Philosophy as Embrace of Mystery
Philosophy as Embrace of Mystery
Please join us in Auerbach 320 or online this Wednesday, Sept. 14 from 1 p.m.-2 p.m. for our next meeting of the University of Hartford Philosophy Club as University philosophy professor Brian Skelly presents for discussión the topic: “Philosophy as Embrace of Mystery”.
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In modern times, the notion of mystery has been plagued by the negative connotations of escapism; a bad excuse for lazy minds to remain idle; something blocking intellectual progress; a barrier to be removed. This attitude has for centuries now served in the minds of many as a fulcrum for the denigration of religion and the advancement of science as our definitive escape from millennia of ignorance which had been standing in the way of the advancement of human society. In this view of things, the role philosophy was to play was as the iconoclast, demasking our lingering narratives of ineffable forces guiding fate and the preservation of our being and the world around us to show them for the superstitions they really are, paving the way for them to be replaced by sound scientific explanation.
This movement came to a head in the twentieth century at the hands of philosophers of a neo-positivist bent, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, A.J. Ayer, and Bertrand Russell. If these or their like gave some role to religion at all – and some did – it was a role that had nothing to do with truth or the way things really are. In particular, they were averse to the notion that there are genuine mysteries to be pondered in a manner that could increase our knowledge without dispelling the mystery itself. Within this tradition of thought, mysteries were seen as sham constructions obscuring our understanding of things rather than enlightening us, setting us off-track from the progress we could be making.
To be sure, those of this particular tradition opposing the notion of genuine mysteries might have accepted that there were some things we just cannot know, but if there are such things, then they are things the incessant wondering and marveling about will bring us no profit while wasting our time and effort and possibly even muddling our thoughts.
In this regard, Bertrand Russell’s characterization of the relationship between science on the one hand and religion, theology, etc. – what we might call the “(pseudo-) sciences of mystery” – was that the latter served as place keepers for the former; that earlier on, the mystery sciences gave us accounts of things just to have a unified account of them that would allow us to get by in our everyday dealings, speech and conversation; but that as time goes on, science would gradually replace these narratives with non-mysterious explanations of its own, until finally there presumably would be no mysteries left. Engendered in this idea is the expectation that religion was but a temporary phenomenon of human experience. This expectation of the eventual obsolescence of religion was popular throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to this day is still embraced in some form or other by more than a few. Again, not all the neo-positivists were convinced that religion had no permanent role to play in our lives, but they all agreed that that role, whatever it may be, had nothing to do with gaining knowledge.
All of this prompts the seeking of clarification on what mystery is in the first place. I suspect that once we make this clarification, we will notice that the argument against “mystery science” has been in large part a “straw man” effort, relying on the worst assumptions of what mystery can be taken to be in order to railroad it out of existence in the public forum. Instead, I propose we play fair and give ourselves the best shot at grasping what mystery is or can be before we decide whether mystery science is a productive or counterproductive enterprise.
(Complete paper attached.)
An ongoing weekly tradition at the University since 2001, the University of Hartford Philosophy Club is a place where students, professors, and people from the community at large meet as peers. Sometimes presentations are given, followed by discussion. Other times, topics are hashed out by the whole group.
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