Unknowable, The

INCONOSCIBILE. - That which cannot be known in any way. The term and the concept are used in philosophy, theology and mysticism.

Sophistry, skepticism, agnosticism and phenomenalism regard being in its objective reality as u. Plotinus affirms the One to be u.; mystics are inclined to accentuate the unknowability of God; Cusanus, understanding the Absolute as a coincidence of opposites, compromises its knowability. Kant, by positing the thing in itself as theoretically unattainable, expressed the clearest and historically most important affirmation of an u., subsequently attenuating it by declaring the noumenon a postulate of practical reason, and therefore in some way graspable. Positivism, especially in Spencer (cf. First principles, part 1), popularized the term and the concept, proclaiming that the ultimate ground of the real is u. because to know is to relate, whereas the Absolute, in order to be such, must be beyond and exempt from any relation.

It is in a certain sense contradictory to call totally unknown that whose existence one affirms. The error arises from the failure to distinguish between the narrow horizon of immediate experience and the unlimited breadth of rational inference. To know is to apprehend being: knowing is commensurate with and coextensive with being; therefore, in an absolute sense, nothing is u. Of the Absolute, its existence and nature are knowable; of the mystery, the terms that express it and their non-contradictoriness are knowable. The unfortunate term poorly expresses the concept, most true, of the limitation and inexhaustible progressiveness of human knowing.

Giacomo Soleri