Dios como fenónemo purola experiencia de Dios en la propuesta filosófica de María Zambrano. Una respuesta a la filosofía moderna de la religión

Abstract

How is it possible that God, without ceasing to be Absolute, can communicate with the human person and how is it possible for the latter to experience this communication in order to express himself or herself freely in the light of it? The condition of possibility of God being recognised by the human person would be His voluntary decision to make Himself present in human existence (revelation). God is prior to any human position regarding Him; God is the condition of the possibility of any position regarding him. As a result, human existence should be affected by this presence, prior to any decision, in such a way that an appropriate phenomenological presentation of human life should be able to show this communication with God prior to any explanatory theoretical position or any practical position. Only thus can the modern critique of religion be rigorously overcome. The title of this work: God as pure phenomenon attempts to capture the conviction, following the fundamental intuitions of Maria Zambrano¿s thought, that this communication with God occurs and is not an extrinsic addition to constituted human life. In the first part a forgetting which characterises modernity and the present culture is criticised, a forgetting which is the result of its glorification of human autonomy, immanence and the equality of knowing and being. The forgetting involves a common Otherness, God/Love/Mercy/Father which cannot be reduced to being and is therefore distinct from the power of the real, an Otherness which one cannot hide from and which exposes human subjectivity and demands a decision. This criticism involves a dialogue with Hegel, searching for a space beyond him in which the revelation can never be understood as a complete revelation of God. For that reason, a tension will be maintained between Presence and Absence, the condition of possibility for respecting the radical truth of the Mystery of God. It also involves a critical dialogue with Heidegger because the denial of a complete revelation of God cannot simply enclose human life in the realm of facticity. Between Hegel (absolute knowledge) and Heidegger (inescapable finitude) the route (method) offered by Maria Zambrano should be situated, as we will critically demonstrate. The second part deals with the route (method) which leads Maria Zambrano to her philosophical maturity. The key to her philosophical proposal can be found here: poetic reason, in critical dialogue with Plato and also with Ortega y Gasset. The important influence of Unamuno and the assimilation of Antonio Machado¿s poetics will be underlined. The third part builds on the others and presents the three possible ways of facing human life which can be derived from Zambrano¿s poetic reason. It is a personal outline of a possible anthropology and deals with three existential modes which correspond to three ways of doing philosophy: nihilism (considering the agony of Europe): stoicism, recalling the thought of Seneca; and the search for ¿human excellence¿ (the virtue of the ancients), in critical dialogue with Unamuno. The ¿place¿ where, for Zambrano, the experience of God as pure phenomenon occurs will thus be outlined and will be dealt with explicitly in the conclusion. The two existential decisions, namely ¿novelisation¿ and ¿tragedy¿, which define the inauthentic life, in other words, which render the escape from nihilism and stoicism and the search for human excellence impossible, are explored in the conclusion via the ¿figures¿ of Antigone, Quijote and Nina. The search for authenticity in human life demands a theory of the soul, a fundamental concern of Zambrano and one which was present in the initial steps of her journey of reflection, an authenticity which makes it possible for human life to remain open to the Truth of transcendence, to God as pure phenomenon.