Vico and Zambrano: From poetic thinking to embodied knowledge

Abstract

There are many similarities between Giambattista Vico (1668-1774) and María Zambrano (1904-1991) that can be recovered in this year’s tribute to the latter. Both philosophers invite us to focus on a different kind of logos, a more merciful gaze, one that can help us understand differently today’s collective and subjective experience. Today, it is urgent to recover aesthetics as a hermeneutic of culture, rather than as a discipline merely linked to formal questions of beauty and art. Indeed, the ongoing economic and socio-political crisis reflects an inherited way of understanding the human world in an intellectualist manner. Given that their thought made an epistemological critique of idealism, and raised our origins genealogically from sensitivity and creativity, the philosophies of Vico and Zambrano constitute an opportunity to create a more humane and hopeful horizon than the one that seems to be taking shape.