Rite and Reason: Where to when science sails into the mystic? asks John Moriarty as Darwin's book takes a tumble on his study floor.
A barrier-reef of books had accumulated around me on the floor, leaving little leg room. One day, midway through a piece I was writing, I decided I must do something about it. Without leaving my high chair, first with the side of my left foot then with the side of my right, I pushed it away from me and as I did so I saw something that intrigued me.
The Voyage of the Beagle had tumbled down into the wide-open, waiting autobiography of St Teresa of Avila. "One great voyage has tumbled into another," I thought. Science had tumbled down into mysticism.
When he was still a young man Nietzsche drew our attention to "a profound illusion that first saw the light of the world in the person of Socrates: the unshakeable faith that thought, using the thread of causality, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being."
If it is Ariadne's thread that he here has in mind then he is saying that it will run out on us long before we reach the end of the ontological labyrinth. From where it runs out, we look into those abysses of being that defy illumination; that aren't penetrable to intelligence; that aren't penetrable, certainly, to what he calls our square little reason.
Where our Ariadne's thread of scientific explanation runs out that is where the Kena Upanishad speaks to us: "There goes neither the eye nor speech nor the mind; we know it not, nor do we see how to teach one about it. Different it is from all that is known and beyond the unknown it also is."
On this reckoning Newton might have done better than he did when he said: "I do not know how I appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding another pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
He might have talked about the great ocean of unknowable being in the things we think we thoroughly know. Or he might have alerted us to the simple fact that the pebble or shell in his hand is something quite other; is for the most part unknowably other than the sum of its explanations, scientific and philosophical.
And since the abysses of being that Nietzsche talks about are as much at the surface of things as in the depths of things it is, as it were, just inside the entrance to the ontological labyrinth that the thread runs out. And it is here, as if we are called to it, that we undergo the dark night of the soul, at the very beginning of which we come to know that activities of the mind are as little able to get us beyond this point as are the activities of the liver or spleen.
St John of the Cross would go further. He would say that from here on our senses and faculties are our domestic foes, at their brightest and best as at their most lethargic - an obstacle to what we seek.
And so, to starboard. To starboard beyond our 19th-century ship of science on its starboard course to a change of course on Galapagos (islands off Ecuador where it is believed Darwin developed his theory of evolution):
"After having been twice driven back by heavy south-western gales, Her Majesty's ship Beagle, a 10-gun brig, under the command of Capt Fitzroy, RN, sailed from Davenport on December 27th, 1831. The object of the expedition was to complete the survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego - to survey the shores of Chile, Peru, and some islands in the Pacific - and to carry a chain of chronometrical measurements around the world."
Ariadne's thread. Fitzroy's chain.How far into what does the thread reach? How much of what it encompasses does the chain enchain? Those questions are our next Galapagos.
Looking ahead, Nietzsche has seen it waiting there for us on the final horizon of science. His response to this insufficiency of mind, even in relation to familiar things - given the ontological depths in them - was a tragic sense of life.
Mystics, of course, haven't settled for this. Certainly mystics of the via negativa or of the janayoga (system of Yoga which teaches deliverance through the acquisition of the right kind of knowledge) type haven't settled for it. To them the thread is in no sense a ne plus ultra. A longing for further blind voyaging in the cloud of unknowing emerged in them there.
To starboard therefore, that surely would be a better response. To starboard beyond stars. To starboard beyond a world made perceptually and conceptually possible by the forms of our sensibility and the categories of our understanding.
To starboard beyond things epistemologically re-estimated as phenomena, phainomena (ancient Greek form of word "phenomena" meaning "things that appear". It is also the title of a 3rd-century BC poem, and a piece of music which explores human fascination with the constellations.)
To starboard, remembering that the first known name - the Spanish name - for Galapagos was Las Islas Encantadas, the Enchanted Isles. As confirmed by early English sailors who thought of them as "shadows and noe reall Islands". This, no doubt, is due to the equatorial mists and fogs that so often enveloped them, merging them indistinguishably with the haze of their surroundings. In a sense, therefore, sometimes they were there, sometimes not.
And how far are we here from capitulation to a Hindu estimation of things as maya? (In Hinduism the goddess Maya represents the constant movement of the universe. There is no life - no existence even - without Maya, but she is so powerful that we cannot see the essence of things and mistake her movement for reality)
So yes, science did take a tumble on my floor. But it was into its final voyage that it tumbled.
John Moriarty, writer and philosopher, lives in Kerry