Quote of the Day (6/10/10) (Ventriloquism Week)

"For Descartes, truth is determined and validated by certainty. Certainty, in turn, is located in the ego. The self becomes the hub of reality and relates to the world outside itself in an exploratory, necessarily exploitative way. As knower and user, the ego is predator. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the human person and self-consciousness are not the center, the assessors of existence. Man is only a privileged listener and respondent to existence. The vital relation to otherness is not, as for Cartesian and positivist rationalism, one of "grasping" and pragmatic use. It is a relation of audition. We are trying "to listen to the voice of Being." It is, or ought to be, a relation of extreme responsibility, custodianship, answerability to and for. Of this answerability, the thinker and the poet, der Denker und der Dichter, are at once the carriers and the trustees."
--George Steiner, Martin Heidegger