Eugenio Trías: the Barcelona philosopher

February 10 marked five years since the disappearance of the Barcelona philosopher Eugenio Trías (1942-2013). Trías was truly in love with the city of Barcelona, like Woody Allen with New York or Lawrence Durrell with Alexandria. In fact, his first inquiries into Platonic thought - in search of an eros that tends to elevate itself to the Ideas, to the general and clear vision of truth, postulated by the Symposium - must, for him, be complemented by the vision of the architect, of the sculptor.

In short, of the artist who descends from the contemplation of ideas to give form to the city, to build public space, to embody in work, in stone, in painting, the vision to which eros has transported him.

-Oh! detura't un punt! Mira el mar, Barcelona, com té faixa de blau fins al baix horitzó, els poblets blanquejant tot al llarg de la costa, que se'n van plens de sol vorejant la blavor. I tu fuges del mar?... -Vinc del mar i l'estimo, i he pujat aquí dalt per mirar-lo millor, i me'n vaig i no em moc: sols estenc els meus braços perquè vull Catalunya tota a dintre el meu cor.

Joan Maragall, Oda nova a Barcelona

It is in The Artist and the City(1974) where Eugenio Trías tells us about that connection betweenerosandpoiesis, between desire and production; where he manifests the need for philosophical search to culminate in civic action, in the configuration of the city.

The interaction between the philosopher and the city will also be felt in his memoir, The Tree of Life (2003). There he recounts his childhood escapades through the streets of Barcelona, hand in hand with his Ecuadorian-descendant grandmother, visiting the city's most emblematic museums and places, which would forge his imagination. Constant are the references to his walks through Barcelona's eixample, his attendance at the Palau de la Música to listen to maestro Eduard Toldrà, his pilgrimage through all the city's cinemas, his visits to Barceloneta, his nocturnal walks to Tibidabo and the view of the city at his feet. Later he would experience the longing, already in Germany, for Barcelona's blue sky.

A PHILOSOPHY AT THE SERVICE OF THE CITY

His renowned philosophy of the limit, which conceives of the human being as "inhabitant of the border" -that zone that unites the fence of appearance, that of visible reality, and a hermetic fence, that of mystery- would never be a solipsistic exercise, closed in on itself, but the fruit of a rich interaction between the thinker and his city. An interaction from which arises that clear awareness of the public vocation of the philosopher, and consequently his eagerness to shape his city, to produce in it a beautiful work, which invites thought and reflection. The city of Barcelona is so present in his work, that in his bookCity upon city(2001) can be guessed between the lines. There he conceives his philosophy as an ideal city, configured by four neighborhoods: philosophical, ethical, artistic, and religious. An ideal city, which interacts with the real city.

"A visible city sustained by submerged, buried, labyrinthine cities, which represented the different strata of cities superimposed by history"

Eugenio Trías follows the reflections ofWittgenstein regarding the conception of human language, understood as a city that amalgamates within it an old town, reorganized by modes of modern rationalization; or, in the manner of Freud, who thought of Rome as a "city upon city," a visible city supported by submerged, buried, labyrinthine cities, which represented the different strata of cities superimposed by history. Trías understands his ideal city as a symbolic model of his beloved city of Barcelona, inspired in turn by Joseph Rykwert's analysis of the foundational rites of cities in the ancient world.

FROM THE OLD TOWN TO THE EIXAMPLE, THE CLARIFYING MODERNITY

Following that beautiful metaphor, Eugenio Trías conceives the medieval city - that of the cathedral and the Jewish quarter, that of guilds and artisans - as the old town, in which a religious symbolism is hidden. That of the Europe of cathedrals, with its love for stone, verticality, and light; with its organic-spiritual conception in the form of an ascending tree, and its spectacular Gothic tracery. Without forgetting the powerful Catalan Romanesque, which today is treasured by the MNAC, with its Pantocrátorsand, in short, a mural painting impregnated with colors that will determine the retina and the imagination of the Barcelona passerby.

Trías' wandering through the medieval city also reveals the Arab and Jewish footprint in the Catalan capital, which speaks of a strange interreligious dialogue: the three great monotheisms of the past hybridized in fascinating forms, such as the oriental tradition of courtly love, which has shaped the passionate eroticism of Mediterranean man in these parts.

This ancient core of the city has been expanded, clarified, and complemented by the famous Cerdà plan, with its left and right extensions that unite, like a dense mesh, the different original municipalities (Gracia, Sarrià, etc.), dispersed in that true "city of cities" that is Barcelona. Here functionalism, aesthetics, beauty, and practical sense go hand in hand, configuring a unique and characteristic, unmistakable identity.

In the same way, Eugenio Trías always understood Modernity not as the attempt to suppress the symbolic-religious world of the medieval, but as the act of becoming aware, clarifying, and elevating to transparency the mysterious character of the sacred. This Modernity that knows how to dialogue with the past, that projects itself utopically but with foundation, is at the heart of Trías' work, as a result of his relationship with the city of Barcelona.

"Trías always understood Modernity not as the attempt to suppress the symbolic-religious world of the medieval, but as the act of becoming aware, clarifying, and elevating to transparency the mysterious character of the sacred"

The "ethical neighborhood" that Trías speaks to us about corresponds to the border subject who, in the elevation,he rises to hear the imperative voice that compels him to be what he already is:border subject, that capable of taming the endogamic instances of the village and the centrifugal demands of the global casino, through the awareness of belonging to a civic center, at the origin of the city.

THE ARCHITECTURAL REVOLUTION AND THE CIVIC SPIRIT

That is why Trías always maintained the dream of that Barcelona, heir to the different Olympic venues, which managed to successfully combine tradition and modernity, maintaining the balance between the spirit of the land and a modernity with a human face. The imprint of the architecture carried out in the 70s, 80s, and 90s in Barcelona - a period in which he was a professor at the Barcelona School of Architecture - shows his interest in the different revolutions in the forms of space and time, introduced by the new urbanism of the Barcelona School. His keen perception for everything that happened in the city in recent decades evidences the avant-garde nature of his philosophical proposal, the clarity of his vision of the new conditions of a city in perpetual change, in continuous renovation.

This love for Barcelona is evident in the civic sense that Trías believed characteristic of the city of Barcelona, as he explains on the occasion of his revisitation of Joan Maragall's thought. Trías had that character of a man of seny, bourgeois and civic, capable of bringing together tradition and modernity and opening up - with innate interest and curiosity - to the new, without losing the most genuine of his own traditions.

"The love for Barcelona is evident in the civic sense that Trías believed characteristic of the city of Barcelona"

The congenital sense of hospitality and a civic love implied for him the best of Catalan identity, and were summarized for him in the Barcelonan citizen. He himself shared Maragall's "Ode to Barcelona," in which coexistence among all the estates and orders that make up the city was called for, and the ethical-linguistic capacity to ask for and give forgiveness was established as the identifying mark of those who have conscience. In civic terms, the dream of a global vision, of a Promethean and inhuman character - perhaps the daydream that gripped, in the 20s and 30s, certain megalomaniac projects of expanding New York - had to give way to a labyrinthine, but human and cordial city, like Barcelona.

MARITIME BARCELONA, A FRONTIER CITY

Perhaps it is because he was born at a time when Barcelona lived "with its back to the sea"; there is no allusion in his work to Barcelona's maritime character. However, I believe that where his formulation of the human condition's frontier character is best reflected is in Barcelona, a Mediterranean city. Eugenio Trías was throughout his life a lover of the sea, of seafaring life, as well as an exquisite gourmet (seafood platters, paellas, stews), and a regular visitor to Barceloneta.

His greatest pleasure was walking down to the sea, where Universitat Pompeu Fabra is located. Then he would walk along the new seafront promenades, which were built for the '92 Olympics, to sit and eat facing the sea. The sea is the perfect symbol of that limit that unites and separates the two shores: that of the known and that of the unknown. A Barcelona projected towards the sea, in a conflicted relationship with it, is the living and real embodiment of that frontier condition, the central core of the thought of one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, who was also, without a doubt, an eminent Barcelonian.