3. The Edge Of An Opening

Reason is our standpoint.

But it is not the standpoint of the donkey or the bee.

They have no reasons to give, nor can they judge ours. What we call reasoning does not belong to their way of being.

By analogy, there may be ways of making sense of the world that we cannot imagine, that remain unintelligible to us.

This would mark a territory we can approach only to its edge. Beyond that edge, there is nothing for us.

But it may not be nothing in an absolute sense.

Acknowledging this possibility adds nothing to what exists, and it takes nothing away from the authority of reason.

It merely marks a possibility: that reason may encounter an opening it can recognize but cannot enter.

Whether anything lies beyond that edge is not something reason can decide.

No explanation can come from there either.

So are moments, in the end, nothing at all?

It is tempting to dismiss them. They may appear intense, memorable, even transformative, and still amount to nothing more than psychological events: flukes of the mind, products of mood, memory, or circumstance. On this view, moments would be no different in kind from passing emotions or illusions that feel significant only while they last.

This temptation is not frivolous. It follows directly from our usual explanatory habits. What cannot be integrated into our frameworks of meaning is often treated as noise. What cannot be accounted for is often set aside. From this perspective, moments seem to occupy an uncomfortable position: they demand seriousness, yet refuse explanation; they claim importance, yet offer no justification.

If explanation were the only measure of significance, this would settle the matter. Moments would be experiences we happen to have, not things that matter. They would be psychologically interesting, perhaps even powerful, but ultimately empty.

This conclusion is difficult to avoid, and it deserves to be faced directly.

And yet, this conclusion moves too quickly.

Moments are real events in a human life, and they have causes. They occur in minds and bodies, and they can, in principle, be described in psychological or neurological terms. But that is not what is at issue here. The question is not how moments arise, but what becomes of their significance. Explaining their occurrence does not explain what they do. To confuse these levels is to mistake causation for meaning.

The inability to explain the meaning of moments does not, by itself, license their dismissal as meaningful. Explanation is not the only way something can matter. To discard moments simply because they cannot be integrated into our existing sources of meaning is to assume, without argument, that these sources are exhaustive. But this is precisely what has been called into question.

Acknowledging an opening at the boundary of reason does not explain moments. It does not ground them, justify them, or elevate them into a higher order. What it does is more modest and more important. It prevents a premature closure. What cannot be decided by reason cannot be eliminated by it either. Enumeration and exclusion reach their limit here.

Moments, then, are not secured by explanation, but neither are they undone by its absence. Their force remains, even when no account can be given. They do not fit into our world as we understand it, but they occur within our lives nonetheless. Treating them as nothing would require an act of dismissal that goes beyond what reason itself can warrant.

At this point, the question shifts. It is no longer a question of explanation, but of response. If moments are neither grounded nor refuted by our sources of meaning, then what remains is how they orient us: how they reconfigure our sense of what matters, without telling us what to think or believe.

Could this role not be played by other experiences as well? Dreams, artistic absorption, intoxication, religious feeling, all can be intense, disorienting, and meaningful. But these experiences enter our shared world differently. They invite explanation, interpretation, or dispute. They can be compared, classified, reproduced, or dismissed. One can argue about what they are, whether they are genuine, or what they signify.

Moments, as they appear here, do none of this. They do not ask to be believed, defended, or interpreted. They do not present themselves as messages, symbols, or signs. Their existence is not a matter for debate, because they are not objects in the world that others could confirm or deny. They matter only to the one who encounters them, and they matter without making a claim. This is what allows them to orient a life without becoming part of an explanatory system.