8. The Unknowable Is the Ground of Whatever Is Known

The Invaluable Uselessness of Dreams 

At some point in the night, dreams disconnect from their uses altogether and return to the useless beauty, sublimity, and horror that birthed them in the first place. When we lose ourselves in play, and in the play of dreams, we return home to the infinite play from which we came. We don’t tell stories for the practical propagation of the species alone, but we propagate the species for the sake of stories. The material consequences of our embodied play give our stories gravitas, so that the skin we put in the game intensifies the value of stories beyond value altogether. What is a body’s value if not for journeying forth into what is invaluable, which is the transcendent immanence of an ecstatic yarn? Our access to the infinite is always through our finitude, and there is no way to better use up our finitude than by strutting and fretting for the hour that we are allotted on this stage with the reckless abandon of the idiot who tells all great tales that signify nothing except the non-fungible, what-it-is-like of being in it. 

The Imaginary projects the virtual object into the gap inherent to being as a becoming, but there is a mismatch between the virtual object in the register of the Imaginary and the gap in the Register of the Real. It is this mismatch that allows being to be meaningful to itself. The ground of meaning is not the signifier but its relation to the nonbeing of a symbolic system of difference, the difference which is enabled by nonbeing. 

Whatever objects appear in the intention, as being appearing to itself, as the phenomenal or conceptual objects of the intention has an excess of intuition about them, or the too much intentional aboutness of too much intuitional givenness, as Jean-Luc Marion formulates his “Saturate Phenomena,” which warps their representational objectification in the manner of the Lacanian Real’s relation to the Symbolic intention as that which “resists symbolization absolutely.” The Real lack inherent to the Symbolic is a structural inequality between the excess inherent to being’s becoming and a lack of intentional representation, which might be understood in terms of Kant’s necessary categories for experience: quantity, quality, relationality, and modality. Being’s becoming overloads all four a priori categories with too much information to quantify, qualia to conceptualize, bodily affect to distantiate, and too many possibilities to be possible. 

The question of being is often formulated as “Why is there something rather than nothing?”. But if the cause of whatever there is, is the relation of something to nothing, then the ground of this dialectical relation is still unaccounted for, which is why the ground of being is often thought of as an uncaused cause, or the given preconditions for whatever else might be given. The gratuity of this givenness is the relation of something to nothing as a pure gift, or as a raw fact, given without a giver because given without explanation or reasons, sometimes called “self-sacrificial” or “unconditional love,” because this givenness is the self-emptying of motivated intention, or giving without the intention of a self.    

Process thinkers like AN Whitehead and Giles Deleuze started with the pure relation of Whitehead’s “relata,” or the pure difference of Deleuze’s “Difference-in-itself," and then followed the positivity internal to the relation, which Deleuze called the “differential field,” into the flows of intensity that comprise the relata of Deleuze’s “Difference-for-itself,” or of “relations relating to itself” in Soren Kierkegaard’s way of putting it. In this formulation, what is given as a raw fact, is the differential field in which difference is related to itself via a Deleuzian repetition, which is the pure difference of a relation without reference to a concept of identity. However, difference is given its differentness through its relation to another numerically distinct difference, which forms a temporary oneness necessary to relate one numerically distinct unit to another. Numerical distinction is given by the “count as one” method of Set Theory outlined by Alain Badiou. So, it doesn’t really matter whether the relation or the related are primary because they constitute each other. The primary difference between starting with the relation, as Process Philosophy does, and starting with the non-relation of identity as what Whitehead called “substance ontology” does, is that whatever is related is given its identity or oneness or intention by its relation and not by whatever it is in itself.  

Whether being’s becoming is conceived of analogically “as” the excessive positivity of indeterminate difference or “as” the excessive negativity of lack of determination is just a perspectival or parallax shift on what is foregrounded and what is backgrounded. For the processes of being’s becoming to move there must be an imbalance of difference over identity, in which identity, or the determination of identity, can’t keep up with the constant production of indeterminate being, which is the actual possibility that hasn't been realized or identified, except as an excess of what can be know about what there is. This inequality between being and knowing is the differential equation of the eternal noncoincidence of being and knowing reflective of a constitutional incompletion in being as a process of becoming. The excess produced by the processes of being’s becoming is both synchronic and diachronicin accordance with the text-like structure of the language that both mediates and gives being to itself through knowing and / or through experience, which is a distinction to be adumbrated shortly.  

The constitutive incompletion of being as a becoming reflected in knowing is synchronic in that there is at any given moment too much actual possibility to be realized, which is thought of as actual but withdrawn possibility in phenomenology, like the parts of a three dimensional object that can’t be seen from a given perspective, but which can be assumed to be there nonetheless because of an imaginal deduction about what can’t be directly seen. This virtual reality is ontologically real even if it hasn’t been realized yet because it is actual. So, possibility is a part of what is that can’t be entirely known because it can’t be counted. Possibilities can be known about before they have been realized, but this knowledge is only partial because each time possibility is realized, it actuates more possibility, which is new possibility space that couldn’t have been known about in advance. 

Every determination or realization creates more indeterminacy or more unknowing. Unknowing is built into the structure of knowing through symbolic difference because symbolic representation is a unification of multiplicity, asBadiou’s “take as one” method from Set Theory shows. A symbolic identification is a take-as-one unification that requires the backgrounding of what doesn’t belong in the set, so that the signifier’s determination is through theforegrounding of a conceptual or imaginary unity against the background of an “inconsistent multiplicity.” This unity, or individuation, is given by the definition of the set, which is the determination given by a concept. A concept isforegrounded, or differentiated, against the background of non-belonging. What doesn’t belong in the set isn’t determined by the concept, so that each concept produces indeterminacy to foreground its semantic content.   

A concept is the realization of a semantic possibility that actuates more semantic possibilities as it is realized. When a novel semiotic determination relates to difference differently, as it does in Deleuze’s “concept creation,” then it doesn’t reduce difference per se, but rather it produces more difference by relating the limit of an individuated conceptual object to the without limit of potential, which is difference related to itself on the “Plane of Immanence” as a repetition with / of difference. Whatever the frame of the concept excluded by its determination is the open indeterminacy of possibility actuated by this differentiation. 

The diachronic aspect of both being’s and knowing’s incompletion has to do with the nature of being’s becoming in time and knowing’s knowing retroactively. The past is brought into the present as whatever possibility has already been realized as concrete objects, including, and especially, the conceptual objects used for the interpretation and realization of possibility. But because the present is an accumulation of past “concretions,” to use Whitehead's term, the present is always more than the past, especially more in terms of more indeterminacy because possibilities increase with each accumulated objective determination. Determinate objects, whether material or conceptual, are not entirely determined by their realizations, so they have virtuality no matter how rigid they may seem, as Deleuze was keen to point out. Determining them does not eliminate possibilities but simply changes the structure of theirindeterminacy and often increases virtuality altogether. The number of possible relations increases with each determination, as is evidenced in complex systems.    

When concepts that were reified in the past are used to frame the present, what is presented is the difference of the past, and this difference individuates new objects by foregrounding (differentiating) the difference of the present against the background of the concepts of the past. The concept highlights this diachronic difference as the contrast between a concept differentiated in the past and what is presented in the present, which is why historical, semiotic realizations, such as those adumbrated by the genealogies of words in etymology, outline change overtime in relation to the semiotic conditions of the past. But any study of any subject is like this because each is a genealogy of symbiological possibilities, both those realized and those available but not chosen. Whatever particular semantics were realized in the past, they were differentiated from within the actual possibilities of the context of the time, so that ahistorical study of any kind is performed by imagining counter factuals, which is the relation of the indeterminate present to the determined past given by concepts.  

No concept can fully interpolate the present without remainder because of this diachronic difference between the greater presentation of the present and the lesser capacity of the concept, which is the built in limitation of the retroactivity of the concept. But this mismatch between the interpretive capacity of the concept and the excessive remainder of indeterminacy pressurizes the conditions for concept creation, in the manner of the paradigm shiftoutlined by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The Symbolic shifts and grows as it “learns” to accommodate, or interpolated, the inevitable novelty of the present, novelty that it continues to create with each new determination. 

How Does the One Become Many? 

At the most basic physical level, the perfect completion, or unity, of matter in the singularity was disturbed by the introduction of energy in the “Big Bang.” According to this view energy is the introduction of space-time to matter’sgravitational resistance, in which energy has the advantage as evidenced by the accelerating expansion of the universe. But the opposite might also be said if the beginning was space-time's relationality into which matter’s gravitational resistance was introduced. The gravitational pull into the unity of the singularity is incomprehensible without the opposing push of the relationality of difference. The beginning of a beginning is incomprehensible and unknowable, so either formulation is a groping after words for what cannot be articulated because representation requires what was always, already begun. The beginning of the beginning never was because the copular “is” must already be, to speak of whatever there was or is or will be. The relation of matter to energy is the “is” that allows matter to represent energy’s divergent intention for difference and the relation of energy to matter that allows energy to represent matter’s singularintention for the unity of identity.  

The question of a ground for what is, or of the ground of being has plagued philosophy since its inception. Usually the question is formed, as it is in modern science, in the formulation of “How does the One become the Many?”,which assumes that whatever there was before the present multiplicity of being, it can be counted as a one. But whatever it was can’t be counted at all because it was before the relation of the one to the many from which numbers and countability come. Alain Badiou described how an “inconsistent multiplicity” is unified by using the “count-as-one" procedure of set theory in which a series is grouped together as if a one. There was not a countable one before its relation to the many but an uncountable, inconsistent multiplicity that somewhat paradoxically forms an undifferentiated homogeneity when backgrounded against the individuated unity of an object. It is the inconsistency of difference that allows for the appearance of a repetition. AN Whitehead explained that repetitions, which he called “generals” arose from within the inconsistency of multiplicity’s difference. The inconsistency of difference is the double negation that produces the consistency of a repetition. It is the relation of a repetition to a difference that is the count-as-one method of making a set or of unifying a series of differences into an object, which is how the multiple becomes one in the processes of representation. 

Process thinkers imagine the ground of what is, in reverse order to the classical formulations of substance ontology in which whatever there is, comes from the without-relations of an ultimate ground. Processes thinkers begin with the with-relations of the Many and ask, “How are the Many unified into the singularity of the objects that appear on our intentional screens?”, which assumes that the unity of phenomenal and conceptual objects is ontologically post facto to a primary difference, and which Deleuze thought of as a differential field. But the differential field is only conceivable against the background of the unity of the objects that it foregrounds, which is why Deleuze admitted that the “Difference-in-itself" before the differential field wasn’t conceivable or directly accessible until its pure potential had some immanent repetition to relate. The same is true for the substance ontology that processes thinkers oppose so vehemently, best represented by Hegel’s “Being-in-itself.”  

This formulation of whatever was before the becoming of the Universe as “being-all-in-one-place" is just as inconceivable as Process Philosophy’s reverse formulation of the pure relationality of difference, or the differential field,because both are equivalent to an uncountable and unrepresentable nothing until they are brought into physical relations and / or into the virtual relations of the count-as-one method of set theory. And it may be that material relations contain both the physical and the virtual in the sort of continuity that monists hold. There are some in the incomplete Universe camp that maintain that this unknowability of the beginning before the beginning remains after the becoming of being has begun as a kind of present absence or groundless ground of whatever there is. And that this groundless ground relates the indeterminacy of its pure potential to the grounded determinacy of matter’s resistance.  

Or formulated slightly differently, this present absence is the background that presences, or foregrounds, indeterminacy for use in an actual possibility space. So that, an actual possibility space might contain accessible degrees of freedom because it is a field whose coordinates aren’t fully determined. If so, then part of the unknowability of the Universe has to do with both actual possibility that hasn’t been realized yet, and potential that hasn’t been actualized yet. The former might be hypothetically knowable by whatever methods possibilities are assessable, usually by statistical analyses. But the former remains unknowable because whatever the pure potential of the differential field is, it isn’t a countable virtuality, nor a measurable material, but rather whatever the absence of determination is, maybe something like the openness of space-time in-itself. 

The One that Failed to Be at One 

Whenever this uncountable, unrepresentable One is addressed in the “Neo-Platonism” of Plotinus, countability and representability fall apart because of the One’s constitutive lack of relationality, so either starting with the something of everything-in-one-place or with the nothing of differential relations in-themselves, there is a sort of unknowability or incompletion built into the Universe. This unknowability is because of the constitutive incompletion of the processes of Being’s becoming, which on the level of physics is the process of energy’s repulsive impression on matter and matter’s attractive resistance to energy. Representation begins here with this interaction between matter and energy because the field of matter-energy is where energy and matter make their impressions on each other, which is a (re)presentation of an “original,” but unrepresentable presence, which is unrepresentable because whatever is present is non-relational and therefore can’t make its presence known by its effect, or impression, on something else.  

Knowing is through representation. The inconceivable nothing that was before whatever there is, wasn’t “before” it except in some metaphorical sense because it is still present as the ground of whatever there is. But this ground isn’t conceivable in-itself either, except metaphorically as the background of whatever is foregrounded. Whatever was before this background must also still be present as a kind of background to the background that was classically formulated as an “ultimate ground,” or an “uncaused cause,” or a “necessary being,” or an “unmoved mover.” A background might be thought of as a present absence because it is necessary to foreground the appearance of whatever is present, or whatever is presented by this foregrounding. Without the presence of these “absence” backgrounds, knowledge isn’t possible, which is to say that whatever is knowable is knowable by foregrounding it against a background of what is unknowable. 

The Universe becomes in the same way that it appears, which is as the continuous processes of differential relations between the determinations of matter and the indeterminate potential of space-energy according to thenatural laws. There are those in the incomplete Universe camp who believe that there are different degrees of freedom accessible to the physical possibility spaces of objective determination version the virtual possibility spaces of subjective determination. But most in the process camp are monists, so that virtuality is available to both subjects and objects, or for those who follow Graham Harmon’s “Object Orientated Ontology,” subjects simply are objects. If subjects collapse entirely into objects, then there are no actual degrees of freedom in object relations. But for those monists who hold one of the many version of “dual aspect monism” there is a split between those who   There are degrees of freedom that are inherent to how it appears through the processes of representation versus its merely physical becoming. How something appears is related to how something is, but this is not a determinate relationship. This is because of the multiply realizable nature of representation. The physical processes of becoming may be materially determined, but how they are represented contains some degrees of freedom. The virtuality of the mental seems to offer options about how to conceive what appears as both phenomenological and conceptual objects. However, for thinkers such as Hegel these virtual degrees of freedom offered by representation can be used to intervene in the material determinations of being. 

of amounts of information versus capacity for storing and processing that could hypothetically be solved if there were enough computational capacity and time to perform the operation. This is a noncoincidence between the understanding of being given in mathematical terms versus the non-quantizable experience of being. Sometimes this incongruence is put in terms of the analog nature of being versus the digital nature of quantizable information, or in terms of the gap between scientific knowing in the third-person or “objective” perspective versus the “direct” knowledge of first-person or subjective experience, or in terms of the quantities of measurement versus the qualities of experience, or in terms of the cut between being and knowing that is created by the symbolic mediation of language. 

Regardless of how the noncoincidence between being and knowing is formulated, adherence of the position that human understanding will always have a blind spot hold this position because in one way or another knowing is limited by its necessarily embedded perspective within being, which isn't gotten out of by amassing the type of information that artificial intelligence can store and process because whatever amount of information AI obtains, this information is limited by the same limitations of its human input. Human input is always from the embedded perspective of the human observer, and human being is only one kind of perspective on being. There is no “God’s Eye View” of the entirety of being, which is sometimes derogatorily called the “View from Nowhere” even though that is what modern science claims for itself when it claims that the third-person verifiability or falsifiability of its quantizable orcountable information is not only “objective” but will eventually be exhaustive or complete.  

But the problem of complete knowledge is even more acute when it comes to consciousness itself since any empirical observation of “objective” being requires a conscious observer to verify, or falsify, its correspondence with a particular “state-of-affairs.” If consciousness is a part of what is, but is also the ground of knowing what is, then there is a particular blind spot that forms when it tries to study itself because it can’t step outside of itself to make itself adirect object of empirical observation. Because consciousness must study itself from within itself, as Phenomenology assumes, it has an inbuilt limitation of what it can know about itself. This blind spot that forms when one tries to study consciousness from within the framework of consciousness itself is often compared to the blind spot, or “scotoma,” that is formed by the optic nerve in the eye. The effect of the blind spot on the visual field is usually minimal and unnoticed until it is demonstrated, usually in psyche 101 class, by placing a point on a piece of paper, closing one eye, and then moving the point around in front of one’s face until it disappears somewhere around the center of the visual field. However, the blind spot of empirical observation as well as what seems like the “purity” of logical reasoning, which are together the foundation of modern science, covers a much larger area than that of the optic nerve, which isbecause the observer is an unacknowledged part of her observations.  

The problem of the blind spot is a much larger issue than saying that the eye can’t see its own looking because one might point out that a mirror can show an eye looking at itself in an indirect way. However, this doesn’t reduce the blind spot any because the eye that is looking at the eye looking at itself in the mirror still can’t see its own looking, and so on. This is something like saying that although metacognition is thinking about thinking, it isn’t the ground of thinking because thinking about thinking is recursive and unending, so that one can think about thinking about thinking, and so on. There is no way to think in such a way as to complete or end thinking. The infinite is built into knowledge as the recursion of a knowing that effects what is known or a thinking that effects the object of thought without any physical contact.  

Thinking seems to contain some degrees of freedom in terms of how to think about the object of thought, which is not to stay that one can see something as whatever they want to see it as, as some people accuse so called “Post Modernism” of asserting. The famous ambiguity of the “Duck / Rabbit” image seems to provide the observer with a choice about how to view the object as either a duck or a rabbit, but one must see it as either a duck or a rabbit and not both at the same time. When one sees a duck, the rabbit withdraws and vice versa. This is how degrees of freedom are accessed in thought, but what can’t be seen Directly is the selector behind the selection of the duck or the rabbit, which is the difference between whatever is in the subject position versus the object position. What one is aware of can be studied as the direct object of one’s perception, but the awareness by which one perceives the object must be studied indirectly as is done in Phenomenology because even if one directly observes the mechanism of perception, one cannot see the perception itself from the vantage point of a third person observer. 

Phenomenology can infer what consciousness is by how objects appear to it, but this is necessarily an indirect kind of knowledge. Neuroscience can study the electrochemical corollaries of subjective experience in the brain, but it can’t directly study consciousness itself either. For the so called “Mysterian” there is an inbuild limitation to knowing whatever there is because of a blind spot in knowing itself that forms both whenever knowing tries to know itself andwhenever knowing knows whatever it knows about the Universe, which is that its knowledge is embedded in a particular, necessarily limited perspective beyond the limitations of location for an observer in a Block Universe. Knowledge is limited because knowing is a kind of realization of actual possibilities, and when an actual possibility is realized, it creates more actual possibilities that weren’t merely withdrawn before the realization of a choice but were actualized by this realization, or made into actual possibilities from the nothing of pure potential by the realization of a choice.  

For Giles Deleuze potential in-itself wasn’t accessible until it was actualized, and so the process of actualization was what made potential accessible as the possible. The most basic description of actualizing potential into possibility was given by AN Whitehead when he described the relation of the infinity of potential to a limit via a rule in an “Actual Occasion.” In modern physics the terms “matter” on the one hand and the term “energy” on the other are commonly brought together in the term “matter-energy” to describe the most basic relation in physical reality, so that “matter-energy” isn’t really a thing in-itself but a relation in-itself, which is the relation between matter as limit toenergy as potential via the physical laws. AN White initiated modern “Processes Philosophy” by asserting that it was “relata,” or the relation in-itself, that proceeded a thing, in the sense that it was the relation that makes a thing rather than a thing making itself, as was previously thought in what Whitehead derogatorily referred to as “substance-based ontology.” There are no things or nothing without relata, so that singularity of all matter compacted into one place before relations was nothing, not even a singularity. 

Deleuze, having studied Whitehead, also began his ontology with the relation in-itself, which he called “Difference-in-itself," rather than with a thing-in-itself, or “Being-in-itself" like Hegel did, which is like saying that what gives a thing its substance is the relation of matter to energy via a rule rather than an ideal form. An actual possibility space is comprised of the relation between potential and its limit, so while the relation defines whatever is related, both the relation and whatever it relates are necessary for an actual possibility space. This is also true for knowledge itself. The infinite can’t be known until it is structured by the limitations of rules, which in the case of the Universe is how matter-energy forms an actual possibility space with the limitations of physical laws. The limit of knowledge is the unstructured potential of whatever is before an actualized possibility space.