It may be that what is “right” and what is “good” consist in staying open to the tensions that beset the most fundamental categories we require, to know unknowingness at the core of what we know, and what we need, and to recognize the sign of life—and its prospects.
—Judith Butler
Although the idea of a horizon retains something of the images of boundary and limit, it is, by contrast, apparent and perspectival. Our horizon moves with us, the line of our outermost reach. It moves, that is, against the objective epistemic terrain, circling the domain of our knowledge. It is “our” horizon because its range and compass are relative to our position and our visionary resources: we see farther in flat landscapes, or from a great height, or with the aid of a telescope. When we picture ignorance as a horizon, we recognize that it not only changes with our knowledge but is constructed by our knowing. Moreover, while we may remove a boundary or cross it, our horizon is always with us and yet always out of reach. Nevertheless, the horizon does beckon us: it attracts our reach, our yearnings. Dawnings and sunsets, like awakenings and forgettings, happen at the horizon, illuminating and darkening our plain of understanding.
The horizon image embodies the fusion of the constantly shifting with the eternally present that is the relationship of knowledge and ignorance. We pursue learning, we research, we comprehend and discover, but—as I remarked at the outset—the vast surround of ignorance remains. Our individual horizon of knowledge may be absorbed within the known terrain of the human race, but collective human knowledge at any moment in time has its own circumscribing horizon. Our learning responds to (some) ignorance, eliminates (some) ignorance, manages (some) ignorance, creates a refined and restructured ignorance, and grows knowledge within that vast surround. We grasp the epistemic aspects of the human condition only when we understand the interaction between our knowing and the unknown.
Luck is a term we use to describe an event or state that usually has three properties: it occurred by chance or was not foreseen; it was not under human control; and it was of significance—positive or negative—to the individual. Luck is a philosophically significant concept, mostly because philosophers intuitively want to exclude it from normative assessment. In ethics, for example, the moral worth of an action or the virtues and vices of a person’s character should be based not on matters of luck but rather on deeper expressions of the self in desires, intentions, and wills. Similarly, the ideal of justice is based on what one deserves, not on luck. Achieving something by luck undermines its quality as a genuine achievement.
In the last chapter, we discussed various tactics and tools for managing the impact of chance and unpredictable events, techniques of using knowledge to cope with ignorance. But epistemologists have recently noticed that luck can undermine our knowledge; it can disqualify as counterfeit what otherwise seems to be genuine knowledge. Let us take a moment to consider this point.
“Genuine” knowledge, as I have noted before, must traditionally meet three criteria: (1) it must be believed; (2) the belief must be true; and (3) the believer must have adequate justification or warrant for believing it. Since Plato, the analysis of knowledge has been framed as “justified true belief.” Because this account is focused on propositional knowledge (knowing that), it is commonly summarized in a simple schema:
S knows that p if and only if:
Centuries of epistemology have been devoted to the attempt to spell out just what is involved in each of those three conditions, with increasingly elaborated results. But the assumption has been that if these three conditions were met (however one defined them), they would yield genuine knowledge (for S).
In 1963, this game was shockingly disrupted by a tidy, three-page article. It is Edmund Gettier III’s one and only publication.1 He simply presented cases in which even justified true belief was not sufficient for knowing something “in the strong sense,” that is, for genuine knowledge. How could that be?
Imagine, for example, that Jim believes the Red Sox beat the Yankees today by a score of 4 to 3, and in fact they did; Jim learned this by watching the game on TV. Thus Jim’s belief is in fact true and he has reasonable justification for his belief. Here is the problem: unbeknownst to Jim, what he watched was a rebroadcast of yesterday’s game—in which it also happened that the Red Sox beat the Yankees by the same score. So, Jim does not really know who won today’s game, not in the “strong sense.”
In Gettier’s problematic situations, there is a mere coincidence between one’s epistemic judgment and the facts: we do not really possess the knowledge we think we do. In Jim’s case, unknown unknowns were in play; his justified true belief was a matter of epistemic luck. Typically, Gettier cases postulate both one’s ignorance of relevant factors and one’s luck in meeting the justified, true belief conditions notwithstanding that ignorance. How can we exclude such circumstances? Unfortunately, Gettier did not develop a solution; he just let loose the force of his examples.
An immediate response—one made by various philosophers—is that we need to tighten the standard for proper warrant or justification. So, in the baseball case, contrary to first glance, we might say Jim did not in fact have sufficient justification for his belief about today’s game. But surely he did have reasonable evidence. Then perhaps we need to introduce a distinction: one might distinguish between entitlements to belief and justifications for belief. In the case above, Jim would have had entitlement for his belief about the game, but not a genuine justification for it. But that is a tricky business. The higher we set the bar for genuine justification, the more we risk a hollow tautology: one’s belief would be justified only if one genuinely knows it to be true. I know only if I know.
Another approach is to require greater precision in formulating the belief proposition. Instead of saying “Jim believed that the Red Sox beat the Yankees today by 4 to 3,” we should say, “Jim believed he saw a game on TV today in which the Red Sox beat the Yankees, 4 to 3.” That justified true belief is not undermined by the epistemic luck that afflicted the earlier belief. This is a dubious move as well. First, that more precise statement does not capture fully what Jim actually believes: he believed it was today’s game. We only state it that cautious way because we are aware of the Gettier threat. And second, other Gettier conditions may be in play that affect even this refined statement—how would one know?
Many epistemologists, therefore, have simply adopted a fourth criterion for genuine knowledge, an amendment to the schema:
In other words, genuine knowledge also requires that epistemic luck is not a factor. That formulation is only a placeholder, of course. It labels and excludes but does not present a general characterization of the undermining Gettier circumstances. The literature has blossomed with new and more contrived Gettier-type cases, proposals for their general characterization, and attempts at a resolution that would eliminate the need for a Gettier asterisk in the analysis of knowledge.
We should mark several points in this matter. Gettier-type cases are matters of epistemic luck; they involve coincidental interactions between knowledge and ignorance. Knowledge is embedded in the justification: Jim knew he saw the game, and he knew the Red Sox won 4 to 3 in the game he saw. He was ignorant of the fact that he watched a rebroadcast; for Jim, it was an unknown unknown. By luck he could form a justified true belief despite relevant ignorance. Second, we should note that luck undermines our sense of achievement, so if we are trying to achieve knowledge, we cannot get there by luck.
Nonetheless, in common human experience, luck is indeed a factor in our coming to know, and our ignorance is also often a matter of luck. Duncan Pritchard, drawing on the work of Peter Unger, has identified three types of “benign” epistemic luck and has proposed a fourth.2 (1) There is content epistemic luck: it is lucky that the proposition is true, that the Red Sox won, in my example. (2) Second, there is capacity epistemic luck: it is lucky that Jim is capable of knowing the outcome of the game. (3) There is evidential epistemic luck: it is lucky that Jim happened to see the game on TV. This condition presumably describes cases like those discussed earlier (chapter 9) in which some historical traces have survived by luck, despite the loss of others. (4) Pritchard also teases out doxastic epistemic luck, in which it is lucky that the believer believes the proposition: it is lucky that Tim believes the Red Sox won. These are, Pritchard asserts, unproblematic for genuine knowledge. But another type is of concern: (5) veritic epistemic luck, in which it is a matter of luck that the belief is true.3 Veritic luck is at play in Gettier-type cases, and Pritchard thinks it is fatal to genuine knowledge and must be eliminated. While it seems clear that Gettier-type cases do involve veritic luck—it was a matter of luck that Jim’s belief about who won the game was true—we might also analyze the case as a matter of (bad) evidential luck: perhaps it was unlucky that Jim didn’t happen to watch the screen when the notice appeared that it was a rebroadcast.
Since Pritchard’s purpose is to protect knowledge from luck, he understandably gives less attention to the “benign” forms. They seem not to threaten the genuineness of knowledge; nonetheless, they do affect the knowledge and ignorance we possess. Evidential luck is particularly significant. Moreover, no matter how we formulate the criteria to secure genuine knowledge, we simply cannot in practice rule out the salience of unknown unknowns. Our Jim may acknowledge that unknown unknowns are always with us; but, by definition, he cannot state what they are or whether any of them would undermine his claim to knowledge by revealing that he was simply lucky in his belief.
We work purposefully within the surround of ignorance to gain knowledge. But the horizon of unknown unknowns is always with us. Not only can we not capture and tame it; it infuses even the circle of light we claim as knowledge. Epistemic luck is continuously at work in the interaction of the known and the unknown. Our horizonal perspective is not something we can autonomously determine or reduce, and the range and reach of our knowledge is not a luck-free zone. Moreover, paradoxically, it seems that the very pursuit of knowledge creates ignorance. Every epistemic advance serves to expand the horizon of the unknown.
We have discussed the ways in which individuals, organizations, and governments may construct and protect ignorance (chapter 6). But how does the very process of coming to know something create ignorance or—as some would say—“improve” it? What is an improved ignorance?
Let us look at a couple of examples. First: in recent years, advances in submersibles and underwater photography have resulted in deeper dives and the discovery of many new species. Photos and videos now show fascinating, bizarre creatures never before observed. Pondering these images, a marine biologist may now be curious about the function of an odd-looking structure, about the evolutionary advantage of strange behavior, or about the adaptations that allow such a delicate organism to survive under the great pressure of deep waters.
The second example: in tracing her family genealogy, a woman knows that her maternal great-grandparents came to the United States from Scotland, but she doesn’t know exactly when. She discovers they are listed in the Scotland Census of 1861, but she cannot locate them in the Scotland Census of 1871. She draws the reasonable, if only probable, conclusion that they emigrated sometime in the decade between the dates of the two censuses.
In the latter example, the ignorance was “improved” or “refined” by narrowing the search, specifying more precisely a known unknown: the possible emigration date—though still uncertain—has been narrowed to a ten-year span. In the former example, however, new knowledge has generated new questions, questions that could not have been asked previously because the organisms were unknown. New knowledge may “create” ignorance by making unknown unknowns into known unknowns; it is a transformation at the metalevel. It is not just that there was no reason to ask these new questions previously; rather, it is that there was no epistemic basis to ask them, no known subject about which to formulate them.
There are more startling cases. A discovery may reveal new relationships among elements of previous knowledge, altering their theoretical connections. Occasionally, an important breakthrough launches new concepts, or even a new conceptual framework or paradigm. In such discoveries, our understanding of a field may be irreversibly altered. The discovery of new sea creatures, despite its significance, does not portend a conceptual revolution. We apply well-embedded biological concepts (species, adaptation, reproduction, and so on) to raise questions about the newly discovered organisms. Contrast that with the impact of new knowledge like the original discoveries of microorganisms, subatomic structure, and evolution. Each introduced new knowledge that reinterpreted our previous knowledge and generated whole conceptual structures within which new sorts of questions might be framed. Sometimes, long-established concepts are given new meanings (in the way that Einstein’s concept of mass altered Newton’s mass). And each such discovery restructures and refines our ignorance, extends its horizonal span, and sets a new agenda for inquiry.
Yet we need to push still further to grasp fully the creation of ignorance. My language may suggest that Nature simply awaits curious humans to uncover its secrets, to discover what is already there but hidden, and thereby to “acquire” knowledge. This outlook, adopted with good effect by the “natural philosophers” of the early Enlightenment, is nonetheless misleading. It underplays the role of the imagination, of theory construction, of creativity, in the search for knowledge. I am not suggesting that there is no reality except what we create—though certainly some do take that position. That view turns scientific research into a convoluted exercise of self-expression by the self-deceived researcher. It leaves us with an unsatisfying account of Nature’s stubbornness, of the surprising refutation of dearly held hypotheses.4 Nevertheless, the linguistic and quantitative systems we employ, our conceptual frameworks, the metaphors that underlie them, the theory-laden instruments we construct, the techniques we develop for research—these are all human creations. Insofar as human knowledge is a social construct in this profound sense, so is ignorance. This means that our new knowledge creates our ignorance: it does not simply identify unknowns that were lurking among the unknown unknowns all along; as we grasp for them, we formulate them, and thus we create their manifestation.
So much of our ignorance is rightly thought of negatively; but when we think of ignorance only negatively, the picture is demoralizing, paralyzing, even terrorizing. It is the epistemic paradox: while we work to learn in order to remove ignorance, we cannot reduce its infinite sea, and—as in the Greek myths of self-defeating actions—our very efforts to learn, even when successful, may increase our ignorance. This dark and stultifying view, however, fails to reflect the full importance of ignorance in our lives. As debilitating and tragic and reprehensible as ignorance can be, as devastating as may be the errors it enables, ignorance, especially when it is acknowledged, also contributes enormous positives to human life. It is to those I now turn.
Neurobiologist Stuart Firestein, in Ignorance: How It Drives Science,5 argues not only that scientific research is propelled by ignorance, but that the goal of science is to refine and improve our ignorance. Yes, curiosity is necessary for scientific research; but curiosity arises only in the presence of ignorance. The felt presence of the unknown can summon us to inquiry. Ignorance, Firestein argues, sets the agenda for research; furthermore, the fecundity of a discovery is largely in the ignorance it creates. We can broaden the thesis, for the same claims apply in the social sciences, in archaeological research, and also in most forms of scholarly research in the arts and humanities.
It is, indeed, the presence of the horizon of ignorance that provides room for imagination, free thought, and creativity. Knowing—and I mean the sort of genuine knowing that carries conviction—is the culmination of thought; it carries no more epistemic yearning on the matter. Only new doubt, new uncertainties can subvert this contentment and spur learning. Only recognition of the possibility of our own ignorance opens a cognitive space for unlearning false knowledge and for genuine learning (or an improved ignorance).
The work and play of imagination and creativity are ventures into the unknown. They are inimical to the repetition of facts, the regurgitation of knowledge. Ingenuity, inventiveness, originality, spontaneity—they all require forays into the unknown.
While all forms of human creativity presume the unknown, some give it a place of honor. Improvisational performance is such an escapade in the unpredictable. Improvisational jazz, for example, uses just enough of the “known” (perhaps a basic melody, a time signature, and a cycle of spotlighted moments by individual musicians in the ensemble) to structure a venture into the free performance space of the unknown. Aleatoric art goes even further, opening the performance or the artwork to chance or random elements. John Cage’s Radio Music (1956), a work for eight radios, was composed using random operations: it involves tuning the radios to fifty-six different frequencies, programmed by eight individual musicians, with or without intervening silences. The same principles are applied in avant-garde theatrical works, painting and other visual arts, dance, and poetry. Films may, of course, include scenes that are not structured in detail, such as recording whatever happens outside a particular window over fifteen minutes. But other aleatoric films use different gateways for chance: Six Reels of Film to Be Shown in Any Order (1971), directed by Barry Salt, was distributed with a special die to be rolled by the projectionist at each showing to determine the order of the reels.
In literature and film, mysteries are emblematic of our love of the unknown. Obviously, no story would be a mystery without the reader’s ignorance of some crucial matter: who committed the murder or, in “locked-room mysteries,” how the crime was committed. There is yet a more fundamental and pervasive role in literature and film for the unknown. Narrative itself has its mesmerizing effects because it moves forward into the unknown: what will happen next; how will things turn out; who is this character? In narrative, as in research, in art, and in life, adventure requires the push into the unknown. (It is true, of course, that especially as children, we love to hear or certain familiar stories read again and again; they become as cherished poetry, and their reading becomes a ritual. Yet it is the delight of the first reading that we rehearse in reexperience, but inevitably find ourselves reading or listening in a different way. The same is true of the favorite films of childhood.)
Ignorance and knowledge, we might say, have a yin-yang relationship: it is the balance and interaction of the two that give us the life of the mind. It is the mutually prehending relationship of the known to the unknown that provides the matrix of learning, the challenge of discovery, the quest of the research lab, the anticipation of turning the next page of the narrative, the exhilaration of risk, the yearning of hope, and the thrill of surprise.
The horizonal presence of ignorance has affective impact; it inspires feelings. One of the most eloquent portrayals of this sense of ignorance is found in John Dewey’s early landmark text, Psychology. Dewey presents ignorance as a state of mind with a distinctive feeling. It is worth quoting at length:
A feeling of knowledge is necessarily accompanied by one of ignorance, and will so continue until the whole organic system of knowledge is mastered. …
A feeling of ignorance is, therefore, strictly correlative to one of knowledge. A feeling of knowledge is one of the realized self; a feeling of ignorance is one of the unrealized self. One is the feeling of the objective and universal self, so far as this has been made to exist in individual form; the other is the vague and indefinite feeling of this universal self as not realized. An animal may be ignorant, for example, but we cannot conceive it to be conscious of this ignorance, unless we attribute to it a true self-consciousness. Ignorance is the feeling of the division or conflict in our nature.
A feeling of the unknown must be distinguished, therefore, from one of the unknowable. The latter would be a feeling of something utterly unrelated to self, and hence is a psychological impossibility. The feeling that something is unknown, or of ignorance, is the feeling of self, but of self as still incomplete. A feeling of the unknowable would be possible only if we could transcend wholly our own being; a feeling of the unknown is possible, if we can transcend our present being, and feel our true being as one which is not yet completely realized. The true function of the feeling of ignorance is, therefore, to serve as an inducement, as a spring, to further action, while a feeling of the unknowable could only paralyze all action.6
In Dewey’s vision, the horizon of ignorance is felt as the unrealized self. Its knowability moves us to transcendence of the present, to a knowing that is self-actualization.
Lovers of mysteries know that a fact is just a fact, a node in our web of knowledge—until it points us to our ignorance. Then the fact becomes a clue. Hunches, guesses, estimates, inferences, conjectures, and hypotheses are projectiles launched from a base of the known into the possible. Intimations and hints are revelations, graspable fringes, prehensions, of the unknown. The very concept of evidence links a known to uncertain possibilities; its etymology identifies evidence as that which makes visible. When we form a question we use our knowledge to cast a grappling hook into our ignorance. Asking questions is in fact the greatest (and most common) expression of the link between knowledge and ignorance. Questions, in their very framing, convey a sense of what is possible; they anticipate the sort of answer that will satisfy our seeking.
Some questions may be answered only by sophisticated knowledge or research: What is the antidote for this toxin? Some questions may be posed meaningfully only by those with sophisticated knowledge (though the answer may not be difficult to locate): What “obscenity” was John Stuart Mill arrested for distributing? Some questions meet both conditions: What are the advantages and pitfalls of the Sveshnikov Variation in chess? But it is easy to discern the implicit knowledge that frames not only all these sorts of questions, but simpler, everyday questions: Can I post a .jpg file to Facebook?
We are capable not only of factual knowledge, but also of modal knowledge; that is, we can have knowledge of actualities, but also of possibilities, necessities, and impossibilities. We can know what is the case, what might be, what must be, and what could not be the case—though there may be variations in the sources and justification of such knowledge. And we can, of course, be ignorant (and have false knowledge) in all these realms. To be clear: we cannot know that which is impossible, but we can know that it is impossible. We can also lack that knowledge or mistakenly believe it is possible. The realm of the actual is the domain of realized possibilities, some of which we know, much of which we do not. Everything that is knowable, however, is in that respect possible. All that is knowable but unknown—the horizon of our ignorance—is unrealized possibility.7 If a question is not merely rhetorical, it seeks to actualize an epistemic possibility.
Although questioning, the verbal manifestation of curiosity, is elemental in all fields of inquiry, it has a special place in philosophy. Philosophy is not a science: its task is not to assemble and validate a set of facts, not even to produce new propositional knowledge of the world in a narrow sense. It may offer insight; it makes intellectual progress; but it rejoices in its questions. The philosopher’s task is, in the first instance, to maintain, sustain, and expand our sense of the possible. It entails the recognition of our ignorance and our collusion in its creation. And second, it involves the elucidation of specific possibilities and their interrelations.
The philosopher is the shepherd of possibilities. I borrow the image from the French philosopher, Michel Serres. He writes:
It is the function of the philosopher, the care and passion of the philosopher to protect to the utmost the possible, he tends the possible like a small child, he broods over it like a newborn babe, he is the guardian of the seed. The philosopher is the shepherd who tends the mixed flock of the possibles on the highlands. …
The philosopher keeps watch over unforeseeable and fragile conditions, his position is unstable, mobile, suspended, the philosopher seeks to leave ramifications and bifurcations open, in opposition to the confluences that connect them or close them. …
The function of the philosopher, the care and the passion of the philosopher, is the negentropic ringing-of-the-changes of the possible.8
This does not mean that philosophy floats untethered to empirical reality. It is an irresponsible philosophy that is uninformed by what is known; but it is a suicidal philosophy that confines itself to empirical facts, or that aims simply to add to their store. Philosophers find insight into the possible to be as interesting and precious as knowledge of what is: the possible inspires action (what might be), opens the future (what could be), and thereby creates space for the normative (what should be). It is an orientation that frustrates those who are impatient with openness, those who see value only in the closure of clear facts that can be added to the hoard of knowledge. “What use is it?” ask the unimaginative, who do not look to the horizon.
Philosophia is not the love of knowledge; it is the love of wisdom. Wisdom entails knowledge, of course, but it expects much more, and it begins in wonder. It is Socrates, as depicted by Plato, who first says that “wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.”9 Not surprise, not curiosity—wonder.
Surprise involves a sudden, unexpected revelation. An unknown unknown has, in a blink, become known. Although being surprised implies a state of ignorance, it is constituted by the extinguishing of that state, and therefore is a state of knowing. Though generally short-lived, surprise is a response to awareness—whether that response morphs into shock and horror or relief and joy. Surprise admits of degrees, and where one’s cognitive expectations (beliefs, habits of thought, expectations of others, etc.) are violated by the revelation, one might be astonished. It is characteristic of these emotions, that their object (the stimulus) is inchoate in the instant of their occurrence.
Curiosity, as we have seen (chapter 8), is both a state of mind and a trait. It involves awareness of one’s ignorance, a specific known unknown, and the felt pull of discovery. Though it bridges knowledge and ignorance, it is felt as a yearning state of ignorance. Whether it is virtue or vice, whether the state is good or bad, it is a desire that is fulfilled in its own extinction. Curiosity impels us to know, to “satisfy” our puzzlement and to leave us in happy possession of the knowledge we seek. Complete knowledge is the extinguishing of curiosity.
Wonder, however, beholds the unknowable. Wonder does not seek the knowledge that will quench it. It does not follow the arc or assume the possibility of such a completed knowing. The pathos of wonder does, however, have effects. There are three alternative paths: wonder may open the door to endless questioning; it may stun and paralyze; or it may lapse into curiosity. The first is the philosophical dwelling in wonder; it activates a spiritual quest or the ceaseless dialectic Socrates modeled. The second is an epistemic torpor, a cognitive languor that is derided as a vice: to be “lost” in wonder. The third is the surcease of wonder, its replacement by the purposeful narrowness of curiosity: philosophy devolves to science; the sublime devolves to analysis; spirituality devolves to religious creeds.10
When Aristotle echoed Socrates’s view that philosophy begins in wonder, he seemed to give the idea a historical turn: “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.” But he may have had curiosity as I have described it in mind rather than wonder: he says, “[A] man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for myth is composed of wonders); therefore since they philosophize in order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end.”11 Aristotle’s wonder seeks closure in knowledge, in understanding for its own sake, and it seems premised on the aim of “escape” from ignorance. His comment seems more suited to ignorance as a place or as a boundary. He seems to maintain this outlook even in the face of ignorance as a limit: “The possession of [knowledge] might be justly regarded as beyond human power; for in many ways human nature is in bondage.”12 Yet Aristotle wavers, for his inclusion of myth as “composed of wonders” does not yield to curiosity. It is wonder, not curiosity, that suits the recognition of ignorance as a horizon, the eternal surround of the unknown.
I am not demeaning science. Philosophy has given birth to most of the natural and social sciences, parturition through partition, as areas of inquiry developed appropriate research methods. The wonderful became the empirical, and the pursuit of knowledge has continuing urgency despite increasingly sophisticated tools. I have celebrated the liberation that knowledge can provide and bemoaned the terrible consequences of individual, political, and collective ignorance. Curiosity feeds learning. The point here, however, is that genuine philosophical understanding recognizes an ultimate “escape from ignorance” as an impossibility, a vain attempt to clutch the horizon.
Aristotle’s well-ordered cosmos was self-contained and stable in its cycles and equilibrations: a snow-globe world. But, as the contemporary European philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, has written: “Spheres are constantly disquieted by their inevitable instability: like happiness and glass, they bear the risks native to everything that shatters easily.”13 Fatefully, as Sloterdijk describes, modernity not only displaced humanity from the privileges of cosmic centrality, it shattered the protective globe. The sky fell. Moderns and postmoderns have found themselves not inside a sheltering sphere, but on the outer surface, staring into the infinite void of space.
The horizon of the unknown, darkest ignorance in all its splendor, is the horizon of our finitude. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”14 We can point to, but not even point out, unknown unknowns, let alone understand them. We have only intimations despite a surety of their presence. The dread of ultimate incomprehensibility, existential angst, and radical skepticism of this surround is counterpoised by the openness, freedom, and possibility, and transcendence it creates.
At the outset, I observed that the infinite unknown has turned some to skepticism and nihilistic despair. For others, like Blaise Pascal, it is a source of existential anxiety: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”15 Some find liberation and rich possibility, as we have seen in this chapter. Still others have surrendered to the unknown, and pursued an apophatic approach. For theologians, this is via negativa, the grasp of what God is not as our meager mode of understanding. For mystics, the yielding is an opening to transcendence.
In The Lure of the Transcendent, Dwayne Huebner writes:
There is more than we know, can know, will ever know. It is a “moreness” that takes us by surprise when we are at the edge and end of our knowing. There is a comfort in that “moreness” that takes over in our weakness, our ignorance, at our limits or end. It is a comfort that cannot be anticipated, a “peace that passeth all understanding.”
In language that echoes Dewey’s description of the feeling of ignorance, he continues:
One knows of that presence, that “moreness,” when known resources fail and somehow we go beyond what we were and are and become something different, something new. There is also judgment in that “moreness,” particularly when we smugly assume that we know what “it” is all about and we end up in the dark on our behinds. It is this very “moreness” that can be identified with the “spirit” and the “spiritual.”… Spirit is that which transcends the known, the expected, even the ego and the self. It is the source of hope. It is manifested through love and the waiting expectation that accompanies love. It overcomes us. … One whose imagination acknowledges that “moreness” can be said to dwell faithfully in the world.16
Within that horizon, however, we may come to understand a great deal about what we do not know, about its intricacy and impact. Within that horizon, we are epistemic agents in community with others, participating in the creation of knowledge and ignorance, and drawing on the traits that help or hinder us in the achievement of learning. Within that horizon, we may come to seek a learned ignorance, to understand our search for knowledge not as a quest for certainty, but as an attempt to refine, improve, and moralize our ignorance.