#subjectivity

There are three basic problems: how a mind can know the world of nature, how it is possible for one mind to know another, and how it is possible to know the contents of our own minds without resort to observation or evidence. It is a mistake, I shall urge, to suppose that these questions can be collapsed into two, or taken into isolation. ↗

— Donald Davidson

#phenomenology #the-other #the-self #the-world #nature

I didn't want to lose my subjectivity and my objectivity about my work. ↗

— Vincent Gallo

#i #lose #objectivity #subjectivity #want

The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art. ↗

— Marilynne Robinson

#subjectivity #art

Even in the act of fleeing modern ideologies, however, literary theory reveals its often unconscious complicity with them, betraying its elitism, sexism or individualism in the very ‘aesthetic’ or ‘unpolitical’ language it finds natural to use of the literary text. It assumes, in the main, that at the centre of the world is the contemplative individual self, bowed over its book, striving to gain touch with experience, truth, reality, history or tradition. Other things matter too, of course — this individual is in personal relationship with others, and we are always much more than readers — but it is notable how often such individual consciousness, set in its small circle of relationships, ends up as the touchstone of all else. The further we move from the rich inwardness of the personal life, of which literature is the supreme exemplar, the more drab, mechanical and impersonal existence becomes. It is a view equivalent in the literary sphere to what has been called possessive individualism in the social realm, much as the former attitude may shudder at the latter: it reflects the values of a political system which subordinates the sociality of human life to solitary individual enterprise. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#capitalist-subjectivity #ideology #individualism #literary-theory #social

I only care for the subjective life; I am very German, you see: The woods interest me, and the world does not. ↗

— Ouida

#nature #subjectivity #life

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege. ↗

— Thomas Mann

#beauty #bias #bourgeois #capitalism #creativity

Changes is the mother of time. Absence of changes makes no time. ↗

— Toba Beta

#perceive #reality #relativity #subjectivity #time

An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know. All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!-that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant . . . ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#subjectivity #women #death

Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed. ↗

— John Searle

#concerned #conscious #distinction #observation #observed

All we know is what we're told. ↗

— Ashly Lorenzana

#knowledge #life #perception #reality #subjectivity