In the last few centuries, everyone has been talking about ‘cognition’ and a ‘picture of the world’, but it is fair to say that what we do not know, our ideas about the unknown, or at least our belief in the existence of this unknown, are no less important than cognition and a picture of the world. The unknown in this painting forms the background, the base over which the colours are applied, and which here and there shines through in places where there was not enough colour — or rather, where the artist did not know what to depict. ‘Enlightenment’, as a certain inclination of mind, as a certain intellectual faith, dreams of a world in which the unknown is either absent or exists only temporarily; its aim is the complete knowledge and then the conquest of the world. What we know we can control. To look at the world scientifically means to see it as a mechanism, the structure of which we do not know completely, but in time we will be able to find out. Then the world will become controllable, man will truly become ‘like God’… and will go to his grave satisfied with power over a star and over the smallest grain of sand. (In short, this is what science fiction of the last century, especially Lem and the Strugatsky brothers, wrote about with such fervour. I do not touch here the question of how much omnipotence can give a person happiness. Personally, I doubt it very much.) In other words, the scientific picture of the world is a picture that has no background. Here everything is on the surface; everything unknown is contained in the already known, and there is no layer on which one could not see the outlines of the whole picture. The scientifically understood world, it is no exaggeration to say, is a world without mystery.

I don’t think even a cardboard sword should be raised against this fantasy. It is as implausible as Rousseau’s doctrine of the natural goodness of man, as the belief in an infallible ‘majority vote’, as ‘historical materialism’ as the final explanation of social development… Yet the belief in this implausibility has grown and now dominates minds; the dogma of the absence of mystery, if I may say so, is unquestioned. The temptation of our days is false omniscience, the belief in science as possessing knowledge of everything. There is no nonsense or absurdity that cannot be introduced into the mainstream with the words ‘scientifically proven’. The disappearance of mystery destroyed the mental horizon and the sense of perspective associated with it. Mystery was such a horizon, as one approached it, all mental perceptions diminished, faded into mist, only to gradually fade away. The sense of the unknown on the horizon ennobled the mind, protecting it from self-deception.

Кonstantin Leontiev once joked unkindly about the study of ‘the nervous system of a sea cockroach’ as an exemplary example of obtaining unnecessary knowledge, and predicted the time when the craving for such studies would disappear. But is it the cockroach? Research into the smallest details is neither bad nor good in itself — as long as we recognise the unknown and the unknowable. The sun of the unknowable on the horizon lends humility to the researcher as long as he sees it. In our time we have to agree with Leontiev: since the expulsion of mystery from the universe, the notorious ‘nervous system of the sea cockroach’ acquires a completely alien to science, an added significance of another confirmation of human omniscience. ‘If I know this too, what has not been revealed to me?’

All this is not so ridiculous as it may seem. The freedom with which the researcher of our day reaches into the past, into the future, generalises and deduces laws would have seemed inexplicable to the positivist of past times, who may have condemned Christianity for its dogmatic, i. e. critically unverifiable and unintelligible content, but who himself avoided any conclusion that was not supported by positive facts. The positivist was, so to speak, constrained by the rules of the game he himself recognised, and could therefore boldly say of the world’s mysteries, ‘Ignoramus et ignorabimus!’, ‘We do not know and we shall not know!’ (Emil du Bois-Reymond, 1880). Modern thinking has a different task: to prevent the very thought of a mystery, especially an unknowable one.

What cannot be explained can be hidden. A whole series of questions (the origin of life, the development of animal species, the origin of man, mental life) are excluded from discussion. In relation to them, the all-powerful experimental method is powerless; they do not possess ‘repeatability under identical conditions’ — an indispensable property of everything that can be caught in the net of law; therefore, all these mysteries are considered to be supposedly solved — i. e. conditionally explained on the basis of some unprovable assumptions or comparisons (the work of consciousness, for example, is compared to the work of a computing device; the activity of ‘natural selection’ — to the efforts of a designer or inventor). There is no universe without mysteries — there is only appearance, the habit of not looking at the dark, unpainted places of the picture.

Timofey Sherudilo.
From the book Knowledge and Creativity: Essays on Culture.

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