Metaphor in Person and Democracy by María Zambrano

Abstract

Persona y democracia (Person and Democracy), María Zambrano’s most political writing, has three constants also recognizable in other of author’s works: the extreme thematic versatility of her prose, never entirely confined to philosophical thought, as the reader would expect according to her – lately recognized – philosophical prestige, since in her essays she mixes literature, aesthetics, theology, psychology, politics, sociology and history. In addition, and related to what we mentioned before, she inherits from Ortega y Gasset a stylistic leaning for images and metaphors of deep and intense plasticity, although less frequently than him or giving preference to the metaphor sequence procedure, which fits better her heuristic interest for word as key phenomenon of sacral nature in her poetic reason (razón poética). Finally, the majority of Zambrano’s metaphors have their origins in archaic and Greek antiquity, whose dawning symbolism she considers to be the core of the Western world.