Zambrano’s Clearing in a Sealed Rationality

How can we think in a way that does not destroy what we are trying to understand?

If we imagine thinking as a hand that explores, we begin to see how this hand can grasp, embrace, or simply touch what it approaches. Every movement affects what it comes into contact with, and our perception arises in relation to how we approach it. The one who thinks is not a neutral observer, but a co-creator. Thinking does not take place at a distance, but is an act that shapes what it turns toward.

Like the blind person who navigates with a cane, we extend our thinking into the world. But this extension is never neutral. It is limited, embodied, shaped by the senses. It carries with it a sensitivity, an uncertainty, and a degree of obscurity, that which Western philosophical tradition has long pushed aside in its movement out of Plato’s cave and toward clarity and control.

Poetic reason, as formulated by the Spanish thinker María Zambrano (1904–1991), can be understood as an attempt to return to precisely this. A way of thinking that does not seek clarity as an end goal, but moves through approach, hesitation, and openness. A thinking that allows image, feeling, and experience to coexist without fully separating them.

Thinking about something does not happen outside the body, as if in an intellectual vacuum. We always think with something, through what the physicist Karen Barad calls apparatuses. These apparatuses become extensions that simultaneously affect what thought reaches toward. They may be language, concepts, or tools, a fishing rod, a brush, what we use to approach the world.

To imagine that these apparatuses do not affect what we try to understand would be like believing that the brush leaves no trace in the paint. Becoming aware of what we are thinking with is therefore crucial for how we think.

In this light, understanding does not appear as a meeting between separate entities, but as something that arises in relation. Thinking is an interaction, not a representation. It happens in the encounter with material, where what is formed also forms back.

From this perspective, Zambrano’s poetic reason appears less vague than certain philosophical traditions have claimed. Rather, it points toward a form of thinking that takes this relation seriously, where knowledge does not arise outside the world, but within it.

In her exile following the Spanish Civil War, Zambrano herself carried this crisis. For her, the collapse of Europe was more than a historical event; it was a sign of a deeper breakdown in the systems of thought of modernity.

Claros del bosque is Zambrano’s poetic exploration of thinking as a movement through clearings, where something can appear without being fully captured. A clearing offers no total overview, but another way of seeing, where light enters without dissolving what surrounds it.

She argues for the necessity of a poetic reason, one that encuentra en instantáneo descubrimiento lo que la inteligencia desgrana paso a paso en sus elementos (capable of discovering in an instant what analytical thought gradually breaks down into its elements).

In a culture of thought that seeks clarity and total overview, the clearing becomes an interruption. It opens space for what is otherwise pushed aside and loses its value. Here thinking deepens and moves closer to experience, in contrast to a stripped-down rationality that has forgotten with which hand, or apparatus, it thinks.

She developed a deep connection to the truths revealed in dreams, in ecstasy, and in artistic creation in general, and poetry in particular. She revitalised these sources through a life lived in close relation to all creation.

Rational thought has long drawn a boundary where image and creation fall outside what is recognised as knowledge. Yet the image is a way of becoming educated, where thinking moves through the senses and the abstract takes form. Today, this form of knowledge is being pushed back, as aesthetic education declines and the artist is forced to defend their relevance. What remains is a way of thinking that has yet to learn what knowledge can be.

Zambrano’s work has often remained at the margins of the philosophical canon. Not because it lacks rigor, but because it moves differently from the dominant tradition, where clarity, systematisation, and conceptual precision are prioritised. Within this tradition, particularly in much of Western and analytic philosophy, a more poetic and experience-based thinking has struggled to gain recognition.

This does not make her work less relevant, but rather shows how it challenges the very criteria of what counts as knowledge. Her thinking continues to move within a clearing; visible in some contexts, overlooked in others. While recognised as a major thinker in Spain, she remains scarcely studied elsewhere in Europe.

Zambrano argued that philosophy left Plato’s cave too quickly to establish itself in the blinding light of rationalism. In doing so, the bodily, the contradictory, and the obscure risk being dismissed. These are precisely the experiences her thinking seeks to reintroduce, not to replace rationality, but to expand it. The light of rationalism is a light so strong that it also makes us blind.

Her thinking is not political in the traditional sense, as she does not develop theories of the state, justice, or social order. Instead, she moves at the level that precedes politics. The ways we perceive and relate to the world shape what appears possible, legitimate, and true. What we give language and visibility to has consequences, while what remains unseen risks disappearing.

What is often perceived as rational is not necessarily logical in any deeper sense. As social psychologist Melanie Joy shows, systems that appear rational can conceal contradictions and forms of violence that have been normalised. Patriarchal structures, for example, underpin systems such as animal exploitation, establishing moral hierarchies where some lives are granted greater value and consideration than others. The rational thus reveals itself not as neutral, but as something shaped within a system.

The philosopher Jonna Bornemark describes how, in our pursuit of knowledge, we often stop at what she calls ratio. Ratio orders the world, determines what is good or bad, and divides it into fixed categories that we turn into laws and structures. In doing so, it forgets its roots in the senses, desire, and imagination. A culture that privileges the measurable risks reducing living processes to data and control. In this, knowledge is lost, and our ability to form healthier relationships is diminished.

As with Karen Barad, it becomes clear that we never stand outside what we seek to understand; we are always part of it. Thinking is a relation, not a detached observation.

When the artist, regardless of form, is forced to defend their legitimacy, this often happens within a system that has already excluded the artistic as knowledge. The defence is directed toward a way of thinking that does not recognise its own influence.

The task becomes almost impossible: to argue for the value of something within a logic that from the outset denies it value. It risks becoming an endless movement, where the artist must continually translate their work into a language that simultaneously reduces it.

And yet, the legitimacy is already there, in the work itself. Not as something to be proven, but as something that operates.

We need new ways of relating to our world and to those within it. This also means exposing how established systems stand in the way of such relations. Like Zambrano, we need to reopen the knowledge found in lived experience. We need clearings in closed systems, movement in a rigid way of thinking. This requires recognising the value of lived experience, not only what can be measured, and not only for some. Only then can what and who has been pushed aside regain their value.