different way of knowing, also related to the transcendental. Poetic action was not only
something that one did by writing, but also a way to develop a modernist identity to aid a
politically frustrated country. In the case of the Cuban writer, though, this process
emphasizes memory, which is for him the material for poetry.
According to Lezama Lima, we know through what we remember. But for him
memories are not a static enumeration of events in relation to time. Memory belongs to
the world of the obscure, of the primal world that can be accessed by the poetic. This also
resembles Bergson’s conception of perception as something that “is entirely absent from
memory, a reality intuitively grasped” (85). In this “state of pure perception we are
actually placed outside ourselves, we touch the reality of the object in an immediate
intuition” (Bergson, 1911, 84-85). Perception adds a different source for history, since
remembering is not about an organized narrative of the present, past, and future, but
about the perception of different durations. Myth and history have to be linked through
creative practice, and poetry and history cannot, then, be separated. This narrative can
only be expressed metaphorically, which led Lezama Lima to talk about metaphorical
justice, the restoration of the world we want to access. Metaphor is the key poetic
element here, and its use hearkens to Bergson’s understanding of this concept.
It is helpful in this context to have in mind Gaston Bachelard’s analysis of
Bergson, according to which the “linguistic impulses, which stand out from the ordinary
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rank of pragmatic language, are miniatures of the vital impulse. A micro-Bergsonism that
abandoned the thesis of language-as-instrument in favor of the thesis of language-as-
reality would find in poetry numerous documents on the intense life of language” (xxvii).
Bachelard’s notion of poetry-as-reality is very helpful to understanding Lezama Lima’s
approach, and his attempt to articulate a relationship between cultural practice and Cuban
history. Like Bergson, he seems to imply that “imagination is entirely metaphorical”, and
that metaphor is “related to a psychic being from which it differs” (Bachelard 74).
Philosophically, Lezama Lima’s interest in notions of uncovering, becoming and
being, might be seen as somewhat connected to the work of Heidegger. According to
Michael Bell, for the later “the royal road to remembrance of Being is through the non-
discursive rout of art and locality,” and in his work the connection between poetry and
philosophy is also very important (206). But local concerns made Lezama Lima’s reading
of Heidegger’s conception of being-toward-death very literal, so he rejected this idea and
replaced it with a notion of man-to-life through a poetic creation that served the purpose
of resurrection, evoking a being that defeats death, the arrival of pure life (Huerta, 10).
Death, of course, was a dangerous word to use in areas in which population had been
deemed inferior and already well along the path to evolutionary extinction.
The possibility of entering into the flow of life, and linking oneself with the other,
means, as Elizabeth Grosz has explained, that this inner continuity is that “through which
[individuals] can access the world of matter and the world of objects, through which a
different kind of knowledge is possible” (48). The new vitalist form developed by
Zambrano and Lezama Lima, though, is less interested in the possibilities of matter and
more focused on the possibility of a logos achieved through spirituality and
22
immateriality. The state of ex-tasis, of being outside oneself, results from the interactions
between philosophy and poetry that were common practice among many avant-garde
artists worldwide by the 1930s.7
Lezama Lima shared with Zambrano an interest in a form of vitalism that
mediated rationalism with an eclectic collection of philosophical material, including
Bergsonian intuitionism. Through this intuitionism a subject can access the internal life
of things, the flow of life paralyzed by rationalism. But this continuous movement that
refers to action has to be experienced. This access grants us the power to link the logical
with the pre-logical, and our ordinary existence with our primal world. This connection
between literature and Bergson’s work was widespread in Europe and the United States,
but among Spanish American writers it was also related to local politics in a unique way.
Locality explains Lezama Lima’s interest in a different vitalist position than
Zambrano’s. His uses of memory and metaphor are linked to an artistic search for an
identity that revealed the creative subject of a modern nation. Artistic subjecthood is very
important in his understanding of the poetic, and in his entering into the stream of life
there is a conception of poetry as a way to know locality: the revelation of a country
through its language and metaphor. It is for this reason that critics of his writings can
identify in them both a universal modern project, and a project for Cuba. For example,
according to one analysis of his novel Paradiso, there are traces of “Proust and Gide” in
it, together with the discovery “of multiple facets of our peninsular reality” (López
Segrera, 96). In 1957 he developed some of these ideas with the publication of La
Expresión Americana, in which there is a return to Spain and its baroque poetry. If for
Zambrano poetic reason is related to self-denial, in Lezama the writing of poetry is an act
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of self-affirmation, and the encounter with self through language. As Tania Gentic puts it,
“his counterpoint is not a dialogic theory of movement rooted in binary dichotomies, but
rather a complex, spatially metaphorized figuring of identity created by a sistema poético,
the imago, and the sujeto metafórico. These interrelated mechanisms create the
expression that, according to him, makes America unique but also allows for a non-
hierarchical connection between it and Europe to exist” (187).
In this type of artistic renewal we can see how creative practice was developed
through philosophy, and, in the case of Zambrano, how philosophy was expanded
through artistic practice. Lezama Lima, the writer, wanted to use the philosophical
vitalism of his time in order to claim an artistic practice rooted in the knowledge of his
country; Zambrano, the philosopher, wanted to create a different way to do philosophy
through creative writing, a poesis that sustained the possibility of a different knowledge.
For both, this new way to understand reality had important political consequences and
uses, which allowed them to integrate their countries within the universal flow of life that
characterized their humanism.
Conclusions:
In this essay I showed how by the beginning of the 20th century the paths of Spain
and Spanish America were reunited in a search for a philosophical system that could
effectively address the limitations imposed by biological determinism and racism. This
concern with creating a more spiritual identity that fostered the production of knowledge
in locality, was aided early on by the French philosophers who renewed the interest in
pure philosophical and speculative approaches. This brought a reconnection with
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vitalism, classical ideas, German philosophy, and the work of Bergson who seemed to
synthetize many of the philosophical currents that had been relevant since the emergence
of literary Modernism in the 1890s.
Bergson became a link to both scientific thought and art in a way that allowed for
the restoration of will and freedom in the search for self-realization. But Zambrano and
Lezama Lima moved a step away from Bergsonian ideas in their attempt to develop new
forms of knowing that restored poetry and creation as the basis of logos. This was also
common to other intellectuals of the time, including the Mexican poet Octavio Paz (1914-
1998), another friend of Zambrano. This exploration of the links that existed between
poetry and philosophy was helpful in the process of creating a more inclusive modernist
culture through the connection to local experience.
These cultural-political reconstitutions allowed intellectuals like Zambrano and
Lezama Lima to create an alternative way of knowledge. Zambrano’s approach is linked
to the recovery of Spanish mysticism as an example of the way in which otherness could
be accessed and reconciled. The culture of the sacred is the opening to the mystery that
reveals true humanity and the flow that connects us to otherness and our limits. In the
case of Lezama Lima, the politics of his aesthetic model seems to make him an aristocrat
removed from the popular tastes and reality of his country, a charge that was quite costly
after the Cuban Revolution. But paying attention to the historical discussion of this essay,
the attacks on Lezama Lima’s appears to be disconnected from the reality his generation
had to faced. The constitution of a modern national identity was quite elusive during the
second half of the nineteenth century for intellectuals in Spain and Spanish America. It is
for this reason that the intellectual movements of the next century moved the discussion
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of nation and modernity away from extinction and death, and into the realm of life and
creation. The artistic path to explore a different way to produce national culture was not
limited in terms of class, but in terms of the ability to become an artist. But this
exploration intended to reveal the nation through the artist, did not imply that this was a
pure individualist effort, since what it was discovered, the source of life, was universally
shared. The anti-essentialism of a project that emphasized vital energy and becoming
turned out to be negative in the 1960s, but it meant resurrection, life, and possibility, as
Lezama Lima put it, in the 1940s.
Endnotes 1 For example, see: Zambrano, María. "Cuba y la poesía de José Lezama Lima." Insula 23 (1968): 260-261; Zambrano, María, and Cintio Vitier. "Breve testimonio de un encuentro inacabable." Paradiso. Ed. Cintio Vitier. España: Archivos (1988); Zambrano, María. "Hombre verdadero: José Lezama Lima." Lezama Lima. Taurus Ediciones, 1987; Poumier, María. "José Lezama Lima y María Zambrano “sembrados” en La Habana” Vivarium, IX. La Habana (1994); Álvarez, José Manuel González. "Insularismo, literatura y cubanidad en la poética de José Lezama Lima." Espéculo: Revista de Estudios Literarios 21 (2002): 52; Johnson, Roberta. "María Zambrano's Theory of Literature as Knowledge and Contingency." Hispania (1996): 215-221; Sainz, Enrique. "La obra inicial de María Zambrano en José Lezama Lima y Cintio Vitier: algunos apuntes." República de las Letras: revista literaria de la Asociación Colegial de Escritores 84 (2004): 133-149. 2 García Calderón is probably referring to these two books by Fouillée: Le Mouvement Idéaliste et la Réaction contre la Science Positive. Paris: Alcan, 1896; Le Mouvement Positiviste et la Conception Sociologique du Monde. Paris: Alcan, 1896. 3 The work of Guyeau was also known through this book by Fouillée, La morale, l'art et la religion d'après Guyau. Paris: Alcan, 1901. 4 “Emile Boutroux, like Bergson and James, reoriented inquiry into the philosophical tradition. Boutroux saw the major philosophers as taking from the past rather than as embodying an historical moment of universal spirit. Like Bergson he privileged the experiential over the a priori and individual development over social order.” See: Robert T. Conn. The Politics of Philology: Alfonso Reyes and the Invention of the Latin American Literary Tradition. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002, 53. 5 Lovejoy was a disciple of Henry James, and himself very influential among poets. He had, for example, a great influence on the work Robert Frost.
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6 This idea of solitude is also very similar to the one that Octavio Paz will develop in his work about Mexican identity. See: The Labyrinth of Solitude: The Other Mexico, Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States, the Philanthropic Ogre. New York, Grove Press, 1994 7 In fact Zambrano’s ex-tasis has similarities with Sergei Eisenstein’s conception of it in that the latter also search through art a way in which the spectator could be removed from his ordinary life and perceptions. His interest in the baroque also follows a model that is similar to Lezama Lima’s. On Eisenstein, see: Salazkina, Masha. In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein's Mexico. University of Chicago Press, 2009. Works Cited “Are the Latin Races Doomed? The Nation 69 n. 1800 (Dec. 28, 1899): 477-478. Baralt, Luis A. “Educación de los Sentimientos y de la Voluntad.” Anales de la Academia de Ciencias Médicas, Físicas y Naturales de la Habana 43 (1906-1907): 159-166. Bell, Michael. Open Secrets: Literature, Education, and Authority from J. J. Rousseau to J. M. Coetzee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.
Translated by F.L. Pogson. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910. ------------------- Creative Evolution. New York: Henry Holt, 1911. ------------------ Laughter; An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. London:
Macmillan & Co., 1911. ------------------- Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul. New York:
Macmillan, 1912. ------------------ Mind-energy: lectures and essays. Translated by Herbert Wildon Carr. New York: H. Holt, 1920. ------------------ “The Perception of Change,” in his The Creative Mind: An Introduction
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Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Dosil Mancilla, Francisco Javier, «El exilio en Cuba de María Zambrano», In María Zambrano. Pensamiento y exilio. Antolín Sánchez Cuervo, Agustín Sánchez Andrés y Gerardo Sánchez Díaz (coords.). Morelia: Universidad Michoacana / Comunidad de Madrid, 2004: 125-172.
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Ferreiro Alemparte, Jaime. “José Ortega y Gasset y el pensamiento alemán en España.” Glossae: Revista de Historia del Derecho Europeo 2 (1989-1990): 143-159. García Calderón, Francisco. Latin America: Its Rise and Progress. Translated by Bernard Miall. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1915. Gentic, Tania. "Creating Poetic Subjectivity in María Zambrano and José Lezama Lima." Revista Hispánica Moderna 63.2 (2010): 173-192. Guerlac, Suzanne. “Foreword.” In Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism. Gontarski, S. E., Paul Ardoin, and Laci Mattison, eds. London: Blackwell, 2013: i-iv. Gingerich, Stephen D. "Europe's Frenzy: European and Spanish Universality in María Zambrano." CR: The New Centennial Review 8.3 (2008): 189-214. Hass, Robert Bernard. "(Re) Reading Bergson: Frost, Pound and the Legacy of Modern Poetry." Journal of Modern Literature 29.1 (2006): 55-75. Huerta, David. “Trece Motivos para Lezama.” In, José Lezama Lima. Muerte de Narciso: antología poética. Ediciones Era, 1988: 9-31. Kelly, Michael R. “A Reading of Two Sources of Morality and Religion, or Bergsonian Wisdom, Emotion, and Integrity,” in Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism. Gontarski, S. E., Paul Ardoin, and Laci Mattison, eds. London: Bloomsbury, 2013: Jones, Donna V. The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity. Columbia University Press, 2010. Jones, Rufus M. “Bergson.” Present Day Papers 1 (1914): 270-273. Laurenzi, Elena. "El funámbulo y el payaso. Notas sobre Friedrich Nietzsche y María Zambrano." Aurora: papeles del Seminario María Zambrano 9: 21-27. Lezama Lima, José. Paradiso. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968. ----------------------- El reino de la imagen. Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1981. ----------------------- La Expresión Americana. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013.
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