Xavier Rubert de Ventós

Xavier Rubert de Ventós divides his time between philosophical reflection and his commitment to active politics. He is a professor of aesthetics at the Barcelona School of Architecture. He has also been Visiting professor at Berkeley and Santayana Fellow at Harvard, in addition to being a founding member of the New York Institute for the Humanities. As a politician, he has been a member of the Spanish Parliament and of the European Parliament. His prolific and multiform philosophical creation is critical and heterodox.

Francesc Xavier Rubert de Ventós was born in Barcelona in 1939, the final year of the Civil War. Philosopher, politician and university teacher, he finished his Law degree in 1961, after which he obtained a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Barcelona in 1965, having written a thesis on aesthetics entitled La estética de la abstracción (The Aesthetics of Abstraction). He was greatly influenced by his teachers José Luis Aranguren at the Complutense University of Madrid (who, in turn, was a follower of Eugeni d'Ors), and José María Valverde and Manuel Sacristán at the University of Barcelona. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio (1964), Santayana Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy at Harvard University (1972) and Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of Architecture in the University of California, Berkeley (1973). He has taught at both Barcelona's universities and in the School of Architecture at the Technical University of Catalonia (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya), where he has been professor of Aesthetics and Composition since 1973. He has also taught courses at the universities of Caracas and Mexico.

Author of an extensive body of work with essays and, philosophical writings on culture theory, practical philosophy (ethics and political philosophy) and philosophy in general, his writing has taken a number of forms: the essay, collections of aphorisms, personal diaries and historical analysis. In the words of Pere Lluís Font, Rubert de Ventós set out, in the 1960s, on "a brilliant career as an aesthetics theorist and culture critic" (Les idees i els dies (Ideas and Days)), publishing a number of books on aesthetics and related themes. El arte ensimismado (The Engrossed Art - 1963, winner of the City of Barcelona Prize), was an analysis of vanguard art, a critique of what he called the "fanaticism" of novelty and, more recently "avant-garde euphoria". In Teoria de la sensibilitat (Theory of Sensibility, 1968), winner of the Lletra d'Or Prize for Catalan Literature) he notes the break from the consequences of Renaissance art, which are still patent in conventional avant-garde works, in the attempt to arrive at an amplified concept of art through what he calls "scientific design", a synthesis of art, science and technology. In the domain of aesthetics, he has also published Utopías de la sensualidad y métodos del sentido (Utopias of Sensuality and Methods of Meaning, 1973), and La estética y sus herejías (Aesthetics and its Heresies, 1974), which received the Anagrama Essay Prize).

It might be considered that his major work is De la Modernidad. Ensayos de filosofía crítica (From Modernity. Essays in Critical Philosophy, 1980), for it is here that Rubert elucidates his philosophical standpoint. In the domain of moral philosophy, he has published Moral y nueva cultura (Morals and New Culture, 1971), where he comes out in favour of a new appreciation of ethics based on permanent revision of one's own values and experimentalism; Ética sin atributos (Ethics without Attributes, 1996), a moral manifesto in which he undertakes the task of defining virtue by purging it of its attributes, and Dios, entre otros inconvenientes (God, among Other Stumbling Blocks, 2000), where Rubert adopts, in the face of belief in God and in other commonplace deities such as Nature, History and Culture (the "means by which we have tried to evacuate the enigma of our existence"), an intellectual stance that characterises the greater part of his work: a distancing both from "liquid opinion that is shaped by all the means and times that are its vehicle, and the solid stupidity that is never, ever caught off balance", in the words of his Introduction. His aim is to denounce the excesses that hide behind excessively unanimous opinions. Continue reading...