We began with Einstein's awestruck observation that the comprehensibility of the world is “an eternal mystery”. The reach of our understanding seems to be incomprehensible, especially in the light of what we know about ourselves. Attempts to eliminate the mystery by closing the gap between the comprehending mind and the world it comprehends proved unsatisfactory. Locating the world inside the mind (Chapter 3) and making the mind part of the material world (Chapter 4) were equally unconvincing. Indeed, the latter approach, which treated us as a piece of nature, and consequently an object of scientific knowledge, made even everyday knowledge, never mind higher-level understanding of the world, entirely incomprehensible. Our scientific image of the world and of our place in it does not seem to be able to accommodate the very faculties that we must have to form such an image.

In subsequent chapters, we identified reasons why we might expect the comprehensibility of the world, however impressive, to remain only partial, although it still exceeds what we might reasonably expect. The knowing subject proved to be a necessary condition of, as well as a constraint on, objective knowledge. Disinfecting cognition of the contamination of the subject (Chapter 5) would be close to being self-contradictory. Knowledge requires to be known by someone – an embodied someone: it is impossible to envisage what-is as having a subjectless view on itself. That someone, however, would always have access to the body of knowledge arrived at, and held in trust by, a vast community of minds. What is more, sense-making, and more specifically, knowing-that – “thatter” – requires a distance between mind and the world it comprehends (Chapter 6). Given that knowledge is a relationship between two independent relata – the knower and the known – the conformity of the latter to the former is deeply problematic. Indeed, the standing of the object of knowledge as an object – distinct from what is known – implies that it should have a residual, irreducible opacity; that there should be something senseless at its heart compounding the opacity of the embodied subject (Chapter 7).

Mysteries are an affront to reason. One response is to deflate them. In the case of the “eternal mystery” of “the comprehensibility of the world”, such an approach may take the form of collapsing the distance between the comprehending mind and that which it comprehends. That this merely displaces, rather than solves or dissolves, the mystery will become clear; but it is worth dwelling on this way of dealing with Einstein's mystery because it has played an important part in the history of thought and of our sense of who and what we are.

The gap can be closed in either of two ways. According to idealistic philosophy, the comprehended natural world is internal to the mind that comprehends it. I shall examine this view, through its most influential exponent Immanuel Kant, in the present chapter. The opposite view is that our minds are internal to, through being the product of, nature. Our capacity to comprehend the world, the argument goes, is not in the least bit surprising because it is a necessary precondition of the existence and survival of those organisms that have minds. This view, most explicitly developed in evolutionary epistemology, will be the subject of the next chapter. The two approaches can be seen as opposite responses to Plotinus’ luminous question. For idealism, the eye sees the sun because the sun is eye-like; while for naturalistic (materialistic) epistemology eyesight is sun-like, being fashioned out of the same material and subject to the same forces as the sun.

Before I address the first option, the eye-like sun, I need perhaps to defend my choice of philosopher. Why Kant? There are, after all, purer versions of idealism, most notoriously that of George Berkeley the eighteenth-century empiricist philosopher for whom reality consisted solely of minds and their ideas. Such idealism however removes, rather than addresses Einstein's mystery: the comprehended world is dissolved without remainder into the comprehending mind. This generates two problems: the origin of a common world distinct from individual minds (to be solved only by appeal to God-the-Perceiver who upholds such a world); and accommodating the process by which the knowing mind comes to acquire (only) partial and progressive knowledge and understanding of its world.

The irreducible knottiness of the present investigation will be apparent from its most succinct characterization: to make sense of the fact that we make sense of the world; or to make better sense of the fact that we progress (or seem to progress) towards better sense of the world. Thus characterized, it wears on its sleeve the impossibility it has in common with many philosophical inquiries. Trying to understand time notwithstanding that we are temporal beings, endeavouring to characterize the stuff of the universe of which we ourselves are a part, or consciously striving to get an outside view of consciousness – these seem equally self-undermining projects.

The present engagement with the enigma of the sense-making animal is a late entry into a very long conversation that has engaged innumerable thinkers approaching the matter from a variety of starting points. It may therefore be helpful to glance back at some ways in which the intelligibility of the world has been viewed. It is salutary to be aware of the struggles of those who have gone before us.

What follows is not a scholarly inquiry. I am not sufficiently deluded to imagine that I can do justice to such a vast and complex aspect of our cognitive past; even less deepen our understanding of it. It has the more modest aim of placing in a wider context the present attempt to get to grips with the fact that our minds seem to make more sense of more of the universe than one might reasonably expect. The mysterious, even miraculous, relationship between our individual and collective intelligence and the seemingly intelligible order of the world is one that has exercised some of the most luminous minds. While the focus in this book will be secular, some of the most influential and profound responses to the mystery of intelligibility have involved a third party – God – mediating between mind and world and He will dominate in the present chapter.

Logos lies at the heart of the attempt to understand human understanding. The word (term, concept, idea) has waymarked a long journey of self-reflection weaving between religious and secular attempts to understand our understanding.

We have set aside two explanations as to how we can comprehend (at least in part) a world that so vastly outsizes us. The first (Kantian) explanation is that this is possible because the comprehended world is folded inside the comprehending mind. This, however, leaves the problem of accounting for the sense of a world outside of the mind of which we have incomplete knowledge. If extra-mental reality is a featureless noumenon, then we must find within ourselves the difference between what we feel we are and what we feel we know. The experiencable Other loses its opacity and, indeed, its otherness. It is difficult, moreover, to understand how the Kantian transcendental subject fails to be all-powerful, if it creates the context (the world) in which it both exerts its power and experiences its limitations. The opposite explanation that the mind is attuned to the world as a matter of biological necessity – the mind is wrapped in the natural world – proves equally flawed as an attempt to deflate the mystery of the comprehensibility of the world. There is nothing in biological processes that seems able either to generate mind or to account for its putative value as a condition of enhanced replicative power. Besides, if there is only nature, then the fact that mind is “about” nature remains unexplained. Organisms, as part of nature and subject to its laws, do not seem to have the wherewithal to generate the kind of distance explicit in intentionality. The determined attempts to eliminate intentionality by many philosophers committed to naturalism is striking testimony to this. Moreover, in both Kantian idealism and the various forms of naturalism, the gradual, laborious acquisition of explicitly incomplete knowledge is equally without explanation. The problem of the intelligibility of the world returns with an added force when we consider the nature of the being – the fallible human subject – that comprehends the world.

The cognitive progress of humanity is typically presented as being characterized by, and dependent upon, progressive escape from the subjectivity of the knowing subject. Minds, it seems, understand the world only by overcoming some fundamental aspects of themselves.

The greatest mysteries are those we are most likely to overlook, because they are the ground on which we stand when we puzzle over things that surprise us. Chief among these is the very fact – though “fact” is hopelessly inadequate – that the world makes sense to us. As Einstein observed, “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility”.

A couple of decades earlier Einstein believed he had come close to fulfilling the Pythagorean dream of discovering the mathematical structure of the natural world – of space, time, and the entities occupying or taking place in them – and rendered the material universe transparent to thought. His euphoria was short-lived. Quantum mechanics – a seemingly unintelligible but immensely powerful way of describing the physical world and an incompatible complement of general relativity – came to occupy more and more explanatory space. Nevertheless, Einstein's surprise, and delight, his wonder, remain valid: even the partial intelligibility of the world is mystery enough. The conflict between these two spectacularly successful theories did not make their theoretical and practical potency any less astonishing.

That the world makes sense and we make sense of the world and of ourselves in the world whose givens impose a kind of sense on us is a many-layered miracle. Even those who do notice it – artists, theologians, philosophers, scientists – do so only intermittently. Typically, it is the (local) failure of sense that provokes us into thought. Otherwise we are too complicit in the necessary assumptions of common sense, paying sufficient attention to get by but not enough to see the extraordinary stuff out of which its fabric is made. We rarely wake to the miracle of our wakefulness and the possibility of waking out of it to some more illuminated state.

Of course, if we did not make moment-to-moment sense of what was going on around us, there would be no “us”. Inhabiting an entirely unintelligible world in which nothing could be understood, anticipated, or acted upon with reliable consequences, would be incompatible with inhabiting.

But there is no “of course” even about this. That human existence requires a more or less intelligible world simply moves the mystery on.

It is time to conclude our inquiry into the sense-making animal, our endeavour to understand or (if that is too ambitious) to see a little more clearly the fact that we are able at least in part to comprehend the universe and that we seem to progress to ever higher or more complete levels of comprehension. This becomes all the more extraordinary as cognitive advance enlarges the scale of its own object. We have always been pin-pricks in a world that out-sizes us many-fold but the billions of light years that now routinely populate our conversations have reduced us proportionately. It is even more remarkable, given that we cannot get ourselves out of the way as the necessary subjects of knowledge and, as Nagel puts it, “our ambitions of transcendence” have to be combined “with recognition of our contingency, our finitude, and our containment in the world”. The very idea of total understanding is inescapably absurd but the history of thought it has prompted is “great by what it finds”.

We have always been smaller than what we know: if we are great in virtue of our knowledge, we are minute in the light of that knowledge. This is evident, at the level of perception, in our visual field, where we are located at the centre of a space given all at once that may exceed many-thousand-fold the volume occupied by our bodies. The widening, encircling horizon shrinks us to a mustard grain. Vision is the metaphor of knowledge – and for good reasons. Knowledge is mediated awareness: I can access that object over there without being in direct contact with it. This asymmetry liberates us from the equality of action and reaction that is evident in touch, where I am pressed by that which I palpate. The inequality of the seer and the seen empowers the seers even at the cost of their feeling dwarfed by the vastness of the visual field.

So much, then, for the notion – in its most powerfully worked out form of Kantian philosophy – that the power of mind to make (at least partial) sense of the world is explicable because the world is in some, admittedly difficult to grasp sense, inside the mind. What of the opposite view, currently more fashionable, at least in anglophone philosophy, that the world is intelligible and the mind makes accurate and truthful sense of the world because it is shaped, even created, by the world of which it is making sense? Instead of the “outside world” being inside the mind, the mind itself is outside in sense of being part of nature.

It is difficult to grasp this directly as a metaphysical thesis. The troubling ambiguity of the relationship between “mind-in-general” and “individual minds” which we identified in Kant's transcendental idealism remains unresolved in the naturalization of the mind and its knowledge. “Mind-in-general” in “the world as a whole” sounds dangerously like panpsychism; and if we are talking about individual minds, they seem to be located in an outside that they have not themselves constructed. The problem of how their sense-making capacity exceeds their, presumably organic, basis, returns. Even so, it is instructive to examine the form the naturalizing thesis most commonly takes in contemporary philosophy: evolutionary epistemology. Evolutionary epistemology is anchored in the individual experience and needs of the living organism.

The central claim is that even the kind of high-level sense-making that we are concerned with boils down to a form of awareness that shapes and guides behaviour necessary for survival. What astonished Einstein, so the claim goes, is less astonishing because it is ultimately an expression of a necessary biological function of the organism. The world must make sense to sentient creatures like ourselves otherwise we would not survive. Getting things right is a matter of life and death; and creatures that did not get things right simply would not exist. If we did not make moment-to-moment sense of what was going on around us, there would be no “us”. Inhabiting an entirely unintelligible world in which nothing could be understood, anticipated, or acted upon with reliable consequences, would be incompatible with life.

We have arrived at the image of ourselves as sense-making animals facing the world, individual representatives of a community of minds. This was an affirmative note since it underlined the extent to which we are liberated, through thatter, particularly in the form of knowledge, from our material surroundings and indeed from the biological mire that supports sentience. Our flesh of course is a necessary condition of our being sense-making animals; and the needs of the flesh give sense-making its primary, although not its sole, purpose, contributing overwhelmingly to its content, in virtue of supplying the needs that are its first and last agenda. Those needs are, of course, transformed over history and the viewpoint from which that agenda is pursued and its knowledge is acquired and organised is not socketed in an ecological niche as is the case with other animals. Looking on a world that for the most part does not look back at us, is the ultimate basis for our ability to bring about events, to utilize material happenings as handles that can be used to shape what happens in accordance with our goals, and to be the authors of genuinely free actions. The present chapter is less optimistic and prepares the way for a critical examination, in the final chapter, of the seemingly uncontroversial idea of absolute cognitive progress and the perhaps more obviously questionable hope of our getting ever closer to a complete understanding of the world (including ourselves as part of it.)

The idea of the subject facing a world of objects is of a relationship. The quorum for the cognitive tango is two – something that is reflected in the connection-across-separation that is our mode of relating to and engaging with the world and is most clearly acknowledged in the correspondence theory of knowledge and truth. Unless we subscribe to idealism, the two relata will be in some important sense external to one another; there will therefore be an irreducible otherness in what is known – the first relatum. Less obviously, there will be an otherness within the knower – the second relatum.

You might be forgiven for thinking that, with this degree of economic difficulty and social distress all around them, the full attention of the political class in both the United States and the United Kingdom would be focused on these two features of life alone. But, of course, the full attention of those who govern us is not so singularly focused, because in each case those in power in Washington, DC and in London do more than govern internally. They also move around the world stage as important and intrusive players. They each supervise economies, one major export of which are armaments sold to governments and individuals abroad;* and they each rely on societies, part of whose stability is underwritten by both the legacies and the contemporary practice of empire. There is an external dimension to the flaws of contemporary capitalism in both the UK and the US. We therefore need both to understand the linkage between external role and internal weakness in each case, and to see that – in consequence – going beyond the internal flaws of each economy and society will require, as one element of reform, a major resetting of those external roles.

The most immediate costs of empire are most visible in the empire which is most immediate: namely the American one. The British empire is now very much a thing of the past, and the British like to think of themselves as fully post-imperial. But to the degree that they do, they partially delude themselves: because the economy and the society of the contemporary UK continues to be shaped by the legacies of an empire now gone. Those longer and more subtle costs of empire await America down the line; which is why here it makes sense to focus on the immediate costs of empire through American data and the longer consequences of empire through British data.

The lesson that we learned from Britain’s 2016 referendum on the European Union is that European integration is experienced differently in different places. This is obviously true across countries, and always has been the case. The British referendum revealed the extent to which such distinctiveness is also true within member states. The British vote was surprising because of the concentration of support for membership in the European Union in places like London, Oxford and Cambridge. It was also surprising for the concentration of desire to leave the European Union in many parts of Britain outside of those major cities. There were of course important exceptions. Scotland and Northern Ireland were most prominent among these. And, in the immediate aftermath of the vote, there was considerable concern that Scots might take advantage of the difference in attitudes to push for another referendum on independence. That seemed to be the most potent source of division within the United Kingdom.

What few observers recognized at the outset, however, were the full implications of the Northern Irish case. To say that Northern Ireland’s relationship with European integration is “distinctive” is an understatement. The Northern Irish peace process was framed by European Union membership both for Ireland and for the United Kingdom. In the two decades that followed the Good Friday Agreement, the people of Northern Ireland grew accustomed to being able to interact freely both with the British and with the Irish economy thanks to this European Union membership.

The decision of the British people to leave the European Union threatened much of this new freedom. In doing so, and inadvertently, that decision also threatened the post-conflict stabilization of Northern Ireland. This potential disruption was difficult to appreciate for any but the closest observers of Northern Irish politics. Even within the British government, the distinctive position of Northern Ireland relative to European Union membership was under-explored. This became all the more true in the aftermath of the May 2017 British general election.