TEHRAN - Mark Tebbit, a lecturer at the University of Reading, says “we are surrounded” by mysteries and problems. 

However, Tebbit says there is no “sharp or clear-cut” distinction between mysteries and problems in humanities and social science.

Tebbit made the remarks in an interview with the Mehr News Agency when asked whether there is a sharp distinction between mysteries and problems in philosophy, humanities and social science. 

A: My answer is that yes, there is an important distinction, but it is not a sharp or clear-cut one. Consider what we are talking about here. Mysteries and problems. Baffling enigmas. Secrets and lies. These are different ways of referring to closely connected experiences, all of which are the driving forces of human life. We are surrounded by them. They are intertwined. Mystery-confronters and problem-solvers – this is what we are. There is even a case for saying that these activities are constitutive of consciousness, from the stage of pre-reflective awareness onwards. The urge to uncover and disclose hidden truths is universal, even in the most primitive of thinking organisms. As the most rational of creatures, our very survival has rested upon refining the ability to devise new methods to transform life-threatening problems into solvable ones. So there is an intimate connection between a mystery – where initially no explanation for strange or unaccountable phenomena presents itself – and a problem, which articulates that mystery into clear and definite shape. With mysteries, we are looking into the dark; with their formulation as problems we are beginning to shine light into the darkness. Mysteries are usually elusive, often hard to grasp or pin down. Problems are not. There is more daylight about problems. Mysteries are associated with darkness or the half-light of dawn or dusk.

Nevertheless, with a selective reading of the connotations of each concept, the two can be interpreted as synonymous, such that to call something a problem is another way of saying that it is as yet a mystery. The solving of one is simply the dissolution of the other.  There are standard ‘problems’ as taught in contemporary philosophy. For example, the problem of knowledge, the religious problem of evil, the mind-body problem. One would not want to substitute the word ‘mystery’ here.  One does not speak of the theological ‘mystery’ of evil. The mystery relates to the nature of God. The problem or question of how He can allow evil is derived from it. The problem of how two completely unalike stuffs as mind and matter can touch one another is generated by the mysterious nature of each so-called ‘substance’. The mystery of our ability to grasp truth lies behind the problem of knowledge. The truth of it is that structures of problems have been explored and articulated in response to more fundamental mysteries about their sources. Conversely, one would not speak of ‘the problem of God’, when one means the mystery of God, or the mysterium tremendum. Nevertheless, in practice, the language blurs the distinction between problem and mystery. Think of the so-called problem of consciousness. Here the words are used interchangeably. For some, the problem of consciousness just is the mystery of consciousness. There has been an urgency about these debates, stemming it seems from a widespread belief that it is desperately important to ‘crack’ the secret of consciousness, of what it is in itself and in relation to everything it is not, which is to say ‘matter’.  Leave aside the questionable use of this word throughout the history of metaphysics, to stand for every ontological entity that is drained of any hint of consciousness, awareness, mentality – as if we could ever understand such a thing. Allow that there is such a type of thing as matter. Is its very existence a mystery or a problem? Some would say both. To resolve its mystery, to explain to ourselves exactly what it is, where it comes from and why there is anything at all rather than nothing, would at the same time solve the problem of how matter relates to mind, because if we now knew what it was we would be in the kind of relationship with it that we were looking for. So solving the mystery would be the solution of the problem. Thus the distinction is elided.

 

Similarly, in the contemporary world of scientific research, the distinction is rarely noticed. When a particle physicist sees a specific set of problems as a mystery or complex of mysteries to unravel, as part of a great project to move towards an ever more complete understanding and exploration of the structure of the atom and the identification of the most fundamental constituents of existence, problem and mystery become two sides of the same coin. The distinction is lost, it is no longer even recognized. Since the advent of the early modern philosophical and scientific project to rationalize the world along mechanistic lines, to shine its searchlight into every corner of the human mind and the natural world, there has been a continuous line of resistance, from proto-romanticism to existentialism and beyond, affirming the essential dark mystery at the heart of all individuals and things, defending the irrationality and irreducibility of the creative imagination. On the brink of modernity, Shakespeare had Hamlet admonishing the spies of the court that they would play him like a musical organ, that they would pluck out the heart of his mystery. What the spies want to know is whether he has assassination on his mind; what is at stake for Hamlet, expressing the anguish of modern man, is his very existence. In modern philosophy, we find Gabriel Marcel’s view of our broken world exhibiting a discordance and asymmetry between the mysteries of existence and the problems of the sciences, problems devoid of this existential dimension. This line of thought is always haunted by the paradox that mysteries at once demand and defy solutions. They cannot be locked away in intellectual museums. Without the perpetual attempts to confront and resolve  them, they lose their power and die. This paradox is the source of their fascination. Mysteries can be terrifying or sublime. They can be exhilarating. They can have elegance, power and beauty. In the end, problems are just problems. 

Let me allow Einstein the last word. “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science”.