





















































The Human “Historicity” as a Permanent Transition in the Philosophy of Ignacio Ellacuría


Elementa
Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology 
and Empirical Perspectives

2 
(2022) 

1-2

Transitions

Edited by Tommaso Sgarro

First Section

Tommaso Sgarro
Editorial I – Transitions: New and Different Perspectives 9

Tommaso Sgarro
The Human “Historicity” as a Permanent Transition 13 
in the Philosophy of Ignacio Ellacuría

Luis Roca Jusmet
François Jullien: The Double Transit of Human Life 27

Jordi Riba Miralles
The Event, beyond the Permanent Crisis 37

Alessia Franco
For an Epistemology of Transition: Paul B. Preciado, 51 
Psychoanalysis and the Regime of Sexual Difference

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Second Section

Tommaso Sgarro
Editorial II – Governing Transitions 67

Pierpaolo Limone - Maria Grazia Simone
Becoming Support Teachers at the University of Foggia 71 
During the Pandemic. An Exploratory Survey

Francesca Finestrone
Music: For a Sustainable Community and the Promotion 85 
of Well-being

Gennaro Balzano - Vito Balzano
Educating for Transition in Work Contexts 101

Giuseppina Maria Patrizia Surace
The Future We Want: The Transition to Adulthood 111 
of Unaccompanied Minors

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The Human “Historicity” 
as a Permanent Transition 
in the Philosophy of Ignacio Ellacuría
Tommaso Sgarro
Università degli Studi di Foggia (Italy)

doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.7358/elementa-2022-0102-sgar
 tommaso.sgarro@unifg.it 

Abstract

Ignacio Ellacuría was brutally murdered in November the 16th, 1989 by the hands of El 
Salvador’s Armed Forces; ten years later in 1999, a quick but detailed “schema” of Xavier 
Zubiri’s anthropology, which he had used for a course he taught between July and August 
1968 at the Centro de Estudios Superiores para el Desarrollo (CESDE) in Medellín, was 
published within the second volume which collected the Jesuit’s philosophical writings. 
The “schema” brings together many of those theses that form the basis of his most impor-
tant work, and which came out posthumously, “Filosofía de la realidad histórica” (1990); 
this was developed in close comparison with the thought of the great Spanish philosopher 
whose Ellacuría was student and collaborator. The historiographical reconstruction of the 
salient passages of Ellacuría’s research on the relationship between historicity and history 
in the broader Zubiri anthropological context makes possible to highlight some peculiar 
aspects of the Jesuit’s thought, which is not merely limited to offer a new and different line 
of interpretation of Zubiri’s thought. The prominence of the idea of history as a transition 
within the social body, characteristic of the human experience, offers a new perspective, 
all internal to the Ibero-American philosophy of liberation, and at the same time, allows 
us to trace new and different sources in Ellacuría’s philosophical production.

Keywords: animal of reality; estado; historicity; history; Ignacio Ellacuría; libera-
tion philosophy; possibility; reality; social body; Xavier Zubiri.

Between 1953 and 1954, Xavier Zubiri (1898-1954) gave about thirty lec-
tures at the Madrid Chamber of Commerce entitled The problem of Man; 

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Tommaso Sgarro

as his best-known pupil, Ignacio Ellacuría (1930-1989) pointed out, this 
was the first attempt by the Spanish philosopher to study man in a uni-
tary way. It was from these lectures that Ellacuría reconstructed, between 
1967 and 1968, an “outline” of the presentation of Zubiri’s anthropologi-
cal problems (also in the light of the work carried out after 1954), that 
he held as a course between July and August 1968 at the Centro de Estu-
dios Superiores para el Desarrollo (CESDE) in Medellín entitled L’antro-
pologia di Xavier Zubiri. He published it for the first time in the second 
volume of the collection of philosophical writings of the Jesuit edited by 
the UCA (Central American University “José Simeón Cañas”) in 1999, ten 
years after the brutal murder of Ellacuría occurred in El San Salvador on 
November 16, 1989 at the hands of the Salvadoran Armed Forces. In an 
attempt to show some interesting and original aspects of Ellacuría’s work, 
I will try to trace a quick trajectory analyzinges the relationship between 
life and historicity from the 1968 work to Filosofía de la realidad histórica 
(1990) 1, which represents his philosophical testament. On one hand, the 
close relationship with Zubiri, one of the most important European phi-
losophers of the twentieth century. and his dramatic death contributed to 
build around Ellacuría a halo of myth and interest; on the other hand, 
this polarization has often forced the interpretation of his thought into a 
constant oscillation that goes from Zubiri’s theories to those of the South 
American political struggle and liberation theology. These two aspects are 
preponderant and decisive in his work; however, they often prevented us 
from seeing the originality of the path that lies primarily, as Hector Samour 
wrote, in having considered philosophy not as: “a mere intellectual pro-
cess or the product of a conceptual dialectic, extrinsic to the very life of 
the philosopher, but the product of an intelligence vitally and existentially 
committed to the revelation and realization of truth in the social and his-
torical reality in which it is located” (Samour, 2003, p. 20). What I will 
try to analyze is how Ellacuría presents the dynamism life-historicality and 
its actualization within the social body, with the aim of proposing a timely, 
partial, reconstruction and a precise historiographic evaluation on one of 
the aspects that seem to be at the basis of the most original concept elabo-
rated by Ellacuría: that of historical reality (Brito, 2020).

 1 We will take into consideration the 2007 edition present in the edition of Ellacuría’s 
works edited by UCA.

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The Human “Historicity” as a Permanent Transition in the Philosophy of Ignacio Ellacuría

1. Life as a question about the “living”
In the text of 1967-1968 Ellacuría starts from the idea of man as a living 
reality, reviewing the question of life formally understood as a spontaneous 
or immanent movement as it is presented in Zubiri’s anthropology (Ella-
curía, 1999, p. 303). The qualification of this movement, however, is rather 
problematic for the latter, since it immediately recalls the Hegelian dialectic 
of history. Life, however: “is in the way of producing movement neither 
spontaneously nor immanently, but […] in a way of being in movement: 
the way according to which movement affects the living […]” (Ellacuría, 
1999, p. 303). Life is the living in movement, the mode of being of this 
movement is the mode of being of life itself (Vargas, 2009); therefore, it 
is not a matter, as for Hegel, of identifying the origin of movement but 
its mode: “human substantiality, therefore, even though it is intrinsically 
mobile and in movement, does not have life because it moves, but its life is 
in what that movement has intrinsic to substantiality as a source of actions, 
[…] to live is to possess oneself in its substantiality, to move substantially, 
to be autós in movement” (Ellacuría, 1999, p. 304). Is not the movement 
that is autonomous, which is not alive, but who is in possession of the 
movement, that is, the man. To live is to be in possession of oneself, and 
this possession for man is the set of vicissitudes that determine his own life 
as movement. The close interconnection between one thing and the other, 
therefore, means that man cannot be interpreted as a soul alone (intrinsi-
cally substantive), nor as a body alone (intrinsically accidental), but in their 
union, in a substantiality that is actualized through the category of pos-
sibility. This is the reason why: “life does not admit only species; it admits 
above all and radically degrees: one is more or less alive” (Ellacuría, 1999, 
p. 304); it should therefore be analyzed not under the form of life experi-
ence, but as a way of living: life is its making, its happening (Pelegrina 
Cetrán, 2002). Substantivity is not proper to life but to the living, and 
in this difference the path of Zubiri’s reasoning is built. Zubiri, in fact, 
speaking of the three moments that delineate man’s life nacer, tener un 
decurso and morir, rejects any substantialist position, because it is not life 
but man that is; it derives a modal conception that is constructed through 
the ideas of collocation (locus/colocación) and state (situs/situación). These 
are two fundamental concepts because they are connected to the structure 
suscitación-respuesta that characterizes life, not so much and not only as 
a succession of states, but rather as a tension that leads from one state to 
another, life as the very dynamic of living:

The living being is “between” things, some external and some internal, that 
keep it in an activity that is not only constant, but primary. By virtue of this 

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it is in a certain state of equilibrium, not static but dynamic, in a kind of 
stationary state, as physicists would say; not a stillness but a quiescence. […] 
In this state it is “between” things. And this “between” has two characters. 
One of installation: the living being is placed among things, it has its locus 
determined among them. Another modal: the living being thus placed is 
arranged or situated in a certain way before them, has its situs. The category 
of situs, which had no role in Aristotle’s philosophy, shows its portentous 
originality and importance in the subject of life. Location and situation, 
locus and situs, taken in their full breadth and not only in a spatial sense, 
are the two radical concepts at this point. They are not two independent 
concepts. (Zubiri, 1982, p. 46)

About the structure suscitación-respuesta proposed by Zubiri as the first state 
of living, Ellacuría proposes an interpretation that seems to particularly 
emphasize the use of the word estado as reinforcing the strongly dynamic 
character of the process itself. An emphasis that is functional to the Jesuit’s 
reasoning, but which finds its raison d’être in Zubiri’s own words already in 
Naturaleza, Historia, Dios: “Things are not in motion because they change, 
but they change because they are in motion. When the actualization of 
possibilities is the result of one’s own decision, then there are not only 
states (estados) of movement, but events. Man is an entity that happens, 
and this happening is called history” (Zubiri, 1944, p. 15). The qualifica-
tion of movement is, therefore, the core of the very reasoning for Ellacuría, 
as is already evident in the text on Zubirian anthropology, composed of 
three writings elaborated for different occasions between 1964 and 1966 
(Ellacuría, 1999, p. 77), where it is emphasized that suscitación is directly 
related to estado vital in its relationship with action. Not being able to 
deepen further here the structure of the substantivity of the living in Zubiri, 
these elements are sufficient to understand how it is marked by an internal 
dynamism, which for man passes from being mere motility of the entity (as 
in Aristotle) to action: this is precisely the point that seems to interest the 
Jesuit most in the connection between living and history.

In Zubiri himself, moreover, the use of the term estado completes a 
progressive maturation in its use from Naturaleza, Historia, Dios, passing 
through Sobre la esencia, where it assumes a first and fundamental valence 
through the qualification of the estado constructo of reality (Espinoza, 
2000/2001), up to Inteligencia y logos: “modern philosophy in general has 
not taken into account the question of the reality of the state. In my view, 
it is necessary to redeem it” (Zubiri, 2008, p. 465). This redemption is 
achieved through a new and precise qualification, from the philosophical 
point of view, of the term: “it is first of all a ‘staying in’ as a way of being, 
and a ‘staying in’ as a way of ‘staying-in’: it is a ‘being-remaining’. And 

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The Human “Historicity” as a Permanent Transition in the Philosophy of Ignacio Ellacuría

this state is therefore a physical and real moment” (Zubiri, 2008, p. 465). 
“Staying” therefore has to do with the very materiality of reality, and the 
dimension of “staying” does not evade man. Ellacuría captures the urgency 
that leads Zubiri to re-evaluate the term and that allows us to define 
life in its substantiality, not only as a succession of states, but rather as 
that tension that leads from one state to another and that characterizes 
the historical character of man. The estado is therefore for Ellacuría the 
ontological precondition of situación, and it is this “being” that allows the 
location of man, to define that dynamism with respect to the surrounding 
environment, and gives him “intramondanity” constructing the space of 
the same anthropological question: “The situación is, first of all, the radical 
condition for there to be things for man, and for things to discover to man 
their powers and offer him their possibilities” (Ellacuría, 1999, p. 241). For 
Zubiri there are three categories that make up situación: status, habitus and 
situs.

What allows the radical condition of the situation is for man the 
sentient intelligence that actualizes in a singular way the intramundane 
reality. Ellacuría thus retraces the entire arc of Zubire’s reflection, insisting, 
however, particularly on the datum of the dynamic immanence of human 
“being” in the world: “The situation involves man in a certain state, to 
the extent that he is affected by things themselves, insofar as they are real. 
This state is the one with which we have to face new situations. A state 
that takes us out of the previous state” (Ellacuría, 1999, p. 317). This is 
possible because man plans (proyecta), but starting from what, in what way 
and with respect to what? Not everything depends on man, and in fact 
man himself does not depend on himself but, materially, is the fruit of 
a generativity that is substantiated in a genetic transmission, formally, a 
transmission of “forms of reality”. If, on the one hand, planning has a clear 
vocation towards the future, on the other hand, it cannot prescind from 
the past.

Ellacuría outlines what he defines as “the splendid study” in which 
Zubiri analyzes the profound sense of the radical substantiality of human 
life, but he also underlines how it does not stop at the mere radical struc-
tures of man as a living being; it is necessary to deepen other three inescap-
able dimensions of his substantiality: the social, the historical and the moral, 
that is, what man does among things, but above all what man does among 
other men, that is, what is the peculiarity of human dynamism: action. This 
highlights the propaedeuticity of the anthropological analysis outlined by 
Ellacuría to the analysis of the “practical” dimension of human life: what 
emerges is the close link that the Jesuit builds between sociality and history 
(present, but not so markedly in Zubiri), because: “each one, by the simple 

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fact of making his own life, discovers that his situation is created by others. 
[…] While man uses, modifies, etc. other things, what he does primarily 
with other men is to live together. Thus, when referring to people, the 
word ‘other’ takes on a special character” (Ellacuría, 1999, p. 329). It is 
not at all an intellectual datum that binds to the other and allows him to 
be grasped, but the fact that man is an animal of reality: “because of the 
psychophysical structure of his sentient intelligence, constitutively poured 
out on others” (Ellacuría, 1999, p. 330). Not only that, that of man more 
than an attitude towards the other is a habit: it is a physical habit, because 
it is a reality of habit. The man is therefore physically linked to others, it is 
therefore given a material definition of the concept of habitus because: “in 
it a ‘have’, and because it is a power, it exerts a ‘pressure’ on me. The social 
is not defined by pressure, but by the habitus of otherness. The social is 
not the presential in itself, but the social is presential because it is social” 
(Ellacuría, 1999, p. 331). Thus, the dimension of sociality maintains the 
same categories as the situación of human reality.

Ellacuría’s survey of Zubiri’s social dimension proceeds in stages 
but, at the same time, is broad and in-depth, demonstrating the incred-
ible knowledge that the Jesuit has of his master’s thought. What is of 
interest here is to highlight how possibility is the aspect that allows us to 
link the social dimension to the historical dimension. If sociality defines 
the dynamics of possibility from the point of view of human planning 
as planning towards the future, historicity defines its coexistence with the 
past; here the question of the relationship between history and historicity 
opens up: “the possession of self, in which man’s life consists, is an appro-
priation of possibility, which makes man, unlike other beings, a historical 
reality” (Ellacuría, 1999, p. 347). History, as well as nature and life, is not 
something other than the reality of the living being, but it is a substantive 
element of its being reality.

2. Making history, having history

In the oral lectures Zubiri gave between 1953 and 1954, speaking of the 
social reality of man he says: “The social constitutes the definition of other-
ness as a system of possibilities. And in this sense it must be strictly said 
that others form for me a social body, has the form of corporeality becau-
se they definitively define the system of real and actual possibilities with 
which I will exist” (Zubiri, 1986, pp. 307-308). The Basque philosopher 
clarifies that this body has no substantiality, but the lemma is not particu-
larly explored. It will be during the course Estructura dinámica de la reali-

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dad held between November and December 1968 that Zubiri will detail it 
and relate it to history:

We humans find ourselves in a social body that, first and foremost, consti-
tutes our world. This world is constituted by a system of possibilities. Possi-
bilities given to man, which man encounters, and this dynamism, the dyna-
mism that is triggered by these possibilities of the social body, is completely 
different from the dynamism that is triggered by social structures as social 
structures. Precisely, if the latter is the dynamism of communization, the 
dynamism of the system of possibilities of the social body as such is some-
thing completely different: it is precisely history. (Zubiri, 1989, p. 260)

Ellacuría perhaps grasps even more than Zubiri himself did in the years 
between the 50s and 60s the importance that the relationship between 
history and the social body has for the construction of a non-dialectical 
philosophy, both in the Hegelian sense and in the Marxist one; thus he 
writes in 1968: “Only the social body ‘has’ history, even if it does not 
follow that the social as such is history. The material subject of history is 
the social, but the formal subject is the social as a body” (Ellacuría, 1999, 
p. 339). Thus, the distinction between making history and having history 
becomes necessary, from whose confusion derives the contrast between: “a 
conception of history as something purely individual or, on the contrary, 
as something supra-individual” (Ellacuría, 1999, p. 340). The relationship 
between the two verbs needs to be clarified, since by the fact that only the 
individual makes history, it has been concluded that history has no other 
subject than individuals, just as by the supra-individual character of history, 
it has been concluded that there is a supra-individual subject that makes 
history. For Ellacuría this clarity is possible only by delineating the inter-
current relationship between historicity and history; history is made by the 
individual man only to the extent that the material profile is made formally 
historical by the fact that it is incorporated into the defining system of 
possibilities of the social body; it is not a matter of a mere incorporation 
(as for Hegel) but of a co-possibility of happening. As Oscar Barroso notes: 
“If Zubiri said that every human being is ‘religious’ to reality, Ellacuría 
would say that – insofar as history is the culmination of the ‘giving’ of the 
real – man is religious to the history of the real” (Barroso, 2004, p. 96). If 
history is constituted by historical facts, it is nevertheless reality insofar as it 
bears witness to the present, real insofar as it is continuity with something 
that precedes it; from a formal point of view then: “it is tradition, that is, 
reality itself that, as reality, is shaping the present from the past. Tradition, 
in fact, is not experiential in nature, because what is important in it is the 
very reality of experience and the way in which experience was constituted. 

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[…] its constitutive moment” (Ellacuría, 1999, p. 340). This making of the 
human act that becomes history marks the difference between the mere 
human act and the human act as historical, because not everything that 
man does belongs to history, but only those dimensions of his doing in 
which he is incorporated into his social body. There is thus a fundamental 
difference between human temporality and historicity:

the incorporation of an event into the social body, in the form of an increase 
or decrease in possibilities, is what places the historical fact in that modifica-
tion, by virtue of which it is no longer so much the doing of certain powers 
as the realization of certain possibilities, which transform the fact into an 
event. The incorporation of the doing into the subject that has history, 
in this consists the event. History is an interweaving of events. (Ellacuría, 
1999, p. 341)

Therefore, history must be configured as an interweaving of events that are 
constructed starting from the historicity of mean in the social body as a 
realization of possibility. What is subverted is the very sense of the Hegelian 
dialectical movement, since it is not the origin of the dynamic movement 
between human historicity and the history of the social body that is sought 
but its “how”. Between history and historicity there is no bond of necessity, 
but a dynamic relationship, of openness, because: “historical time is not 
composed of past, present and future, but of precession, contemporaneity 
and succession, which represent the temporary condition in which the 
social body is left by the incorporation of the real and effective time of 
human life. It is time converted into social co-possibility” (Ellacuría, 1999, 
p. 342).

If man is therefore the “what” of the social body, it is in the “how” 
of man as historicity that the movement of history must be sought; this 
movement unfolds not from a necessary or necessitating mechanics, but 
from the social body as a body open to its possibilities: this is what makes 
historical time open, as much to the present as to the past and future. 
It is undeniable that Ellacuría focuses everything on the individual-social 
body relationship in order to avoid any possible fall into a universalization 
of history, which Zubiri himself admits at least under the aspect of the 
unity of the human species as a monophyletic unity. For this reason, for 
the Jesuit, at least up to the moment he is writing, there has never been 
a universal history, because all men have never constituted themselves in 
a single social body, and yet universality had become possible because of 
the interconnection of social bodies; in any case, that a universal history is 
possible does not mean that it must be interpreted under the necessitating 
category of law. History is not an automatic movement, but a march that 

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must be interpreted from the point of view of the dislocation of the social 
body, its continuity and the internal modification of the possibilities of 
the social body itself. It is a matter of rejecting every fatalist perspective 
(Ellacuría, 2009, p. 282) and determinist (Ellacuría, 2009, pp. 299-302) 
within a historical reading of reality, of rejecting historicism in favor of a 
living historicity, which is action of the individual in the social body.

3. The relationship between the “how” of life-history 
dynamism and historical reality

Ellacuría does not reject the dialectical process in an absolute sense, but 
the idea that it can represent the unity and dynamism of all that is, in 
its passage from logic to reality: “for Ellacuría, negativity is based on the 
dynamic reality of things and is the result of a judgment and human action 
on a concrete situation or on a certain processual configuration of histor-
ical reality that hinders, prevents or limits the real and effective giving of 
a reality” (Samour, 2003, p. 181). What comes to be rejected, therefore, is 
a merely dialectical reading of reality, both in the Hegelian and Marxian 
sense, as it clearly emerges in a text written between 1974 and 1975. The 
text is elaborated after Ellacuría attended, in January 1974, Zubiri’s course 
Tres dimensiones del ser humano: individual, social, histórica, and is propae-
deutic to the posthumous work Filosofía de la realidad histórica on which 
the Jesuit has been working since 1972; “history – he writes – is not born 
from the absolute spirit. […] History is born from personal individuals, 
insofar as they form a social body […] Hegel intends the absolutization of 
history as substantialization; he hypostatizes history. […] Hegel and Marx 
differ in the determination of the historical dialectic, but are similar in 
the substantiation of the process” (Ellacuría, 2001, pp. 91-91). History, 
moreover, as per Zubiri: “is not the system of social forms insofar as they 
are real, but insofar as they are principles of possibility of modes of being 
in reality. It is then that we have history. The dynamism involved in history 
is not social dynamism, but the dynamism of possibility” (Zubiri, 2006, 
p. 90).

One of the elements that then must be defined is the nature of this 
dynamism; the impersonal place that is the social body has among its char-
acters the: “processual dynamism. Since all reality is structural, all reality is 
also inherently dynamic, and in the case of material realities this dynamism 
is processual” (Ellacuría, 2007, p. 254). Reality in its being a whole of 
form and matter is absolutely dynamic, the category of estado in reality 
is always to be considered as a “limiting concept”; this is the case of that 

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“being” proper to the social body, which is among the objects of socio-
logical analysis: “the social state is a kind of limiting concept of a reality that 
by its nature must ‘be’, but to whose being one must proceed; and this not 
only because society includes innumerable dynamic elements that drive the 
process, but because it itself, as a whole, is dynamic, since it assumes in a 
larger unity the dynamic components that compose it” (Ellacuría, 2007, 
p. 254).

That of the social body, therefore (if we speak in sociological terms, 
society) is a processual and structural dynamism, which implies its very unity. 
This is because the social body as a place that “has” history is composed 
of a somatic part, which has to do with humanity as a species biologically 
understood, and a formal part that is the dimension of the other. This 
emphasis on the relationship between historicity and the social body is 
also due to the different Zubian source used by Ellacuría to talk about 
the category of possibility; if in Natura, Historia, Dios in fact, history is the 
place of the appropriation of possibilities, in the anthropological writings 
is more marked the active role of man in the construction of possibilities as 
a moment of opening and, therefore, realization of the historicity-history 
relationship. The possibility is such only if there is another in whom it 
is actualized, so that the simple biological life can unfold historically in 
the social body: “if it is essential for man for his very structure to have a 
social body in which he lives impersonally, it is no less essential for him 
to have a social body in which he lives in communion. It is absolutely 
chimerical, impossible, to find people who in one way or another do not 
live in personal communion with each other” (Zubiri, 2006, p. 59). Ella-
curía further clarifiesZubiri’s thought, “The social body is thus the precise 
concept of human society, which has its roots in the species and its formal 
character in the habitus of personal otherness” (Ellacuría, 2007 p. 255). 
What we call society is nothing more than the simplification of this process 
that takes place in each individual human with his coming to life. It is 
transmitted genetically, but the ways of being in reality are handed down: 
it is because there is tradition, that human life does not start from scratch. 
This is the reason why the problem of the movement of reality has to do 
not with its origin but with the “how” of the movement itself.

Human life is such in its becoming by living: “To live is precisely to 
possess oneself, to truly possess oneself as reality. Life as a course is but 
an argument of life, because in life man possesses himself dynamically 
and transcurrently, but this course is life only because in it man possesses 
himself ” (Ellacuría, 2007, p. 348). In this regard, the lemma estado within 
Philosophy assumes a relevance greater than that of the same Zubirian texts 
from which it comes: “Things, including the living being, modify the vital 

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The Human “Historicity” as a Permanent Transition in the Philosophy of Ignacio Ellacuría

state and the living being responds to this modification, thus acquiring 
a new state” (Ellacuría, 2007, p. 317). In the wake of Zubiri, the state 
cannot be considered immobility; on the contrary, it is a reversible and 
modifiable dynamic equilibrium. This modifiability and reversibility of 
being that characterizes the living prevents, clearly, to consider the “how” in 
the dialectical sense, since the latter is always progressive; at the same time, 
however, it is not about the act-power “dynamism” of Aristotle that does 
not allow any reversibility as Zubiri had already pointed out in Estructura 
dinamica de la realidad (Zubiri, 1989, p. 49). Therefore: “it is true that 
life has to do with movement – whatever philosophical interpretation one 
gives to movement – and therefore has to do with time. All bodies in the 
universe, however, are affected by movement, but there are very different 
forms of being in movement and very different forms of movement itself ” 
(Ellacuría, 2007, p. 402). There is a material history, affecting the cosmos 
and genetically affecting human beings, formally due to the poder of matter, 
an inherent and natural unfolding of an evolutionary nature (Zubiri, 1996, 
p. 447), but then there is human history as an unfolding of possibilities, for 
which man is an active living reality: “this activity is certainly processual, 
because the living reality is always ‘passing’ from one state to another, so 
that the very concept of state is only a limiting concept, since the activity of 
the living is always in transition and progressing from one state to another” 
(Ellacuría, 2007, p. 316). This vital dynamism is contextualized and “liber-
ated” by unfolding as a historical processuality in the social body character-
ized in the form of a permanent transition:

In each of its moments – one should discuss what is the appropriate 
temporal measure of the social moment – society remains in a certain state, 
but the social state is itself a permanent transition from one state to another. 
[…] If we combine, then, the structural and the dynamic character of the 
social body, we conclude the dynamic-structural character of the social body: 
the process of society is a structural process. […] What can be said is that 
the intrinsic dynamism of society is a processual and structural dynamism, 
which implies the unity of the social body, the totalization of the subsystems 
in a single structural system, and the processual and totalizing dynamism of 
this unitary whole that is the social body. (Ellacuría, 2007, p. 254)

It is a material dynamism but not materialistic (as in Marx), vital (Zubiri, 
1989, p. 150) but not vitalistic (as in Bergson), liberating but not finalized 
(as in Hegel). It is the determination of that plan of action that allows 
the passage from life to historicity, determined primarily by the power of 
the present: “everyone is a child of his time. The ‘today’ discovers a formal 
dimension, which constitutes the ‘historical level’. […] the power of the 
present constitutively implies a version of the past and is a prospective 

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power, because possibilities are constitutively prospective” (Ellacuría, 1999, 
pp. 344-345). Ellacuría’s is not presentism, but the recognition of historicity 
as the first projectuality of life: “man is not historic because of what he 
knows, but because of what he is as reality, insofar as he is a sentient intel-
ligence. His historicity does not consist in the relativism of the forms of 
the logos, but in the character of open essence that gives him, with respect 
to a social body, his dimension of sentient intelligence, in the course of 
time. […] Settling in a social body, man is more than what he would be 
as a pure individual. But, because of his historical dimension, he can be 
different in every situation” (Ellacuría, 1999, p. 347). History as betraying 
transmission according to Zubiri’s idea, is realized in its making within the 
social body, and that making happens now because it is within a dynamic 
process: “without history, without the historical process, Ellacuría argues, 
not only would man, in the sense of humanity, cease to realize himself, but 
he would probably even leave his most proper and most splendid aspects 
without realization or actualization; and the very being of humanity would 
be truncated” (Samour, 2003, p. 81). That intrinsic movement that is life, 
therefore, is as such because it is dynamism, thus a realization of possibili-
ties that are human creations, but in their concrete situation, in that situ-
ation that is given to man in a concrete moment and as such is susceptible 
to concrete variations that can vary from one moment to another. If the 
biological movement of human life is linear, birth-death, the course of life is 
a continuous transition, a constant oscillation. The movement of reality as 
history can only be thought of as functional, not substantial, and is closely 
connected to the biography of each individual, as the same intellectual and 
personal path of the Jesuit demonstrate: “Ellacuría’s philosophy stems from 
a personal experience framed in this historical context, and his reflection 
would not be intelligible without taking it into account” (Samour, 2003, 
p. 211). The very question of the relationship between Zubiri’s philosophy 
and Ellacuría’s must be read not under the problem of origin but of the 
“how”, of a philosophical form, Zubiri’s, being transmitted into Ellacuría’s: 
it is not a process of mere transmission of ideas, but of transmission of 
forms of philosophical reality.

In this regard, a final historiographical consideration, in order to 
better frame what has been reconstructed here, should be made starting 
with some suggestions from a 2018 essay by Ronald Carrillo (Carrillo, 
2018). If Héctor Samour in Voluntad de liberación, a valuable guide to 
move in Ellacuría’s thought, highlighted the Jesuit’s dialogue with Marx 
(Samour, 2014) and Hegel as a determining element to understand his 
thought, Carrillo’s text emphasizes the link of some passages of the Jesuit 
with existentialism, particularly (in some ways unexpectedly) with the 

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philosophy of the Frenchman – considering the readings of Heidegger and 
Sartre as secondary funds –. As for Sartre, according to Ellacuría, the man 
is a project, and in the case of the Jesuit it finds its actualization in histor-
ical reality. In this respect, the life-historicity dynamic is propaedeutic to the 
liberation movement as the very horizon of history (Savignano, 2014), not 
within the universality of history, an idea that still operates in Zubiri, but 
within the individual biography that becomes historicity of the social body, 
where only freedom can be authentically affirmed.

References

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Brito, M. (2020). Génesis y evolución de la categoría realidad histórica en Ignacio 
Ellacuría. Revista Realidad, 155, 17-46.

Carrillo, R. (2018). El sentido filosófico de la vida en el pensamiento existencia-
lista. Una lectura desde Ellacuría. Teoría y Praxis, 32, 29-44.

Ellacuría, I. (1999). Escritos filosóficos, Tomo II. UCA Editores San Salvador.
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Ellacuría, I. (2007). Filosofía de la realidad histórica. UCA Editores San Salvador. 
Ellacuría, I. (2009). Cursos universitarios. UCA Editores San Salvador.
Espinoza Lolas, R. (2000/2001). El logos nominal constructo en el pensamiento 

de Zubiri. The Xavier Zubiri Review, 3, 121-132.
Pelegrina Cetrán, H. (2002). Experiencia y vivencia (desde la antropología de 

Xavier Zubiri) / Simple experience and conscious experience. Archivos de 
Psiquiatría, 65(4), 265-290.

Samour, H. (2003). Voluntad de liberación. La filosofía de Ignacio Ellacuría. Coma-
res.

Samour, H. (2014). El diálogo de Ellacuría con Marx y el marxismo. Revista Rea-
lidad, 140, 157-183.

Savignano, A. (2014). La filosofía de la liberación. El testimonio de Ignacio Ella-
curía. Logos, 47, 321-329.

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Riassunto

Ignacio Ellacuría viene brutalmente ucciso il 16 novembre 1989 per mano delle For-
ze Armate di El Salvador; dieci anni, dopo nel 1999, sarà pubblicato all’interno del 
secondo volume che raccoglie gli scritti filosofici del gesuita, uno “schema” riassuntivo e 
di approfondimento dell’antropologia di Xavier Zubiri, che egli aveva utilizzato per un 
corso tenuto tra luglio e agosto 1968 al Centro de Estudios Superiores para el Desarrollo 
(CESDE) di Medellín. Lo “schema” raccoglie molte di quelle tesi che, sviluppate in un 
serrato confronto con il pensiero del grande filosofo spagnolo del quale fu allievo e colla-
boratore, sono alla base della sua opera più importante, e uscita postuma, “Filosofía de 
la realidad histórica” (1990). La ricostruzione storiografica dei passaggi salienti della 
ricerca di Ellacuría sul rapporto tra storicità e storia nel più ampio contesto antropolo-
gico zubiriano, permette di evidenziare alcuni aspetti peculiari del pensiero del gesuita, 
che non si limita solo ad offrire una nuova e differente linea interpretativa del pensiero di 
Zubiri. La preminenza dell’idea di storia come transizione all’interno del corpo sociale, 
caratteristica dell’esperienza umana, offre una prospettiva inedita, tutta interna alla fi-
losofia della liberazione ibero americana, e al contempo permette di rintracciare nuove e 
differenti fonti nella produzione filosofica di Ellacuría.

Copyright (©) 2022 Tommaso Sgarro 
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How to cite this paper:
Sgarro, T. (2022). The human “historicity” as a permanent transition in the philosophy 
of Ignacio Ellacuría. Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical 
Perspectives, 2(1-2), 13-26. doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.7358/elem-2022-0102-sgar

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	Sommario.pdf
	First Section
	Editorial I
	Transitions:
New and Different Perspectives

	The Human “Historicity”
as a Permanent Transition
in the Philosophy of Ignacio Ellacuría
	François Jullien: The Double Transit
of Human Life
	The Event, beyond the Permanent Crisis
	For an Epistemology of Transition:
Paul B. Preciado, Psychoanalysis
and the Regime of Sexual Difference

	Second Section
	Editorial II
	Governing Transitions

	Becoming Support Teachers
at the University of Foggia
During the Pandemic *
	Music: For a Sustainable Community and the Promotion of Well-being
	Educating for Transition in Work Contexts
	The Future We Want:
The Transition to Adulthood
of Unaccompanied Minors
	An Exploratory Survey





