“Hoping for a big tent in which it is understood that disagreement is the price to be paid for exploring important ideas.”
Transcendent Thought.—That a state of affairs is incomprehensible is for us no objection to it. The human imagination is not a metric by which to distinguish reality from appearance, the true from the false, the sacred from the profane—with degree of reality presumptively corresponding proportionally to degree of comprehension. We can determine clearly enough the conditions under which the human imagination took shape—the environment of our evolutionary adaptedness, which, in the case of cognitive evolution no less than biological evolution, is ongoing. As with transitional forms of life, all forms of thought are transitional with the exception of the final form, which is the penultimate form of extinction. The incomprehensible is our spur to thought that transcends familiar categories of understanding, and so it places all previous thought in a more comprehensive perspective—with perfect irony, the incomprehensible is a necessary condition to attaining comprehension of a higher order. On occasion, the higher order of comprehension is revealed to us in an intuitive breakthrough in which a novel conception suddenly opens a new perspective on our familiar understanding of the world. Perhaps more often, it is our slow, incremental reconciliation with the counterintuitive, forced upon us through repetition with increasing clarity, that gradually extends our ability to conceptualize the incomprehensible, bringing that formerly beyond our scope within the purview of the human mind. The strangeness of the world forces itself upon us, and we must respond with equally strange forms of thought and understanding.