beyond understanding

While this chapter was very interesting, I had a lot of lingering questions once I was finished.  First of all, he says on page 99 that "It could be argued that human beings possess some qualities— free will, intuition, or original creativity, for example — that set them aside from (or above) the normal course of nature, and therefore outside any generalized form of understanding."  Okay, I "understand" that there is no way to generalize understanding of human beings because all people are so radically different from one another that it would be impossible (as far as we know now) to make broad assumptions about the entire species of human beings.  But is he also saying that because of our free will, intuition etc. that humans are incapable of understanding motivations?  For example, if someone murdered another person in self defense, is it impossible to say that we understand that they killed in self defense?  Is it just a lack of complete information (or being able to completely understand that person's understanding of the situation) that leads us to conclude that we can't understand?  I find it hard to believe that we can't understand someone's actions or the reasons for their actions.  I agree that it would be impossible to completely understand them, but do we have to have complete knowledge in order to have an understanding of something?  And if so, couldn't we argue that there is no real understanding because we can never know everything about something?

I though Mason brought up a great point when he said on page 90 that "a reluctance to accept anything beyond understanding may be connected with an unwillingness to contemplate nonhuman perspective."  However, what kind of perspective are we expected to take?  Is he referring to animals, trees etc. or some non-human entity?  Would that even be possible?  I disagree that the reluctance to accept something that is "beyond understanding" is related to us being unwilling to look at it from different angles.  I think the reason's are more practical: at this point humans need evidence to back up claims and if they have to look beyond a human perspective of an issue, there would be no concrete evidence.  How can you justify something when not looking at it from your perspective?

I totally agreed with Mason's view that the most interesting things are beyond our understanding though.  Whatever that means.