ACROBATS

Susan Sontag
Against Interpretation

Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’ It is to turn the world into this world. (’This world’! As if there were any other.)

More

We recognize ourselves in our character because we imitate ourselves, and because our personality is thus the habit of our own name. It is because we unify ourselves around our name and dignity. Besides, the copy we constantly remake must also be improved upon or else the useless model is tarnished, and the soul, which is essentially an aesthetic determination, dissolves.

Gaston Bachelard
Intuition of the Instant

In other words: instead of naively carrying out the acts proper to the nature — constituting consciousness with transcendent theses and allowing ourselves to be led by motives that operate therein… we set all these theses ‘out of action,’ we take no part in them; we direct the glance of apprehension and theoretical inquiry to pure consciousness in its own absolute Being.

Edmund Husserl

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

Richard Rorty