The thrust of that particular section, is that ‘everything in nature is mortal’. Hence the aspiration of the religious to ‘the unborn’. I’m not trying to preach, this is strictly a philosophical analysis. But it’s important to recognise the boundaries, which (all due respect) you’re blurring.
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I hear you. I’m just offering a “pagan” reading of that “text.” The gods put on and take off, again and again, the flesh of mortal animals, some of them supreme through the splendor of signs, bending the circle into a widening spiral.
You will notice, if you read the OP, the very first reference is to Jacques Monod. Are you familiar with him? Nobel laureate in molecular biochemistry. Author of the book Chance and Necessity, 1971, which is a canonical materialist text. And he’s a staunch advocate for exactly that kind of absolute objectivity.
The scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity—that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe. Now, this is basically incompatible with virtually all the religious or metaphysical systems whatever, all of which try to show that there is some sort of harmony between man and the universe and that man is a product—predictable if not indispensable—of the evolution of the universe.
― Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology by Jacques Monod, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1971,
I’m not objecting. I’m pointing something out about objectivity.
Of course we agree here. A god’s POV is tacitly assumed, from which “consciousness” ( pov in general) is a stuff that emerges from a more primary stuff. More philosophically sophisticated physicists see the problem and try to make better sense of the situation, or at least experiment with another framing.
For me one crucial here is the strong tendency to read “objective” intensely metaphysically. A sober reading of “objectivity” is as freedom from disqualifying bias. Subjectivity is fundamentally bias, so this is an ideal toward which we strive in relation to others.
In my view, philosophy is scientific in spirit in that it also strives against this intrinsic bias of subjectivity as such. But philosophy is necessarily hermeneutic, as I only struggle against my bias by struggling to understand others who see differently.
Our fetishization of math tends to frame the real in terms of something perfectly lucid beyond the realm of ambiguity given in un-reduced experience. A genuine empiricism is hermeneutic and poetic without rejecting the relatively lucid tools of mathematics.
Of course! And objectivity is essential for many disciplines - science, jurisprudence, many others. (But then there’s also disinterest or detachment - which are similar but not quite the same.) The problem in modern culture is to regard objectivity as the sole criterion of truth. That’s where a methodological principle turns into the metaphysical naturalism which claims that only science provides the criterion against which truth is judged.
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We might see it as a “safely neutral” construct. Privately we are potentially far more free than this safe neutrality. To me a sober reading of science itself does not imply a reductive ontology. But people want a “deep” ontology — consider the passion of youth for security through the possession of truth — and this construct is a tempting candidate. Look at its power in the lifeworld, and look also at the prestige in mastering its mathematical machinery. It it is simultaneously esoteric and exoteric, Platonistic and empirical, the best of both worlds and yet the loss of the world in which it seductively flowers.
I beg to differ. Reduction accounts for major part of the power of scientific method. It is true that there are criticisms of reductionism within science, and that the newer ‘sciences of complexity’ resist reductionism (especially in biology). Also that German culture has a category called Geisteswissenschaft, ‘commonly translated into English as the humanities or human sciences. It encompasses academic disciplines dedicated to studying human culture, language, history, art, and philosophy through interpretation and understanding, rather than purely objective measurement.’ I don’t know if there’s an equivalent term in English, although I suppose ‘social sciences’ would be close.
But that is not the subject of the conversation. I have something more like Husserl’s criticism of naturalism in mind:
A persistent trait of twentieth-century Continental philosophy has been its resolute anti-naturalism. In this respect, Husserl must be credited with great prescience for—very early on—diagnosing naturalism as the dominant philosophical position of the twentieth century, one that demands both careful descriptive attention and also ‘radical critique’ (PRS, pp. 253, 293), which he interprets (as Heidegger too will do in Being and Time) as a ‘positive critique in terms of foundations and methods’. When Husserl speaks of naturalism, he specifically has in mind late the nineteenth-century versions, espoused, for instance, by Auguste Comte and Ernst Mach, but he also traces naturalism back to the beginnings of modern philosophy, especially Hobbes, Locke, Hume (somewhat ambiguously since Hume is also, for Husserl, a proto-transcendental philosopher), ‘and a naturalised Kant’. Gradually he extended the term ‘naturalism’ to cover every ‘objectivistic philosophy’ (Crisis, § 56, p. 194; VI 197) that had sprung up in response to the extraordinary progress in the natural sciences. By 1912–1913 Husserl was explicitly criticizing naturalism from an explicitly ‘philosophical’ and indeed ‘transcendental’ point of view, in that it is seduced by the spirit of unquestioning (‘naïve’) acceptance of the world that permeates the natural attitude, leading to the ‘reification’ (Verdinglichung) of the world, and its ‘philosophical absolutizing’ (Verabsolutierung, Ideas I, § 55, p. 129; Hua III/1 107). Naturalism (and ‘objectivism’) which begins from the presumption of a given ‘ready-made world’ is opposed to transcendentalism which Husserl characterizes as follows:
Transcendentalism, on the other hand, says: the ontic meaning (der Seinssinn) of the pregiven life-world is a subjective structure (subjektives Gebilde), it is the achievement (Leistung) of experiencing, prescientific life. (Crisis § 14, p. 69; VI 70)
Dermot Moran, Husserl’s transcendental philosophy and the critique of naturalism
Yes. And indeed so obviously that one might hope that this method won’t be read ontologically.
I agree, so the issue becomes figuring out how exactly we share this prescientific lifeworld as subjects. What makes a subject a subject ? Vision that is simultaneously blindness : seeing this by not seeing that, seeing what I see by not seeing what others see. To share a world is to walk more in darkness than light — if we acknowledge the reality of what others see.
This prescientific world is “primordially” intersubjective. Husserl is great, but Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena intensifies intersubjectivity at the expense of gazing on essences without the aid of self-transcending signs.
Bakhtin is also great on this, and you might like his critique of the separation of value from meaning. This is from The Bakhtin Reader.
…there is no reason for saying that meaning belongs to a word as such. In essence, meaning belongs to a word in its position between speakers; that is, meaning is realized only in the process of active, responsive understanding. Meaning does not reside in the word or in the soul of the speaker or in the soul of the listener. Meaning is the effect of interaction between speaker and listener produced via the material of a particular sound complex. It is like an electric spark that occurs only when two different terminals are hooked together.
…
Those who ignore theme (which is accessible only to active, responsive understanding) and who, in attempting to define the meaning of a word, approach its lower, stable, self-identical limit, want, in effect, to turn on a light bulb after having switched off the current. Only the current of verbal intercourse endows a word with the light of meaning.
…
No utterance can be put together without value judgment. Every utterance is above all an evaluative orientation. Therefore, each element in a living utterance not only has a meaning but also has a value. Only the abstract element, perceived within the system of language and not within the structure of an utterance, appears devoid of value judgment. Focusing their attention on the abstract system of language is what led most linguists to divorce evaluation from meaning and to consider evaluation an accessory factor of meaning, the expression of a speaker’s individual attitude toward the subject matter of his discourse … Referential meaning is molded by evaluation; it is evaluation, after all, which determines that a particular referential meaning may enter the purview of speakers - both the immediate purview and the broader social purview of the particular social group. Furthermore, with respect to changes of meaning, it is precisely evaluation that plays the creative role. A change in meaning is, essentially, always a reevaluation: the transposition of some particular word from one evaluitive context to another. A word is either advanced to a higher rank or demoted to a lower one. The separation of word meaning from evaluation inevitably deprives meaning of its place in the living social process (where meaning is always permeated with value judgment), to its being ontologized and transformed into ideal Being divorced from the historical process of Becoming.
This last part describes this very forum.
The outcome is a constant struggle of accents in each semantic sector of existence. There is nothing in the structure of signification that could be said to transcend the generative process, to be independent of the dialectical expansion of social purview. Society in process of generation expands its perception of the generative process of existence. There is nothing in this that could be said to be absolutely fixed. And that is how it happens that meaning — an abstract, self-identical element — is subsumed under theme and torn apart by theme’s living contradictions so as to return in the shape of a new meaning with a fixity and self-identity only for the while, just as it had before.
Bakhtin would presumably be the first to confess to the non-finality and incompleteness of his pointings.
That’s what I’m asking. We don’t just distinguish between different frequencies of electromagnetic radiation; we experience seeing red and blue. We don’t just distinguish between C6H12O6 and NaCl on our tongue; we experience tasting sweetness and saltiness. No physical description of any of the structures or eventsdescribes, or even hints at, our inner experiences. So I don’t understand how the physical is responsible for them.
Good. Along with @Patterner, we’re pretty clear on the contrast with “artificial.” The question is about the validity of “natural vs. supernatural”. Specifically, does this exhaust the concepts that may be contrasted with “natural”? If it does, and if we want to say that items like mind and rationality are not natural, then we’re left with having to say they’re supernatural. Even leaving aside the unfortunate connotations of “supernatural,” that just sounds like a label for we-know-not-what.
The alternative is to embrace a “liberal naturalism” that admits mind, rationality, et al. into the realm of nature, but agrees that there is an important distinction to be made, ontologically, between an item like a rock and an item like my mind.
What are the objections to this? You cite what I’m sure is a plausible cultural history of how “naturalism,” once allowed a foot in the door, tends to demote rationality to a mere “servant of natural selection,” as Horkheimer says. But I don’t think the devolution of a defective naturalism is reason enough to abandon it.
The other objection, of course – and this is where philosophers like Price and McDowell (and Kant, for that matter) come in – is that we lack a satisfactory account of the ontological difference I referred to above. Moreover, we lack a solution to the “placement problem” that everyone can sign off on. Both naturalists and non-naturalists want this, or they should. If I am a “non-naturalist” in the traditional sense, but also want to argue that humanity’s place in nature is not suspect or mysterious, then I have my work cut out for me. One amusing way to phrase it would be to say that my goal is to turn myself from a non-naturalist into a New Naturalist or something similar. I want to continue to reject all the traditional ways in which “naturalism” has been invoked to explain what there is. At the same time, I want to be able to say, with Patterner, that to accept the alternative “non-natural” is uncomfortable and misleading.
This is a good reply to scientism, it seems to me. We can say, “As long as your reduction is not insisting on some ontological point, some primacy of the physical, then go right ahead with your interesting work.” In philosophy, we would want to oppose someone like Sellars who believes that science is ontologically basic, and is prepared to defend (in the Philosophy Room, so to speak) a view that nothing “truly” exists except what physics may show us.
Let me just mention another way of seeing the “natural vs. what?” question. McDowell says, of Kant: “For Kant, nature is the realm of law and therefore devoid of meaning.” So if a “naturalist” is someone who believes that nature is defined by, or constituted by, lawlike behavior, then you pretty much have to be a “non-naturalist” in order to make room for meaning, mind, et al. This view of nature as causation may be partially what you have in mind? It’s a good question to ask whether this view is mandatory, given the framework of scientific inquiry. Also, whether the cause-and-effect world must demote rationality to a series of causes, as opposed to what it claims to be, namely a series of reasons. Yet again, the placement problem . . .
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Excellent. I disagree with the word “liberal”, but realize it’s the way many people would need to be approached.
I’m glad it makes sense. And I just borrowed “liberal naturalism” from McDowell.
The topic being explored here is considerably more prosaic and less abstruse than this.
But I think this is the forced dichotomy that lurks behind this debate. The reason the natural/supernatural binary appears is precisely because that distinction was one of the causes behind the framework in which the question is asked. And that framework had already expelled teleology from nature and divided mind from matter. Once nature is understood as essentially mechanical — no purposes, no intrinsic directedness, no immanent goals — then appeals to purpose seem a hark back to the supernatural. It’s almost a naturalist article of faith that the Universe is purposeless.
Jonas’ phenomenology re-introduces the telos of living beings, which had been excluded from consideration by the mind-matter division. Jonas’ ‘needful freedom’ as a feature of organisms, the fact that organisms strive to maintain themselves against entropy (almost as a primitive manifestation of will). Once purpose is recognised on this level — not as a supernatural addition but as intrinsic to organisms — mind ceases to look anomalous. That’s the major point of this particular essay.
But there’s another question that appears later, in relation to humans in particular. Animals don’t consider the reason they exist. They don’t wonder. (And recall, ‘wisdom begins in wonder’.) The capacity to wonder — to stand back from one’s own existence and question it — is not just a more complex form of biological functioning. It is an existential transformation. Nature, through the human, becomes capable of questioning itself.
I think that this is what is behind these questions of the ‘naturalisation of reason’. As Nagel says in Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, to explain reason in biological terms, to say it is something that has come about through successful adaptation, is to undermine the sovereignty of reason. So reason has to grapple with the ultimate existential question, which is where religions entered the picture in earlier epochs. Not offering an answer here, just clarifying the question!
Yet this begs the question as to what ought to guide us in any ontological assertions. It is not necessary to make ontological assertions at all, but if it is considered desirable to make them, then what would be the best guide?
Imagination? It seems clear that it was imagination―that is commonsense intuition― which has guided ontological views in pre-scientific times and cultures. In hunter/gatherer cultures a predominance of animism is found. How do we know this? Through (hopefully as unbiased as possible) observation in anthropology, that is through science.
This animism seems natural enough given that observation shows it to be a primal disposition for humans (and some animals) to look for agency. I live with two failed cattle dogs. Loud sounds don’t normally bother them. If I slam a door and they see me do it, they don’t react much. If the wind slams a door they act as if spooked.
Imagining a realm of gods, angels, spirits, celestial beings seems to be inevitable given the undying human love of creating stories in the context of ancient cosmologies that thought the Earth to be the centre of the Cosmos.
So, for the vast majority of human recorded and unrecorded history it seems clear that it was imagination inspired by the kinds of associations of things according to their perceived “correspondences” (as in alchemy, astrology, numerology, hermetic magic and of course theology) that guided ontological speculation and doctrine.
The methodological bracketing of the imagination and belief in the verity of such “correspondences” came about slowly, along with the developmental successes of science and mathematical reasoning.
The idea that the intuitive imagination tells us something about the nature of things is not a completely dead attitude. The fact is that we don’t know if it does or could, or to what extent it does or could, simply because it is not something that can be tested if the ontological speculations it delivers involve entities which cannot be sensorially detected or mathematically modeled.
The detailed Chinese explanation for the effectiveness of acupuncture is a great case in point. It is a causal explanation that involves entities―chi and meridians―which are undetectable. So, on what basis would we accept that explanation? On the basis of the intuitive “correspondences” I spoke of earlier. If we want a cogent explanation for the effectiveness of acupuncture we must look to physiology and anatomy, chemistry and biology. That said, the placebo effect is well recognized and studied, and it should be no surprise that strong belief may have physiological effects if we accept that beliefs are correlated with brain processes and that the mind/brain/body are conceptual distinction only and are functionally inseparable.
So, I think the real issue is the question of naturalism vs super-naturalism. What is considered natural is simply that which can be reliably detected. We don’t have to worry about whether to call it physical or not. This attitude does not necessarily change anything about human feelings or reject their validity (although of course it might for some individuals).
Some people worry that the rejection of supernatural explanations “disenchants” the world and our lives in it. I don’t see that as a valid generalization at all. Again it may disenchant the world for some individuals, but I think that for many others the modern understanding of the Cosmos is far more bewildering and wonderful than the ancient understanding of the cosmos. We can still enjoy to the full natural beauty, poetry, literature, music and the arts, without needing to believe that they point to something substantively transcendent―something supernatural and somehow, in some imagined unknowable way, objectively real.
That said, people are free to believe whatever they like or should be if their beliefs are not imposed upon and do no harm to others. For me it is the “culture wars” that are most detrimental to human life. I have no doubt the culture wars are, on many fronts, basically a conflict between naturalism and supernaturalism.
Whitehead, who loved science and maths, and also the arts and the beauty of the natural world, spoke against the “bifurcation of nature”. I see naturalism as being simply concerned with “the nature of things”―and the important question is ‘how will we approach the attempt (if that is what is needful or what we want) to find out what is the nature of things?’. It seems clear that we cannot hope to ever have a definitive and complete answer―and I think we should be comfortable with that.
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I’m not offended but I am surprised. If the topic is so prosaic, then why does science have a blind spot, etc. ?
To object to the abstruse in fundamental thinking doesn’t make sense from over here. Philosophy strives against the complacency of a false lucidity. You could have asked me to try another approach, but instead you seem to want to exclude what isn’t immediately agreeable. Note that a “foe” can be agreeable in the sense of being the expected foe, the foe one has trained for.
Great post in general and I agree with you here. Personally I’m glad to integrate the scientific image in a larger sense of the natural. If Einstein reveals nature, then so does Yeats. Some of this nature is depersonalized. We “scrub off the normativity.” We polish the concrete of the basement floor. This gives us power to build art museums and an internet on which we can talk wild stuff about Heraclitus and Plato and about the fundamental mystery of the world just being here as only ever partially lit.
@Wayfarer didn’t like my “vision is blindness” metaphor, but to me it does credit both to subjectivity as intensely real ( one way of lighting up the world itself ) and to the world that encompasses that subject and every other subject.
The world is a vast darkness pierced here and there by light, like kids running in the forest at night with flashlights. This framing is a bit romantic for mundane well-understood physics/technology, but it becomes fair, I hope, when we consider the “depth” of what we can achieve through an ontology that is essentially poetic.
Our mysterious poetic faculty allows for a continual injection of novelty into the world. It transforms the world. As Gadamer puts it, the portrayal modifies the very being of the portrayed, as it points out new aspects of the portrayed, though this might only make sense within a non-representational or non-dual appropriation of the world. Ontology would be continuous with myth and music as world-opening and world-deepening. Where do we draw the line between nature and culture ? And why would we, except to avoid the fear of phantoms and to build devices ? I liked your mention of beaver’s dams and spider’s webs. I think Feuerbach put his finger on something here:
Man distinguishes himself from Nature.
…
This distinction of his is his God: the distinguishing of God from Nature is nothing else than the distinguishing of man from Nature.
I wouldn’t say that this is all bad. It’s more complicated than that. But I wonder how much ontology can be investigated in the light of this pointing ?
I agree. I don’t expect scientistic philosophers to be less deaf than other philosophers are to other philosophers, but as long as the “rebels” aren’t silenced all is well ! This “deafness” sounds to me like something that cannot be removed, for we are digging into framework deep assumptions.
I love Sellars’ “role semantics,” so it’s a bit disappointing that he was scientistic on the whole. Yet this scientism motivated him to point at how meaning might live here in the world with us. So this is a good example of the entanglement of prejudice and insight.
Here you’re falling back onto relativism and subjectivism, what is ‘true for you’. And it matters greatly whether it is physical or not. You can’t simply declare it irrelevant.
As for what can be ‘reliably detected’, add to that ‘by the senses or by scientific instruments’ right? Empirical philosophy, in a word. But we also discover truths by reason, and by philosophical insight. Existential truths are able to be discerned.
There’s a term that John Vervaeke introduces in his lecture series, ‘the imaginal’. Vervaeke draws on the philosophy of Islamic scholar Henri Corbin and psychologist Carl Jung to distinguish the “imaginal” from the merely “imaginary”. While the imaginary consists of fantasies, illusions, or hallucinations, the imaginal serves as a crucial psychological bridge to the nouminous. (Episode 49.)
This original post attempts to re-frame the question of the relationship between mind and body, self and world, from a phenomenological perspective, beginning with Hans Jonas 1966 book, *The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophy of Biology"
With regard to the interpretation of living beings, Jonas emphasized that Western categories failed at their goal. Modernity was unable properly to address the issue of the meaning of life. Additionally, this weakness seems to have had ontological roots: Modern science failed to understand life because the ontology it believed in was an ontology of death. And death, of course, is unable to feel and comprehend life. Modern ontology mistook its scientific and methodological abstraction with reality. Nineteenth century idealism seemed to be the beginning of a new turn in philosophy against this modern abstraction. Yet, this attempt failed as well because of the success of the modern, materialistic, and technological view of things.
Nevertheless, Jonas believed that ontology primarily has to do with life, not death. At the outset of Western thought, life – not dead matter – is the original evidence of being, and life alone is the aim and object of thinking. Thus death, not life, is the first philosophical problem, while death is nothing but an unaccountable event taking place in an essentially living universe.
I won’t try and do justice to the scope of Jonas’ book in a post, other than to say that he addresses what he sees as the shortcomings of dualism, idealism and materialism, by trying as far as possible to consider the sense in which organisms themselves are beings, and what differentiates them from the sorrounding matter. Jonas was a student of Heidegger, however he later dissented from Heidegger in important ways.
Your style is highly improvisational, allusive, and even poetic. Often insightful. Reminds me a litle of free jazz improvisation. Ornette Coleman. Mine is more prosaic. I was a tech writer for 20 years. I try to define a lane and stay in it.
The Blind Spot of science is a book, by Adam Frank, Marcello Gleiser and Evan Thompson (two scientists and a philosopher). It draws considerably on Husserl, particularly Husserl’s ‘Crisis of the Western Sciences’, The blind spot is an analogy from the visual blind spot which I’m sure you’re familiar with. A brief excerpt:
“Husserl believed that “Western,” particularly European, civilization had lost its way. He traced the deep roots of the “crisis of European humanity” to a failure of reason and a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of modern science. The confusion was centuries in the making. Science itself, the actual practice of scientists, was not in crisis. On the contrary, science was tremendously successful. Instead, the crisis arose from the meaning that had become attached to science. A particular worldview had been grafted onto science, the worldview we are calling the Blind Spot. The dominant philosophical conception of science led to elevating mathematical abstractions as what is truly real and to devaluing the world of immediate experience, which Husserl called the “life-world.” Modern humanity had lost sight of the fact that reality and meaning are far richer than they are represented as being in the dominant materialistic philosophy attached to science. That philosophy had led to a “disenchantment of the world,” to use German sociologist Max Weber’s term”
Excerpt from
The Blind Spot
Adam Frank;Marcelo Gleiser;Evan Thompson;
This material may be protected by copyright.
Of course, all the sources you’re quoting would probably affirm the idea but I’m trying to focus.
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Thanks. I agree that both science and poetry reveal the nature of nature, although in the latter case it is more often the human nature of nature than its non-human nature that is revealed. And it must be remembered that what is revealed in any kind of enquiry is nature as revealed to us. As I see it when we put aside our linguistically and imaginatively generated speculations about how things might work and just observe instead then we begin to read the book of nature closely. There is much poetry in science just as there is elsewhere.
Exactly! I’ve always resonated with the “through a glass darkly” metaphor. Some sages may see more clearly than the average person, but I don’t believe they have access to absolute propositional truths about the nature of things. I think they have just learned how to “be themselves” without any fear at all, or at least with fear so minimal it cannot show. It is a fact about human nature that those seeking certainty find self-confidence immensely beguiling.
Thus we have the “guru phenomenon” which so often leads to megalomania in the guru and egregious exploitation of the acolytes. The “great sages” such as Jesus and Gautama are far away enough for it to be forgotten that they were merely human like the rest of us, so they become as gods for many. Truth is we don’t know what they may have gotten up to, human nature, and the tendency to mythologize the heroes being what it is.
Yep, where there is light there is always darkness as counterpart. The more we know the more we realize we don’t know. So our light and darkness grown together. Speaking of blindness I have never bought the so-called “blind spot of science”. For me the detachment of scientific method is a methodological epoché that mirrors that of phenomenology. Just as phenomenology properly brackets the question about the “external world”, so natural or “hard” science brackets the questions of the subject and consciousness.
Yet this is not the case with the human sciences, which are places where science and phenomenology may fruitfully meet. The metaphor of a blind spot in science seems weak to me for the simple reason that it is not science that sees or refuses to see anything, but rather it is humans practicing science who see or fail to see. And I doubt there are all that many of them so lacking in insight as to forget that science is but one of our practices, and that it necessarily relies on human perception (along with its augmentations) and the lifeworld as does all else. Of course science is but a part of human life.
I like that metaphor. I agree with McGilchrist that we have become dangerously left-brain oriented, so we can easily get lost in analysis. But analysis is useless without synthesis and that is where the imagination, the poetry (poesis…making) comes in. McGilchrist sees the right-brain as far more intelligent, but its knowledge is intuitive and “global” and may be more or less, or even hopelessly lost in being made explicit, just like what may happen when we explain the meaning of a great poem or on a more mundane level, a joke.
The ontological stories we tell can never be definitive or complete, but as Peirce hoped, the community of enquirers may asymptotically approach the truth (where “truth” is defined as “for us”, not absolute). I know you may not share this view, but I see the absolute or “in itself” as the beckoning darkness we never give up hope of shining light upon, and even though it is a hopeless “Sysyphean” task, it is nonetheless potentially full of wonder and joy. Who would ever want to completely dispel all mystery? I think that even if it were possible it would be a terribly sad fate and state indeed.
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