The poetic and the paradox

Only through aesthetic evocations of the paradoxical – in other words, through the poetic – can such contraries as war and peace, construction and destruction, suffering and pleasure be resolved without a loss of creative tension. In this sense, if in no other, Friedrich Nietzsche was right when he said that "the word can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon." And it is true for societies at least as much as for individuals. This is what is meant finally by the term "culture," the highest pinnacle of which is invariably occupied in any society by conscious manifestations of the poetic.

Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) p. 22