Propositional discourse is limited in its ability to approach ultimate reality. Its very terms take us back, as left hemisphere discourse always does, to the familiar. In Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘language makes the uncommon common’. Philosophical language requires a metaphoric and flexible character and thus, according to Whitehead, ‘philosophy in its advance must involve obscurity of expression, and novel phrases’.190 He claims that the history of ideas should be studied with a ‘constant remembrance of the struggle of novel thought with the obtuseness of language’.191 He later adds that one of
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