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L I S T E N I N G  T O  T H E  B R E A T H , 
C H A N T I N G  T H E  W O R D : 
T H E  T W O  B R E A T H S 
I N  M A R Í A  Z A M B R A N O ’ S 
C L E A R I N G S  O F  T H E  F O R E S T
R a q u e l  F e r r á n d e z
A Contemporary Western Upaniṣad
How could any word be spoken without intonation or chant?
(María Zambrano)1
The border between philosophy and poetry represents a dangerous 
zone of friction for the rigor to which the history of philosophy aspires 
today, and an inhospitable place, devoid of gods, for the ahistorical 
eternity of which poetry continues to dream. The passage from meta-
phor to concept and vice versa has never been a friendly threshold and 
is not meant to be. The metaphor of the “clearings of the forest” can be 
traced back to at least three figures in the history of Western philosophy, 
namely: Martin Heidegger, José Ortega y Gasset and María Zambrano. 
If we walk through these three “clearings” carefully, we will observe not 
only the conceptual influences of the German philosopher on the two 
Spanish philosophers, but also the fundamental singularity of María 
Zambrano’s clearings, boldly open to the poetic abyss, as opposed to 
the more cautious, safe, sheltered landscapes of Heidegger and Ortega.
In Holzwege (Forest Paths), Heidegger brings us close to this zone of 
friction, but he himself never comes to inhabit it, and its reading does 
1  María Zambrano, Claros del Bosque (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1977), 92. All translations of 
quotations from Spanish texts to English language are provided by the author.
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p O l I G R A F I
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not demand from us the radical experience of the borderline. The fact 
that the Heideggerian Lichtung is devoid of air, as luce Irigaray pointed 
out,2 is closely related to Giorgio Agamben’s assessment of Heidegger’s 
relation to poetry. For, although the German philosopher recovered for 
the history of philosophy poets like Hölderlin, he himself never dared 
to throw himself into this experience: “[Heidegger] was not able to be 
a poet; he feared the ‘rail accident’ that he believed was about to hap-
pen in his language.”3 Having said this, Heidegger has needed neither 
air nor poetry to show us that there are grandiose ways of aspiring to 
the original word and to the experience of the clearing, even if it is up 
to others to complete the song and the atmosphere that traverses them. 
Air is the music of the elements just as poetry is the music of the word. 
It is no coincidence that María Zambrano’s poetic clearings are full of 
air, of breaths that split, of words that inspire inward, of a being whose 
asphyxia can provoke the rupture of vital respiration. The first writing 
that heads her Claros del bosque (Clearings of the Forest) tells us that 
a clearing is not something that can be deliberately sought, but only 
found. And if when we find it, we hesitate in the face of ecstasy and 
enter it as intruders, a bird will mock us, reproaching us: “you were 
looking for me and now, when I am finally favorable to you, you turn 
to that place where you cannot breathe.”4
Antonio Colinas, poet and friend of María Zambrano, argues that 
the path of experience brings us closer to the truth through the rhyth-
mic word, that is, through breathing. There is, according to this Span-
ish poet, a chain of initiates in the practice of conscious breathing, 
those who have tried to merge “word, feeling and reflection” to acquire 
both physical and spiritual health. María Zambrano would be one of 
the latest additions to this initiatory chain:
And María Zambrano, the last initiate of the chain, did she not tell us that 
when we breathe, “souls breathe in harmony, breathe in rhythm”? […] We 
reconcile ourselves with the Whole by breathing the word, breathing rhythmi-
2  luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (london: The Athlone press, 
1999).
3  Giorgio Agamben, The Fire and the Tale, trans. lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity press, 2017), 70.
4  María Zambrano, Claros del bosque, 12.
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cally, musically. And we reconcile ourselves with the Whole when we are in-
spired. And the one who breathes musically with the verse breathes infinitely, 
merges the extremes. We silence, we breathe, we hear the inaudible music, we 
write it, we pronounce it in recitation…5
Colinas considers that the initiators of this initiatory chain are to be 
found in Indian and Chinese philosophy. He specifically mentions the 
Vedas for their consideration of the prāṇa and the breathing rhythm.6 
This appreciation is interesting if we take into account the work that 
concerns us, Claros del bosque, belonging to what would be the end of 
this chain of initiated “breathers.” published in 1977, this work gathers a 
series of writings composed between 1964 and 1971, during a period in 
which María Zambrano, still exiled from Spain, lived in seclusion with 
her sister Araceli in a house in la piéce, on the border between France 
and Switzerland. It was there that her sister Araceli, to whom this work 
is dedicated, died. Although all of Zambrano’s work is directed towards 
the original integration of philosophy, poetry and religion,7 Claros illus-
trates – as few of her works do – the practical exercise that would cor-
respond to such integration. In Claros, the Spanish philosopher dares 
to make that poetic/breathing leap about which in other writings she 
had limited herself to theorizing. Consequently, the clearings she offers 
us are different from those of Heidegger and Ortega, but also different 
from any contemporary philosophical literary genre. It is not an essay, 
much less a systematic work, but neither could we consider this work 
the intimate diary of a thinker, nor a collection of poems. Some of the 
texts that make up this book are only a few paragraphs long; the titles 
of the different sections seem to guide us through a kind of transit, but 
the structure of the clearings is clearly symbolic, and their coherence is 
not evident to the intellect accustomed to conventional books on con-
temporary philosophy. And although its format is writing, many of the 
traces of this work respond to song and orality, they are alive enough to 
5  Antonio Colinas, El sentido primero de la palabra poética (Madrid: Siruela, 2008), 33.
6  Colinas, El sentido primero, 32.
7  “philosophy, poetry and religion need to clarify each other, to receive light from each 
other, to recognize their reciprocal debts, to reveal to the man half suffocated by their discord, 
their permanent and lively legitimacy; their original unity.” María Zambrano, Hacia un saber 
sobre el alma (Madrid: Siruela, 2005), 57.
p O l I G R A F I
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become inner music in the reader. “In Claros del bosque, when I was so 
liberated from the word without music, from the word without song, 
from the abstract word, although from the liturgical one I never was, I 
heard the grass singing…,” María Zambrano would confess years later.8 
As would we, the readers/listeners, if we repeatedly walked these paths 
and were open to the original listening; we would come out with cer-
tain thoughts turned into oracular music, as for example: “It is neces-
sary to fall asleep up in the light,”9 or “[i]rremediably, the first sky that 
has to light our night, is the night itself.”10 
Because of its condition of poetic centers or clearings, Zambrano 
presents in this work the fruit of an unusual cultivation of thought in 
contemporary philosophy. A cultivation that lends an ear both to the 
idea and to the rhythmic sense of the word from which it cannot be 
separated, for ideas here are not independent of the way in which they 
are expressed, just as our breathing is not independent of the air that 
feeds it. The literary genre of this work makes it uncomfortable in the 
eyes of institutional philosophy because of its unclassifiable and experi-
mental character, heretical to both poetry and philosophy – just as it is 
not easy to teach upaniṣadic philosophy in contemporary Western uni-
versity classrooms without stripping it of that state of mind conceived 
in union with the whole, of the sacred aspects of being, without which 
the words of the inspired are meaningless.
The initiatory chain of “rhythmic breathers” to which Colinas refers 
could still have a continuity, albeit transformed, if we were to con-
template Zambrano’s text in the mode of a contemporary Western 
Upaniṣad. We encounter here the double daring of poetry and mysti-
cism. In 2005, Daya Krishna wondered during a conference addressed 
mostly to an Indian audience, why no one dares to compose Upaniṣads 
in contemporary times anymore. “But why have the ṛṣis ceased? Has 
god forsaken us? Are we not intelligent enough? Are we not sensitive 
enough?”11 His conclusion is that human beings in our days are prey 
8  María Zambrano in Antonio Colinas, Sobre María Zambrano: Misterios encendidos (Ma-
drid: Siruela, 2019), 186.
9  Zambrano, Claros del Bosque, 39.
10  Zambrano, Claros del Bosque, 140.
11  Daya Krishna, Nostalgia and Utopia (New Delhi: Sage, 2012), 230. 
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to a fear of which the Vedic poets, creators of marvelous compositions 
made in that sacred state of being, in harmony with the whole, do not 
partake.12 
The fear to which Daya Krishna refers might be in sympathy with 
the fear to which Giorgio Agamben alludes when he affirms that “mod-
ern philosophy failed in its political task because it betrayed its poetic 
task; it did not want to put itself at risk in poetry or know how to do 
it.”13 Thus, philosophy lives from and for concepts, but no longer dares 
to listen to the inner breath of the word; it collects arguments, but does 
not dare to initiate itself into the song that every language carries with 
it, to the rhythm that every idea is incubating. That would be to go be-
yond what is reasonable, beyond what is debatable and, sometimes, be-
yond what is communicable. “We are still here and you have wanted to 
make the leap to the beyond,” José Ortega y Gasset said to his disciple 
María Zambrano, after reading her work Towards a Wisdom of the Soul 
(1950).14 Certainly, by addressing the breath of the word, Zambrano 
had dared to leap beyond the “vital reason” proposed by her teacher. 
And the difference between the two “reasons” can already be perceived 
in the treatment that both philosophers gave to breathing. Ortega in-
vites us to recognize thought as a vital function, just as breathing is, 
while Zambrano has the courage to think about the breath of being 
and invites us to harmonize it with vital respiration. In the following 
pages, my purpose is to listen to the Claros del bosque from a respiratory 
paradigm, that is, taking into account the fundamental role played by 
breath, inspiration, asphyxiation, and respiration in all its dimensions, 
from the beginning of the mystery to its end.
12  “Why don’t you write your own Upaniṣads? Why don’t I write? Friends! It is a sad thing 
that at least in the thirteenth century in this country nobody was afraid of composing a new 
Upaniṣad, and yet we feel that something is wrong in writing a new Upaniṣad today. Imagine 
the presumption: ‘How can I write an Upaniṣad? Only the ṛṣis could do it’. But there was a time 
when nobody was afraid. Take the case of the Vedas themselves. Anybody who has attempted 
to read the Veda, even slightly, would be amazed at the fact that suktas, new suktas, have been 
composed all the time.” Daya Krishna, Nostalgia and Utopia, 230.
13  Agamben, The Fire and the Tale, 70.
14  Colinas, El sentido primero de la palabra poética, chap. “Sobre la iniciación: Una conver-
sación con María Zambrano,” 363.
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Centers of the Forest: Breathing beyond the Others
Zambrano’s clearing is a center that comes to meet us by way of 
revelation. Whoever seeks it finds nothing, or once there, finds nothing 
within it; and those who manage to enter, without having sought it, 
suspend all questions there and find in the emptiness that presents itself 
to them a “new life,” an unforeseeable beginning. “Every method jumps 
out like an ‘incipit vita nova’ that reaches out to us with its alienable 
joy.”15 Every philosophical method has its origin in a luminous instant 
of consciousness, the method being something that aspires to continu-
ity, and consciousness by its nature discontinuous, hence the misunder-
standing that occurs between the two, according to Zambrano. But even 
in the face of the most logical and reductionist of methods, the Spanish 
philosopher invites us to listen to the melody of its triumphal birth in 
consciousness: “Hallelujah is heard in the Cartesian discourse.”16 This 
idea-verse-thought brings us viscerally close to Zambrano’s conception 
of philosophy. precisely because of the disparity that her “poetic reason” 
manifests in relation to Cartesian methodical rationalism, one would 
expect to find a critique of the French thinker’s philosophy. However, 
every philosophical quest goes back to an origin that now in the clear 
we can hear and celebrate, regardless of its later development. “Not 
unlike Nietzsche,” claims Armando Savignano, “the will to system is, 
for Zambrano, the will to lie, for it is about totalizing attitudes that 
cannot account for the multiplicity and richness of the real.”17 Embrac-
ing the multiplicity of the real implies also embracing the birth of that 
which does not accept such multiplicity, which reduces the possibilities 
that the human being has before the question and belittles their own 
capacity to breathe. lenart Škof and petri Berndtson have shown the 
oblivion of breathing manifested in the Cartesian Meditations. In his 
famous exercise of isolation with the world, Descartes simulates the 
arrest of all his sensory functions, but does not take into account that 
the being thus isolated is still in communion with the air that makes it 
15  Zambrano, Claros del bosque, 14.
16  Zambrano, Claros del bosque, 14.
17  Armando Savignano, María Zambrano: la razón poética, trans. Fernando H. llano 
Alonso (Granada: Comares, 2005), 24.
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possible for him to remain alive, that is, to remain a “thinking thing.” 
“Descartes is not at all conscious of every breath he takes during the 
process of thinking. His cardinal sin of ‘forgetting breathing’ leads to 
a completely fictitious philosophical description.”18 Far removed from 
this oblivion are Zambrano’s Claros del bosque. Because of its initiatory 
nature, this work places breathing in the foreground of all that is born 
– including the breathing of the Cartesian method itself.
What does this “Incipit vita nova” that every method, however strictly 
logical, instrumental it may be, really mean? It can only respond to the joy of a 
hidden being who begins to breathe and to live, because at last they have found 
the adequate means to their hitherto impossible or precarious life.19 
Every method, even the one that refuses to breathe, has its origin in 
breathing, it has its own unique relationship with the air that feeds it. 
If we really want to start thinking from a new respiratory paradigm, we 
cannot limit ourselves to denouncing the oblivion of air in the most im-
portant thinkers of modernity. It is also necessary to enter into the heart 
of this oblivion and hear it beat in its particular “Hallelujah,” to deci-
pher the thread of air that gives life to all these thinking oblivions. Hei-
degger did not take air into account and yet his metaphysics breathes 
in a unique and vibrant way; the same is true of Cartesian philosophy. 
Breath may be absent in their ideas, but not in the words that support 
them, not in the human being who manifests them. Adopting this her-
meneutic turn would lead us to celebrate the triumph of life in the very 
immediacy of its negation, following the steps that Zambrano sketches 
in Claros: “Only the method that would take charge of this life, at last 
destitute of logic, incapable of establishing itself as in its own milieu in 
the realm of the accessible and available logos, would be successful.”20 In 
this last stage of her exile, in which the writing of Claros takes place, the 
question of “method” will be particularly important for Zambrano. The 
third section of Claros, entitled “pasos” (“Steps”) begins with a text of 
barely two paragraphs in length, entitled “Método” (“Method”).
18  lenart Škof and petri Berndtson, “Introduction,” in Atmospheres of Breathing, eds. lenart 
Škof and petri Berndtson (New York: SUNY press, 2018), xiii. 
19  Zambrano, Claros del Bosque, 15. (Emphasis added by author.) 
20  Zambrano, Claros del Bosque, 15.
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It is necessary to fall asleep up in the light […] Up in the light, the heart 
abandons itself, surrenders itself. In the light that embraces, where one does 
not suffer any violence, because one has reached that light without forcing any 
door and even without opening it, without having crossed lintels of light and 
shadow, without effort and without protection.21
The method proposed here by Zambrano seems to tell us: “let your-
self be defeated and you will triumph.” In the heart of the clearing, 
we expose ourselves to the openness of being, without effort, without 
violence, without safeguard. And this light in which we are invited to 
fall asleep, without resistance, is directly related to breathing. Joy, love, 
and breathing are three symbols that, together with light, are repre-
sentative of Claros according to Antonio Colinas. perhaps because of 
his own condition as a poet, Colinas has been able to see with lucidity 
the weight that Zambrano gives to breathing in this work, and he also 
knows the importance that the practice of conscious breathing had in 
Zambrano’s life.
Because of this eagerness to breathe consciously, I placed María Zambrano 
[…] in the last step of that chain in the time of those who have found the 
light of being in the light. Breathing is a precious aid that not only gives us life, 
but also unifies us and fuses us with the forest-world. “Breathing is the most 
threatened thing today” she had written […] She highly values this practice 
when returning from her walk, already back home, in bed, under the light of 
her sister Araceli’s lamp: “Then I continued lying down watching the beautiful 
evening as it was falling, and calming myself in its silence and in mine I said to 
myself: we must let the soul breathe in the nameless.” Hers is an extreme lu-
cidity in this phrase, which brings together an absolute feeling and thinking.22
But is this eagerness to breathe a new and singular contribution of 
Zambrano’s philosophy, and were not the Spanish philosophers whom 
she admired so much – such as José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de 
Unamuno  themselves great breathers? The answer is ambiguous: yes 
and no. Yes, insofar as they reconciled, in their own way, philosophy 
with life, and for this it was necessary to restore breathing to its rightful 
place in thought. However, they never took breathing beyond life, at 
21  Zambrano, Claros del bosque, 39.
22  Colinas, Sobre María Zambrano, 197–198.
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least not as Zambrano does in Claros, going back to the first breath of 
being. The year 2023 marks the centenary of one of Ortega’s fundamen-
tal works, The Modern Theme. There we will find an essential exposition 
on “vital reason” with which Ortega dethrones abstract thought from 
its fictitious heights to place it at the level of vital functions, including 
the respiratory function.
Thought is a vital function, like digestion, or the circulation of the blood. 
The fact that the latter are processes active in space and among bodily tissues, 
while the former is not, makes no real difference so far as our particular theme 
is concerned. When the nineteenth century biologist refuses to consider as 
vital phenomena those which do not possess corporeal character he admits, at 
the start, a prejudice which is incompatible with any strict positivism. A doc-
tor treating a patient has before him with equal immediacy the phenomenon 
of thought and that of respiration.23
As a “heterodox” disciple of Ortega, María Zambrano knows well 
this reason that does not fear life but invokes and embodies it. Ortega’s 
vital reason could be considered the threshold of the “poetic reason” 
that she will develop in her own way over time. In the first stage of her 
exile spent in Mexico, Havana and puerto Rico in the 1940s, Zambrano 
devoted lectures and courses both to the philosophy of her teacher and 
to the thought of Miguel de Unamuno. The first lecture of the course 
on the philosophy of Ortega y Gasset that she gave at the University 
of Havana began by reflecting on the fundamental role played by the 
figure of the teacher in our lives: “If we have truly been his disciples, it 
means that he has achieved from us something apparently contradic-
tory: that, by having attracted us to him, we have become ourselves.”24 
This reflection can serve to illustrate the relationship between Zam-
brano’s philosophy and that of Ortega. Attracted to the vital reason, 
Zambrano reaches that beyond which constitutes her particular pro-
posal in the reform of understanding, the “poetic reason.” She herself 
confessed, in an interview with Antonio Colinas, that for a long time 
23  José Ortega y Gasset, The Modern Theme, trans. lázaro Carreter (New York: Torchbook, 
1961), 36.
24  María Zambrano, “Ortega y Gasset: Filósofo español” in María Zambrano, España: Sueño 
y Verdad (Barcelona: Edhasa, 1983), 93.
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she thought she was doing “vital reason,” when in fact she was already 
exercising poetic reason.25
Zambrano’s admiration for the irreverent thought of Miguel de Un-
amuno was reflected in the numerous essays she also dedicated to his 
work. Unamuno, unlike Ortega, has no will of system and we could 
even say, no will of philosophy. His thought embraces contradictions, 
takes as its origin the tragic feeling of existence and is an existential-
ism with a marked religious anthropology in which recovering the “hu-
man being of flesh and blood” is a sine qua non requirement to think 
honestly. According to Zambrano, Unamuno’s literary genre would un-
doubtedly have been tragedy, were it not for the fact that the Basque 
philosopher did not compose any tragedy. In one of his most famous 
works, The Tragic Sense of Life, one can read a very common criticism 
in Unamuno’s writings against “professionalism” in the philosophical 
field, namely against the tendency to specialization that makes one for-
get to think and live integrally.
There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain, or with 
whatever may be the specific thinking organ; while others think with all the 
body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the 
heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with life. And the people who think only 
with the brain develop into definition-mongers; they become the profession-
als of thought.26 
To this tendency towards philosophical specialization – which usu-
ally underestimates feeling in favor of reasoning, establishing an artifi-
cial frontier between the two – Unamuno calls it derogatorily “cerebral-
ism.” Following the premises of “cerebral literature,” our vital functions 
are also contemplated from their specificity, as if the organism did not 
live holistically. However, Unamuno insists that “we think, feel and 
25  “I thought, then, that I was doing vital reason and what I was doing was poetic reason. 
And it took me a while to find its name. I found it precisely in Towards a Wisdom of the Soul 
(1950), but without yet having much awareness of it. I took this essay, which gives the book 
its title, to José Ortega himself, to the Revista de Occidente. After reading it, he told me: ‘We 
are still here and you have wanted to make the leap to the beyond.’” Zambrano in “Sobre 
la iniciación: Una conversación con María Zambrano,” in Colinas, El sentido primero de la 
palabra poética, 363.
26  Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in Peoples, trans. J. E. Crawford 
Flitch (london: Macmillan & Co, 1921), 2.
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will with our total human constitution (to use scholastic terminology), 
although we think by the ministry of the brain, just as we breathe with 
the whole organism, although by the ministry of the lungs.”27 With 
Unamuno, it is no longer only a question of recognizing that thought 
is a vital function just as breathing is – as in the case of Ortega – but 
of recognizing that one thinks with the lungs, with the liver and with 
the skin as much as with the brain. The forgetfulness of breathing in 
modern Western philosophy is related to this philosophical cerebralism 
that Unamuno denounces, with the belief that thought can be located 
only in a specific organ. By reducing the thinking being to a minimal 
part of itself, it reinforces the dangerous abstraction of the person him-
self, of the life that passes through them and of the environment that 
surrounds them.
Following this respiratory thread, with Zambrano it is no longer 
only a matter of assuming this organic integration, the person “in flesh 
and blood” of Unamuno, but of seeking in ourselves the original breath, 
that is, the breath of being, in order to verify how united or split it is 
from our vital breath. In the second section of Claros de Bosque, entitled 
“El despertar” (“The Awakening”), Zambrano dedicates one of the texts 
to inspiration. I allow myself to reproduce it here at length given the 
absence of English translations of this work. As can be seen, Zambrano 
enters at the same time into the metaphysics and the phenomenology 
of breathing, which are alien both to Ortega’s vital thought and to Una-
muno’s vital feeling.
The first thing in breathing has to be the inspiration, a breath that is then 
given in a sigh, because in each expiration something of that first breath re-
ceived remains feeding the subtle fire that ignited. And the sighing seems to 
restore it, already washed by the very fire that it has sustained, the invisible 
fire of life that appears to be its substance. An ungraspable substance formed 
from the first inspiration in the initial breath, enchains the individual that is 
born with the breathing of all life and its hidden center. And in the image and 
imitation of that center of life and being, the breathing is rhythmic, within 
the innumerable rhythms that form the sphere of the living being. But the 
being, forced to be individually, will remain in a certain emptiness on the 
27  Miguel de Unamuno, Obras Completas: Tomo III: Ensayos (Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado, 
1950), 326.
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one hand and at the risk of not being able to breathe on the other, between 
excessive fullness and emptiness. And it will have to struggle to breathe, op-
pressed by the excessive density that surrounds it, that of its own feeling, that 
of its own thought, that of its dream that constantly surrounds it. And then 
it sighs, calling out, invoking a return even more powerful than that of the 
first breath, which now, at the very moment, crosses all the layers in which 
its hidden burning is enveloped, which are sustained by it. A new inspiration 
that sustains it, itself and all that weighs on it and on which it is sustained.28
Being and life: The Two Breaths
Inspiration constitutes a struggle for the being. Forced to breathe 
individually in order to be born and to give itself to life, it strives to 
overcome nothingness, emptiness, on the one hand, and, on the other, 
the density that suffocates it. petri Berndtson has shown that Merleau-
ponty, in a writing that was published only a few years before that of 
Zambrano’s Claros, briefly mentions the inhalation and exhalation of 
“Being” and invites us to take this literally. However, Berndtson points 
out, “Merleau-ponty does not say anything else about this ontology 
of ‘inspiration and expiration of Being’.”29 Berndtson wonders if it is 
possible to find an ontology of breathing, and who could serve as in-
spiration for such an ontology. In Claros, Zambrano not only speaks of 
the breath of being, but understands that all being is already in itself 
“breathing,” “pulsating life.”
A “being” in a certain way is a pulsation, a palpitating presence: life. Some-
thing elusive, blowing, breathing. […] A wound without edges that turns 
being into life. It arises in the immediacy that with being does not fit in the 
human or in any living being. An unlimited gift, a pledge received as if it 
were one’s own, this palpitation that is neither being nor only life, but living 
already and since now. Since when? A congenital breath with the birth, which 
is received from the darkness that sustains when the light is somehow made.30 
28  Zambrano, Claros del bosque, 24.
29  petri Berndtson, “The possibility of a New Respiratory Ontology,” in Atmospheres of 
Breathing, eds. lenart Škof and petri Berndtson (New York: SUNY press, 2018), 29.
30  Zambrano, Claros del bosque, 30.
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One of the fundamental themes that can be appreciated in this work 
is the split between the vital, physiological breath and the breath of the 
being that lies hidden and is, in truth, sustaining the breath of life. In 
one of the texts entitled “Solo la palabra” (“Only the Word”), Zambra-
no explicitly thematizes these two breaths, their longed-for unity and 
the consequences of their splitting for life and for being. Significantly, 
Zambrano points out that the direct manifestation of being is the word. 
At this point, the breath of being and the breath of the word are uni-
fied, for through the breath of the verb we can access the breath of be-
ing. This appreciation is also closely related to the song that Zambrano 
recognizes as inherent to the word in other texts of this work. “There is 
no history without a word, without a written word, without an intoned 
or chanted word – how could any word be spoken without intonation 
or chant?”31 Do chants and breaths coincide here? Could it be the inner 
breathing of the word, through which being manifests itself, the chant 
that is inherent to it? It is in the stones, writes Zambrano, which lack 
history because they lack the written word, that we must seek the lost 
song. “And that stone, so much like the others, could it not be the one 
that chants? And could not those, these stones, each or all of them, be 
something like letters?”32 Under Zambrano’s gaze, the mysticism of the 
word takes a surprising turn to unite with a more solid and opaque mys-
ticism of nature; the air or the inner “breathing” of the word is twinned 
with the “unwritten stones,” with that solid/earthly element that luce 
Irigaray recognized as the favorite of the metaphysical tradition.33 
The presence of the word alone establishes a kind of inner breathing, a 
breathing of being, of this being hidden in the human that needs to breathe 
in its own way and that cannot be the way of life alone. life and being must 
breathe at least in the human realm making us presentiment that it is so in all 
realms of being and life distinctly or unitedly.34
31  Zambrano, Claros del bosque, 92.
32  Zambrano, Claros del bosque, 91–92.
33  According to luce Irigaray: “As long as Heidegger does not leave the ‘earth,’ he does not 
leave metaphysics. The metaphysical is written neither on/in water, nor on/in air, nor on/in fire. 
Its ek-sistance is founded on the solid.” Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air, 2.
34  Zambrano, Claros del bosque, 100.
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The possible unity or the probable split between these two breaths 
– that of life and that of being – condition the life of each human be-
ing and are at the same time an indicator of his or her own process of 
self-knowledge. Everything begins with the split, the separate birth of 
these two breaths. But in this double channel, the breath of life is at 
the mercy of the breath of being hidden in the human being; although 
the asphyxia of being is only revealed to us in its affectation of physi-
ological breathing, the relationship between the two breaths is always 
at play, whether we perceive it or not. Zambrano seems to lament that 
the ordinary human being believes they have only one breath, the one 
that is most obviously presented to them, their organic and physiologi-
cal breathing.
Initially the two breaths – that of life and that of being – are given sepa-
rately. The breathing of life is under a threat of a cessation that only makes 
itself felt at certain moments by an immediate physiological cause and so 
often by the lack of breathing of the being hidden in the human being. […] 
And it is rare that the lack of breath of the being does not fall back on the breath 
of life as it is rare or impossible that any ailment of the being does not affect 
the ailment of life.35
If we must take literally the idea that the being inhales and exhales, 
as Merleau-ponty pointed out, then we must also recognize, following 
Zambrano, that the inhalation and exhalation of life in us depends on 
this original inhalation and exhalation, and not the other way around. 
“The inverse, on the other hand, follows another law. The being hidden 
by breathing can hold aloft the life of the one in whom it is given, with-
out any preconceived intention or any stimulus from without getting 
in the way.”36 Therefore the relationship between the two is not equal, 
for the health of the being determines the health and flourishing of 
life. Karolina Enquist illuminatingly explains Zambrano’s cosmological 
ontology in which this particular relationship between being and life 
can be appreciated:
In Zambrano’s ontological rendering of the cosmos, being is a fundamen-
tal concept of totality defined by potentiality, nothingness and the need to 
35  Zambrano, Claros del bosque, 100.
36  Zambrano, Claros del bosque, 100.
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come into presence. Being is an eternal potential presence, because it is also 
nothingness. located within being is life. life is all that is enmattered and 
which for that reason participates in a space-time structure that it has in com-
mon with others. life is the continuous process of expressing and representing 
being, conducted by the soul in the human case.37
This poetic phenomenology of the two breaths aims at reunifica-
tion, at restoring their original unity. However, the rhythm of these 
two breaths constitutes a transcendent instant that few people are able 
to experience, and, in most cases, it only remains a form of longing. 
Zambrano’s description of this rare state of union transports us to a 
mystical plane charged with the symbols of emptiness, nullification 
and silence. It is the breath of being that gives meaning and depth to 
the breath of life, and when both breaths are unified, the word/breath 
of being, which is its “most direct incalculable manifestation” unfolds 
the entire language to unify it as well, resulting in the destruction and 
nullification of the word itself in silence. The last breath of being, in 
this longed-for unity, produces the last word that precedes the ultimate 
silence.
And, at last, in some human beings the union of the two breaths is ful-
filled. […] The inward breathing of being, if considered from that surface that 
life inexorably offers. For life is by principle superficial, and only ceases to be 
so if its breath is joined by the breath of the being that, hidden beneath it, 
is deposited on the first waters of life, which our living barely touches. […] 
Everything is transcended by the breath of being and thus its word, the single, 
unknown and prodigious, miraculously identified word, raises in its unique 
impetus all the words together and unifies them, destroying them irreversibly. 
For in the human being that which transcends, it nullifies. And this action 
also manifests itself doubly. The nullification that proceeds from the being, 
pledge of the union, and that other supreme way that proceeds not from the 
cessation of the vital breathing, but from the extinguishing of the breathing 
of the being that is more hidden with greater impetus, breathes, giving then 
its only word. Only its word before opening the silence that transcends it.38 
37  Karolina Enquist Kälgren, María Zambrano’s Ontology of Exile (Switerzland: palgrave Mc-
millan, 2019), 127.
38  Zambrano, Claros del bosque, 101.
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240
These fragments will be enough to notice that in Claros we are in 
the plane of a phenomenology, not only poetic or metaphorical, but 
opaque and mystical, whose purpose is to transport us to that breath-
ing, to that chant, to that union of the two breaths, rather than to 
invite us to think about them in a reductionist way with the help of a 
single specific organ. The “cerebralism” that Unamuno denounced, so 
frequent in the institutional philosophy of our days, would completely 
prevent the joy, the ecstasy, the love and the light to which this work 
invites us. And yet it gives the impression that the work itself, in its vi-
brant vitality, knew how to protect itself against unwanted visitors and 
was designed to respond differently depending on the visitor’s state of 
being. For anyone who tries to approach Claros as if it were a piece of 
cerebral literature will find it inaccessible and unbreathable, the words 
will close the way and hide its clearings from the gaze of the uninitiated.
Conclusion
Numerous writings on the thought of María Zambrano focus on the 
geographical frontiers that this philosopher crossed physically, by virtue 
of her exile from Spain after the end of the civil war in 1939. Her stay 
in Mexico, Cuba, Italy or Geneva, among other locations, extended 
a situation of uprooting in which Zambrano took root through what 
she would later call “poetic reason.” However, in this essay I wanted to 
focus not on the external frontiers, but on the inner frontier between 
poetry and philosophy, between the word and its chant, between the 
breath of being and the breath of life, which Zambrano thematizes in 
Claros del bosque, resorting to a whole symbolic universe. Thus, she 
invites us to a thought whose word chants and breathes, whose word 
speaks to us explicitly of chant and breath. Zambrano’s clearings lead 
us to the encounter of a truth that cannot be calculated, systematized, 
or even deliberately sought. What clear and distinct method can there 
be to unite the breath of being with the breath of life? Or to restore the 
lost chant of the word? What method to fulfill a consciousness that is 
by nature discontinuous? Of course, the germ of this mature work can 
already be found in her extensive previous bibliography, since Zam-
brano’s work maintains a coherence throughout her life. In this sense, 
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her way of understanding philosophy was always related to the symbols 
that – in Claros – enjoy a life and a body of their own. In a lecture she 
gave at the University of Havana, during the first period of her exile, 
she asked her audience what philosophy consisted of, and she herself 
recognized that the answer she was about to give may not only sound 
strange, but also “old.”
philosophy is a form of love, the only form of love that is not a passion, for 
it is intellectual love. And so, being love, it partakes in the qualities of intel-
ligence; indeed, of the very essence of thought. And in turn, thought, being 
love, participates in the intrinsic quality of love, which is its capacity to tran-
scend. love and thought are thus saved by each other: love is saved from being 
a passion, that is to say, from being passive and basically immobile, limited. 
Thought is saved from remaining in that cold region that floats above life, 
from being sterile, from not having the capacity to engender a form of life.39
love and thought, saved one by the other, will both be brought back 
to the symbol of light so dear to Zambrano’s poetic reason. “Intellectual 
love resolves itself into light, that is, into vision; it is above all a hunger 
to see.” In turn, in Claros this vision will be reconnected to breath-
ing: “The fact that breath and vision are given together – and not as a 
simple possibility but in act – is already a high, pure heaven.”40 Vision, 
breathing, light, love or joy, are some of the symbols that María Zam-
brano’s heaven gives us, generous in clearings, and therefore, in enigmas 
and questions, more than in answers. It is a heaven worthy of being 
breathed and, at the same time, a challenge to the breathless frenetic 
rhythms of the academic philosophy of our days. These clearings can-
not be breathed in a single breath, nor can they be traversed by shoes 
that already know where they want to go in haste. 
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39  María Zambrano, “De Unamuno a Ortega y Gasset,” in Unamuno (Barcelona: penguin 
Random House, 2023), 163.
40  Zambrano, Claros del bosque, 143.
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