Il metodo della ragione poetica per una nuova filosofia. Note a Luoghi della poesia di Maria Zambrano.

From the recent Italian edition of the book “Luoghi della poesia” by Maria Zambrano, edited by Armando Savignano, the essay by Stafania Tarantino delves into the theoretical core of poetic thought that acquires, in the philosophical path of the Spanish philosopher, a substantial originality. She sees poetry as an action and not as a mere contemplation, for it opens spaces otherwise impenetrable to reason, having an effect on the depth of individual and collective consciousness, delving in one’s deepest memories to track that original unity of the being that can not be represented by the philosophic thought but not by the poetical word that receives it as a gift or grace. For its intrinsic arbitrariness the poetical act is in itself the most revolutionary even though it is not voluntary and intentional for who does it. It is the result of an encounter with something that acts inside the subjectivity. The issue of possession is central to understanding the differences between poetical attitude and philosophical attitude. Unlike the philosopher who severs the links with everything that comes from the outside world and who puts his trust in the act of thinking to the point of making it coincide with reality itself, and sets on the outside of logos all that can not be included in a conceptual definition, the poet does not start from himself and, above all, does not want to define reality, he is rather immersed in it, caught by all its lights and shadows without getting rid of it. So the specific character of poetry is that it bears in itself, the marks of another time and another life, it does not shrink from the heterogeneity of things, it does not fear their multiplicity. The poet knows that before any knowledge and logical analysis of the reality, the human being feels his own being. He feels it because he has got a body and because he has (in himself) a presence that he does not know but that lets him be more than himself compared to his empirical and psychological self. One can therefore understand why the need to go back to the precious teachings of the orphic-pythagorean tradition, to regain the root of a knowledge that in front of the contradictions of reality discovers the harmonic and mathematically precise form of the temporal processes of the universe and of the human psyche, is to Zambrano a real opportunity to restore all that had been excluded by the logos-word of philosophy in a wider knowledge. From the numeric root of the universe in fact the Pythagoreans drew the notion of harmony and with it the perception of a living resonance closed in the vital rhythm of the physis. With the logos of number we do not discover just the harmony of the contraries, the non-identity thanks to which all things are related to each other but we discover the soul too. That endless and timeless shadow that lives in the heart of the human being.