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" que la exhaustiva «ciencia del hombre»: la science de l’homme. En este término debemos percibir el juego completo de valores y connotaciones asociados a la raíz griega lógos –que como todos sabemos es esa palabra difícil, que oscila desde «espíritu» y «palabra ordenadora» hasta «lógica» y, tal vez, «misterio encarnado», según la forma en que se emplea en el cuarto Evangelio–. Un antropólogo, si no quiere ser un mero etnógrafo o coleccionista de exotismos, debe ser, dice Lévi-Strauss, nada menos que un «científico del hombre», cuyo modelo comprensivo de la naturaleza de la vida humana tenga como preliminares la investigación marxista "
― George Steiner , Nostalgia for the Absolute
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" We open the successive doors in Bluebeard's castle because each leads to the next by a logic of intensification which is that of the mind's own awareness of being. To leave one door closed would be not only cowardice but a betrayal - radical, self-mutilating-of the inquisitive, probing, forward-tensed stance of our species. We are hunters after reality, wherever it may lead. The risk the disasters incurred are flagrant. But so is, or has been until very recently, the axiomatic assumption and a priori of our civilization, which holds that man and truth are companions, that their roads lie forward
are dialectically cognate....We cannot turn back. We cannot choose the dreams of unknowing. We shall, I expect, open the last door in the castle even if it leads, perhaps because it leads, onto realities which are beyond the reach of human comprehension and control. We shall do so with that desolate clairvoyance, so marvelously rendered in Bartók s
music, because opening doors is the tragic merit of our identity. "
― George Steiner