"Death is close enough not to fear life." "The existence of God is perhaps the best reason not to believe in him." “Will I be good enough in the last moments to think of the others? In those whom I leave more than in the fucking afterlife into which I plunge? These are some of the ironic reflections committed to life that Xavier Rubert de Ventós gathered over the years in more than a hundred notebooks and with which he built his book Si no corro, caic in 2017. Today the Barcelonan philosopher, A key figure in Catalan public life since the late sixties, he died at the age of 83 in a hospital in the Catalan capital, leaving behind a thought always linked to daily existence, extensive work as a Spanish and European parliamentarian with the PSC of his childhood friend Pasqual Maragall -as a result of the experience he would write El cortesà i el seu fantasma-, and an enormous job as a teacher, as a contagious professor of Aesthetics at the School of Architecture since 1973.
With a humor and wit that is inimical to any seriousness, as a writer he was one of the greatest essayists in Catalan through books such as Teoria de la sensibilitat, published in 1968, during the dictatorship, and would lead the intellectual debate in the country since the founding of the Col.legi de Filosofia together with Eugenio Trías or Jordi Llovet in 1976 until his final approach to independence positions in the last decade with a reasoning in which he defined himself as a Hispanic, such as a Colombian or a Peruvian, who did not want to maintain the current type of relationship that Catalonia maintained with Spain.
Rubert de Ventós, father of four children, among them the painter Gino Rubert (1969) -fruit of his relationship with the Mexican psychoanalyst and writer Magda Català- and the novelist Xita Rubert (1996), whose mother is the writer Luisa Castro, was born in Barcelona in 1939 and he said that since he was little he wanted to be, in addition to being a footballer, a doctor and the father of many children. He explained that his uncle, the publisher Joan Teixidor, told him that when he was thirty he could be an athlete close to retirement or a young philosopher. In 1961 he would graduate in Law in Barcelona and later would conclude his Philosophy degree in Madrid where he would have José Luis López Aranguren as a teacher. He received his doctorate in 1965 with the thesis "The aesthetics of abstraction". In his youth, he was a member of the clandestine Front Obrer Català, like Pasqual Maragall, which would lead to several arrests and even a brief exile towards the end of the dictatorship.
In 1976, together with Eugenio Trías, Jordi Llovet and Josep Ramoneda, he would found the Col·legi de Filosofia de Barcelona, with free access conferences that would renew the discipline. By then he had already published his Teoria de la sensibilitat, in which he reflected on how avant-garde art had intuited a new sensibility in which aesthetics no longer explained everything and the social context was increasingly important but often there was no out of the forms inherited from the Renaissance. Even so, a new art was born and he pointed out that Renaissance art flowed, culminated and died in the art involved. He would also create the Barcelona-New York Chair of Catalan language and culture (1979) and would participate in the creation of the New York Institute for Humanities and the Barcelona Institute of Humanities.
A professor at Harvard, Cincinnati or Berkeley, he claimed to have always tended towards a philosophy "closely linked to the daily life" that was the "middle ground between fascination with what we don't know and trying not to drown it in overly complex abstractions, a organic philosophy conscious of being part of a whole that surpasses it. In the 19th century philosophy became almost a theology. I try more to associate philosophy with physiology or metaphysics with urbanism”.
Between 1982 and 1986 he would be a deputy in Congress and from 1986 to 1994 a European parliamentarian with the PSC. In the continental parliament he would promote the Mies van der Rohe Architecture Award. the largest in the EU. Even so, during the procès, he would end up supporting the CiU candidacy for the Parliament of Catalonia in 2012 and would lay the foundations for a non-nationalist independence movement, which he had already reflected on in The labyrinth of Hispanicity (Mirror Prize of Spain in 1987), a study comparison of Hispanic and Anglo-Saxon colonization in which he made a defense of the ambiguous and doubtful Spain glossed by María Zambrano against the conventional image of an imperative and structuring Spain. An idea of Hispanicity without so much historical subject and more habitable by those who were its object. And a hard analysis of what the author called the "murky legend" of the conquest: its legacy of caciquismo, coup and corruption.
He was precisely the author of a great essay work and already in 1963 he won the Ciutat de Barcelona prize for El arte ensimismado. With La estética y sus heresías (1974) he would obtain the essay Anagram in 1973 and his De la modernidad would be capital. Essays in critical philosophy. He would also write informative works like Per què filosofia (1983) and more political ones like Catalunya: de la identitat a la independència (1999).
