Quotes

Poetry

Living in poetry is rather one of the ways through which we experience being moved within ourselves. In this only are humans able to find their self-fulfillment. Our education will again have to return to and acknowledge what inner value is and what living in poetry means, and certainly also what for the devout living in prayer means and what for all of us living in the unutterable word means. It is the rediscovery of the abundance which memoria is able to grant to human life. Memoria is preserving [Bewahren] — not external orders or institutions, but all of what we are. Preserving is not an unquestioning clinging to what is. In the end, we have to learn from Plato that we must continually renew what we hold to be true. The poem of a poet does not permit us a superior-critical judgement. Critique means, in reference to a poem, to acknowledge it as such and to allow it to be true. It depends on us to preserve it. Preservation is certainly always and finally the authentic manner in which the true can be for us humans. (The Verse and the Whole, Gadamer, 1992, p.91)

References

• Gadamer, H.-G. (1992) Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry and History: Applied Hermeneutics, Misgeld, D. and Nicholson, G. (eds.), Albany, NY, State University of New York Press.