“Cognition, knowledge, no longer appears to me as an end in itself. It has turned into service . . . Cognition is autonomous, it refuses to have any answers foisted on it from the outside. Not every question seems to me to be worth asking . . . now I only inquire when I find myself inquired of . . . I am anxious to answer the scholar qua person but not the representative of a certain discipline, that insatiable, ever inquisitive phantom which like a vampire drains one whom it possesses of their humanity. I hate that phantom as I do all phantoms. On the other hand, the questions asked by human beings have become increasingly important to me”

Franz Rosenzweig, God, Man, and the World. Lectures and Essays, 26