A Poet in the Land of the Sciences. Thinking About Human Nature with Wisława Szymborska

Abstract

Is it necessary to have a notion of transcendence, a traditional metaphysics, to defend the human? This article addresses this question through an interpretation of the texture and rhythm of Szymborska’s language. Her poems are multi-faceted, and often playful, but it is difficult to ignore the poet’s insistence on ethics, despite the utter indifference of the natural world to good and evil. Humans are themselves a part of the natural world, and thus, if, like Szymborska, one does not accept a reality beyond nature, the strangeness of the ethical demand, which appears groundless, becomes shorn of any possible explanation. In the conclusion of the essay, the researcher puts Szymborska’s view of ethics in conversation with Emmanuel Levinas, whose position resembles hers and yet also sheds a new light on what the groundlessness of ethics might mean.