Susan Sontag On Experience as the True Language of Understanding
Why Direct Experience Transcends Academic Knowledge
Amanda Stern
October 29, 2025
Hello, friend. Welcome to The How to Live Newsletter—a weekly space for people who think deeply, feel fully, and want to grow without turning themselves into projects.
Here, psychology meets philosophy to offer grounded insight and emotional clarity, helping you make the hard parts of living a little easier—and reminding you that you’re not alone in trying to make sense of it all.
Susan Sontag on Experience as the True Language of Understanding
Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
The project of my life has been overcoming all that holds me back, and all that holds me back is my mind.
So, the project of my life is overcoming my mind.
Why is the mind so often the place where we get trapped? Why are we consumed with categories and labels, instead of living in accordance with the fluid who-ness of ourselves?
One reason, I assume, is to avoid feeling the discomfort in not knowing anything for certain. And uncertainty, as we know, is uncomfortable. To escape it, we travel to an even crueler climate—our mind, where we interrogate every interaction to convince ourselves that our fears are valid.
We spend so much time dissecting our social, romantic, and workplace interactions—analyzing personal dynamics, professional failures, and disappointments—yet so little time directly engaging with the sensory and emotional experience of life itself. The result? We wind up repeating much of what we'd hoped to avoid. After all, it is far easier to intellectualize emotion than to feel it—but where does this lead?
In the seminal essay from her 1966 book Against Interpretation, writer, intellectual and cultural critic, Susan Sontag protests against the habit of critiquing and analyzing art in favor of developing a more emotional connection with art and literature.
What she shares shifted how I think about thinking, and flipped my sense of self on its head. Maybe, just maybe, this book helped me see, I’m not actually wrong at my core, after all?
My hope is that this piece might do the same for you…
Read on…we’re about to get into it…
We spend so much trying to feel better.
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