• Determine what went wrong with all past philosophies, not individually but in common. To do this he must penetrate to a much deeper level than any of these philosophies, and determine the unspoken and unrecognized assumptions that lie there.

• Develop a new way of doing philosophy not subject to the vicissitudes of history and changes in the scientific worldview. This will require a totally new conception of reality as something open at multiple levels, rather than closed, fixed, and exhaustible, and a corresponding new theory of intelligence, knowledge, and truth.

• Demonstrate that there is genuine progress in philosophy by creating a new synthesis which is not a drop-in replacement for and rejection of all the old erroneous systems, but rather something which absorbs their key insights and refines and/or corrects them in a dynamic, rather than a static synthesis such as that of Kant. This synthesis must be equally capable of absorbing developments in science and mathematics.

It is important to understand at the outset just how radical Zubiri’s rethinking of philosophy had to be in order to achieve his goal. Though in constant dialogue with the history of philosophy, and recognizing that this history must be the starting point for his (or any effort), Zubiri

• rejects the traditional view of reality as a zone of things, whether "out there" beyond perception, within the mind, in the realm of ideas, or anywhere else, replacing it with a more fundamental and general notion, that of formality, which refers to the nature of what is present to the intelligence;
• rejects the traditional four-part division of philosophy into metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and ethics as the primary basis for its organization, instead recognizing that no such strict division has ever been achieved or is even possible, and that a new approach to human intellection is necessary;
• rejects the traditional notion of God as a reality object, instead conceiving of Him as a reality fundament or ground;
• rejects the traditional idea of reality as "closed" and static, as implied in most conceptions of essence, in favor of a new view of reality and essence as "open";
• rejects the traditional notion of a person as another type of "thing," arguing that personhood is a separate, distinct kind of reality.
• rejects the agreement of thought and things as the fundamental notion of truth; rather this dual truth is founded on a more fundamental truth, real truth, the impressive actuality of the real in sentient intellection.
• rejects the traditional notion of sensible intelligence founded on opposition between sensing and intelligence, replacing it with a fully integrated conception, sentient intelligence.

For Zubiri, this is not merely a roundabout way, but something worse:

In fact, Zubiri believes, the essence in general cannot be defined in genus-species form, and may not be expressible in ordinary language at all. He believes that essences—in the radical sense of determining what a thing is, and thus how it will behave, what its characteristics are, and so forth—can be determined only with great difficulty; and much of science is dedicated to this task. Specifically, Zubiri believes that it is necessary to go back to Aristotle’s original idea of essence as the fundamental determinant of a thing’s nature, what makes it to be what it is, and expand on this concept in the light of modern science.

But this critique indicates that there is a deep realist strain to Zubiri’s thought, a belief that we can, in some ultimate sense, grasp reality. The problem arises in connection with our belief that what we perceive is also real—a belief upon which we act in living out our lives. This compels Zubiri to make an extremely important distinction with respect to reality: between reality in apprehension (which he terms ‘reity’), and reality of what things are beyond sensing (true reality, realidad verdadera). Zubiri believes that the failure of past philosophers to distinguish these, and consequently, their failure to recognize that they refer to different stages of intellection, is at the root of many grave errors and paradoxes. This leads directly to the second pole of Zubiri’s thought: Phenomenology.

But because the world discovered to us by science is quite different from our ordinary experience (electromagnetic waves and photons instead of colors, quarks and other strange particles instead of solid matter, and so forth), a critical problem arises which thrusts Zubiri towards a radical rethinking of the notion of reality. This is one of the main themes of Sentient Intelligence.

The third idea—perhaps ‘inspiration’ is a better term—which Zubiri draws from phenomenology has to do with his radically changed concept of reality. For Zubiri, reality is a formality, not a zone of things, as in classical philosophy:

This conception of reality is, so to speak, a radical "paradigm shift", because it means that there are multiple types of reality and that many of the old problems associated with reality are in fact pseudo-problems. Zubiri notes that

Much of the work is devoted to analyzing the process of intelligence, and explaining how its three stages (primordial apprehension, logos, and reason) unfold and yield knowledge, including scientific knowledge.

Zubiri seeks to reestablish radically the basis for human knowledge as the principal step in his restructuring of philosophy. This task goes far beyond any type of Kantian critique—something which Zubiri believes can only come after we have analyzed what human knowledge is, and how we apprehend. For Zubiri, perception of reality begins with the sensing process, but he rejects the paradigm of classical philosophy, which starts from opposition between sensing and intelligence. According to this paradigm, the senses deliver confused content to the intelligence, which then figures out or reconstructs reality. The Scholastics said, nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu nisi ipse intellectus. This is sensible intelligence, and according to Zubiri, the entire paradigm is radically false.

Zubiri’s point of departure for his rethinking of this problem is the immediacy and sense of direct contact with reality that we experience in our perception of the world; the things we perceive: colors, sounds, sights, are real in some extremely fundamental sense that cannot be overridden by subsequent reasoning or analysis. That is, there is associated with perception an overwhelming impression of its veracity, a type of "guarantee" which accompanies it, that says to us, "What you apprehend is reality, not a cinema, not a dream." Implied here are two separate aspects of perception: first, what the apprehension is of, e.g. a tree or a piece of green paper, and second, its self-guaranteeing characteristic of reality. This link to reality must be the cornerstone of any theory of the intelligence:

• affection of the sentient being by what is sensed (the noetic).
• otherness which is presentation of something other, a "note", nota (from Latin nosco, related to Greek gignosco, "to know", and noein, "to think"; hence the noematic)
• force of imposition of the note upon the sentient being (the noergic).

Otherness consists of two moments, only the first of which has received any attention heretofore: content (what the apprehension is of) and formality (how it is delivered to us). Formality may be either formality of stimulation, in the case of animals, or formality of reality, in the case of man.

The union of content and formality of reality gives rise to the process of knowing which unfolds logically if not chronologically in three modes or phases:

• Primordial apprehension of reality (or basic, direct installation in reality, giving us pure and simple reality)
• Logos (explanation of what something is vis à vis other things, or what the real of primordial apprehension is in reality)
• Reason (or ratio, methodological explanation of what things are and why they are, as in done in science, for example)

This process, shown schematically in Figure 1, is mediated by what Zubiri calls the ‘field’ of reality. The reality field concept is loosely based on the field concept from physics, such as the gravitational field, where a body exists "by itself", so to speak; but also by virtue of its existence, creates a field around itself through which it interacts with other bodies. Thus in the field of reality, a thing has an individual moment and a field moment. The individual moment Zubiri refers to as the thing existing "by itself" or "of itself"; de suyo is the technical term he employs. The "field moment" is called as such and implies that things cannot be fully understood in isolation. This is in stark contrast to the notion of essence in classical philosophy.

Figure 1

Sentient Intelligence in Zubiri’s Philosophy

Roughly speaking, primordial apprehension installs us in reality and delivers things to us in their individual and field moments; logos deals with things in the field, how they relate to each other; and reason tells us what they are in the sense of methodological explanation. A simple example may serve to illustrate the basic ideas. A piece of green paper is perceived. It is apprehended as something real in primordial apprehension; both the paper and the greenness are apprehended as real, in accordance with our normal beliefs about what we apprehend. (This point about the reality of the color green is extremely important, because Zubiri believes that the implicit denial of the reality of, say, colors, and the systematic ignoring of them by modern science is a great scandal.)

As yet, however, we may not know how to name the color, for example, or what the material is, or what to call its shape. That task is the function of the logos, which relates what has been apprehended to other things known and named from previous experience; for example, other colors or shades of colors associated with greenness. Likewise, with respect to the material in which the green inheres, we would associate it with paper, wood, or other things known from previous experience. In turn, reason via science explains the green as electromagnetic energy of a certain wavelength, or photons of a certain energy in accordance with Einstein’s relation. That is, the color green is the photons as sensed; there are not two realities. The characteristics of the three phases may be explained as follows:

• Primordial apprehension of reality is the basic, direct installation in reality, giving us pure and simple reality. This is what one gets first, and is the basis on which all subsequent understanding is based. Perhaps it can most be easily understood if one thinks of a baby, which has only this apprehension: the baby perceives the real world around it, but as a congeries of sounds, colors, etc., which are real, but as yet undifferentiated into chairs, walls, spoken words, etc. It is richest with respect to the real, poorest with respect to specific determination (ulterior modes augment determination, but diminish richness). In it, reality is not exhausted with respect to its content, but given in an unspecific ambient transcending the content. This transcendence is strictly sensed, not inferred, even for the baby. Primordial apprehension is the basis for the ulterior or logically subsequent modes.
• Logos (explanation of what something is vis à vis other things, or as Zubiri expresses it, what the real of primordial apprehension is in reality). This is the second step: differentiate things, give them names, and understand them in relation to each other. As a baby gets older, this is what he does: he learns to make out things in his environment, and he learns what their names are, eventually learning to speak and communicate with others verbally. This stage involves a "stepping back" from direct contact with reality in primordial apprehension in order to organize it. The logos is what enables us to know what a thing, apprehended as real in sentient intellection, is in reality (a technical term, meaning what something is in relation to one’s other knowledge). It utilizes the notion of the "field of reality". The reality field is a concept loosely based on field concept of physics: a body exists "by itself" but by virtue of its existence, creates field around itself through which it interacts with other bodies.
• Reason (or ratio, methodological explanation of what things are and why they are, as is done in science, for example). This is the highest level of understanding; it encompasses all of our ways of understanding our environment. One naturally thinks of science, of course; but long before science as we know it existed, people sought explanations of things. And they found them in myths, legends, plays, poetry, art, and music—which are indeed examples of reason in the most general sense: they all seek to tell us something about reality. Later, of course, came philosophy and science; but no single way of access to reality, in this sense, is exhaustive: all have a role. Reason, for Zubiri, does not consist in going to reality, but in going from field reality toward worldly reality, toward field reality in depth. If one likes, the field is the system of the sensed real, and the world, the object of reason, is the system of the real as a form of reality. That is, the whole world of the rationally intellectively known is the unique and true explanation of field reality.

Given Zubiri’s radically new approach to philosophy, and his analysis of intelligence as sentient, it is not surprising that his concept of reality is quite different from that of previous philosophy as well. As mentioned above, he rejects the idea of reality as a "zone of things", usually conceived as "out there" beyond the mind, and replaces it with a more general notion, that of formality. "Reality is formality", he says over and over, and by this he means that reality is the de suyo, the "in its own right"; it is not the content of some impression. Anything which is "in its own right" is real. This de suyo, the formality of reality, is how the content is delivered to us. Our brains—Zubiri refers to them as organs of formalization—are wired to perceive reality, to perceive directly the "in its own right" character. It does not emerge as the result of some reasoning process working on the content; it is delivered together with the content in primordial apprehension.

This includes reality in apprehension, as well as reality beyond apprehension. But always, the character of reality is the same: de suyo. It is therefore something physical as opposed to something conceptual. And this is true whether one is speaking of things perceived at the level of primordial apprehension, such as colors, or things perceived in ulterior modes of apprehension such as reason, where examples might be historical realities such as the Ottoman Empire, or mathematical objects such as circles and lines: both are real in the same sense, though they differ in other respects (mathematical objects are real by postulation, whereas historical entities are not). Moreover, reality is independent of the subject, not a subjective projection, but something imposed upon the subject, something which is here-and-now before the subject. Logos and reason do not have to go to reality or create it; they are born in it and remain in it.

When a thing is known sentiently, at the same time it is known to be a reality. The impression of reality puts us in contact with reality, but not with all reality. Rather, it leaves us open to all reality. This is openness to the world. All things have a unity with respect to each other which is what constitutes the world. Zubiri believes that reality is fundamentally open, and therefore not capturable in any human formula. This openness is intimately related to transcendentality:

Reality must not be considered as some transcendental concept, or even as a concept which is somehow realized in all real things:

Sentient intellection is transcendental impression, in which the trans does not draw us out of what is apprehended, toward some other reality (as Plato thought), but submerges us in reality itself. The impression of reality transcends all its content. This is the object of philosophy, whereas the world as such-and-such is the object of science.

For Zubiri, the fundamental or constitutive openness of reality means that the search for it is a never-ending quest; he believes that the development of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century has been an example of how our concept of reality has broadened. In particular, it has been broadened to include the concept of person as a fundamentally different kind of reality:

Now of course, not everything which we perceive in impression has reality beyond impression; but the fact that something is real only in impression does not mean that it isn’t real. It is, because it is de suyo. And what is real in impression forms the basis for all subsequent knowing, including science. Still, we are quite interested in what is real beyond impression, which may be something else, or the same thing understood in a deeper manner. For example, electromagnetic theory tells us that colors are the result of photons of a particular energy affecting us. But, according to Zubiri—and this is extremely important—there are not two realities (the photons and the colors), but the colors are the photons as perceived. Reason is the effort to know what things are "in reality" which are known in primordial apprehension.

Truth, like reality, is much different in Zubiri’s approach. The traditional view has always been that truth is some sort of agreement of thought and things. Zubiri rejects this view because it is incomplete and not sufficiently radical for two reasons: (a) "things" as understood in this definition are the product of ulterior modes of intellection, and (b) "thought" is not univocal, being different in the three modes. The notion of truth as agreement of two things, dual truth, is a derivative notion, which must be grounded upon something more fundamental. For Zubiri, the priority of reality is always paramount, and hence the primary meaning of truth, real truth, is impressive actuality of the real in sentient intellection. It is a quality of actualization, not agreement of two disparate things, which as the ground of truth would pose insuperable verification problems. All other truth is ultimately based on this real truth, this actualization. As such, real truth is imposed on us, not conquered; dual truth, a derivative form of truth, we conquer through our own efforts. Real truth must be sought in primordial apprehension:

Zubiri believes that one of the principal errors of past philosophers was their excessively static view of knowledge—a conquer it "once and for all" approach. Typical of this mentality are the repeated attempts to devise a definitive list of "categories", such as those of Aristotle and Kant, and Kant’s integration of Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry into the fabric of his philosophy. Rather, knowledge as a human enterprise is both dynamic and limited. It is limited because the canon of reality, like reality itself, can never be completely fathomed. It is limited because as human beings we are limited and must constantly search for knowledge. The phrase "exhaustive knowledge" is an oxymoron:

Understanding is also a richer and more complex process than heretofore assumed. Indeed, oversimplification of the process of understanding has led to major philosophical errors in the past. Understanding requires both apprehension of something as real, and knowing what that thing is with respect to other things (logos stage) and what it is in reality itself (reason stage). Traditionally only the latter is considered. Zubiri comments:

Understanding, then, requires sentient intellection and cannot exist, even for subjects such a mathematics, without it. This insight reveals clearly Zubiri’s radical departure from all previous thought.

For centuries it was believed that what is real "beyond" impression comprises "material bodies", envisaged as made up of some sort of billiard-ball type particles. The development of quantum mechanics forced a change in this picture, though not without considerable controversy. A much more difficult effort was required to recognize that something can be real and yet not be a thing, viz. the human person. The human person is a fundamentally different kind of reality, one whose essence is open, as opposed to the closed essences of animals and other living things. An open essence is defined not by the notes that it naturally has, but by its system of possibilities; and hence it makes itself, so to speak, with the possibilities. "Its-own-ness" is what makes an essence to be open. This open essence of man is the ground of his freedom, in turn the ground of his moral nature. Zubiri terms the set of notes defining the essence of what it means to be a person personeity, and personality the realization of these notes by means of actions. A person, for Zubiri, is a relative absolute: "relative" because his actions are not entirely unconstrained, but are what make him the kind of person that he is; "absolute" because he enjoys the ability to make himself, i.e., he has freedom and is not an automaton, fully deterministic.

As a consequence, man’s role in the universe is different; and between persons (and only between them) there is a strict causality, which in turn implies a moral obligation. This causality is not a simple application of classical notions of causality to persons, but something irreducible to the causality of classical metaphysics, and still less reducible to the concept of a scientific law. This is what Zubiri refers to as personal causality: "And however repugnant it may be to natural science, there is...a causality between persons which is not given in the realm of nature."

The person is, in his very constitution, turned toward a reality which is more than he is, and on which he is based. This reality is that from which emerge the resources he needs to make his personality, and which supplies him with the force necessary to carry out this process of realizing himself. This turning of a person to reality is relegation. It is a turning toward some ground not found among things immediately given, something which must be sought beyond what is given. The theist calls this ground ‘God’. With respect to religions, nearly all offer a vision or explanation of this ground, and therefore there is some truth in all. But Christianity is unique because of the compenetration of the relegated person and the personal reality of God.

Zubiri’s philosophy is a boldly conceived and superbly executed rethinking and recasting of the great philosophical questions, unique in many extremely significant respects. It represents a new conception of philosophy as well as a new way of viewing and absorbing the history of philosophy. At the same time, it presents satisfying answers to the great philosophical questions, and reveals how many of the problems of the past were in fact pseudo-problems arising from deep-seated misunderstandings, especially of the nature of human intellection as sentient.

Special thanks is owed to Professor Gary Gurtler of Boston College, who graciously read the entire translation and suggested innumerable changes in terminology, phraseology, and sense of passages. But for his skills and great labor, this translation would be much poorer. Of course, no two readers of Zubiri or any philosopher will agree on all points, and so the translator is responsible for any errors that remain in the text.

Translation of a major philosophical work such as this inevitably requires many difficult decisions on terminology. Zubiri’s philosophical method and approach leads him to use existing words in new ways, and to devise many neologisms. Great effort was made to find the most natural way of rendering these in English, but for reference, listed here are the principal technical terms for which something other than a fairly literal translation has been employed, or for which there are possible misunderstandings. More extensive treatment of Zubiri’s terminology than it is possible to include in a book such as this may be found in the glossary section of the Xavier Zubiri Foundation of North America’s Website, whose address is: www.zubiri.org/general/glossary.htm.

De suyo. Zubiri’s most famous technical term, and one which is therefore left untranslated. Its literal meaning is "in its own right".

En propio. Meaning depends somewhat on context, but generally translated as "of its own" and on occasion as "in its own right".

Fundamentar. The word and its derivatives, such as fundamento and fundar, are closely related to the English "to found". However, English does not have the infinitive "to fundament"; rather, English (like German) uses "to ground" for this purpose. However, some of the Spanish forms such as fundar, "to found", do exist in English. This complicates the translation problem. Here the most natural English rendering is made in each case, but the reader should be aware that "to ground" and "to found" and their derivative forms are essentially synonymous and have been used interchangeably.

"La" realidad. Translated as "reality itself", as distinguished from simple "reality". It usually occurs as en "la" realidad, "in reality itself", contrasted with en realidad, "in reality". These terms refer to two different levels of knowing reality.

Talitativo. Literally, the term means "suchness" or "such-making", and with the idea of the English "such-and-such". These expressions, rather than the literal "talitative", are used here.

Transcendentalidad. A neologism which is

Veridictar. This is a term with an obvious literal meaning, "to speak truth". Though it does not exist in English, the form "veridictance", meaning "speaking the truth", was created to avoid unnatural complex phraseology.

Verificar. Literally, "to truthify". The term is rendered here as "to make truth".