The Phenomenology of Mystery: a study in objectivity and subjectivity

When I gaze at the stars, or even just think about them, I am transported in feeling to a vastness and wonder and awe beyond words, beyond emphasis. It is not just the facts we tend to relegate to astronomy that fill my thoughts, but any and all facts, not least of which is my own puny but extraordinary existence in the scheme of things. Where did it all, we, come from? How could such complexity just pop up out of nowhere, out of nothing, and then evolve into a structure as arbitrary yet aware and intelligent as we are? Why is there anything at all, even a single hydrogen atom, not to mention one hundred billion galaxies? 

Well, you know the drill. The universe, existence, is amazing (what an inadequate word!), that’s all there is to it. 

And yet … it isn’t amazing at all. That is, objectively speaking (as we say), the universe just is (like God in the burning bush). Nor is it even inexplicable or the ultimate mystery. It is not mysterious at all because obviously it exists and so there must be an explanation. We simply happen not to know it (in its entirely). And there is surely nothing mysterious about a relatively unhairy ape not being able to understand the origin of one hundred billion galaxies! 

The non-mystery is even less mysterious than that. For the very idea of an explanation is entirely relative to a cognizer, a knower, and the particular kind of knower one is. A universe could exist without there being need of an explanation, or even of the very concept of an explanation, or of knowledge, if there were no one who needed or wanted to or could know about it. And indeed, that is probably the usual state of affairs, even in the existing universe. Humanity may disappear in the same blink of a cosmic eye with which we appeared, and, if as now (incredibly) seems a distinct possibility, we are the only intelligent beings, it will have turned out that the only sign of there even having been such a thing as knowledge or curiosity or mystery is a sliver of stratigraphy on or beneath the surface of a little rocky planet. 

My particular reason for waxing manically about these ultimate things right now is (absurdly) to make an academic point. It is that my own reaction to the universe, as I stated at the outset, is hyperbolic … and even then seeming to me not even close to being hyperbolic enough, as utterly inadequate to the true state of affairs. So one might be tempted to say that my subjective response falls short of the objective reality. And yet I went on to explain that the objective reality may not at all, not to mention to a high degree, possess the property or properties that my response was attributing to it, that is, of being awesome, of being mysterious, and so forth, except relative to moi.

 Furthermore I can point to a good friend of mine whose own subjectivity or feeling life more closely conforms to that “other reality.” For if I were to expand on the wonder and amazingness and impenetrable mystery of the universe to him, I can easily imagine his shrugging his shoulders and saying, “Well, yes, it’s big (relative to us), and we don’t know (yet?) how it all works (although we’ve made significant advances in just the last century), but … what are you getting so excited about?” 

So perhaps the most amazing thing of all is that amazingness is subjective.

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