23 • The mystery of wonder and awe
What is phenomenologically mysterious isn’t necessarily also inexplicable. Differentiating between propositional and perspectival knowing, we can understand the mystery of relevance realization.
Accepting the limitations of our fundamental framing, the grounding of our experience, enables us to sharpen our intuition about what lies beyond. What we can’t fully conceptualize and precisely define, we can still grasp with our deeper ways of knowing.
Or as Christopher Alexander would put: We can feel it.
An atmosphere of significance
I want to read you a couple of quotes from an article by Paolo Costa in a book called The Joy of Secularism. He has a fantastic article there called A Secular Wonder, and he wants to try to explain what's going on in wonder.
And think about wonder! Think about how it's pointing towards the insight, the sense of opening up, but also the connectedness. How it’s perspectival and participatory. How it involves your caring. How it often can merge with awe and altered states and potentially higher states [of consciousness]. Wonder is central.
Notice the machinery he uses to explain wonder. This is a quote:
The very ordinary fact that things always “matter” in some way or other to us, and that we cannot help but be affected by things as if we were immersed in a sort of bubble of meaningfulness…
Notice it's the relevance realization, how things matter to us. And he uses the word "matter", because it's that importance, that constitutive kind of relevance realization, and we're immersed in it.
…or better in an atmosphere of significance, an import [notice the word "import" is already here] that we do not create from scratch.
We do not create it, but are absorbed by.
The metaphor of the atmosphere should see that it's not only the image of a global container, but also of a rhythm of breathing…
The compression and particularization. The generalization and the specialization. The assimilation and the accommodation. The breathing — the lifeblood of our spirit.
…and of a light refraction…
It's doing relevance realization! It's refracting the light, structuring the intelligibility.
…to which a living being must [listen to this word:] attune or adjust herself.
All the participatory knowing. This is from somebody who's commenting on secularism!
He goes on to point out there's a central consequence of what he calls a "bubble of significance". This is another quote:
The experience of having a world [Hear the Heidegger in here?] has its roots, not in a head on and focused relationship with a clearcut object,…
It is not something that we have as a focal object, something that we can objectify with an "I-it" conceptualization.
…but in the emergence of a bubble of significance that for a sentient being plays the same role that is played by the atmosphere with regard to the earth.
You participate in the atmosphere. You contribute to it, but you emerge from it. And you did not make it.
It creates, that is, special conditions of life where existentially crucial distinctions between inside and outside are drawn.
That primordial ground makes all the distinctions between the inner and the outer possible for us. The transjectivity is deeper than our subjectivity and our objectivity, because the constitution of subjectivity and objectivity require all of this machinery.
He then goes on to argue that because we aren't aware of the atmosphere in a focal, objectified way — I mean as a perceptually focalized object, I don't mean as an object of thought — he then goes on to argue that:
The atmospheric nature of the bubble of significance means that we don't experience it as a focal object, but through non-focal states such as [and here's the point of his article] wonder and awe.
Or, I would add, their opposites (which we'll talk about later): absurdity and horror.
Relevance realization creates in our minds a world made out of objects and our self. The inner working of this machinery is not directly accessible to our conscious thinking, because conscious thinking itself is made possible by it, emerges out of it.
There is, however, a residue of this process that bleeds into our experience. Because of its nature, we cannot become focally aware of it. But we experience it through non-focal states of wonder and awe.
The deepest experience of order
Christopher Alexander in The Nature of Order, book 1, The Phenomenon of Life [highlights mine]:
In a few cases, life in a thing, or in a person, or in an action, or in a building, reaches a level of intensity which is truly remarkable. This can happen in a work of art, or in a person’s life, or in a moment of a day.
Above all, it does sometimes happen in buildings and in artifacts. It is this melted unity, this deepest experience of order that we experience with wonder, which is the real target of this book, since it is this quality which we are most often trying to reach when we make a building.
What impresses us about all these examples is that they have a kind of blitheness or serenity, an innocent and simple quality. Their depth is not a mechanical composition: there is a truth, an easiness, about many of these things. Their easiness takes the breath away. They arrive at a simplicity and truthfulness which ring an echo in us — sometimes perhaps even make us weak in the knees. Somehow these works remind us of the essence of life. They have a simplicity beyond artifice.
Wonder and awe
Wonder is that state in which we become aware, not in a focal way, but in a perspectival and participatory way, of the significance, and our involvement, and our indebtedness to, and our participation from, and our committedness to the atmosphere of relevance realization.
I'm worried here about being sacrilegious, so I’m using this analogously, but the analogy is meant to be a strong one also: This atmosphere — you see what Costa is doing here? He's invoking what Saint Paul said: “God is in whom we live and move and have our being”.
I'm not claiming that relevance realization is God. That's ridiculous. I'm not doing that. But what I'm saying is: Wonder and awe, which are often directed towards things like God, are ways that Costa is arguing in which we disclose the relevance realization and it's spiritual significance to us. The way in which, within it we live and move and have our being. Again, this is from a person who is trying to articulate a secular sense of spirituality!
Now, somebody who is aligned with this, but I don't think is secular, is the masterful work by Robert Fuller on wonder. His book on wonder is just a fantastic book, and he also argues how central wonder is. Now what’s interesting: He does two things that align with [religio] so well, and I highly recommend this book because it's a book “From Emotion to Spirituality”.
What Fuller argues, is that of course wonder is responsible for some of our deepest spiritual experiences, our deepest experiences of what I'm calling religio. But he does that by precisely explaining the fundamental functionality of things like wonder.
Wonder is basically in the being mode where curiosity is in the having mode. I'm using these terms in their prototypical senses. We use these terms in various slippery fashions. […] I'm talking about the kind of wonder that can overlap very readily and prototypically with awe, and I'm talking about the kind of curiosity that overlaps prototypically with our solving our problems and our manipulating the world in a way that we find powerful and efficacious. It's not that one mode is good and the other mode is bad.
You've got curiosity within the having mode, and that's great, because curiosity is problem solving. It's focused, it has a focal object. Curiosity is directed: “What is that? What does that do? How does that work?”
Wonder is, it's not focal, it's the opening up. It's the awe, it's the sense of the atmosphere. It's the perspectival and participatory sense of “Oh! Oh! Ahhh!”
And what Fuller argues is — and he makes use of people like Fredrickson and others — this emotion, the point of wonder is: If curiosity gets you to focus in on specific features of the world, specific objects, wonder tries to get you to participate in the gestalt, the whole. How does it all fit together?
Awe pushes you towards on opening, an ongoing accommodation, a sense of the inexhaustibleness, the combinatorial explosive nature of reality, and the ongoing evolving adaptability of your relevance realization to that explosive potential within reality itself. That's what wonder does. Wonder isn't about solving a problem, wonder is about remembering sati, your being, by putting you deeply in touch (notice the language) in touch with religio.
We live in a world that worships the having mode, curiosity, problem solving, directed attention towards features, keeping things under control. We are modally confused. At the same time our capacity to open up towards the gestalt, towards wholeness, towards experiencing wonder atrophied. We do not remember the being mode. We are not deeply in touch with the world, with others, and with our self, in a perspectival and participatory way.
Like the fish asked “How’s the water today?” responds “What is water?” we have lost connection to the atmosphere of significance we’re immersed in. That atmosphere grounds all our cognition, all our conscious thought, and makes possible our capacity to focus on features to solve problems. But we have lost touch to that ground and only see the effects.
What if we trained ourselves to look the other way?
Mystery
Think about wonder, think about awe and what we've been talking about, and this remembering of the being mode, which is so central to spirituality. That's another aspect of this.
Think about [awe] as accommodation, that opening up. When I accommodate, I come to know something by how I am transformed, in order to come into contact with it, and in my self-knowing of how I've changed, and the disclosure, my realization of that, what that is, are bound together. Prototypically when you're in love with somebody, Da’ath. This is accommodation and it's in the being mode, you're remembering sati.
In the being mode, you're confronting a mystery. […] I'm opening up, and my insight goes from a reframing to a transframing, because I stopped having insights about my focal problem. I start getting an insight, not about just the problem or the world, […] I'm also getting an insight of the inadequacies of my style of framing, my way of framing. I'm getting a transframing happening.
You get this trajectory of transframing. It doesn't stabilize, and that's the point — it can't land on a focal object. All it’s disclosing in the trajectory of transframing is the machinery of religio. And yet you find that — like flow — deeply meaningful, to a point. If it's pushed too far, it becomes deeply meaningful in a negative sense, of horror.
Phenomenological mystery vs. things we can’t explain
[…] There's a distinction between something being a phenomenological mystery and it being something that I cannot theoretically explain. To equate them is to equivocate between propositional and perspectival knowing, for example, and we should not equivocate between them because they're not identical.
For example, it is phenomenologically impossible for me to perspectively know what it is like to be dead. Because whenever I try to conjure up a frame, […] no matter what I do, I can't get a framing that has within it my own non-existence, perspectively. But that is not proof that I'm immortal. It is not proof that I've existed for all time. Of course not, that's ridiculous! That's a mistake. That's an equivocation.
[…] You need an additional argument to go from phenomenological mystery to the claim of theoretical inexplicability. They do not follow because they are not identical for the deep reason that propositional and perspectival knowing are not identical. That is an equivocation.
I'm talking about a phenomenological mystery here.
The mystery of relevance realization
What is at the core of Religio? The death example actually points to something more primordial. It points to the fact that I can never make a focal object of my framing, my capacity for relevance realization. I mean, perspectively.
What I mean by that is: Whenever I am thinking or doing anything, it's always framed, because if I'm unframed, I'm facing combinatorial explosion, which is not intelligible to me. So whatever I'm thinking of is inside the frame. But what is precisely not inside the frame is the framing process. […] It is mysterious. It is phenomenologically mysterious.
[…] It is phenomenologically mysterious to [me], but it doesn't mean that I'm unaware of it. I always have […] a subsidiary awareness. I'm always aware through my “I” of my “me”. I'm always aware through my framing of my frame. I'm not completely out of touch with it. It is not inaccessible to me, but I cannot focalize it. I cannot make it a focal object. I cannot frame it.
The machinery of relevance realization is in that sense deeply phenomenologically mysterious to me. It doesn't mean I can't talk about it theoretically — I've just been doing it. But it has a deep phenomenological mystery to me.
The fact that it grounds, it makes possible my subjectivity and the objectivity, where what I mean by that is: things constellated into objects that we can make inferences about, etc. I can't use the grammar of subjects and objects, subjects and predicates, conceptual categories to talk about [relevance realization and transjectivity] in the sense of exemplifying it.
I can use words to talk about it, in the sense of pointing to it, but I can't produce it in subjective and objective categories, precisely because the whole argument points towards its transjective nature. Again, that only makes it phenomenologically mysterious. It doesn't make it a theoretical inexplicability.
You cannot confuse properties of your theory with properties of what your theory is about:
If I have a theory of light, it itself isn't light.
If I have a theory of war, my theory isn't itself an instance of war.
If I have a theory of gravity, my theory isn’t itself generating gravity.
My theory of vagueness doesn't itself have to be vague.
In fact, my theory of vagueness should be clear.My theory doesn't have to exemplify what it's talking about. And there are cases where it cannot exemplify what it is talking about. But that doesn't mean I can't talk about what I'm talking about. It has to be that I have to understand the limitations that are given by the differences between the kinds of knowing, and also the ways in which I can and cannot bridge between these kinds of knowing.
There's something deeply phenomenologically mysterious. And in that mystery, the mystery opens up an affordance of a trajectory of transframing that allows us to participate in, perspectively, the kind of wonder and awe of religio.
You can get into something very much like a “transjective trajectory flow state” in which we are basically celebrating, in flow, our participation in religio. And we do this, I would argue, for the very good reason that to make significant, to reflect upon, to celebrate and enact religio is to fundamentally enhance our agency, the disclosure of the world, and our connectedness to it.
And what else could be more valuable to us?
It seems to be in our nature to get to the bottom of this, to reflect, find significance, enhance our agency, and get in touch with reality — to try to reach the ground.
Unfortunately, tangled in our modal confusion and caught up in the propositional tyranny of our ideologies, we are only left with problems to solve. It has become incredibly difficult for us to pick out from the noise the silent whisper of our intuition, wanting us to confront mystery instead, and begin to live up to our potential.
The feeling is clear. Only the effort to find a theory to justify your intuition might confuse you.
— Christopher Alexander (in The Nature of Order, book 1)
Mirror of the Self is a weekly newsletter series trying to explain the connection between creators and their creations, and analyze the process of crafting beautiful objects, products, and art. Using recent works of cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and design theorist Christopher Alexander, we embark on a journey to find out what enables us to create meaningful things that inspire awe and wonder in the people that know, use, and love them.
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