UNKNOWABLE. — That which cannot in any way be known. The term and concept are used in philosophy, theology, and mysticism.
Sophistry, skepticism, agnosticism, and phenomenism consider the being in its objective reality to be unknowable. Plotinus affirms the unknowability of the One; mystical writers tend to hint at the unknowability of God; Cusanus, understanding the Absolute as the coincidence of opposites, compromises its knowability. Kant, by positing the thing-in-itself as theoretically unattainable, expressed the clearest and historically most significant affirmation of an unknowable, later maintaining it by declaring the noumenon a postulate of practical reason, and thus in some way graspable. Positivism, especially in Spencer (cf. *First Principles*, Part I), popularized the term and concept, proclaiming that the ultimate ground of reality is unknowable because knowledge is relational, whereas the Absolute, to be such, must transcend and be exempt from all relation.
It is in a certain sense contradictory to speak of something as totally unknown of which existence is affirmed. The error arises from the indistinction between the narrow horizon of immediate experience and the boundless scope of rational inference. To know is to apprehend being:
1773
**UNKNOWABLE — CORONATION**
Knowledge adapts itself and extends to being; hence, in an absolute sense, nothing is unknowable. Of the Absolute, existence and nature are knowable; of the mystery, the terms that express it and their non-contradictoriness are knowable. The unhappy term poorly expresses the very true concept of the inexhaustible limitation and progressiveness of human knowledge.
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