All is allegory. Each creature is a key to all others. —J.M. Coetzee

 

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Biology is discovering subjectivity as a fundamental principle throughout nature. It finds that even the most simple living things —bacterial cells, fertilized eggs, nematodes in tidal flats—act according to values. 

Organisms value everything they encounter according to its meaning for the further coherence of their embodied self. Even the cell’s self-production, the continuous maintenance of a highly structured order, can only be understood if we perceive the cell as an actor that persistently follows a goal. Life always has an inside, which is the result of how its matter, its outside, is organized.

 

—Andreas Weber

The Biology of Wonder

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The conscious self is not really perceiving until it recognizes itself as part of what it perceives.

—Northrop Frye

 

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