A Problem About Mysteries

A Problem About Mysteries

What is the natural history of mystery? When did human beings first feel a sense of mystery, and what mystery came first? We don’t know, but presumably there is a fact of the matter. Is there a logical order here—with mysteries ranked according to their subject matter? So, consider a time before the sense of mystery had ever dawned (I assume animals have never had this sense, but I may be wrong). What prompted the first human to think, “Hmm, that’s pretty mysterious”? And what did he mean by “mystery”? He had faced problems before—things he needed to figure out, to solve: how to make a tool for cutting, how to shelter from the rain, what to do about his troublesome neighbor. He knew he could answer these questions with time and concentration, as he had done with so many questions before. But when did he first feel that some question was quite beyond him, that he had no idea what the answer might be? Children might be thought to go through a similar experience today, only they can always ask an adult. I think the natural order is as follows: first the stars; then his own body; then the origin of life; then the nature of matter, then the nature of mind.  He goes about his terrestrial business, his eyes firmly before him, or pointing down: this is what he has to deal with on a daily basis—food, safety, potential mates. His eyes are keen and informative in these respects. But occasionally he looks up, seeing the sun during the day and the stars at night (especially the moon). “What are they?”, he wonders. No clue is provided by what surrounds him here on earth; he is seeing a different order of nature. He waxes religious, mythological, supernatural. He is in the presence of mystery. He knows he can’t travel to where the stars are and have a look; he feels condemned to ignorance. Even the village elders confess themselves baffled, and they know stuff!

Then he begins to ask questions about his own body, something very close to home. It is with him always, but what is its nature—what is it like inside, how does it do what it does? He eats and defecates, but what is the connection—might the one be the other in altered form? What about his reproductive organs and their connection with babies? What is blood, why does he sometimes feel a beating in his chest, why does he fall ill? All quite mysterious. He would like to know, but he has no obvious way of finding out (cutting up corpses is not to his taste). The distant sky is a mystery, but so is his proximate body. It feels surprising to him that his body is a mystery, given that it is what he is—he thinks, “I am a mystery”. These reflections on his body make him wonder about other bodies: he knows babies come from them, human and animal, so he knows they have origins, causes. But where did the adult bodies come from? From other bodies, evidently—but how far back does this go? Puzzling. Again, he waxes religious and mythological. It is a mystery where life comes from, calling for extravagant speculation.

That’s three perceived mysteries, all quite manifest, not requiring much theoretical ratiocination. But they lead to more abstract questions. He is very familiar with material things, though he may not use this concept, and he is familiar with their composition and observable properties. But, he wonders, what is matter—what is matter made of? About any piece of matter, you can ask what is it made of. No obvious answer comes to mind, and no empirical procedure suggests itself (he is starting to think fancy thoughts like this). He wonders if material things are all made of the same kind of stuff, or some subset of the full plurality. He is thinking about the mystery of matter in general. Again, the village elders are no help (they advise him to put his mind to more practical things).

We might imagine now a long gap in our man’s mystery journey—he thinks he has the ground covered with the four basic mysteries already listed (the stars, the body, life, and matter). But after a while a new question occurs to him: what about his own mind? At first, he simply assumed he knew all about it—it was more transparent than his body. He knows what is inside his mind! But then he starts to wonder about memory: where do his ideas go when he isn’t thinking about them? He sometimes forgets things, but not always—where do his “memories” exist? Memory is pretty mysterious, he concludes. Then he moves on to perception, thought, and emotion; he is troubled by inchoate questions. By this time, he has learned a bit about the body, so he wonders if the mind and body have any connection. The mind-body problem takes shape in his mind, culminating perhaps in a sense of mystery about consciousness—the thing closest to himself.

His sense of mystery has moved from the distant stars, to his own body, to life and matter, to his own inner nature as a conscious being. We can suppose that at this point there is still no science to speak of, so the mysteries retain their full depth; but it will turn out that some of these mysteries can be solved, or at least mitigated. In any case, these are the five stages of mystery natural history; and they have shaped the development of human thought. Perhaps the most impressive result has been the solution of the first great mystery—the mystery of the stars—which has set the standard for mystery resolution, rightly or wrongly. Don’t we tend to think that what has been done for the stars can be done in all the other cases? Consciousness awaits its Copernicus.[1]

[1] I haven’t discussed the question of how early man came to have the power to recognize mystery when he sees it. What cognitive preconditions made this possible? Did it require language or metacognition or a primitive epistemology? I really don’t know. It does seem like a basic fact about our apprehension of nature.