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Answer by user38026 for The experience of simultaneously holding very different interpretations of reality

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The traditional romantic English language term of "negative capability", which I believe originated with Keats' criticism of Coleridge

Keats understood Coleridge as searching for a single, higher-order truth or solution to the mysteries of the natural world. He went on to find the same fault in Dilke and Wordsworth. All these poets, he claimed, lacked objectivity and universality in their view of the human condition and the natural world. In each case, Keats found a mind which was a narrow private path, not a "thoroughfare for all thoughts". Lacking for Keats were the central and indispensable qualities requisite for flexibility and openness to the world, or what he referred to as negative capability

The wikipedia article is quite good, though the only philosophy it mentions is Zen (your particular question seems to have strong hua-yen overtones, which is a scholastic school of Buddhism that's influenced much contemporary zen), and I don't recall any contemporary Zen philosophers, e.g. from the Kyoto school, mentioning it. I understand how an orientation away from an "absolute knowledge of every truth" and toward "uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts" may help someone read and write. Whether or not that could assist philosophical thinking probably depends on whether you feel presentation and argument are separable (I believe that's anathema to some critical theorists).

So you may want to look for philosophical articles about 'negative capability', or failing that 'cognitive dissonance'.


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