Question

Give me a essay on the topic mystery

Answer 1

The idea of mystery motivates the production of knowledge, or at least of inquiry. The mystery, an unknown object, or what Alfred Hitchcock called the McGuffin, can be theorized and labelled as the object of inquiry, a marker of potential knowledge.1 In this case, mystery drives the investigation and plots the contours of discourse. It determines the clues, the traces, that one follows (whether scientifically, conjecturally, or faithfully). At the same time, the status of mystery qua mystery lies beyond the field of inquiry. It is that which by definition is unsayable. It signifies the value of knowledge that surpasses human reason and hovers somewhere beyond the limits of current human knowledge. In order to qualify as mystery, "it" (the unutterable) has to remain unknown—or else it becomes something other than mystery.Mystery also shapes the subjectivity of the scholar through its relationship to the secret. The etymology of "secret" refers to a separation of elements. Secretus is connected to the verbs "to hide" and "to withdraw," but it can also mean "to sieve," to set and keep apart. For example, the "divine mystery" is to the secret that separates God from man. But the secret also determines the very separation of disciplines within the academy. Here, the secret marks the passage from the wholeness of wisdom to the increasing fragmentation of separate and mutually closed off knowledge regimes. The secret constitutes the place of the scholar within a clearly demarcated specialism. If this seems farfetched, it is because modernity has abandoned the very idea of the secret as the foundation of difference. The division of knowledge into disciplines might not seem remotely arcane in the current academy, precisely because it seems transparent and self-evident. To put it conversely, the secret becomes so visible that it no longer looks like a secret. Yet this secret that does not seem like a secret, this secret that likes to hide, is precisely what regulates scholarship.