Knowing and Not Knowing

Kant speaks of the unknowable thing in itself. This describes the thing’s alienation from the apriori – from the interiority of the categories of rational thought. Knowledge can recognise similarities and differences between rational categorical modes and the stuff of the world, but can never entirely encompass or appropriate the latter. But how can knowledge take determinable shape on its own, without this relation to a field of unknowable exteriority? What is the sphere of the known in itself? I’m aware that addressing this question would require a close discussion of Kant’s notion of the apriori – something, that I’m scarcely in a position to attempt here. My concern here is simply to suggest that perhaps a relation to the unknowable character of the real provides the basis for all our machinations of knowledge. To speak of the unknowable thing in itself need not be to envisage our absolute separation from the real, but rather to insist that knowledge – the sense of knowing something – is a derived phenomenon. The world asserts itself first (and last) as unknowable force, as a field in which we are interpolated and summoned. Eluding the forms of knowledge, eluding even the subject/object dichotomy, we are enmeshed within the sphere of the unknowable. It is not only an awkward ground, it is not only something that can be gradually overcome, it shapes even the conditions of knowledge. Knowledge itself reveals a dimension of the unknowable – as it becomes an object, as it becomes a thing. Our relation to the real – in its unknowable character – is what makes reality pressing, is what makes it inescapable.