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In chapter 8 of Estructura Dinámica de la realidad, Xavier Zubiri resituates us

within the discussion regarding how we ought to conceive distinct moments in what

philosophy, largely up to now, has considered under the concepts of identity and difference,

sameness and change. At stake in this chapter is how we ought to conceive the idea of

sameness, and of that which really is said to be a living thing. What we will see is that

living beings, and human beings in particular, occupy the position of being a dynamic

structure, a system, and that living beings are differentiated in a particular way vis-à-vis the

real in relation to other things (cosas) as beings for whom, sentient material beings who are

forms of reality beyond a notion of the mere suchness of a thing (184). In asking the

question about the stability of a structure that is nevertheless dynamic, we are, thus, asking

about the nature and extension of life itself over the whole of the earth. Further, in asking

the questions “what is life” and “how are different living beings all part in parcel with what

is called life” we will see that we are asking once again about how to think the unitary

character of structure.

Zubiri begins by first reminding us that the dynamism of the dar de sí of the real is

distinct from, although founded as substrate of, change (158). Within this distinction there

are two types of dynamism that, despite being distinct, are not metaphysically different.

The first is variation, the type in which an anteriority and thus grounding is presupposed for

the tracing of the subject of the dynamic movement. This type of dynamism occurs at the

level of adherent properties of a given sustantividad. The second is alteration, the type in

which a sustantividad seems to produce another sustantividad (159). Regarding this

distinction between the two types of dynamism, the question is how to render the fact that

there seems to be a difference between affecting change at the level of the structure of a

sustantividad and the production of alterity.

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Under the heading of alteration, we encounter the schema of evolution, mutation,

potentiality and virtuality, and therein, an answer to the question just posed. The production

of alterity that occurs in alteration is predicated on evolutionary movement that appears as

variation. This is so as the occurring and integration of mutations (159-160). That occurring

and integration of mutations is the actualization of a potentiality already adherent to the

structure of a sustantividad. The production of virtualities that are actualized in generation

or production occur on the basis of this variation, a case in which the foundation of one

dynamic movement is founded in another (161). This relation between the two types of

dynamism is transcendentally, metaphysically, real (160).

It is at this level of the relation between what is anteriorly presupposed in the

production of alterity that Zubiri introduces another aspect of reality – namely, stability.

The presupposition of anteriority in the production of alterity, the relation between what is

anteriorly and adherently sustantive and that which is produced as other in relation to that

sustantive, is now conceptualized as a dynamic stability that is constitutive of what we have

been calling reality (161), and this occurs in two distinct ways. The first is at the molecular

level in which the persistence of matter is given/ occurs (163).

The second is the transmolecular level. This is the level at which what appears on

the molecular level as the subsistence of a microscopic system, the adherence of which is

called a molecule, opens into a system of molecules as an activity (163-164). That system

characterizes what we call life, a reality more differentiated than the immediacy of the

subsistence of molecular sustantividades and the things (Cosas) that surround a life vis-à-

vis the universe (164-165), a characteristic thus of humans that appears in our domiciling

ourselves as a differentiation from each other (170). Life in turn is defined as a dynamic

equilibrium (165), as a structure that living beings do not possess, but rather are (166-167).
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This dynamic structure is constituted by three aspects. The location or emplacement

of living beings, the character of the dynamic activity of being alive, and life as a mode of

reality. Living beings are structured as ecological and responsive beings (170-172). Living

beings, according to how they are structurally (174), are stimulated by, and in turn possibly

experience meaning (sentido) distinct from and on the basis of, stimuli that are either

nutritive or merely sensory (173-174). The important point this description communicates

calls us back to the Zubirian definition of structures.

More precisely, Zubiri’s formulation here calls our attention to how he conceives

the relation between space, structure, and the occurring of living beings. The question is

one of matter and sentience, and coincidently one of how to think the relationship between

what some philosophers refer to as transcendental and/or material conditions for the

possibility of an action and the action itself. For Zubiri, structures that make possible

activity are not metaphysically different from said activity, but rather, the spatial location of

an activity that is said to be on the basis of this structure (175). Similarly, matter and

sentience are unitary with regard to living beings (176). Sentience is not added to matter,

but rather evolves (176) materially to the emergence of nervous systems that ground the

activity of formalization, and thus, the interiorization, the la mismidad, of the living being

(183).

That interiorization is no mere suchness of a thing, but rather, the form of reality

that the thing is (183). We are given a repetition of Zubiri’s reconceptualization and

redefinition of the relationship between conditions for the possibility of an action and the

action itself. La mismidad is not the persistence of a sustantividad, as in the molecule, but

rather the “the reduplicative and formal act by which a living being is as it is as it was
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structurally” (185). This is the dynamic structure of mismidad, that which is the “proper

sustantividad” of a living being (185).

The coincidence of condition and act, of interiorization and material, is now shown

to be the fact that the being of a living being is involved with the activities that constitute

that living being as such, really, as a form of reality itself (183). This is what Zubiri calls

“being possessed,” the definition of living. “Y en este sentido digo que vivir es poseerse”

(183). It is in this sense of possession, not in the additive sense of a subject being capable

of possessing accidents, but in the sense of the unitary structure of condition and act that

Zubiri calls a relative scale of “auto-possession” with regard to various living beings vis-à-

vis their form of reality (184). With this idea, we are back at the larger questions of how to

think becoming and change. How is it that that living beings are said to be forms of reality

the reality of life (189)? Again, we return to the definition of structure.

There is a unity of activity that is called structural that constitutes a living being, not

a subject or substance upon which accidents are added (190). Rather, the structure of life, of

a life, consists again in reduplicatively and formally being itself (197-198). We do not

possess ourselves as objects, but rather are occurring, acting, or being, what we are (198) in

relation to our mismidad and to our environment. This means that we are constitutively in

motion, so to speak. We respond out our mismidad, we do not simply react (199).

Secondly, and again, our structure simply is. We are our structure. This structure

again is dynamic. We are constitutively becoming because we are structurally becoming

(200). This becoming is real, it is the dar de sí of itself, as what we are (200). The

differences amongst living beings consist in greater or lesser grades of this giving of the

real, a phenomenon that we can say is constitutively coincident with a given structure of a

given living being (200).

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Zubiri concludes by schematizing these ideas in relation to the earlier discussion of

alteration and variation. There are eight strata that make up the movement toward creative

formalization, the notion of mismidad as the structural occurring de sí that constitutes living

life. These strata range from the sheer fact of living matter to said interiorization (202).

The most important thing to consider at this point, Zubiri notes, is that what we are

describing must be considered as transcendentally real. By transcendental, Zubiri means

only that mode of reality that the suchness (talidad) is said to constitute (203). The

transcendental reality of living beings is mismidad, the structurally dynamic giving of itself

as what it is as it was (204).

Questions and Comments

1. I am still a bit confused as to how Zubiri understands the relationship between

change, dynamism, and evolution. Would it be wrong to say that dynamism and

variation are related but distinct phenomena that coincide with change?

2. How does Zubiri’s account of evolution of life toward creative formalization get us

out of the problems posed by substantialist notions of the self?

3. Can we summarize for the sake of clarity how the discussion of alteration and

variation leads us to the question of mismidad?