The act of turning to imagination is not an act of introspection: it is a negative capability, a willful suspension of disbelief in the [daimones] and of belief in oneself as their author. The relativization of the author—who is making up whom, who is writing whom—goes along with the fictional mode; in the course of active imagination one waivers between losing control and putting words in their mouths. But introspection will not solve even this problem, only the act of fictioning further. Introspection simply returns one to the literalism of subjectivity. We have taken the notion of subjectivity so literally that we now believe in an imaginary subject at the beginning of each sentence who does the work, a subject pre-fixing each verb. But the work is done by the verbs themselves; they are fictioning, actively imagining, not I. The action is in the plot, inaccessible to introspection, and only the characters know what's going on. As Philemon taught Jung: you are not the author of the play of the psyche.

James Hillman, Healing Fiction

The New Testament Bible still gives the Gospels "according to" its various writers. We have lost this humble attitude toward language. Whatever we say seems to us to be our own; we do not feel like speaking "according to" thought processes conveyed to us through our verbal heritage. We do not believe anymore that sometimes not we are speaking our language, but our language is speaking through us as if it were a post-hypnotic suggestion implanted into us.

Theodore Thass-Theinemann, The Subconscious Language

The history of Western thought has been the history of the relations between being and meaning, the subject and the object, man and nature. After Descartes, the dialogue was altered by a sort of exaggeration of the subject. This exaggeration culminated in Husserl's phenomenology and Wittgenstein's logic. The dialogue of philosophy with the world became the interminable monologue of the subject. The world was silent. . . . Levi-Strauss breaks brutally with this situation and inverts the terms. Now it is nature which speaks with itself, through man and without his being aware. It is not man but the world which cannot come out of itself.

Octavio Paz, Claude Levi-Strauss

For Descartes, truth is determined and validated by certainty. Certainty, in turn, is located in the ego. The self becomes the hub of reality and relates to the world outside itself in an exploratory, necessarily exploitative way. As knower and user, the ego is predator. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the human person and self-consciousness are not the center, the assessors of existence. Man is only a privileged listener and respondent to existence. The vital relation to otherness is not, as for Cartesian and positivist rationalism, one of "grasping" and pragmatic use. It is a relation of audition. We are trying "to listen to the voice of Being." It is, or ought to be, a relation of extreme responsibility, custodianship, answerability to and for. Of this answerability, the thinker and the poet, der Denker und der Dichter, are at once the carriers and the trustees.

George Steiner, Martin Heidegger

Once the idealist argument is accepted, I understand that it is possible—even inevitable —to go even further. . . . The Cartesian "I think, therefore I am" is thus invalidated: to say I think is to postulate the I, and is a petito principii. In the eighteenth century, Lichtenberg proposed that in place of I think, we should say, impersonally it thinks, just as one could say it thunders or it flashes (lightning).

Jorge Luis Borges, "A New Refutation of Time"

Sometimes I wonder whether we are only endlessly repeating in our heads an argument that is going on in the world's foundations among crashing stones and recalcitrant roots.

Loren Eiseley, The Firmament of Time