/lit/ - Literature

Alfred North Whitehead's philosophical investigations heavily involved the process of discovery. He famously described that "the true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation."

In "Thinking With Whitehead" Isabelle Stengers describes the relationship between Whiteheadean thought and William James:

>Commitment to an experimentation capable of freeing the question of nature from its habitual formulations associated with our specialized branches of knowledge, and of succeeding in creating a plan able to welcome, without priviledge or hierarchy, the pluraity of what we are aware of, presupposes a trust that needs neither guarantee nor foundation. On the contrary, it conveys the difference between two modes of "trusting": the implicit one presupposed by our certainties and habits, and the riskier one, which exposes the thinker to adventure.

>"Unlike habit, which is carried out in a determinate world, trust is paradoxically exercised in a world of indeterminacy, which James calls the "plastic zone," the transmission belt of the uncertain, the meeting point of the past and future." It is indeterminacy that makes us need trust, but it is also because we have trust that we take the risk of the indeterminate... The feeling of trust makes experience a field of experimentation. It is therefore the condition for every form of creation.

Helen Keller described a very similar sentiment:

>Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. God Himself is not secure, having given man dominion over His works! Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold. Faith alone defends. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.

bump so I can read it after dinner

>>16669896
Honestly this is the reason why I want to set up a comfy small library/observatory room and do astrophotography. The level of comfort would be off the charts.

...Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.