Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Our daily understanding is built from trying and failing to make sense of things. True unfiltered experience is impossible for humans to capture.
- In plain terms
- We learn by interpreting the world, which involves mistakes and wins.
- What can you take from it?
- Accept that interpretation always shapes how we see reality.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- How much of your view is shaped by past failures?
Another view
It assumes stones cannot interpret, which is an unproven claim.
More from Alfred North Whitehead
Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.
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