Scheler and Zambrano: on a transformation of the heart in Spanish philosophy

ABSTRACT

This paper compares the concept of the heart in the works of Max Scheler and María Zambrano. Both authors use the heart as a metaphor for distinct human affective phenomena that have a central anthropological, epistemological, and ontological significance. The comparison between authors’ use of the metaphor is organised around three main topics: the order of the heart; the idea of a primordial feeling and its place in the affective life; and the primacy of love in relation to negative affective attitudes. Our aim is twofold: to investigate the influence of Scheler on Zambrano’s thought and to demonstrate how Scheler’s phenomenology of affectivity transformed in Spanish philosophy and, in particular, in Zambrano’s work. After introducing the topic (section 1), the paper focuses on Scheler’s model of affectivity (section 2), presents an overview of Scheler’s reception in Spain focusing on Zambrano’s knowledge of his works (section 3), and examines Zambrano’s notion of the heart tracing parallelisms in Scheler’s works (section 4). The paper concludes with a discussion on Zambrano’s extension and transformation of the metaphor of the heart in the context of Spanish philosophy.

KEYWORDS:

• Max Scheler
• María Zambrano
• heart
• emotion
• Spanish philosophy
• phenomenology

1. Introduction

This paper compares how Max Scheler (1874–1928) and Maria Zambrano (1904–1991) developed the metaphor of the heart to refer to distinct human affective phenomena, which have a central anthropological, epistemological, and ontological significance. By focusing on both authors, we chart the reception and transformation of the phenomenological movement in Spain. Our focus on Zambrano as a receiver of Scheler’s conception of the heart also helps clarify the philosophical use of the concept.

This paper has a twofold aim. First, it systematically examines Scheler’s influence on Zambrano’s thought, an influence that several authors have noted albeit have not fully investigated. For example, Ana Bundgaard argues that Scheler’s work helped Zambrano focus on emotional intentionality, but Bundgaard does not investigate the actual concepts that Zambrano borrowed from Scheler.¹ Similarly, Carmen Revilla argues that Zambrano’s concept of passivity was developed from her initial contacts with Scheler’s ideas of love as a sphere of non-objectivating experience of the world.² Sara del Bello, on the other hand, traces Scheler’s influence on Zambrano as a particular kind of openness towards the world that Zambrano develops into the concept of sentir originario, originary sensing.³ In addition, Roberta Johnson shows how Zambrano uses Scheler’s concept of the spirit to discuss the role of the woman as well as the concept of the person and a person’s relationship to community and nature.⁴ Against the backdrop of these recent and more general accounts, the primary aim of this paper is to deepen the understanding of Scheler’s influence on Zambrano by focusing on a single aspect: the notion of the heart. As a secondary aim, this paper provides a detailed account of the relationship between Scheler’s and Zambrano’s notion of the heart to shed light on Scheler’s reception in Spain. Until now, the reception and transformation of the phenomenological movement in Spain has mainly focused on Husserl and Heidegger, and only a few studies have systematically examined Scheler’s legacy.⁵ To fill this gap in knowledge, this paper focuses on how one essential concept in Scheler’s thought – the heart –was transformed by Spanish philosophy, particularly in Zambrano’s work. However, we also suggest that in more general terms there are good reasons to believe that Scheler’s phenomenology of affectivity and value significantly influenced the development of Spanish phenomenology and that the particular reception of his works influenced the development of a social phenomenology of emotions.

In the following, Scheler’s notion of the heart is related to his ideas about affectivity. In particular, this paper examines three topics: the order of the heart; primordial feelings and their place in the affective life; and the primacy of love and its relation to negative emotions (section 2). In addition, we examine Scheler’s reception in Spain with an emphasis on the topic of love, Zambrano’s knowledge of Scheler’s works, and how these works might have influenced Zambrano (section 3). Third, we examine Zambrano’s notion of the heart, tracing parallelisms with the three elements of Scheler’s work mentioned above (section 4). This paper concludes by examining how the notion of the heart was elaborated and transformed by Zambrano in the context of Spanish philosophy.

2. Scheler on the heart, human affectivity, and the primacy of love

2.1. Ordo amoris: the logic of the heart and the idea of exemplarity

In a series of essays and books written between 1910 and 1920, Scheler introduces the idea of an order and logic of the heart, which can be regarded as the touchstone of his thought. Although this idea runs throughout his philosophical production, attention will be paid mainly to three works central for explaining the reception of his thought in Spain and, in particular, in Zambrano’s work.

Scheler’s idea of the heart is clearly formulated in Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik) 1913/16). In this work, Scheler discusses a widespread prejudice that separates reason and sensibility,⁶ a view that only a few philosophers have dared to challenge. In particular, Scheler mentions St. Augustine, from whom he takes the idea of ordo amoris (order of love), and Pascal, from whom he takes the idea that ‘le coeur a ses raisons’ (‘the heart has its reasons’) – i.e. there is an eternal law of feeling, loving, and hating that is absolute in the same sense that logic is absolute, but that cannot be explained in intellectual terms.

The heart is also the main concern of Scheler’s unfinished posthumously published manuscript from the same period, ‘Ordo Amoris’ (‘Order of Love’). This expression, originally used by St. Augustine, is used by Scheler to argue that each individual and collective is a system of value assessments and preferences. Ordo amoris is the window through which we engage with the world as love is the

means whereby we can discover, behind the initially confusing facts of man’s morally relevant actions, behind his expressions, his wishes, customs, needs and spiritual achievements, the simplest structure of the most fundamental goals of the goal-directed core of the person, the basic formula, so to speak, by which he exists and lives morally.⁷

The world of values is revealed in the counter-image of the heart: a complex of preferences and interests constituting an order of discovery.

To be precise, this text distinguishes three meanings of ordo amoris (Scheler explicitly mentions two of them): the descriptive, the objective, and the normative. Descriptive ordo amoris describes an individual’s or a group’s feelings developed in the course of life. It differs from person to person and group to group and defines individuality and character. As such, it is the key to understanding how a person or group feels, favours, and approaches the world: ‘Whoever has the ordo amoris of a man has the man himself. He has for the man as a moral subject what the crystallization formula is for a crystal. He sees through him as far as one possibly can’.⁸ Objective ordo amoris refers to a realm of values independent of the human being. For Scheler, values are ordered in an eternal and absolute hierarchy that can be given to us through evidence and grasped through feeling. The normative ordo amoris constitutes a selection of those objective values realised in the course of a person’s or group’s life. The normative ordo amoris should not be considered an imperative to become a specific human being, but it does involve the potential self that can be realised. Normative ordo amoris is not constituted by our individual history but is given at birth – i.e. normative ordo amoris is a part of the objective ordo amoris that can be realised by each individual. The differentiation between these three types of ordo amoris is important to Scheler as it explains why persons can differ in the way in which they feel about values despite values being objective. Each individual or group has its particular mode of apprehending and realising the objective values so that discrepancies are possible. ‘Ordo amoris’ is a particularly important text for Spanish philosophers such as Ortega y Gasset and Zambrano. As Zambrano focuses on descriptive ordo amoris rather than the objective order of values, she emphasises the idea that each person objectifies the world in a process of expressive creation in which the values play a formative functional role.

In ‘Ordo Amoris’, Scheler introduces another key concept that Spanish philosophers gravitated towards: our primary access to the world and others is determined by our affectivity rather than by our cognition and will – ‘Man, before he is an ens cogitans or an ens volens, is an ens amans’.⁹ That is, love is an attitude of openness towards the world and others enable us to apprehend the evaluative dimensions of life. We orient ourselves in our surroundings via our capacity to feel evaluative properties and not via cognition and will. Love is an essential condition we can use to grasp our surroundings as permeated with value. In fact, the order of the heart pre-selects what can be grasped and what cannot be grasped and in which order of preference it will be given to us. Only after these values are given to us can we perceive, think, judge, and will. In this respect, ordo amoris works not only as a metaphor with anthropological significance, but also as an epistemic and ontological dimension: it refers to the capacity of our feelings and preferences to mould the way in which we epistemically access the world and determine who we become and who we are.

A third central text on the order of the heart crucial to understanding Scheler’s Spanish reception is Vorbilder und Führer (Exemplars and Guides, 1911/1921). In this text, Scheler develops the idea of exemplarity, previously presented in his Formalism book, and connects the idea of ordo amoris with the realm of values and its hierarchical order. In particular, Scheler identifies the following ranks: the sacred (the holy and the profane), the spiritual (beauty, correctness, etc.), the noble, the useful, and the pleasant.¹⁰ The main exemplar types are distinguished according to this hierarchy: the saint (der Heilige), the genius (der Genius), the hero (der Held), the guiding spirit of the civilisation (der führende Geist der Zivilisation), and the artist of pleasure (Der Künstler des Genusses).¹¹

Scheler’s theory of the exemplars is connected to ordo amoris as the theory addresses the value phenomenon through which objective value orders can be disclosed. Although Scheler believes all the exemplars can be found in human culture, each one of us has to search for the proper exemplars to serve as a guiding image for the future realisation of values within the normative ordo amoris.¹² It is the order of our heart that determines the selection of an exemplar among the different types, the choice depending on our descriptive ordo amoris and on our personal normative order of values. As Cusinato notes, research on Scheler has neglected the importance of the concept of exemplar, but, as we will see, it is one of the concepts that received much attention in Zambrano’s work.¹³ In particular, her critique of the notion of the hero will play an important role.

2.2. Wertfühlen – Primordial feeling and its place in the affective life

The second axis of Scheler’s thought clearly resonating in Zambrano’s work is the idea of a primordial feeling conceived in terms of a feeling of value or value feeling (Wertfühlen). To expose this idea and to prepare the field to show its influence on Zambrano, it is necessary to present Scheler’s ideas on the issue found in his Formalism. With the aim to develop an ethics based on the experience of value, Scheler develops in this book an account of how human affectivity is connected with objective values. In this context, he presents a complex taxonomy of the affective mind in which the idea of original emotive intentionality plays a crucial role.

The key concept of Scheler’s taxonomy is the concept of a primordial feeling (Fühlen) to apprehend values. Scheler speaks of this feeling of value (Wertfühlen) in terms of value-ception (Wertnehmen), a phenomenological concept that expresses the similarity between the human capacity to disclose values and perception (Wahrnehmen) and the capacity to sensorially apprehend reality. To underscore the analogy with perception, Scheler describes the primordial feeling in terms of the ‘organ’ for comprehending values.¹⁴ Despite this analogy, for Scheler value-ception is a more primordial phenomenon than perception. In fact, he argues that we can first apprehend the value of something (e.g. if there is a danger or if something is repugnant) before we apprehend the particular specificities of the bearer of these values.

Apart from ‘value feelings’ and ‘preferences’ (Vorziehen/Nachsetzen), the acts of ‘love and hatred’ also exhibit an original emotive intentionality. Although preferences are responsible for apprehending the rank of a value (e.g. I see that the value of the sacred is superior to the value of elegance), ‘love and hatred’ enable us to discover values.¹⁵ For Scheler, to grasp a value and its place in a hierarchy of values, we must be receptive to them: ‘In love and hate our spirit does much more than ‘respond’ to already felt and perhaps preferred values. Love and hate are acts in which the value-realm accessible to the feeling of a being […] is either extended or narrowed’.¹⁶ Love is a movement of the heart towards higher values whose intention is the realisation of the higher values in its object, whereas hate is a movement towards lower values, which destroys higher values.

These ideas are further developed in The Nature of Sympathy (first published in 1913 as Zur Phänomenologie der Sympahtiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass and revised in 1923 as Wesen und Formen der Sympathie). Here, Scheler states again that love and hate are more originary than all other affective, cognitive, and conative phenomena.¹⁷ These phenomena are the foundation for all acts of preference, all functions of feeling, and all emotional responses. Moreover, as stated above, this attitude of being open or closed to the world (which is the core structure of our descriptive ordo amoris) determines what we can perceive or judge about the world and what we can want and desire from the world.

According to Scheler, once we feel a value and its rank, this value demands and calls for certain emotional responses. For example, if we feel a situation is unfair, this feeling demands us to respond with indignation (although we might not always respond accordingly).¹⁸ Scheler develops a stratified model of the emotional life in which different layers are distinguished according to the hierarchy of values: a) sensations such as pleasure and pain directed to the values of the pleasant and unpleasant; b) vital feelings directed to the noble and the mean; c) psychological feelings directed to epistemic, ethic, and aesthetic values; and d) feelings of personality directed at the sacred and the profane. The structure of human affectivity ultimately becomes a counterpart of the objective world of values and their rank, and it has an analogical structure for the different types of exemplars mentioned above.

These ideas appear reformulated and further developed in one of Scheler’s later works, The Human Place in Cosmos (Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, 1928), one of the few books quoted repeatedly by Zambrano. In this text, Scheler discusses the singularity of the human being by placing her on a scale of lower and higher grades of interiority, measured by different modes of affectivity in plants, animals, and human beings. For the latter, it is the presence of a soul and a corresponding external and objective order that is crucial to Scheler. Furthermore, he states that a system of impulses mediates life and consciousness, which correspond to the categories of time and space.¹⁹ Time and space are fundamentally based in the spontaneity of intuitive movement and actions of which some are never fully fulfilled. Unfulfilled acts produce a sensation of emptiness, which corresponds to the first notion of time and space as infinitely empty. This feeling of the infinitely empty, Scheler claims, is in fact the emptiness of the heart, placing emptiness and unfulfilled value responses as the original feeling giving rise to the categories of time and space.²⁰ This view leads Scheler to conclude that it is human life that takes the form of being as intimacy and being as a body for others. This understanding of embodiment allows Scheler to explain the correspondence between the order of the heart and the objective order of values.

2.3. Love, sympathy, hate, and ressentiment: positive and negative affective attitudes

In the context of Scheler’s philosophy of love as a primary attitude towards the world and others, the related phenomenon of sympathy becomes of particular interest as Zambrano’s concept of piety resonates with Scheler’s view of love and sympathy. In The Nature of Sympathy, Scheler describes sympathy as the human ability to apprehend what the other as other is going through. As such, it can be directed towards negative as well as positive feelings. Against this background of positive attitudes, Scheler focuses on negative modes of relation such as hate and resentment, an approach that points to the possibility of a break in the positive nexus with others and a disorder of the heart, disrupting the individual and collective ordo amoris.

Scheler deals with the phenomenon of hate in his two major books – Formalism and The Nature of Sympathy – as well as in a series essays such as the above mentioned ‘Ordo Amoris’. Although in these texts Scheler considers hatred an emotional act-experience like love, he carefully notes the asymmetry between hate and love. First, love and hate exhibit contrary directions. Although hate moves towards lower possibilities of being and aims at the annihilation of life’s highest values, love reveals the positive side of the beloved and therefore positive values come to realisation. Second, hate has a much narrower scope than love. For Scheler, there is no order of hate – i.e. negative experience is solely the break in our relationship with others and the world. Finally, Scheler posits that love is the foundational characteristic of all the other human experiences, including hate. In short, hate implies love, but love can be free of hate.²¹

In ‘The Origins of the Hate of Germany’ (‘Die Ursachen des Deutschenhasses. Eine Nationalpädagogische Erörterung’, 1916), Scheler examines how hate – which he describes as a ‘toxic, corrosive, deadly wind’²² – can function as dispositional background manifesting itself in different forms, including motivating atrocities. Leaving the political dimension of the text aside (the critique of the First World War), the main focus of the text is on how hate stems from differences in the ethos of individuals and collectives (i.e. differences in the form of engagement with the world).²³ Each collective might judge another one on the basis of its own ethos instead of on the basis of objective values, and this may lead to the development of hate.

Scheler’s most brilliant contribution to the phenomenology of negative attitudes is without a doubt his essay ‘On Ressentiment’ (‘Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen’, 1915), where he adapts Nietzsche’s understanding of ressentiment in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887).²⁴ Although Scheler refutes Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity in On the Genealogy of Morals, he uses the concept of ressentiment as a terminus technicus to refer to a specific hostile attitude consisting in a complex process of devaluing objects previously felt worthy.²⁵ Ressentiment, for Scheler, describes a process of depreciation of certain objects that takes place when the subject realises that she cannot achieve them – i.e. adopting an attitude of sour grapes. In this respect, ressentiment subverts the order of the heart by deflecting from the realisation of value.²⁶

For Scheler, ressentiment is never our first reaction towards another being as it presupposes what he calls a progression of feeling in which other negative affective states are involved as sources or ingredients. That is, ressentiment develops in stages: desire for revenge, envy, jealousy, competitive urge, hatred, malice, rancour, spite, and Schadenfreude. These negative affective states when coupled with feelings of powerlessness become particularly violent and might ultimately assume the form of ressentiment.²⁷ As a result, a distorted apprehension of values takes place: rather than apprehending values in objective and evident hierarchy, we overcome the tension between desire and impotence by denying the positive value of the desired object. In Scheler’s analysis, ressentiment is regarded as a possible consequence of hate. However, there is a crucial difference between both phenomena. Ressentiment presupposes a value-delusion, so the person engaged in ressentiment is blind to values. By contrast, the hater is aware of the values of the hated object; in fact, the hater is in search for lower values and the realisation of these values.²⁸ In this sense, hate, as Steinbock has put it, blinds one to values but does not blind them.²⁹ This relation between negative attitudes and values was important in the Spanish reception of Scheler, not the least in Zambrano, who focused on one of ressentiment’s and hate’s closest allies, envy.

3. The general reception of Scheler’s ideas in Spain and Zambrano’s position in this reception

This section presents the general context of the reception of Scheler’s works in Spain and then discusses Zambrano’s knowledge of Scheler, with a focus on translations as well as influential philosophical positions in the reception.

Authors connected to early phenomenology, such as Brentano and Pfänder, had been widely translated into Spanish, and the reception of the phenomenology in Spain favoured realist phenomenology rather than Husserl or Heidegger (whose works were translated relatively late but then became very influential). Among the realist phenomenologists, Scheler was widely translated and was well received in the wider debate about the body, the concept of life, the role of women, as well as the relationship between culture and nature.

The reception of Scheler’s work appeared in two main waves, separated by the Spanish Civil War. The first wave was between about 1920 and 1936, mainly as the result of engagement and translations by José Ortega y Gasset, Garcia Morente, and Zubiri. A second wave is associated with Joaquim Xirau, Jose Gaos, Ferrater Mora, Rosa Chacel, and Zambrano. These Spanish authors developed Scheler’s thinking further. This second wave coincides with a period of emigration and immigration, which enabled the dissemination of Scheler’s work to new philosophical milieus. Interestingly, Paul Ludwig Landsberg³⁰ and later Aurel Kolnai, authors who were influenced by Scheler, contributed to Scheler’s popularity during their time in Spain. Zambrano and Chacel can be seen as two important disseminators of Scheler’s thought in Latin America, as can José Gaos and Ortega y Gasset. As the emigration during this time was mainly the result of German Jews fleeing to Spain and Republican Spanish philosophers fleeing to Latin America, this emigration could have contributed to a social and sometimes political interpretation of the question of values.

Zambrano’s reception of Scheler, and in particular her development of the metaphor of the heart, can be understood in the larger context of a resurgence in Spain of philosophical reflection about life, experience, and the relationship between the individual and the social. Scheler’s investigation on the role of feelings and values in the human being, most importantly his idea of the heart and ordo amoris, was interpreted against the backdrop of a more general critique of German idealism already present in Spain and which tended to formulate the debate on values in terms of ontology rather than as pure transcendental judgements.³¹

Scheler was, for example, a clear influence in García Morente’s PhD thesis Los juicios de Valor (Value judgements, 1918)³² as well as in ‘Ensayos sobre el progreso’ (‘An essay on progress’), where he develops the idea of value in connection with the possibility of progress. For Morente, values are objective and discovered by the subject as the values of the things.³³ Likewise, under Scheler’s influence, Joaquim Xirau published L’amor i la percepció dels valors (Love and the perception of values, 1936) in Catalan and Amor y Mundo (Love and World, 1940) in Spanish. Like Scheler, Xirau conceives love as an essential feature of human nature and as the core of our personality and understood ontology to be directly connected to the axiology of values. Love is a ‘radical stance of our consciousness and life’ corresponding in and delimited by only hatred and ressentiment.³⁴

However, the most influential figure in Scheler’s reception was Ortega y Gasset. Not only did Ortega y Gasset foster translations of Scheler’s work, he also further developed some of Scheler’s ideas. Moreover, Zambrano’s initial engagement with Scheler’s work was mediated by Ortega y Gasset’s book Meditaciones del Quijote (Meditation on Quijote, 1915) in which the German played a pivotal role. In fact, Zambrano’s first publications on the figure of ‘the heart’ were connected to a polemic with views expressed by Ortega y Gasset in his article ‘Vitalidad, Alma, Espíritu’ (‘Vitality, Soul, Spirit’) although their stances would be developed in parallel after 1939.³⁵

Already in Meditaciones del Quijote, Ortega y Gasset connects love to Scheler’s hierarchy of values by referring it to a noble attitude. Ortega y Gasset underscores that love is the foundation of any kind of activity – i.e. a love that is ‘a love for the perfection of that which is loved’.³⁶ He adds, in a somewhat different vein than Scheler, that philosophy is the general science of love, and he compares the sexual relief of nervous frustration with the relief through philosophy of intellectual tension, drawing loosely on Scheler’s discussion on frustrated emotions. He follows Scheler further when he counterpoises love with hate and claims that the latter disconnects objects from the intellect (or the spirit). Ortega y Gasset affirms that love is what amplifies the person and connects people to other things in their surroundings. For Ortega y Gasset, love is the primary force: ‘I am me and my circumstance’.³⁷ Unlike love, hate disconnects an individual from others and things and annihilates the individual, as it does not allow for a connection between existing things, a condition necessary for individuality. Ortega y Gasset adds that ressentiment (rencor) is what arises from a feeling of inferiority connected to the annihilation of individuality. Echoing Scheler’s idea of a normative hierarchy of values, Ortega y Gasset claims that a true ethics can only be based on the continuous personal perfection of values already objectively present to the individual.³⁸

These ideas are developed in Ortega y Gasset’s essay ‘Qué son los valores?’ (‘What are values?’, 1923), where he defends the view that values have their own nature not explained by pleasure, desire, or norms.³⁹ That is, values are ‘irreal qualities’ as they have a virtual objectivity because they are experienced as being objective, but they are not real as trees or other men. Like Scheler, he conceives values as existing in a hierarchy, as being positive and negative, and as apprehended exclusively through a feeling that he describes as ‘absolute and mathematical’.⁴⁰ Although acknowledging the existence of an objective order of values, Ortega y Gasset emphasises the absolute capacity to feel as the basis for the necessary personal and group realisation of descriptive as well as normative orders of values. For Ortega y Gasset as well as for Xirau, the ontological and objective aspects of values are combined with the personal development of axiological, and normative values are the basis for their political commitment with social education during the Second Republic.⁴¹

Although Ortega y Gasset’s understanding of love as a sentiment is developed in line with Pfänder’s theory of sentiments,⁴² most of his works on love are inspired by Scheler. For example, Ortega y Gasset extends Scheler’s view that emotions can deceive us, a phenomenon Ortega y Gasset calls ‘pseudo-love’.⁴³ However, most importantly, he adopts Scheler’s concept of the heart, which Ortega y Gasset describes as an acceptance and rejection machine that determines preferences and dislikes. Love is the key to understanding an individual’s ratio cognoscendi as well as ratio essendi. That is, before we know an entire situation, we are guided in a particular direction by certain values dependent on the character or specific order of the heart.⁴⁴ Ortega y Gasset also argues that this idea of love can be applied to periods, for example, to a generation. Like Scheler, he argues that love is a deeper power than cognition and will.⁴⁵

These interpretations of Scheler correspond to a wave of translations of Scheler’s works: Die Formen des Wissens und die Bildung (1926), Ressentiment (1927), The Human Place in the Cosmos (1929), Vorbilder und Führer (1933), ‘Ordo Amoris’ (1934),⁴⁶ Formalism (1941/1942),⁴⁷ The Nature of Sympathy (1943), and several articles. Zambrano, who did not read German, had a selective knowledge of Scheler, mainly from the publications from before the Civil War in the journal Revista de Occidente and its publishing house.

Zambrano’s early articles reveal clear influences from Scheler as she mentions Scheler by name as early as 1928 together with quotations from Die Formen des Wissens und die Bildung, translated into Spanish as El saber y la cultura (Knowledge and culture). Her first publication engaging more thoroughly with Scheler came in 1934 with the article ‘Hacia un saber sobre el alma’ (‘Towards a knowing of the soul’), which was written as a commentary for the 1934 publications of Scheler’s ‘Ordo amoris’ and Tod und Fortleben (Death and Survival, translated into Spanish as Muerte y Supervivencia). In this text, Zambrano relates her notion of the heart to the works of Scheler, Augustine, and Spinoza. In later works, Zambrano’s style grows increasingly poetic and therefore refrains from author citations, but there is a strong resemblance in her reflections on feelings and values in later books such as El hombre y lo divino (Man and the divine) as well as in her late Notas de un método (Notes on a method). It is unknown whether Zambrano had knowledge of the contents of Scheler’s more systematic works on value and emotions, which were translated into Spanish after 1940, since by that time she had left Spain and lived as an exile in Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. This exile can in part explain the critique that she directs against Scheler and Ortega y Gasset and her political radicalisation of the latter’s position.

4. Zambrano’s metaphor of the heart

4.1. Ordo amoris: the order of the heart and exemplarity

In 1934, her first major engagement with Scheler’s philosophy, Zambrano relates Scheler’s notion of the ordo amoris into what she perceives to be the major philosophical issue of the day – i.e. the re-evaluation of the human being not as a being foremost characterised by reason but as a being in life. As such, the metaphor of the heart implies considerations of anthropology, epistemology, and ontology. Through the metaphor, the human being is depicted as determined by reason as well as passion, with the order of the heart conceived of as a poetic knowing, un saber, of nature and the cosmos, which is different from the dominating knowledge of reason. In close resemblance with both Scheler and Ortega y Gasset, the heart metaphor suggests the heart mediates human beings and their surroundings.⁴⁸ Zambrano calls this realm the order of the heart, and sometimes the soul, echoing Scheler’s idea of a realm of directing values. In her later texts, the heart appears as the bodily organ of the soul, binding and determining bodily experiences as well as affording the possibility of transcending bodily experiences.⁴⁹

Unlike Scheler’s hierarchical orders of values, Zambrano argues the order of the heart is unknown. In her interpretation, love is a fundamental capacity rather than objective content. In her later elaborations, the order of the heart is described as an experiential order different from both reason and sensation. It is an attitude or a mode of encounter with the surroundings and a fundamental direction, a ‘cauce de vida’ (‘a course of life’).⁵⁰ Two basic ideas similar to those found in Scheler’s ‘Ordo Amoris’ can therefore be found in Zambrano’s treatment of the heart and love. First, the heart is the metaphor of an order of experience that is primary to the rational experience of objects, resembling Scheler’s descriptive order of values. Second, the heart is connected to the idea of exemplarity and guidance, an issue emphasised in Scheler’s texts that Zambrano knew. However, Zambrano did not follow Scheler’s view that the heart places the experience of objects within a particular value rank. Rather, she believed that the heart promotes an action that unifies the human subject in an exemplary attitude, allowing for a nexus between subject and object independent of establishing the identity of both. Similar formulations can be found in Scheler’s works when he speaks about the edifying action that is the essence of love, but this openness towards the other is combined with the identification of objective values.⁵¹ This difference between the two also suggests that exemplarity plays a different role in Zambrano’s works.

In the short text ‘El héroe’ (‘The hero’), a small part of Scheler’s Vorbilder und Führer published in 1933 in Revista de Occidente, Scheler describes the hero as one who carries noble values. For Scheler (and echoed in Ortega y Gasset), love is a concept connected to individual preferences of value that can be found as an objective structure in a social group, for example, a generation. In Zambrano’s account, the experiential order of the heart is characterised mainly by a specific kind of passive openness towards one’s surroundings and (unlike Scheler) do not correspond to an objective order of values:

The heart is the most noble intestine because it carries with it the image of a space, of a dark, secrete and, mysterious inner which, occasionally, opens up. […] Its nobleness consists in this opening up, the most heroic and surprising action of an inner bodily organ that seems, suddenly, to be nothing but vibration, pure passive sensing (sentir puramente pasiva). […] And this: interiority that offers itself in order to continue being interiority, without being annulled, that is the definition of intimacy.⁵²

This quotation discloses a veiled critique of some of the aspects that Zambrano connected with Scheler’s thinking at the time – the exemplary hero that promotes values as part of the normative order of values, for example, or the idea of the possibility of knowledge of the objective order of values. In her account, the exemplarity of the noble attitude connected to the heart is not that it works as a structuring societal element that guides one towards the highest values, but that it works as enacting passivity and openness towards the other in an ethical act of intimacy.

Furthermore, Scheler’s description of the hero as a carrier of the noble characteristics of the value hierarchy, and not the least the interpretation that Ortega y Gasset made of it, carefully coloured the order of society in typical male attributes. Scheler argues that in the order of values of life, exemplified by the hero, nobility consists in having the power to develop a community by determining what values will be inherited by later generations. In fact, certain heroic values (perseverance and the communal good) are inherited as nobleness through the blood.⁵³ Furthermore, he emphasises that the hero is an erotic model, who by attracting the desire of women helps create the mixture of values that will be the hereditary order of values in the future.⁵⁴

Zambrano’s reception of Scheler was coloured not only by ‘El héroe’ but also by Ortega y Gasset’s interpretation of Scheler, which she explicitly criticises. In ‘Vitalidad, alma, espíritu’, Ortega y Gasset describes the structure of the individual as part reason, part volition, and part emotions, the latter connecting the individual with the other. However, the images that Ortega y Gasset use to exemplify this connection, and in line with his idea of the amplified ego – I and circumstances expressed in Meditaciones del Quijote – are based on the man who takes a woman as an object of love. Importantly, the moment of transcendence between ego and the other is described in terms of an orgiastic rapture of a woman who surrenders her intimacy, her own inner unity, to the determining man.⁵⁵ In this context, Zambrano’s description of the passive receptive constitution of the heart, offering without being annulled, and the fact that this passivity is also a kind of action resulting in intimacy were direct critiques of the tendency to equate feeling with an experiential order determined by a male hero through rapture, sexual selection, and heredity.

As Roberta Johnson has shown, Zambrano’s lectures in Cuba in the 1940s were influenced by the way in which Rosa Chacel interpreted Scheler’s notion of love, echoing a critique of male love: ‘the woman is the ideal of the man, but based on her absolute impassivity, which only aides to highlight that it is not a real woman that serves these purposes, but the other one, that which the male created in his dreams’.⁵⁶ Zambrano’s critique is based on a political interpretation of Scheler’s works, which is deployed to develop a new kind of intimacy that does not subsume the other under the hierarchies of value of the individual. Her examples were designed to show the importance of acting in protection of values of self-delimitation – offering and passivity – which enables unity with the other.

In the preface to a collection of articles written before and during the Spanish Civil War, also entitled Hacía un saber sobre el alma, Zambrano suggests that it is because she believes in the order of love that she could act to protect her political convictions during the war. Moreover, she lifts as exemplary Professor D. Julián Besteiro, who she says lived and died for his Kantian principles by the hand of Franco soldiers.⁵⁷ The mentioning of Besteiro is significant for the political position that Zambrano held at the time of the Civil War and which in part explains her critique of both Ortega y Gasset’s and Scheler’s conception of the hero. In one of her earliest books, Horizontes del liberalismo (Horizons of liberalism, 1930), she defends a liberalism that combined liberal civic rights with economic redistribution. Likewise, Besteiro defends Marxist socialism combined with Kantian, Neo-Kantian, and phenomenological insights, mentioning among others the importance of Scheler. Nevertheless, he also criticised what he called Wertphilosophie (value philosophy) and its over emphasis on violent communal emotion as one of the sources of fascism.⁵⁸ In addition, this view goes hand-in-hand with her public political opposition of Ortega y Gasset’s idea of the need of a national consciousness, a goal she identified as hopelessly inefficient in the light of increasing polarisation. She thought that one had to choose between fascism and the democratic values represented by the Spanish II Republic.⁵⁹ In her book on the European catastrophe, La Agonía de Europa (The Agony of Europe, 1945), she identifies a will that enforces itself on everything around it as the root cause of the war.⁶⁰ Therefore, Zambrano’s interpretation of the heart as a source of fundamental values, understood in terms of openness rather than objective determination of others, was clearly connected to her political stance before and during the Civil War.

4.2. Sentir originario – the realm of primary sensing and the guide

Zambrano elaborates on love and exemplarity in several other works. In her La Confesión, género literario y método (The Confession, literary genre and method), Zambrano develops a notion of love that directs the individual towards other creatures.⁶¹ In the article ‘La Guía, forma de conocimiento’ (‘The guide, a form of knowledge’), she describes the literary genre of guides as a specific form of knowledge that expresses individual experiences not reduceable to universals: ‘Like knowing from experience, it is communicating and active, transforming. Its unity will hence be a unity of action. And this unity of action is given to it from the field in which it needs to operate, the situation that it needs to transform’.⁶² In line with Scheler’s idea of love as a capacity for openness and nexus with one’s surroundings, the order of love that Zambrano develops demarcates a specific kind of relationship between subject and object. As the quotation indicates, this unity is temporary, action-oriented, and depends on the field in which it operates (i.e. not on an objective order of values). What Zambrano seems to be suggesting is that objects come into our experience as something that we need to act upon, and in this acting, we can choose to confront them through domination or through love thus letting them stay ‘others’ while we interact with them. This loving interaction ultimately produces a new unity – neither completely subject nor completely object – but a unity of action, a new kind of ethic agency.

The idea of a primary order corresponding to a unity of intimacy and action is developed further in her later book, Notas de un método (Notes on a method), published after her return to Spain in 1984. The book is composed of a series of short texts that turn around the notion of sentir originario, primary sensing. Here, primary sensing is discussed as precisely the field in which the order of the heart, or love, acts. Zambrano suggests that for Kant pure sensing was the origin of experience. Unlike the standard view of Kant, Zambrano suggests that sensation precedes concepts, and the idea is conditioned by the sensation that it conditions.⁶³ Furthermore, she goes on to claim that the sentir originario is in fact a realm of experience previous even to sensation, similar to the way in which Scheler uses the term Fühlen. That is, Zambrano’s sentir originario considers not only Scheler’s late work – as it has been already acknowledged – but also his early works, where he develops the concept of a primordial feeling. She does not, however, emphasise values in relation to the sentir originario. Unlike Scheler’s reliance on values (but with certain similarities to his discussion of the emptiness of the heart), she considers the experience of nothingness, la nada, and its intersection with being as the condition for any idea of objectivity. Primary sensing is constituted by the initial sensation of being and nothingness as equivalent, an experience lived in feelings of anguish and alienation. From this experience, the human being creates expressive forms to objectify the world.⁶⁴ The same argument can be found in her early work Filosofía y poesía (Philosophy and poetry) in which she connects the anguish of the poet to the necessary creative and form-giving action with which the poet meets nothingness.⁶⁵ Therefore, emotions such as anguish, love, and envy are objectified transformative functions, actualised in an historical ‘ascension on the scale of forms, winning higher modes of being’.⁶⁶

These ideas draw on other parts of Scheler’s works, particularly The Human Place in the Cosmos, a book that she cites repeatedly. No longer denoting a specific kind of intentionality, Zambrano describes love as the principle of expression and communication – i.e. of action – by which human beings react to the fact that they are ultimately without salvation, between being and nothingness: ‘If there was any intention, it disappeared; but not in plane nothingness, in the creative nothingness of revelation, in the nothingness that transcends being: love. The desire to form, which was the beginning, it has now been converted in the principle of a form that engenders itself’.⁶⁷ Strengthening Scheler’s ontologizing of the impulses of the heart in The Human Place in the Cosmos, Zambrano’s late works transform love from an epistemological to an ontological concept, corresponding to a general human function of living expression caused by the experience of anguish facing nothingness. That is, love no longer corresponds to any kind of objective or external order of either emotions or values, rather love is the emotional and expressive answer to nothingness.⁶⁸

4.3. Love, piety, and enviousness – A history of positive and negative emotions

Zambrano’s idea that love is a driving force of human world-making through the power of which expressive forms come about means that human history is merely the history of objectified emotional expression, a view consistent with her ontologizing and political reading of Scheler. Scheler’s mainly intra-psychological interest – individual or generational – had in Zambrano’s works given way to a perennial history of the phenomena of human feelings. In the 1955 book El Hombre y lo Divino, Zambrano argues that love, as a trait of the human being and not of the gods, first appeared when the concept of individuality developed in Ancient Greece.⁶⁹ Love is crucial for the historical development of the individual as the medium through which I and my surroundings are developed simultaneously, making the attitude with which we encounter the other crucial for what form the other is given – as an object of domination or as an other worthy of value.

Because other feelings are formed within this primary medium of love, we can choose our attitude towards the other. Such feelings are piety and its opposite, envy. Zambrano argues that piety is the mode in which we know how to ‘treat adequately with the other, saber tratar con lo otro’.⁷⁰ Piety is the loving direction towards the other and is connected to a kind of transformative knowledge that changes both object and subject without reducing the former to the latter. Envy is the opposite. That is, envy is the enforced reflection of one’s own interiority as the result of an experience with someone who is similar. This experience can be destructive when we see ourselves reflected in the similar but experience the impossibility of being equal. However, that same reflection can also be transformative as it might help us discover our own personal interiority, a necessary discovery to achieve a higher form of individual identity.⁷¹

Similar to Scheler’s notion of hate, envy sees the value in others, but not as a directing towards lower values or as a reducer, rather as a recognition of oneself in the other, with both a destructive and a transformative potential. In fact, to reach the kind of individual subjectivity in which it is possible to feel piety – knowing the other in its otherness – envy must first have shown the other as similar. Furthermore, there is no corresponding concept to Scheler’s ressentiment in Zambrano. Although ressentiment falsifies the objective hierarchy of values, envy is a negative feeling in Zambrano that nevertheless contains a transformative potential.

5. Concluding remarks

In the light of the analysis of the notion of the heart in Scheler and Zambrano, two conclusions can be posited. The first conclusion concerns specifically the transformation of Scheler’s notion of the heart in Zambrano’s works. As demonstrated in this paper, the concept of the heart is employed by both authors as a metaphor for a complex of affective phenomena with anthropological, epistemological, and ontological relevance. Both authors share the view that people are essentially marked by a primary feeling that determines the relation with their environment and constitutes the kernel of their personality. Nonetheless, there are intriguing differences in the way in which both authors make use of this concept. In the following, the main findings regarding the three aspects compared in this study are summarised.

First, regarding the notion of the heart, this study has traced a development from Scheler to Zambrano in the direction of an embodied and socially-embedded form of engagement with the world. Whereas for Scheler the ordo amoris is the window through which individuals and collectives engage with the world, for Zambrano the heart is a metaphor to refer to the deeply embodied human affectivity, which in her view only can be conceived in its social, cultural, and historical context rather than within the limits of human cognition. For example, Scheler and Zambrano employ different definitions of ordo amoris and Zambrano critiques the notion of exemplars in Scheler (and Ortega y Gasset) and defends the idea of an ongoing and action-oriented realisation of intimate individuality as the ethical ideal.

Second, as far as the notion of ‘original emotive intentionality’ and in particular of a ‘primordial feeling’, which is present in Scheler as well as in Zambrano, a twofold development took place. First, whereas Scheler was interested in connecting the objective values with the feeling subjects, Zambrano rejects this objective world of values and makes them dependent on their historic actualisation through the development of the human subject. Second, Scheler describes this primordial feeling as the organ for the apprehension of values, whereas Zambrano understands this primordial feeling in terms of a bodily organ of the soul, a view that leads to the conclusion that this organ is of an embodied nature.

Finally, each author attributes to negative affective attitudes a different ethical function. For Scheler, they are revelatory of aspects of the human condition that we tend to overlook or disguise because they indicate the possibility to break the positive nexus with others and the transmutation of values. Zambrano, on the other hand, recognises the negative impact of emotions such as anguish and envy and connects them to the will to dominate others and turns her critique towards objective values related to the heroic male subject. Nevertheless, she also emphasises the necessity of negative emotions for the transformation of the individual. Although anguish promotes expressive formation and creation, envy entails emotional recognition of the other and ultimately leads to the formation of a higher form of intimacy and unity with the other. Therefore, negative affects can be a tool for domination or can play the role in transforming the order of the heart, and piety corresponds to the moral attitude in which we chose correctly between the two ways of life. For Zambrano, the ontological mode of being through the emotions corresponds to a moral and ultimately political choice.

The second conclusion that can be derived from the analysis developed in this paper has a more general character and concerns the reception of Scheler’s phenomenology in Spain. As we have clearly demonstrated for Zambrano’s particular case, Scheler’s reception in Spain focused mainly on the phenomenology of affectivity. Yet, we have also shown that Scheler’s account on affectivity played an important role in the phenomenological thought of other Spanish phenomenologists such as Ortega y Gasset, Garcia Morente, and Xirau. It seems that we have good reasons to affirm that Scheler’s legacy in Spain focuses strongly on the notion of affect. Yet, as with Zambrano, none of these other authors adopts Scheler’s thought acritically. In fact, it seems that there was a transformation of the notion of the heart in the context of Spanish philosophy from a conceptual tool to describe the connection between the feeling subjects and the realm of objective values towards an embodied and embedded notion with political connotations. This change was true to a lesser degree for Ortega y Gasset and Xirau than for Zambrano. This change is evident mainly in the transformation from an intra-psychological phenomenology to a history of human phenomenon and in the intersection between the individual and the social as well as the change in emphasis from intentionality and reception to creativity and expression.

On the basis of this conclusion, a more general hypothesis can be formulated. Namely, there is a tendency to afford the affective dimension of the human being an embodied and embedded character in various Spanish authors who took Scheler as inspiration. This turn towards embodied affectivity with political as well as ethical implications can and should be placed in a larger current of embodied phenomenology developing in Europe and elsewhere at the time.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ana Bundgaard, Más allá de la filosofía (Madrid: Trotta, 2002), 438–9.

2 Carmen Revilla, ‘Correspondencias o sincronizaciones entre Max Scheler y María Zambrano’, Aurora nr. 8 (2007): 63–73.

3 Sara del Bello, ‘María Zambrano e l’idea di persona’, Aurora no. 16 (2015): 8–17.

4 Roberta Johnson, ‘El concepto de ´personáde María Zambrano y su pensamiento sobre la mujer’, Aurora no. 13 (2012): 8–17.

5 In the volume Phänomenologie in Spanien edited by Javier San Martín, no chapter is devoted to Scheler. Javier San Martín, Phänomenologie in Spanien. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005). To our knowledge, there are only two contributions on Scheler’s legacy in Spain: Antonio Pintor Ramos' ‘Schelers Einfluss auf das Denken der spanischsprachigen Welt’, Phänomenologische Forschungen, no. 28/29 (1993), 314–31 and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran’s ‘Schelers Phänomenologisches Denken und die frühe Rezeption in Spanien’, Phänomenologische Forschungen, (2009), 175–201.

6 Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Values, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, 1973) 253.

7 Max Scheler, ‘Ordo amoris’, Selected Philosophical Essays, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, 1973), 102.

8 Scheler, ‘Ordo amoris’, 100.

9 Ibid., 110–1.

10 Max Scheler, ‘Vorbilder und Führer’, Gesammelte Werke, vol. X, (Bern and Munich: Francke Verlag, 1986) 262 (in a similar sense, 268).

11 Scheler, Vorbilder und Führer, 262. Own trans.

12 Ibid., 263.

13 Guido Cusinato, Person und Selbsttraszendenz: Ekstase und Epoché des Ego als Individuationsprozesse bei Schelling und Scheler (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neuman, 2012) 174.

14 Scheler, Formalism, 256.

15 Ibid., 261.

16 Ibid.

17 Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2008) 156.

18 Scheler, Formalism, 259.

19 Max Scheler, The Human place in the Cosmos (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2009) 54.

20 Scheler, The Human place in the Cosmos, 46.

21 This point was developed by another phenomenologist Kolnai, who takes Scheler and Pfänder as points of departure. Aurel Kolnai, On disgust (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2004) and Aurel Kolnai, Ekel, Hochmut, Hass: Zur Phänomenologie feindlicher Gefühle (Frankfurt am Main.: Suhrkamp, 2007). Zambrano also references Kolnai’s book in Filosofía y poesía, and El hombre y lo Divino.

22 Max Scheler, ‘Die Ursachen des Deutschen Hasses’, In Gesammelte Werke 4, (Bern and München: Francke, 1982) 311.

23 Scheler, Die Ursachen des Deutschen Hasses, 298, 300.

24 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) 22.

25 ‘Ressentiment’ should be distinguished from the English term ‘resentment’, which is an emotional response arising from a sense of injury, an anger which responds to moral wrongs and which in certain occasions can fulfil a positive function. See Thomas Brudholm, ‘Revisiting resentments: Jean Améry and the dark side of forgiveness and reconciliation’, Journal of Human Rights 5, no. 1 (2006): 12.

26 Max Scheler, Ressentiment (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2010), 45.

27 Scheler, Ressentiment, 42.

28 See Kolnai, ‘Standard Modes’, and Ekel, Hochmut und Hass. Ortega y Gasset defined this moment as ‘falling in hate’ in analogy to ‘falling in love’ and described it as a phenomenon of attention. José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Amor en Stendahl’, Obras Completas, vol. V (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1964), 583.

29 Anthony Steinbock, Moral Emotions. Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart (Evanston: Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, 2014), 22.

30 Xavier Escribano, ‘Paul Ludwig Landsberg, a Knight Errant of the Spirit in Barcelona’, Journal of Catalan Intellectual History, no. 9–10 (2015): 9–34.

31 The reception of Scheler in other countries took a similar path, but in Spain love received particular attention. See Scheler’s reception in France, which according to Leroux focused on Scheler’s thoughts on value, person, and intersubjectivity. Henri Leroux, ‘Sur quelques aspects de la réception de Max Scheler en France, Phänomenologische Forschungen’. (1994): 332–56.

32 Juan Miguel Palacios, ‘Prólogo’, in Manuel García Morente, Ensayos sobre el progreso, (Madrid: Encuentro, 2002), 10.

33 Manuel García Morente, Ensayos sobre el progreso, (Madrid: Encuentro, 2002), 46.

34 Joaquim Xirau, Amor y Mundo, (Barcelona: Península, 1983), 105.

35 María Zambrano, ‘Hacía un saber sobre el alma’, Obras completas, vol. II, ed. Moreno Sanz, Jesús. (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2016) 441.

36 Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas, vol. I, (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1966), 311. ‘El amor a la perfección de lo amado.’

37 Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas, vol. I, 322. ‘Yo soy yo y mis circunstancias.’

38 José Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas, vol. I, 311–6.

39 José Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas, vol. VI (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1947) 325, 328.

40 Ibid.

41 Joaquim Xirau, ‘Pòrtic’, in Campalans Rafael, Pedagogía vol dir política (Barcelona: Fundació Rafael Campalans/Columna, 1993), 17–19. José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Misión de la universidad’, Obras completas, vol. IV (Madrid: Revista de occidente, 2005), 533, 557–9, 568.

42 Like Pfänder, Ortega characterizes love as centrifugal, as virtually going towards its target, and as continuous and fluid. Alexander Pfänder, Psychologie der Gesingungen, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung I/III, (1913/1916).

43 Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas, vol. V, 568.

44 Ibid., 618.

45 Interestingly, the idea that nothing can be known or desired if it is not loved can be found in the works of Unamuno. This idea plays a crucial role in his book The Tragic Sense of Life (1913). Scheler knew of Unamuno’s text (See, John Raphael Staude, Max Scheler (1874–1928). An Intellectual Portrait (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 244) so that we can suppose that Scheler can have been inspired by Unamuno.

46 Max Scheler, ‘Muerte y Supevivencia’ and ‘Ordo Amoris’, 1934. Zubiri translated ‘Ordo Amoris’ only one year after the publication of ‘Ordo Amoris’ in German in 1933 (a posthumous publication of a text first written in 1916 or even earlier).

47 Scheler’s Formalism was translated by Hilario Rodríguez Sanz and published 1941/42, although the announcement of the publication took place already in 1936 (the Spanish Civil War probably postponed the publication).

48 María Zambrano, Hacía un saber sobre el alma, 436–8.

49 María Zambrano, El hombre y lo divino. Obras completas, vol. III. Ed. Moreno Sanz, Jesús. (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2011), 272.

50 María Zambrano, Hacía un saber sobre el alma, 434.

51 Scheler, Ordo Amoris, 109. This connection between Scheler’s idea of love and exemplarity and Zambrano’s thought has been already stated by: Guido Cusinato, Person und Selbsttraszendenz, 2012, 173.

52 María Zambrano, ‘La metáfora del corazón (fragmento)’, Hacía un saber sobre el alma, Obras completas, vol. II. ‘El corazón es la víscera más noble porque lleva consigo la imagen de un espacio, de un dentro oscuro, secreto y misterioso que, en ocasiones, se abre. [. . .] Este abrirse ess u mayor nobleza, la acción más heróica e inesperada de una entraña que parece, al pronto, no ser otra cosa que vibración, sentir puramente pasivo. […] Y esto: interioridad que se ofrece para seguir siendo interioridad, sin anularla, es la definición de la intimidad’.

53 Scheler, Vorbilder und Führer, 312.

54 Ibid., 314.

55 José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Vitalidad, Alma, Espiritu’, Obras completas, vol. II, 451–80. First published in El Sol, 1924.

56 María Zambrano, La aventura de ser mujer. (Málaga: Editorial Veramar, 2007) 114. ‘La mujer es el ideal del hombre, pero a base de una absoluta impasibilidad, de lo que viene a resaltar que no es la mujer real la que sirve a estos efectos, sino la otra, esa que el varón ha creado con sus sueños’. Also cited in Roberta Johnson, ‘El concepto de persona’, 11.

57 Zambrano, Hacía un saber sobre el alma, 427–30.

58 Julián Besteiro, Marxismo y antimarxismo (Madrid: Fráfica socialista, 1935) 73–6, 85, 92–9, 103–4.

59 María Zambrano, ‘Tres cartas a Ortega’, Escritos sobre Ortega, ed. Ricardo Tejada, (Madrid: Trotta, 2011), 211–9.

60 María Zambrano, La Agonía de Europa, Obras Completas vol. II, ed. Jesús Moreno Sanz (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg (2016).

61 María Zambrano, La confesión, género literario y método, Obras completas vol. II (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2016), 93–95.

62 María Zambrano, ‘La Guía, forma de conocimiento’, Hacía un saber sobre el alma, Obras completas vol. II, ed. Jesús Moreno Sanz (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2016) 482. ’Como saber de experiencia es comunicante y activa, transformadora. Su unidad será, pues, unidad de acción. Y esta unidad de acción le está dada por el campo donde ha de operar, la situación a la que ha de transformar’.

63 María Zambrano, Notas de un método, Obras completas vol. IV:2, ed. Jesús Moreno Sanz (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2019), 116.

64 Zambrano, Notas de un método, 117.

65 María Zambrano, Filosofía y Poesía, Obras completas vol. I, ed. Jesús Moreno Sanz (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2015), 750.

66 Zambrano, El Hombre y lo Divino, Obras completas, vol. III, ed. Jesús Moreno Sanz (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2011), 277, ‘Ascención en la escala de las formas, ganando modos más altos de ser’.

67 Zambrano, Notas de un método, p. 113. ‘Si alguna intención había, ha desaparecido; más no en la nada sin más, sino en la nada creadora, reveladora, en la nada que transciende el ser: el amor. El anhelo de forma, que era el comienzo, se convierte, se ha convertido ya, en principio de una forma que se engendra a sí mismo’.

68 Cf. For an analysis of the influence of Scheler’s book on Zambrano focused on the notion of ‘affective impulse’: Carmen Revilla, ‘La raíz fecundante de la vida. Impulso affectivo y sentir originario en la antropología de Max Scheler y María Zambrano’, Aurora, no. 9 (2008): 28–33.

69 Zambrano, El Hombre y lo Divino, 264–72.

70 Ibid., 230.

71 Ibid., 281–3.