The mystery in broad daylight

The mystery in broad daylight is the paradoxical openness of human self-understanding: a person’s present conduct is conscious and meaningful, yet what it means in a life cannot be settled until future freedom takes it up. The phrase names neither a hidden secret nor a supernatural puzzle, but the visible, ongoing uncertainty built into temporal existence.

Meaning and Temporal Openness

Human reality makes itself known through what it is not yet; it comes toward itself by projecting possibilities. The future therefore stands as a kind of confirmation still to come. A present not yet lived may ratify or invalidate the meaning that a person now projects, and, because that future present will freely recover the past in light of a new future, its verdict cannot be known in advance.

This structure makes conduct at once lucid and obscure. A person may be fully conscious of what an action means now, yet unable to know how the action will finally count. The example of an adolescent’s crisis makes the distinction concrete: the adolescent recognizes the mystic sense of the conduct, but must entrust its meaning to the future, which will disclose whether it was a passing crisis of puberty or a serious commitment to devotion.

Waiting for Oneself

The expression describes a condition that is not an accidental weakness or nervous habit. Because the for-itself temporalizes itself, life consists not merely of waiting for the outcomes of undertakings but of waiting to discover what those outcomes mean. Even if a person succeeds in an enterprise, wins love, or obtains a distinction or favor, the place and value of that achievement in the life as a whole remain to be determined.

These are waitings that wait for further waitings. Their nested structure is identified with selfness: to be oneself is to come to oneself, not to possess a finished identity in the present. The image of mystery in full daylight holds together the two sides of this condition: consciousness is not simply concealed from itself, but its future possibilities leave its present self-knowledge incomplete.

The Unattained Final Term

The sequence of waiting points toward an imagined final term after which nothing further would need to be awaited: a repose that would be being rather than waiting for being. Such completion would make the recovery of the past final. A youthful experience could be known once and for all as fruitful or ill-starred, and a crisis of puberty could be fixed as either a caprice or a genuine preformation of later commitments. The curve of a life would be settled and its account closed.

That closure is presented as a value, a plenitude of the type in-itself-for-itself, but it is never available as an ordinary present conclusion. Christians have tried to take death as the final term. In a private conversation, the Reverend Father Boisselot suggested that the Last Judgment performs precisely this closing of the account: it prevents further recovery of one’s course and makes one, irredeemably, what one has been. Against the continuing openness of life, the phrase’s central force lies in this contrast between the meanings still awaiting their future and the imagined judgment that would end waiting altogether.