The known, the unknown, and the unknowable

The known and the unknown are blessings. The unknowable is both a mystery and a blessing, a blessing because it is a mystery.

Learning and knowing feel good to us. We are built that way. They are a form of power, of strength; our survival depends on them, and we get a fundamental kind of pleasure from them. Actually, “pleasure” isn’t that good a word for how they feel to us–it’s too lightweight. There is often a deep-seated satisfaction, a sense of well-being, of security, that accompanies our feeling of knowing and understanding something. The known is a blessing; that we can know is a blessing (and a bit of a mystery; the entire field of epistemology attests to the mysteriousness of our capacity to know anything about the world and ourselves.) Most people will have no problem affirming this principle: the known is a blessing.

The unknown, on the other hand, is often thought of as scary. What we don’t know can hurt us. But just imagine what it would be like if there were no unknown–if everything were known and understood by us. It would be incredibly boring. What would we do with these big brains of ours? Wonder and awe are our natural responses to encountering the edge of the unknown, or to learning something new and remarkable about the universe. If we knew and understood everything–what could then inspire wonder and awe in us? And would we really want to live without the pleasures of learning, or in a world devoid of wonder and awe? So the unknown-but-potentially-knowable is also a blessing.

Which leaves the unknowable. There might be some who would deny that anything is inherently unknowable, but my response is that they lack imagination. There is much that is unknowable, at many levels. At a more obvious and trivial level, no one now living will ever know, this side of death anyway, the specific and actual details of what happened in the life of any one of their ancestors say ten thousand years ago. A person who believes in past life regression might believe something about such a thing–but I would argue that the truth of the matter is inherently unknowable.

At a more profound level, what happens to us–to the conscious “me” of our own experience–when we die is unknowable as long as we are still alive. Again, people have various beliefs, based on doctrine, hope, or experience of one kind or another. But all such beliefs are based on lived experiences of this world, projected beyond death. Thus we may believe whatever–that we simply end, that we continue in some form, that we merge with the All as a drop of water merges with the ocean–and it’s certainly possible that some or all of someone’s beliefs are actually true. But we do not and cannot know the truth of the matter.

But there’s a deeper kind of unknowable. The above examples both refer to information that we cannot know. But however much information we might have, there always remains mystery. As Galen Guengerich said in his Christmas homily this year, “Despite all our knowledge, life remains a mysterious and risky business. Reason doesn’t guarantee contentment, knowledge doesn’t guarantee happiness, and self-reliance doesn’t guarantee fulfillment. Sometimes even children of the Enlightenment find themselves in the dark.”

The qualia of consciousness–even why, exactly, consciousness exists and what its relationship is to our bodies and brains–are also mysteries. And by “qualia of consciousness” I don’t just mean why red looks and feels a certain way to me, and does it look and feel the same to you? (A question I remember discussing with my brother one night when I was about seven and he would have been about ten; he was the precocious li’l philosopher who brought it up.*) Consider love. There is genuine mystery to love. We know a fair amount about the biochemistry of love these days, and presumably will know more in the future. And it’s easy to discuss the phenomenon of love from the perspective of its survival value for a social species. But there’s more to love than information about it, there’s more to love even than how it makes us feel. Mystery remains.

And a good thing, too, I say. Somehow, our sense that there is meaning to our lives, that there are things that matter in some profound sense, are tied up with the existence of this kind of deep mystery. Thus, the unknowable too is a blessing.

So, these three abide: the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. They are in some sense the foundation of whatever spiritual life I have. They work as an invocation when lighting candles, providing this extreme doubter for whom no tradition quite works with a basis for ritual. And the phrase can be flexibly expanded: “The known, the unknown, and the unknowable blessings of god,” say, or “The known, the unknown, and the unknowable meaning of life.” Play with it; make up your own. It works, whether you’re a doubter and seeker like me, or a person blessed with a satisfying spiritual and/or religious life grounded in a tradition.

*My answer–once I understood what the heck he was talking about–was that I believe red does look/feel essentially the same to different people, because we are all products of the Universe, having developed/emerged here through the same processes. With some refinement, this remains my answer to this day. The truth of the matter is, of course, unknown and unknowable.