Just as the senseless oppression of the superego lies at the root of the motivated imperatives of conscience, the passionate desire peculiar to man to impress his image in reality is the obscure basis of the rational mediations of the will.
(Jacques Lacan)

Representing is no longer a self-unconcealing-for... /das Sich-entbergen für/ but is a laying hold and grasping of.... What presences does not hold sway, but rather assault rules.
(Martin Heidegger)

As the study and systematization of empirical fact, science enables mankind to rise above the level of animal creation and to behave in a manner distinctively human, by relating means to ends in an ordered scheme of life. As such, it unquestionably has "its own good." The good of science, however, is limited by the fact that it fails to disclose an end other than that of mere adjustment, ut conformemur huic saeculo. It is thus incapable of satisfying the appetite for felicity to which mankind, by the very conditions of his being, necessarily aspires.
(Charles Norris Cochrane) {230/231}

This perplexity, inherent in all consistent utilitarianism, . . . can be diagnosed theoretically as an innate incapacity to understand the distinction between utility and meaningfulness, which we express linguistically by distinguishing between "in order to" and "for the sake of.". . . The perplexity of utilitarianism is that it gets caught in the unending chain of means and ends without ever arriving at some principle which would Justify the category of means and ends, that is, of utility itself. The "in order to" has become the content of the "for the sake of"; in other words, utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness.... It is because of these consequences that Plato, who at the end of his life recalls once more in the Laws the saying of Protagoras, replies with an almost paradoxical formula: not man--who because of his wants and talents wishes to use everything and therefore ends by depriving all things of their intrinsic worth--but "the god is the measure /even/ of mere use objects."
(Hannah Arendt) {231/232}

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms-- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.... to be truthful means using the customary metaphors--in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all.
(Friedrich Nietzsche)

People of literary inclinations, I believe, have a natural jealousy of sociology because it seems to be in process of taking over from literature one of literature's most characteristic functions, the investigation and criticism of morals and manners. Yet it is but fair to remark that sociology has pre-empted only what literature has voluntarily surrendered.
(Lionel Trilling) {232/233}