Personal reason and abstract reason: regarding a letter from María Zambrano

Digitalization is the decomposition for the prediction of all our behaviors and desires

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Andreu Navarra

On October 24, 1949, María Zambrano was in Rome and had just visited Florence. She set out, once more, to try to write to her friend Josep Ferrater Mora, who in those years used to write her about his bibliographical achievements and about the healthstate of his son Jaime. What Zambrano writes to him is a brilliant description about what is known as Stendhal’s Syndrome: “Since I set foot on this land, that is, since I entered the Mediterranean, I began to oscillate furiously like a magnetized needle attracted by a pole that was too intense and close, or perhaps two, and I turned dizzyingly from the most intense ecstasies to the deepest misfortune and for the same reason. And specially in Firenze, more than in Rome , I have suffered from time vertigo, in an instant I fell down from several centuries like airplanes when they “swoop.” This wonderful letter can be read in the Epistolario 1944-1977 published in Renacimiento by Miguel Osset in 2022.

In Florence, according to Zambrano, “all things were exasperatingly beautiful.” And she continues: “Any trace of Greece – the mother – makes me smile calmly, as though I was being transported to a point where everything can be understood, in the very center of the intelligible world, which is not the world of pure Reason, but the world of the reason of the soul.” A few pages further back, Zambrano had explained to Ferrater that for any exiled the heavy ‘Historical Reason‘ always keeps him within restricted boundaries that don’t let to go beyond, through the personal reason that would allow him to lead a more pleasant or easier life. This is the traditional dichotomy between ‘Violent Reason‘ and Zambranian ‘poetic reason‘, coming from the Spanish thought and the Greek world.

And he continues like this: “Nowadays we do not have, as far as I know, anything similar to what Christian life used to be at the beginning; The concrete and the immediate is simply the economic and at most the “psychological.” Yes, Psychology: psychoanalysis, etc., wants to fill that tremendous gap left in human life by living under an increasingly detached and “abstract” culture.” How current does it sounds, does it not? It is curious that Franco “Bifo” Berardi, a thinker still active, refers to the radical “abstraction” of our existence as one of the main social problems of today that Left doesn’t seem capable to detect. Indeed, Digitalization is the decomposition for the prediction of all our behaviors and desires. Our administrations and the business world do not seem to understand, nor are they interested in: why a small group of human communities or isolated behaviors (walking, dining, black humor, attentive reading) refuse to be reduced to ‘Economic Reason‘ . The amazing thing is how María Zambrano, more than seventy years ago, did already realize that psychologism (today we would say “emotional education”) is a powerless patch against the imposed disconnection from historical or economic Reason.

“Pedagogism, like any other religion, does not understand intimate resistance, it does not understand that someones may prefer to live their own life outside of Revelation”

Something similar happens with pedagogism: its solemn and megalomaniacal narratives, its stupidizing utopia of mass standardization and social classification causes only anxiety and depression where, in theory, a Paradise should be found. Why? Because they annihilate improvisation, the human factor, the authentic dimension of living and its undigitizable and transutopian personal reason. Pedagogism, like any other religion, does not understand intimate resistance, it does not understand that someone prefers to live his own life outside of Revelation, pure historical and violent Reason, in contact with free beauty and explorative reflection and nameless senses like the Stendhal’s syndrome. Pedagogism does not understand that someone doesn’ want to be foreseen, nor to be biometrized or commercialized, outside the cyberfeudal and paternalistic prostheses of our current days.

Ferrater Mora answered her on December 22, 1949, from Pennsylvania, and wrote as follows: “Man has become a “psychological being”: is there anything more scorching? I am very close to admit that the attitude of 19th century materialists, for whom man was of course a “physiological being” was rather more aceptable. At least, since physiology is more naive, is less «demonic». But let’s stop talking about this, even in case «this» actually means something”. And so will us, even in case we have actually said something too.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons