Aesthetic thinking according to Wisława Szymborska

Abstract

The starting point for the considerations undertaken here is Wolfgang Welsch's concept of "aesthetic thinking". Welsch, referring to the findings of Kant and Nietzsche on the cognitive capacity of man and the fictional nature of reality, claims that it is an aesthetic project, a phan­tasm established each time in human experience. Hence the fluidity, instability of the world and, consequently, the impossibility of its full cognition. From the perspective of this reflection, the Author of the paper looks at the poetry of Wisława Szymborska, who invariably poses the most fundamental questions of a philosophical nature, regarding existence, meaning, truth, human cognitive capabilities, and human relations with the world and other entities. By tracing some of the themes present in Welsch's concept and their literary transformations in selected poems by Szymborska, the Author essentially reconstructs Wisława Szymborska's "aesthetic thinking".