Wisława Szymborska – On Anthropocentrism with Moderation

Wisława Szymborska often referred to the idea of anthropocentrism with an ironic distance and scepticism, seeing it as an expression of human pride and humanistic usurpation. The author discusses this theme of Szymborska’s writing on the example of two poems: Rozmowa z kamieniem (Conversation with a Stone) and Widok z ziarnkiem piasku (A View with a Grain of Sand). He points at philosophic trains of thought contained in them, polemical towards the tradition of Western metaphysics and epistemology, focusing also on the question of the linguistic inaccessibility of the essence of the non-human world.
 

Wisława Szymborska often referred to the idea of anthropocentrism with an ironic distance and scepticism, seeing it as an expression of human pride and humanistic usurpation. The author discusses this theme of Szymborska’s writing on the example of two poems: Rozmowa z kamieniem (Conversation with a Stone) and Widok z ziarnkiem piasku (A View with a Grain of Sand). He points at philosophic trains of thought contained in them, polemical towards the tradition of Western metaphysics and epistemology, focusing also on the question of the linguistic inaccessibility of the essence of the non-human world.