5. The Unknowable Is the Ground of Whatever Is Known

Unknowing is the Necessary Ground of Knowing 

The subjective ground of “objective” information allows other sorts of information to be “true,” in the ontological sense of being “real,” without being third-person verifiable. If knowing about the Universe includes its intentional ground, then there isn’t an increase in amounts of information in terms of measurable correspondences to objective facts or “states of affairs,” but rather an increase in the quality of information, especially in the qualitative depth of meaning. This position holds that there is more about the Universe than what can be counted as the information of Information Theory or than what can be known through the countable bits or units of computable code. Scientific knowledge is not the only way to “know” the world because computable bits of information lose the qualitative aspects of whatever there is for being’s quantities. For many thinkers, this is to lose being altogether because for them being is primarily composed of the quality of experience, sometimes called “Qualia,” which can’t be quantified. The “objective” states-of–affairs that the sciences can describe and explain with the correspondences of quantities are necessarily devoid of subjective qualia, which Thomas Nagel called the “What-it’s-likeness" of being. A full description of the Universe isn’t possible within the limits of scientific measurement because what it’s like to be a being of the Universe can’t be accessed from a third-person, objective perspective on being that reduces being to measurable quantities. 

This contrary view to scientific positivism, which might be thought of as negative relative to the first’s positivity about the quantization of being, is classically formulated as the “non-coincidence between being and knowing.”Being in this formulation is whatever there is, so in this view, knowing cannot completely disclose being because quantitative description is inadequate to the task of describing qualitative experience, which leaves an irreducible remainder or gap between quantifiable knowing and the qualitative Universe.  The most common idea about why we can’t know everything is that there is just too much to know, in terms of quantity, as was outlined above, but this positivistic view isn’t pessimistic about scientific knowledge per se because while the gap between being and knowing is irreducible, the gap is describable in terms of quantities in much the same way that numbers can’t determine infinity but infinity can be described in terms of the limits of numbers.   

However, this pessimism about complete knowing isn’t pessimistic about any lack of information but about a lack “within” quantitative information itself to disclose all of what being is. The experience of being is more than can be measured scientifically, which means that whatever these qualitative aspects of being are, they are lost in translation to quantities. Quantities and qualities do overlap in some ways. For example, red can be described quantitatively in terms of intensity, which is the signature quantities of the height and length of its light wave. But this description loses entirely the experience of red, which, like any color, isn’t in its positive, or measurable, quantitative description, but “in” the experience of the first-person observer. There are many different versions of this loss of correspondence between lived experience and scientific knowing, but one result for all of them is that while amounts of information may continually increase, being remains irreducible.  

One version of this pessimistic position about complete knowledge, derogatorily called “Mysterianism,” or “Scientific Pessimism,” and whose most famous adherent is Noam Chomsky, is that human intelligence simply isn’tcapable of grasping all of what is because it can’t fully know about the consciousness that grounds its intelligence. The knower’s consciousness is a part of what there is, but a part of what there is that it can’t be aware of. Consciousness has an ontological status, but it forms a kind of blind spot within itself. This blind spot is formed because the knower must inhabit the ground of its knowing to know, which is like saying that consciousness can’t see itselfbecause it is standing in its own way. We can know that we are conscious and that whatever we know, we know through the awareness that it gives us, but we can’t know what awareness is because it is the ground that we must stand on to be aware, which means that we can’t get enough distance from it to make awareness an object of awareness. 

Whatever the knower knows is known through awareness, which is called the “intention” in phenomenology. The phenomenological intention is an “intention” in two senses of the word. The first sense of intention is the common usage of the word as “what one intends,” which is one’s aim or goal, but the second sense of the word is both the projection and screen upon which the world appears. In phenomenology, both senses of the word are combined to convey the idea that one sees the world as one intends. The appearance of the world on the intentional screen, or of what is called intentional “aboutness,” isn’t “objective” but necessarily a subjective projection of third-personobjectivity. The third-person is a mode of the first-person intention that unifies whatever there is, into the world of unified objects that appears as if whole and complete in the register of the Lacanian “Imaginary,” which means that thethird-person is an imaginary projection of the first-person.  

Because it isn’t possible to stand outside the first-person, the intention is always “motivated” as opposed to “objective,” which is to say that the objects that appear on the intentional screen aren’t strictly “objective” in the sense of “disinterested.” The third-person is an imaginary projection of a motivated intention, which is neither uninterested nor disinterested. Therefore, the intention’s knowledge about itself is necessarily “limited” by its own inescapable intention. The third-person isn’t an omniscient “view-from-nowhere," which is a common formulation of the criticism that is sometimes levelled against some of the overblown claims of scientific objectivism. So, this necessary limitation, or “blind spot,” forms an ineluctable gap between being and knowing. Knowing must always include knowing about the limitations of the intention upon which any possible object of knowledge appears. But it is important to remember that this blind spot, like the optic nerve that forms it, is both the limit and the horizon knowing. 

The blind spot of human knowing is larger than the analogy to the optic nerve that is often employed would suggest. The blind spot of the intention is the intention itself, or rather, it is the necessarily motivated perspective of the intention that marks both the “facticity” and “care” of the intention, to burrow a couple of terms from Martin Heidegger. The Intention’s facticity is its situatedness in a particular time and place, and most importantly for “en-language” being, the Symbolic. The Lacanian Symbolic is the language, as well as the societal or cultural rules, norms and narratives, that govern the world that one inhabits. The intention is both the projection and the screen of this symbolic world.  

Besides the facticity that binds the intention to the location of its perspective, there is also the “care” that motivates this binding to a particular intention. Martin Heidegger explained that being cares about its being, and that the world appears to being from the motivation of that care as the phenomenological intention. Intention is limited by care, so knowledge can never be total or complete. However, care is motivated by the limit of the intention. Whatever isn’t within the per view of an intention is said to "withdraw” from that intention in the manner that the hidden side(s) of a three-dimensional object is hidden from any perspective of it. But what is hidden can be assumed or inferred, so that while there is a limitation to direct knowledge, this limit is also the horizon of any possible knowledge. The limit of perspective motivates the care for being, which desires whatever is beyond the limit of its own intention. 

The intention of any given being is “perspectival” because it must foreground what it intends against a “withdrawn” background of what it doesn’t. Language is a symbolic system of differences, and it works according to this same relation between backgrounding and foregrounding, so that the conceptual object that language identifies isn’t simply what it is but is given its identity by what it isn’t, or by what it is different from. Whatever language identifies, it identifies against a “withdrawn” background of symbolic differences, or “non-identity,” so that the intention of any particular being can’t ever see all being, or being’s totality because of the perspectival necessity of foregrounding an identity against a background of difference, which might simply be understood as both the limitation and horizon of knowing. Knowledge is necessarily incomplete because it is grounded in the unknowing of difference, which is the relation of a foregrounded identity to a withdrawn system of symbolic differences. 

An identification for a symbolic intention isn’t an a-equals-a indexical relation between the signifier and the signified because each time an object is “located” or foregrounded within a system of symbolic differences, the background difference is hidden but present, as that which presents the signified through withdrawn, or absent, difference. The symbolic intention is perspectival, which means that it is located within a particular geographic and cultural place and historical time, which is the “facticity” of the situated intention briefly touched on above. This limit of the intention’s situation is necessary for there to be an intention at all because the particularity of perspective is the ground of the relation of between backgrounding and foregrounding, which is the horizon upon which phenomenal and conceptual objects appear, in the same way that Immanual Kant’s a priori categories are both the limits and horizons of perception. In general, the necessity of backgrounding for intentional foreground means that knowing is foregrounded by the background of unknowing, so that the necessary limit to knowing is knowing's horizon, which is unknowing, in the same way that being’s necessary ground is nonbeing, or presence is grounded by absence. 

The signifier’s relation to the signified isn’t indexical because it is mediated through a semantic concept. A general or abstract intention is represented by a particular end, which is why the phenomenological intention is about objects and cannot be about the “all” or the “totality” of being. Language’s limit to knowledge is the basic condition of knowledge, so that complete knowledge about being is prohibited not only to the being of any particular languageuser, but by being itself because there is no ultimate perspective from which to stand in relation to the totality of being. Lacan summarized this relation between the totality of being and the limitation of language as the relation between the Symbolic and the Real’s absolute resistance to symbolization, but also with his famous aphorism, “There is no metalanguage,” which was similarly summarized by Jean-Francois Lyotard as “There is no metanarrative.”  

The sciences are also starting to realize the same necessary limitation, or horizon, of what can be known even within their own “objective” paradigm once thought to be the meta-discourse to ground knowing in the a-equals-a relation of knowing to identity. But the solidity of this third-person ground is based on the denial of its grounding in the shifty subjectivity of the first-person. Scientific knowledge has been based on belief in the “objectivity” of the third-person perspective. But some are now coming to terms with the structure of third-person verifiability and falsifiability, which is limited because of its necessary relation to the subjective intention of the first-person. The first person is the necessary background upon which the determinations of the third-person are presented as objective, which will be covered more thoroughly below.  

Evolutionary Biology Notices the Precarious Relation of Science and Truth 

A second variation on this pessimism about complete knowing is like the one adumbrated above in which the formal structures of knowing, or of determination, may not be able to take in the world as it is because of thenecessary neuro-biological structures of perception rather than of the related limitations of the psycho-phenomenological structures of the intention. This is a pessimism about complete knowing that shifts from the psycho-phenomenological emphasis on the motivated, perspectival imagining of the world as comprised of objective wholes to the evolutionary intention for biological, sensory systems to perceive according to the intentions of survival and reproduction. Before we imagine a world on the intentional screen as whole and complete phenomenal and conceptual objects, we must sense it through our biological sensory systems.  

Our most basic percepts are necessarily mediated through the categories of perception given by our sensory mechanisms’ relations to biological necessity and a given environment. Even if bodily sensation is without the objectification of phenomena or concepts, it isn’t exactly the immediate knowing of “direct” experience, whatever that might mean, because experience is necessarily given by the mediation of basic sensory categories, categories which like any intentional presentation are determined by withdrawn difference, which is the relation of the background to the foregrounding of any possible perception. This argument also has many variations, but Immanuel Kant beganmodern philosophy with his distinction between the noumenal world of “things-in-themselves," which is the necessary background, and the phenomenal world foregrounded by the a priori categories of experience.  

A single percept can’t be perceived in isolation. It must be related to another percept via a sensory category, which is the necessary “relation” of the differential background to the foregrounded sensation. Sensory systems are like the signifiers and concepts of the Symbolic because they join percepts not via the copular “is,” as the Symbolic does, but via the relation of sensual difference.  AN Whitehead defined a concept as the relation of two percepts via a rule or category. For example, a baby doesn’t notice the temperature until it changes upon exiting the womb because of the “without-difference” of the womb, but the unpleasant change of temperature in the delivery room is the beginning of the baby’s consciousness of temperature. This initial perception upon exiting the womb is a relation of two different percepts of temperature without the relation of a concept but with the relation given by the sensory apparatus of the body. The temperature of the womb is absent in the delivery room, but it is remembered, without a concept and without the copular “is,” by the infant’s sensory apparatus as a present absence in the same backgrounding and foregrounding mechanism of the phenomenological intention outlined in the previous section.  

The odd thing about the phrase “things-in-themselves," is that it seems to suggest that whatever was before the relation of difference, Kant’s “noumenal” realm, is what something “really” is, which is how the classical idea of substance was perceived as “in-itself” or “without-relation.” And then the phenomenal world is secondary, or derivative, because putting it into relation, somehow pulls it out of itself through artifice or adulteration. But it is the sensual copulation, or coupling, of relation that makes something what it is because whatever it was before, it wasn’t a thing, let alone a “thing-in-itself.” The great discovery of “Process Philosophy” was that things are relationships and not in-themselves, which dispelled the classical notion of what AN Whitehead called “Substance Ontology.” Process philosophy begins with the relation as the ground of whatever there is, as outlined in the above example of the relation of two different percepts according to the category, or rule, of temperature, so that any notion of substance or of essence is secondary rather than primary, which has prompted some modern philosophers to formulated the “thing-in-itself" as the relative phenomenon that emerges out of the relation of difference.  

The great discovery of Structuralism was this same realization of the primacy of the relation of difference but in semiotics rather than ontology. Ferdinand de Saussure and CS Pierce’s saw how the signifier expressed its semantic meaning through a relation of difference with other absent signifiers, which Giles Deleuze connected to ontology as repetition with or of difference. Peirce connected his semiology to ontology as well with his “Hypostatic Abstraction.” Both Deleuze and Peirce will be covered more thoroughly regarding this connection between being and language shortly. For now, it suffices to say that ontology works like semiology in that the determination of being (ontology) and thedetermination of identity (semiology) are both determined through the present absence of what isn’t. This necessary relation between is and isn’t, might be best understood in its simplest form as the relations of presence to absence inbinary oppositions, which at base are Hegel’s dialectical relations of being to nonbeing, which are the relations that ground all other relations of difference. It is ordinary enough to hear that we only know the good because of the bad, or light because of the dark, and so on, which is how Structuralism’s presence in common wisdom long predates Saussure or Claude-Levi Strauss. The Structuralist formulation of ontology can be taken negatively as determination by negation, like light is the absence of darkness, or it can be taken positively like light is the present absence of darkness, although the latter sounds ridiculous. However, these reverse determinations show the relation of absence to presence in ontology and identity to difference in semiology. Absence difference is present as the withdrawn differential background of any foregrounded, or “present,” identity.  

The primacy of relations of difference can be seen in the thought of Immanuel Kant who began modern philosophy by considering which relations were necessary to unify difference into phenomenal objects. He grouped therelations necessary for perception into various “a priori” categories, such as the relations of quantity, quality, relation itself, and modality. None of the a priori categories can be understood “in-themselves,” but must be understood relationally. For example, the “number” of quantity is a comparison and not an absolute number, or an in-itself. Expressions like ratios, percentages, and proportions all answer “how much” in relation to something else. Any standard or baseline, like a “Foot” or a “Yard” is established arbitrarily for the sake of these comparisons that yield either the quantity of numerical relations or the identity of semiotic relations.  

Absolute Knowing 

The apparently “absolute” number that seems to be given by the Planck Unit has to do with a sort of necessary absolute of non-relation, but not the absolute necessity of the without-relation of an “in-itself,” so the basic relationality of quantity hasn’t been eliminated in the absolute number of the Planck Unit. A Planck Unit isn’t the “unity” of a thing-in-itself because a thing without relation is not a thing, nor a unity, which demonstrates how anything that can be counted as a thing, or “taken as a one,” in Alaine Badiou’s way of putting it, must be comprised of a relation of unity to difference. The absolute oneness of a Planck unit isn’t inherent to it but given to it by the relation of a natural law to the difference, or contradiction, of its limit. This absolute limit of relation beyond the Planck Unit is like the limit of being to nonbeing because each constitutes the other in the manner of a horizon discussed above. The Planck unit is the relation of a physical law to its limit taken as one thing, like a set in Set theory. Badiou demonstrated that the oneness, and therefore the quiddity of an object is this relation of a series of difference to the unity of a limit. An object is like set because it is unified by the take-as-one procedure of sets, which is the relation that appears as if one, or as if independent, as an individual, or discreet, object. The absolute of a Planck’s Unit is neither a one, nor a thing, but a point, like a threshold between the possibility of relations of difference and the void of non-relation. It may ground measurement at the limit of the possibility of measurement, but this doesn’t make measurement absolute because measurement is a relation. 

A Planck Unit is the defined limit of a physical constant, which is the relation of a limit or threshold to the constancy of a law. A Planck Unit is the point at which the constancy, or the defining unity, of a natural law breaks downinto inconsistency, which is why Badiou thinks of whatever there is before the take-as-one function of sets, or the “wholes” of things, is the no-thing of an “inconsistent multiplicity.” These limits are necessary or “natural” because they are the limits of the relativity necessary for natural laws, which is not only the limit of laws but of things as well. There can be no “objective” measurement beyond the threshold of the Planck Unit because measurement, or quantity, is a relation, and Planck’s Unit marks the end of relativity. The concept of number is given by its limit, which is the relation of unity to multiplicity. There is no multiplicity beyond the Planck Unit, so there is no unity either. There is not any difference to “make a difference” according to Information Theory’s definition of information. The limit of information is the limit of identity, which is difference. 

For example, the Planck Length is the relation of length to its limit, which is the limit defined by the curvature of spacetime. It is the smallest possible length because the curvature of spacetime flattens and becomesindistinguishable from a straight line beyond Planck’s length. Another way of thinking about this limit is that it is the threshold beyond which there isn’t any difference to unify as a measurement. Length is like a set because it defines a measurement according to the relation of change to spacetime. Without any difference, or change, there can’t be any objects, or anything else, because there is neither multiplicity nor the unity with which to objectify it.   

Other Planck Units are adumbrations of this foundational relation between relation and non-relation or unity and multiplicity, which is both the threshold and horizon of the relativity of difference. For example, Planck Time is the relation of spacetime to its limit, which is the speed of light. Planck’s Time is directly related to Planck’s length because it is the distance, which takes no time for light to travel. Planck Time offers a clear example of how Planck Units are both the threshold and horizon of the relation, or of Einsteinian “Relativity,” because what fails at the limit of the spacetime continuum, which is the limit of the speed of light, is the necessary relation of space to time for the measurement of speed, which is the relativity given by the difference of intervals. There are no intervals beyond the speed of light, so there is no speed after the limit of Planck Time, which is why Einstein taught that light travels at the fastest possible speed.   

Planck units mark the horizon of both relation and difference as the limit of relativity itself because beyond these limits both the consistency and the change necessary for measurement, or for number itself, are lost to the total consistency of nonrelation, which is Badiou’s “inconsistent multiplicity,” but really, whatever it is, it can’t be named because both “inconsistency” and “multiplicity” are relative terms. The same is true for Quentin Meillassoux’s“necessary contingency.” Beyond the Planck Unit, there is neither “necessity” nor “contingency,” and whatever is there is the beyond of being that Hegel called “nonbeing,” but nonbeing is also a relative term, so it is hard to say what the term could even mean because language and knowing break at the threshold of relation and nonrelation. In whatever way being is structured like the relationality of the language that speaks it, it breaks too into the absolute nonbeing of whatever is beyond this threshold, which is no longer the relative nonbeing of the dialectical relation between being and nonbeing, but the “absolute” nothing of without-relation. The “absolute” number of the Planck Unit is a unity givento it by its relation to multiplicity, in much the same way that being is given to itself by its dialectical relation to the nonbeing internal to it, which is the relation that Hegel called the “Absolute” horizon of both being and knowing. 

Basing measurements on the “absolutes” of physical laws may eliminate the arbitrariness of establishing them on other sorts of relative standards, but quantity can never be “absolute” in the sense of without relation. Each of the Kantian categories necessary for perception relates difference or unifies the multiplicities of change by relating at least two percepts or bits of noumenon, whatever those might be, via a category, so that an object is a temporary phenomenal or conceptual unity that foregrounds a particular series of differences, like a set in Set Theory, against the background of different objects or of difference itself. The sensory categories of the body and the related conceptsof the Symbolic make present through a temporary unification, which is the unification of differences given by either a sensory system or by a concept, like a set, or both in relation to each other. The intention foregrounds an objective unity against the background of difference. 

The distinction between how the world appears to us through our bodily sensory apparatuses and our concepts and how it is “in-itself” has been taken to extremes in some corners of evolutionary biology and neuroscience as of late, with such evolutionary biologists as Donald Hofman claiming that our perceptual interface with the world is nothing like whatever there is apart from our perception of it. Whatever the world “in-itself” means in evolutionary biology, it doesn’t mean whatever is beyond the relation and difference of the threshold of the Planck Unit because there is nothing for truth to be in correspondence with after that point. And as demonstrated above, the Planck Unit doesn’testablish an absolute truth but truth as a relation. Truth is the relation between an interior concept to an exterior “reality,” which is considered “valid” when this relation is in “correspondence.”