IN MODERN thought the awareness that there is something out there that we are not yet awake enough to see is the engine that drives the investigative mind. Relentless and systematic questioning: this is the spirit of scientific intelligence. In this spirit we dissect to see what connects, we dismember to understand the whole, we kill to catch life in its act.

The hope is that we will at some moment awake to precisely what is before us. We reassure ourselves that there must be a bottom to it all, an irreducible stuff out of which the universe is made or a discoverable set of laws to which the Heraclitean flux is faultlessly obedient. “Now we see in a glass darkly,” Paul said, “then face-to-face.” The investigative mind shares this eschatological fantasy. When we do get to the bottom, not a symbol will remain. All need for interpretation will have passed. What now seems extraordinary will then be simply ordinary. We will gaze at the face of the real as innocent with wonder as a field mouse.

However, this hope, that we will one day see what is there precisely as it is there, is being challenged at the same time that it is growing. And the challenge is coming from those who have most vigorously encouraged the quest to behold the real face to face. The reason is that the closer we get to the real the stranger it becomes, more and more unlike what we expected it to be. The most hardminded researchers into subatomic reality, for example, find themselves drawn into wild speculations about what is really there. We thought they would find a primal dust, a swarm of lifeless and identical realities, the atoms of Epicurus only smaller, that are the building units of all larger, composite beings. But in fact they are describing things more dreamlike than real, more made of empty space than substance. Far from relieving us of all need for interpretation, the need for it has grown. In fact, each attempt to end an interpretation calls for a new and more imaginative interpretation. If philosophy begins in wonder it also ends in wonder.

Although the modern scientific quest reveals levels of reality that reach beyond the limits of all existing knowledge, it is not yet the mystics’ insight that we are known more deeply than we know. The restlessness that drives this quest, however, is a step toward the mystical because it derives from the awareness that the day world knowledge of the waking I is not to be trusted.

This awareness is intensified when it is seen that once interpretation enters, an interpreter enters with it. With all wonder there is a wonderer. No longer can we separate the reality we are looking at from the reality of the looking. What we see depends partly on what is there and partly on who is looking. This is the hermeneutical circle: all seeing is interpreting, all interpreting is the act of the interpreter; therefore, every interpreter must include the act of interpretation in what is being interpreted. For that reason, interpretation never comes to an end. Each new reading of reality carries the seeds of its own contradiction, requiring a still newer reading.

This could be one of the most disturbing elements in the modern quest for knowledge, disturbing because it wakes us from a daydreamer’s certainty to a dawning limitlessness both without and within. It is the contemporary version of Pascal’s terror: a physical reality so vast and a psychic reality so bottomless no place remains for a fixed ego. Yet it is just that insight that puts us at the threshold of a different vision. If philosophy begins and ends in wonder, so does the philosopher.

How to Order the Universe

Make Something Up

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: 1