Aesthetics as Access to Reality in Contemporary Spanish Thinking

Abstract

Aesthetic thinking has been a constant in the contemporary Spanish philosophical tradition, and certainly not by chance. We can ask ourselves why. As it is well known, our thinking during the twentieth century has had as one of its main focuses of attention on the integration of reason and life: from the great step that the Ortega’s ratiovitalism supposed, the concern for this topic has been a constant among our authors. With his thought Ortega joins a tradition of authors such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or Bergson, in which it becomes clear how necessary it is to think in different ways of exercising reason against the merely conceptual or theoretical one. This new dimension is linked to aesthetics. Thus, aesthetics ceases to be only a reflection on art and beauty, to become a diverse mode of access to reality, as can be seen in the same Ortega, d’Ors, Zambrano ... and Zubiri, who brings with his sentient intelligence the aesthetical access to reality to his highest expression —in my view—, as he explains in his brief «Philosophical Reflections on the Aesthetic».