Afterword: Speculative Earth

Abstract

A flight after the unattainable. This is how Alfred North Whitehead (1929: 65) chose to characterise the “disturbing element,” the generative impulse which gives rise to the singular experience and practice of speculation. Not the conquest of the unknown, not the prophetic mastery over the future, not the progressive composition of a good common world, not the transcendental access to some great beyond—flight. The world suspended mid-air. Life in the imperfective. An immanent experience of fugitivity and divergence that is engendered in giving oneself over to an imaginative improvisation, to an unsettled dance, to the ongoing and unfinished experimentation with that which escapes even the most capacious of systems and shrugs at the most settled of foundations. Hence Whitehead’s proposition, despite his insistence on the immanent requirements of coherence and logic, that speculation is “in its essence untrammelled by method” (1929: 65). For its function is none other than that of inventing the very methods that here and there push thought and life out of bounds, over the guardrails, to the outlaw edges of the territory governed by the rational, the probable, and the plausible (Savransky, 2022). Its function is to pierce beyond habitual methodologies of life so as to give way to a homeless space that makes of flight itself its groundless ground and makes of the disturbance of the present its precarious chance to attend to that which insists and persists “below the rim of the world” (Whitehead, 1929: 65), in its interstices and crevices, fabricating possibles out of the impossible, inventing forms out of the unformed.

The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights.

William James, Pragmatism (1975: 62)