L'inquieta chimera. Angoscia e nullità ontologica in Xavier Zubiri

The restless chimera. Anxiety and ontological nullity in Xavier Zubiri This essay traces the spiritual genesis of Zubiri's constant intellectual concern for the theme of reality in a short article entitled Las fuentes espirituales de la angustia y de la esperanza (1961). Zubiri recognizes in anxiety one of the most serious evils of his time, analyzing it not only from an ontological point of view but also as a mainly social phenomenon. If the ultimate root of man's stability lies in his being bound to reality as the very possibility of his life, in what Zubiri calls religación, in anxiety, conversely, man experiences a sort of uprooting from reality, he finds himself lacking of foundation, returned to its original "radical ontological nullity". Anxiety, however, is revealed to man physically unsustainable, since it is a negation of himself. In this perspective, Zubiri believes that anxiety must become a kind of warning so that man can regain a sense of reality, intimately recovering his moralization.