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March 29, 2010

the vanguard of the species

To be authentic is to realize that the relation between Dasein and Being, between man and what he is trying to refer to when he creates such words [“the truth”], is not that of the particular to the general, or the temporal to the eternal archetype, but a relation to himself. There is nothing more to him than his language, and nothing more to his language than what he puts into it. There is nothing more for man to be, in short, except a poet.

My view posits the poet rather than the priest, the philosopher or the scientist as the paradigmatic human being…the poet in the general sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species.


Richard Rorty

Posted by amin at March 29, 2010 1:01 PM