Octavio Paz Lozano
1914-1998 · Latin American · Renowned
Octavio Paz was a Mexican poet and essayist and the 1990 Nobel laureate in literature. His El laberinto de la soledad reads Mexican history as a succession of masks laid over a founding solitude. The deepest experience life offers, he held, is entering reality as a whole in which the opposites make peace rather than fight it out. He resigned his ambassadorship to India over the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, and spent his later decades attacking the Mexican one-party state and the Soviet bloc with the same pen. He set the present against progress and the laws of history, the only time a poem can hold.
Signature
The position Paz is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Opposition
- leans Concurrence
- Paradox
- Coincidentia Oppositorum
Positions on the 5 axes the sources answer
- Meaning
- leans Constructed (21 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Opposition
- leans Concurrence (83 on a 0–100 scale from Sublation to Concurrence)
- Nature
- leans Harmony (75 on a 0–100 scale from Mastery to Harmony)
- Ignorance
- leans Bondage (25 on a 0–100 scale from Bondage to Bliss)
- Conviction
- leans Uncertain (15 on a 0–100 scale from Uncertain to Certain)
15 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Paz refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Government
- Representative Democracy
What is your ideal form of government? - Highest Good
- Love
What is the highest good? - End of Things
- Open Future
What is the ultimate end of all things? - Agency
- Radical Freedom
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Time
- Eternal Present
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Economy
- Welfare Capitalism
What is the ideal organization of economic life? - Paradox
- Coincidentia Oppositorum
What is the status of paradox? - Human Nature
- Existence Precedes Essence
What is human nature?