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Again, both these positions are wrong.

First, that the world may only be understood by us in


relation to human understanding does not mean that it does not make sense to talk of aspects
of the world that may elude that understanding. Second, that the world is as it is independently
of our human understanding does not mean that we may be able to fully understand how the
world is. This leaves a non-comprehensible aspect of the world, a mystery. We may sense that
mystery, become aware of it, albeit in indirect ways. We may attune to it not by some
extraordinary act of visionary contemplation, but by engaging with awareness in the everyday
things we do: walking in a garden, listening to music, feeling the wind on our faces and sun
on our heads. We may then be aware that there are things that are beyond us.

Why should we think this view is correct? Here a bit of philosophical background is needed.
It might be supposed that to understand reality the thing to do would be to strip that
understanding of all that makes our perspective, and come to see things in a totally impartial,
disinterested way — a view from nowhere. This is what René Descartes had in mind as the
“absolute conception.” But it turns out there is a flaw in this plan — and we find a critique of
it in the works of Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
and Ludwig Wittgenstein — namely, that it gives no credit to the way in which any concepts
we might use to think about the world arise. That way is only through our active, interested
engagement in the world as reflects the contingently embodied partial creatures that we are. A
simple example: Things are out of reach to us in a quite different sense from that of a bird.
Take those kinds of considerations away and there would be no ways any world delineated in
concepts, any understanding, would arise at all, and so nothing would “ex-ist” in the literal
sense of “stand out” — at best, the world would be an undifferentiated homogeneity.

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