Notes on a Phenomenology of the Divine in Maria Zambrano

Abstract

It is at the very moment when thought brings itself to confront life and tries to take up considerations that embrace life’s ineluctable totality that it inevitably comes up against the paradox of its immeasurable objective, since such a reflective act belongs to its own object: life itself. The vital process subsumes and engulfs the act of thinking in such a way that any project of systematization could only be considered as a metalanguage whose fate would be its reabsorption into its own functioning. It is exactly in this way that Reason tends, naturally, to go beyond its own boundaries; the act of thinking insists on thinking about itself, as if, by means of doing so, it could sublimate itself by cancelling itself out. But what could happen to a consciousness that succeeded in being conscious of itself? This urge, if it were perfect and absolute, would lead to a sort of implosion, a gap in nothingness, perhaps a mystical experience.