Do We Create Our Own Mysteries?
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
—Bertrand Russell
Socrates can be credited with making us aware of our own ignorance in philosophical matters. In the Theaetetus, Plato has Socrates say that wondering about something is the point where philosophy begins. It is realizing that we do not actually understand what seemed unproblematic. To Socrates, what was “self-evident” to his fellow Athenians was ripe fodder for analysis. To Plato, we should remain in the state of wondering about things since this opens up inquiry—it is an unsettling state, but we should remain open to the inscrutable in the everyday world. Plato’s student Aristotle also stated in his Metaphysics: “It is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and first began to philosophize.” But Aristotle advocated the countervailing trend of closure: ending wonder by finding the causes of the subject of our wonder. He valued wonder only as a preliminary step—wonder is ultimately eliminated by knowledge.
Aristotle’s position came to dominate Western thought. By the time of Thomas Aquinas, remaining in a state of wonder and amazement was only a sign of sloth: we should keep pressing until we know all the causes except the one unknowable cause (God). By the beginning of the modern period, René Descartes listed wonder in The Passions of the Soul as the first of all passions, but he too insisted that this was only a means for gaining knowledge of things and that an excess of wonder is always bad—one stuck in astonishment is not apt to investigate causes. And he believed that his method of analysis would replace all wonder with comprehension. He thought that those who understood his work would see that in the end there is nothing at which to marvel, and thus wonder would cease: his doctrine of “clear and distinct” perception implied that if we understood a thing at all we understood it completely.
Descartes’s search for certainty and clarity shaped the modern philosophical quest: since the Age of Enlightenment, a campaign to banish all mystery from the world has been waged in the West. The objective is to maximize our vision and minimize mystery. Of course, many philosophers continue to wonder at the world. For example, Immanuel Kant wondered at “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” But the anti-mystery sentiment of most analytic philosophers of the last hundred years is expressed by the logical positivist Moritz Schlick: “No meaningful problem can be unsolvable in principle”; “a genuine question is one for which an answer is logically possible”; “in principle there are no limits to our knowledge”; “there is no unfathomable mystery in the world.” He could still maintain that “the more we know of the world the more we shall marvel at it” and that “if we should know its ultimate principles and its most general laws, our feeling of wonder and reverence would pass all bounds,” but nevertheless he believed that all mysteries will be banished under the glare of reason. Any real question will have a logically possible solution, and scientists—at least in principle—will be able to find it. All we have to do is to formulate the right question with the appropriate concepts. Conversely, if scientists cannot possibly answer a question, there was no real question there in the first place. The only limits to our knowledge are the practical limits of science. To logical positivists, the alleged deep philosophical mysteries of reality do not fall into that category because no observation could in principle solve them—e.g., how could we possibly tell if the world is ultimately mind or matter, and what would it matter to us if we could tell? There is nothing “unsayable” about the real world, and thus no genuine mysteries.
But the positivists’ solution failed: they never succeeded in reformulating scientific theories into sentences about sense-experience alone with no theoretical commitments, and without being able to do that, their way of dealing with mysteries rang hollow. Trying, in effect, to produce a new language in which metaphysical questions could not be formulated failed. However, the idea that all mysteries are to be clarified by philosophers and the remaining empirical matters are to be resolved by scientists did prevail. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said in the preface to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” In the body of the work, he states: “When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.” “Everything that can be known can be expressed in the propositions of science.” And he ended the Tractatus with the famous last line: “What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence.” This did not prevent Wittgenstein from expressing “wonder at the existence of the world,” although he thought this expression was a misuse of language (because he believed that we cannot imagine the world not existing). The philosophers’ job was to solve the conceptual problems resulting from, to use Wittgenstein’s phrase from his Philosophical Investigations, “the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” Philosophical questions are of the form “I am in a muddle; I don’t know my way,” and the purpose of philosophy is “to show the fly the way out of the bottle.” Thus, the objective was not to offer a solution to a mystery but simply to show that it never existed in the first place.
By the middle of the twentieth century, the philosophical analysis of ordinary language in Anglo-American philosophy was going strong. Certainly, ill-formed questions lend themselves to being clarified and then revised or discarded. To give a simple example, consider the old question, “What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?” This can be easily resolved by a philosophical analysis: if there is an irresistible force in reality, then by definition there cannot be any immovable objects—anything can be moved; conversely, if there is an immovable object, then there cannot be irresistible forces. Thus, the two cannot meet—if the one thing exists, then the other cannot—and hence the question of what happens if they meet is only a muddle. The question may sound meaningful, but it is as meaningless as asking “If 2 + 2 = 4, what happens when 2 + 2 = 5?” Once the muddle is cleared up, nothing remains, and the apparent mystery vanishes.
Thus, that question had an implicit contradiction revealed by philosophical analysis. For a simple example of how science and philosophy work together in an analysis, consider another old question: “Does a tree falling in the woods with no one around make a sound?” This comes down to what we mean by “sound”—if we mean “the generation of sound waves,” then of course the falling tree makes a sound; if we mean “the sensation resulting from the impingement of sound waves on an ear drum,” then of course no sound is generated (the sound waves simply dissipate unheard). All that is left after the analysis are scientific accounts of the generation of sound waves and the generation of the sensation of sound in a person and a decision on how to use the word “sound.”
Under ordinary language analysis, all alleged mysteries once again would be reduced to empirical problems for scientists or conceptual problems for philosophers—all legitimate questions would be answered. That is, the alleged misuse of ordinary language was seen as the cause of philosophical problems, and the philosopher’s task was to point out the confusion—and the alleged mysteries would then evaporate. Unfortunately, the ordinary language movement also did nothing to resolve mysteries: the Big Questions have not proved to be amenable to such dissolution. The mind/body problem and free will were especially popular targets, but the philosophical community finally accepted that these issues, like the other Big Questions, required substantive arguments.
Nevertheless, the negative attitude toward mysteries persists today. For example, Daniel Dennett states that “[a] mystery is a phenomenon that people don’t know how to think about—yet.” Mysteries, he claims, are tamed once we know how “to tell the misbegotten questions from the right questions.” Alleged mysteries are still divided into two groups: empirical puzzles that scientists either will solve or will at least reduce to “in principle” solvable remainders, and philosophical mistakes generated by our conceptual systems that philosophers will unravel. All that is required is the proper analysis. Thus, the only legitimate unanswerable questions about reality are those that scientists as a practical matter cannot address, but nothing remains obscure in the sense of exceeding our ability to comprehend in principle. We may still feel awe and astonishment about some phenomena or reality itself, but all legitimate questions about reality will have been tamed.
However, there is a surprising lack of consensus among professional philosophers today on any of the Big Questions.1 As Peter van Inwagen notes: “Disagreement in philosophy is pervasive and irresoluble.” And philosophers also change their mind on major issues, as with Antony Flew over whether there is a transcendent deistic source to the natural world. This does not mean that there has been no progress on addressing the Big Questions or that any of the Big Questions are necessarily mysteries—perhaps some philosophical positions maintained today are correct and perhaps arguments may be forthcoming that will convince most opponents. Certainly, the disputants do not take the lack of consensus as a sign of mystery—each believes that he or she and like-minded colleagues have solved a particular alleged mystery or at least have made important strides toward cracking it. But the field is divided up into competing camps rejecting the others and defending their own claims. The competing answers do help to clarify current issues, but the relative lack of progress toward any consensus does suggest that these issues are not simple problems. (And remember the Ptolemaic astronomy problem: consensus does not guarantee moving toward the truth. Here, closure may be no more than a way to quiet our questioning mind rather than the truth.) In science, there are empirical methods to resolve conflicts, and disputes usually are eventually resolved as long as further research is possible. But philosophy has no resolution protocols, and the lack of any way to resolve the disputes may mean that we are stuck with mysteries.
Still, the prevailing view among philosophers today, to the extent they think of mysteries at all, is that there cannot be ontic mysteries: mystery is obviously only our problem—it is a matter of our lack of an ability to know and understand. Epistemic mysteries may remain but only because of the limitations to our mental and technological capacities. On the other hand, perhaps everything is in fact comprehensible with our rationality and technology—since we are a product of nature, our rationality may eventually be able to unravel all of it. If so, it is only a matter of time before we know everything fundamental about reality. Either way, for most philosophers nothing is truly mysterious about reality itself: it must be rational—how could reality have any intrinsic mysteries or paradoxes?
Few books or articles have been written on the subject in philosophy since the rise of logical positivism. Indeed, mysteries are seldom mentioned in most works in epistemology and metaphysics, even just to mention unraveling one. (One exception: the term “mysterians” was applied as an insult by the opponents to one position in the mind/body field, but advocates of that position happily adopted it.) Part of the problem is simply that mystery is not a subject for direct assault—it is the residue remaining after an analysis. Philosophers cannot get the type of closure that they like to get in their arguments when the topic is so murky. Thus, the very idea of “mystery” has fallen into disfavor.
However, the analytic philosophers’ assault on mystery does raise an interesting question: do we in fact create mysteries where there are none simply by the way we conceptualize situations? Concepts are innately vague, and this can lead to unanswerable questions. For example, should a given stone be classified as a “pebble” or a “rock”? Or the “paradox of the heap”: how many straws can we remove from a bale and still have a “bale”? Or consider the ship of Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens, that the Athenians kept in good repair: if we replace broken parts of a ship one by one, when do we no longer have the original ship? What if the original ship was insured and the ship now consisting entirely of new parts is in a wreck—does the insurance company have to pay? What if someone builds a ship by refashioning all the discarded pieces—which ship is now insured? Perhaps pushing philosophical analysis on any subject far enough leads to all things looking fuzzy and mysterious.
We do create puzzles here, but no one considers these to be real mysteries—they are only products of, for example, applying our discrete “digital” concepts to a continuous “analog” world, and no one but philosophers linger over the resulting problems. But conceptualizations can present deeper problems. Consider how our conceptualizations play a role in seemingly straightforward empirical questions. For example, the question “What is the longest river in the world?” seems simple enough—we just get a globe and measure all the rivers in the world and see which one is longest. As things stand, the Nile River is the longest. However, Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi mentions something relevant here. The Mississippi was originally mapped by Europeans north to south from its headwaters in Minnesota down to Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico. Thus, when the Mississippi met a big body of water flowing in from the west, that body was considered a separate river—the Missouri. But if the Mississippi had been mapped south to north, then when the mappers reached the confluence of the two bodies of water the mappers would have considered the Mississippi as turning west since that was the larger branch. This means there would be no Missouri River but only a much longer Mississippi and a “new” river heading north (perhaps called the “Minnesota River”), and the revised “Mississippi River” would then be the longest river in the world. Thus, how we conceptualize the situation—how we label the rivers—determines the answer to an apparently simple empirical question.2
Or consider the famous paradoxes of the ancient Greek Zeno. By arguments that are now familiar he showed, for example, that a rabbit, no matter how fast, could not catch up to a tortoise with a head start, or that an arrow shot from a bow could not move. We know from experience that these situations are not so, but the point is that we can conceptualize things in such a way that shows them to be impossible—we create a false “mystery” by how we conceptualize a situation. This leads to an unsettling question: how do we know that our conceptualizations and questions are not so totally misguided that they create problems where there are none, just as with these paradoxes? Perhaps, as many philosophers believe, all philosophical mysteries are in fact no more than by-products of our misrepresenting reality, and all we need to do is to devise concepts that better reflect the nature of reality. We can revise concepts—for example, in the Copernican revolution, new meanings were given to earlier astronomical terms—and that may be all that is needed to dispel deep-seated mysteries. In the mind/body field, perhaps what we need to do is to devise a conception of ourselves that does not reflect a dualism of “mind” and “body” and our sense of not understanding will disappear.
More generally, what we consider things to be depends on how we conceptualize things, and when a paradox arises we may be able to figure out another conceptual scheme that avoids the conflict of ideas crystalized in the paradox. For example, the ancient Egyptian word for “south” literally means “to go upstream” and the word for “north” means “to go downstream,” reflecting the northerly flow of the Nile River. So when Egyptian soldiers encountered the Euphrates River, which flows south, they had to call it, paradoxically, “that circling water that goes downstream in going upstream.” The physical situation itself was obviously not paradoxical—the soldiers could clearly see the direction that the Euphrates was flowing—but their language simply could not handle what they saw. We now have conceptual systems that consistently handle the situation with more abstract concepts of “north” and “south” that are not tied to local phenomena and thus avoid the paradox caused solely by the ancient Egyptian language.
This suggests that at least some paradoxes are of our own making: they are only the result of how we conceptualize situations. But all paradoxes arise only when our concepts conflict with each other, not necessarily because of the way reality is. Our ideas then seem to produce absurdities. Paradoxes often occur at the limits of knowledge on a given subject. They can also occur directly from our conceptual systems, as shown by the paradoxes of self-reference—the most famous being the Liar’s Paradox (“This sentence is false”—if it is true, then it is false; if it false, then it is true). Paradoxes in science lead to attempts at reconceptualizing reality. But if we cannot get around a paradox, we are left with a mystery: reality may in fact involve paradoxes or perhaps we simply cannot see reality clearly enough or think deeply enough to develop a system that circumvents the problem. If we are left with a paradox, how can we tell if the problem lies with reality itself or is only a by-product of our all-too-human conceptualizations? Conversely, are we routinely imposing consistent order where there in fact is none?
We accept the Aristotelean laws of identify (x is x and not not-x), noncontradiction (nothing can be both x and not-x), and the excluded middle (anything is either x or not-x with no third possibility), and we think that a contradiction in a statement about the world indicates that one of two conflicting claims must be wrong. That is, we believe that the universe cannot contain paradoxes because we believe that any self-contradictory statement cannot be true. We would not know what to believe in a self-contradictory description of anything. If someone said, “Both the Mets and Yankees won last year’s World Series,” what are we supposed to believe when we know that only one team can win it? But why are we unable to accept two halves of a contradiction simultaneously? Is it because of the way our brain works, and so we are incapable of thinking any other way? Or is just the rules of how any language must operate to be intelligible? Or is it because reality itself cannot be contradictory?
For most philosophers, the laws of logic are only a matter of the relation of our statements—they are a restriction on our statements and do not constrain reality in any fashion. Claiming that something is both “x” and “not-x” tells us nothing whatsoever about that thing or about anything else and thus is meaningless. But philosophers routinely draw a consequence of this without any discussion: reality must be logically consistent—it must conform without any contradictions to some set of concepts that we can devise. However, it is not clear why reality must conform to our concepts without contradictions or how we can be certain that contradictions among our ideas must be only the product of our conceptual systems.3 Why must reality be capable of being fitted consistently into some conceptual scheme that beings with our particular brains can devise? In fact, the consequence of the laws of logic being only a matter of our statements is that logic in no way compels anything to be logical or prohibits reality from being illogical. Perhaps there may be aspects of reality that lie outside of any conceptual horizon that any beings existing inside the natural universe could conceive. Indeed, many philosophers throughout history have accepted limitations to our ability to understand reality. For Plato, the fact that we inhabit an imperfect material world limits our ability to comprehend the real world of the realm of perfect forms: we are like prisoners in a cave who can see only moving shadows on the cave walls caused by real people walking by a fire—we cannot see the reality causing the shadows. So too, for Immanuel Kant (as discussed in the next chapter): our mental abilities cannot comprehend the world-in-itself. But it is not clear how we can resolve this matter of logic and reality.
One final issue about the nature of conceptualizations must be noted: may our conceptualizations not only create apparent mysteries but also shield us from a genuine mystery? That is, do we supply a conceptualization or explanation to what is in fact a genuine ontic mystery that only makes us erroneously feel that we understand it? Do our conceptions obscure much of reality? For example, do reductive explanations completely miss nonphysical factors at work in nature? This leads to a troubling bottom line: even if we think that we have solved a mystery or reduced it to a solvable problem by a reconceptualization of a situation, how can we be sure? Or does our perennial view of something that never seemed mysterious miss something vital that would expose a deep mystery? Perhaps future conceptualizations will open up new mysteries. And does this mean that our conceptualizations are too impermanent to determine today whether there are genuine mysteries to reality? Do we simply open and close “mysteries” by our very fragile conceptualizations? Or, are all human beings endowed with an unrevisable set of concepts that conditions us to see things as paradoxical when there are none? Does an irresolvable paradox or other mystery indicate something profound about reality or only show that we are way off the track for a proper understanding of reality and that we need a new way of looking at things? How can we ever tell what is the true situation?
It is often said that the questions asked in philosophy are more important than the answers proffered at any moment. But the questions reflect how we see reality, and particular questions may be faulty: how do we know that we are asking questions that will lead to genuine final knowledge? Perhaps we are closing off aspects of reality by our questions. The limits of our language may not set the limits of our world, as Ludwig Wittgenstein thought, but language does encode what we take to be real and how we conceptualize the world.4
William James spoke of “our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational shape in our minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by the crude order of our experience” and that “[t]he world has shown itself, to a great extent, plastic to this demand of ours for rationality.” Looking for a “because” for our “why” questions is a sign of rationality, but philosophers may also suffer from a compulsion: trying to dispel all mystery by demanding reasons for mysteries even if there are none. The mindset to resolve all mysteries at all costs is the “philosopher’s disease”—that is, the belief that, even if we do not have the correct answer today, we can be certain that one is forthcoming because there must always be a sufficient reason that we can find for anything. Talk of mystery simply covers up confused thinking. Looking for a reason must be pursued, but this approach becomes counterproductive when the assumption that there is always a reason will not be given up under any circumstances—when one is certain that there must be a “because” no matter what. Even if as a matter of simple logic there must be a “x” or “not-x” answer to any meaningful question, it is another matter to assume that that answer must be available to us.5 Such a predisposition may distort our ontic and epistemic situation in the world—the demand can lead to dismissing legitimate questions and forcing erroneous answers and fraudulent reasons where there are none. It may lead to accepting a partial understanding as a sufficient or total understanding. At a minimum, this creates conceptual barriers between us and reality by directing our attention away from direct contact with reality and focusing it on the conceptual products of our mind. And why the universe must be transparent and free of paradoxes or mysteries to finite beings such as ourselves would also be an issue that must be addressed. And if the universe does indeed turn out to be transparent, that itself may turn out to be a mystery. But perhaps our rationality cannot be celebrated as all-encompassing—genuine mysteries in fact would then become only deeper and more entrenched as we study more of reality.
Unless we can prove that all well-formed “why” questions must have a “because” (and that appears hard to do), we should remain immune to the philosopher’s disease and should remain open to the possibility of indefeasible mysteries to reality. Whether the basic philosophical mysteries of the Big Questions will ever be resolved as science advances is a real issue. Conceptual clarification by philosophers would of course be helpful at any point in history, but some questions that we accept at a given time as well formed may be unanswerable by us even in principle. That they are unanswerable does not make them literally meaningless even if we not are in a position to know how even to begin to answer them—in fact, they may be of utmost importance to us. So too, when studying mysteries, we must remember the danger noted above that we may only be fooling ourselves by the answers we provide: we may never be in a position to guarantee that there are no genuine mysteries to reality—we may simply be supplying conceptualizations that quiet our mind but that do not reflect reality. This is a mystery about mysteries that is always present.
1.A 2009 survey of professional philosophers shows the lack of consensus on any major philosophical topic (Chalmers 2015: 351–352). For example, on the mind/body problem, 57 percent accepted or leaned toward physicalism, 27 percent nonphysicalism, and 16 percent other; on the question of God, 73 percent accepted or leaned toward atheism, 15 percent theism, and 13 percent other. Only a “nonskeptical realism” about the external world reached over 80 percent support (82%). David Chalmers believes that new insights, methods, and concepts may finally lead to answering the questions because all truths are logically entailed by fundamental empirical truths concerning fundamental natural properties and laws discovered by scientists—none are inscrutable. But he acknowledges that not all philosophers today (e.g., Colin McGinn and Peter van Inwagen) are so optimistic: they believe that some answers may be unknowable because the lack of progress on the Big Questions shows that human beings do not have “the level of intelligence” to answer some of them (ibid.: 368–369).
2.Today, the Nile is once again longer because engineers have straightened the Mississippi by cutoffs.
3.It should be pointed out that most of us operate normally with contradictions permeating our everyday thought. Many of us do not try to make all our beliefs consistent with each other but simply accept dilemmas unresolved. F. Scott Fitzgerald opined: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” But that is not the issue here—here the issue is the theoretical possibility of a consistent conceptual system reflecting the basic nature of reality.
4.Bryan Magee correctly points out that the limits of what we can apprehend determine the limits of what is linguistically intelligible to us, not vice versa.
5.Badly formed questions can distort situations. Even apparently simple “yes or no” questions may have a background that entails implicit claims that make a question ill-formed. For example, the classic question, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” cannot be answered “yes or no” by a husband who has never beaten his wife.