The women philosophers of meaning

María Zambrano with her inseparable cigarette holder,
recently returned from exile,
in her home in Madrid in 1984
©Raúl Cancio – El País –

  In 19th-century Europe, there was a convergence of the works of three giants of philosophy: F. Nietzsche, K. Marx, and S. Freud. Philosophy up to that point had been life-destroying, concealing the interests of capital and castrating instinct under a supposed shadowless rationality, we were told.

   We were witnessing then the emergence of modern nation-states and the struggle of liberalism to shape the principles of the new democracies. They have gone down in history as the “philosophers of suspicion,” since their respective works denounce the political, religious, and metaphysical traps that had held human beings captive during the twenty centuries separating them from the luminosity of classical Greek thought, which discovered humanism, individual freedom, rational critique, secular ethics, and democracy. Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, each in their own way, extended their suspicion to the prevailing ideologies. They sought the keys to human emancipation from the threats hidden within the human being itself, in its sociopolitical environment, and also in the realm of the supra-human. Another matter entirely were the consequences of the revolutionary transformations that these philosophies of suspicion set in motion.

   But a few years later, those hopes—many of them expressed in the form of intrahistorical utopias (in their two versions: nationalist and internationalist) or supra-historical ones (religious eschatology)—collapsed dramatically. Europe entered three long decades of darkness and unprecedented violence, beginning with the outbreak of the First World War and ending with the defeat of the imperialist and exterminatory ambitions of Germany and Japan—replaced by those of the USA and the USSR—having in between witnessed the Russian Communist Revolution—and later Mao’s Chinese one—with their disastrous consequences for individual freedom.

   A new form of thought then emerged, which we will call the Philosophy of Meaning. It found its best expression in the works of Albert Camus (1913–1960—Nobel Prize in 1957) and María Zambrano (1904–1991—Cervantes Prize in 1988). Antonio Machado (1875–1939), Simone Weil (1909–1943), and Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) also belong to this same sphere of a new metaphysics of meaning. Their works seek to humanize reason and to direct philosophical efforts toward offering human beings proposals of meaning, from a reason open to the most intuitive and emotional dimensions of our mind, anticipating the North American theories of multiple intelligences (Howard Gardner, 1983): the “pensée de midi” and “poetic reason” symbolize their respective philosophies. They aim to offer individuals a place in the world beyond traditional ideologies: to build a society in which each person’s rights stand above borders and phobias; the limit of the relative against the mythologization of utopias; the preservation and care of life in its multiple manifestations against the drive for heteropatriarchal domination; universal fraternity and moral principles derived from the dignity of each subject against reason of state; inner life against religions of rites and symbols; art as a source of meaning and happiness. These are some of their philosophical proposals.

   Today we once again face a landscape of disillusionment and despair, after the glimpses of a new humanism that came with the creation of the UN and the proclamation of human rights, or the end of the Cold War. Imperial ambitions, violent and exclusionary nationalisms, and supremacist ideologies are returning. All this unfolds under the threat of an unprecedented environmental crisis and the mixture of technological revolution and existential threat posed by AI. Once again, the proposals of the women philosophers of meaning have become indispensable. Their representatives today are still predominantly women: Nancy Fraser, Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum, and Spanish thinkers such as Victoria Camps and Amelia Valcárcel.

(More about María Zambrano here) 

www.filosofiaylaicismo.blogspot.com