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Monday, October 1, 2018

Knowing and Not Knowing



     We value knowledge and regard its lack as a simple deficiency, but that view is neither inevitable nor is it always serviceable. In fact knowing and not knowing, like all bipolar oppositions, have a dialectical complementarity. [1] Their relation is so intimate that ignorance is entailed by every specific claim to knowledge, and skepticism in general need not be a logical cul de sac. The apophatic tradition’s route even as far as the divine is only the most spectacular use of not-knowing. Neither the lack of direct demonstrable evidence (of God, for example) nor an insufficiency of evidence (for any other proposition) need bring an end to inquiry.
     There is an inescapable figure/ground relationship involved in sense perception and no less in cognitive processes. Gestalt psychologists have demonstrated that, when one focuses on an object, one necessarily, at the same time, becomes unaware of its context. For every apparent gain in understanding, there is a corresponding loss. It is no more possible to maintain an equal awareness of all parts of a field than to fix both the position and momentum of a quantum object. To understand an utterance means to ignore other associated data. To recognize one reality means to be unconscious of many others. For functional problem-solving and most science, this presents no difficulty; indeed, the limited focus is essential and fruitful. In this way, not knowing is harmoniously intertwined with knowing throughout daily experience.
     Rightly understood the apparently limiting condition of our inescapably partial vision is more often the enabler of conviction than an obstacle. Growing up one is educated by acquiring the beliefs cultivated in one’s own culture. While the process enables an individual to function effectively in a social situation, it requires becoming blind to other possibilities. Yet societies do change, and, for the individual as well, this patterning of blindness and insight [2] may develop, evolve, and alter. The comfortable certainties of received ideas may be threatened or overturned by exposure to other societies with other visions, which may leave the thinker hopelessly at sea, but which often results in an eclectic or a skeptical point of view, or simply a more informed conclusion. A similar step toward enlightenment may occur due to ratiocination, meditation, drugs, or any of the range of techniques people have developed for altering consciousness and thus broadening the mind’s horizon.. Only then does the individual realize the significant role ignorance played in what had felt very much like secure conviction.
     But there can be no eliminating a residue of uncertainty about even the most superficially self-evident facts. One of the most systematic and influential philosophic formulations of this is the Indian catuṣkoṭi, a series of propositions that has been used in a wide variety of ways by Asian philosophers; my own use is doubtless different from theirs. [3]
     The catuṣkoṭi is generated by considering the array of possibilities when considering the truth of a proposition P. It may be so (P) or it may not (not-P). It also may be that both P and not-P are true, or that neither P nor not-P is, resulting in the following. Clever logicians including the great Nagarjuna then doubled this to eight propositions and added a capping ninth term sunyata, or emptiness.


Positive configuration
1. P
2. Not-P
3. Both P and Not-P
4. Neither P nor Not-P


1.
Negative configuration
1. Not (P)
2. Not (Not-P)
3. Not (Both P and Not-P)
4. Not (Neither P nor Not-P)

Sunyata


     This catuṣkoṭi has been used in a wide variety of ways by Asian philosophers; my own use is doubtless different from theirs. [4] To me it is a dialectical series of oppositions that, rather than resolving, leads to a further bipolar pair. It expands indefinitely like a human embryo starting with a single cell, then doubling and redoubling into nearly unfathomable complexity. In the broadest application the formula applies to any proposition, that is to say, to the world at large.
     One may walk through the progressively unfolding implications of the catuṣkoṭi until their complexity becomes unwieldy. One naturally takes the reality of the phenomena one can perceive for granted. This is the first term of the original tetralemma. The first duality then appears with the suggestion that the world is in fact illusory, a veil of maya, avidya, or not-knowing into which one must look more deeply to achieve enlightenment. At this point the critical doubt is productive, suggesting possibilities which would not otherwise arise. This skeptical questioning, flying in the face of common sense, produces the second term.
     Yet the world is not wholly and simply non-existent either. Even if it be a magic show, a puff of smoke, a flash of light, even these are something. The world must simultaneously exist in some sense while not existing in the last analysis. On the other hand the paradox forces the observer to conclude that it neither fully exists nor fully lacks existence in the ordinary understanding. These then are the third and fourth terms.
     This schema already gives the juggling thinker too many thoughts to keep airborne at once, but the savants’ increasingly exquisite metaphysical elaborations may serve the receptive mind as a basis for epistemology. Frustrating though it may be for those with little tolerance for paradox and mystery, this view, in which knowing and not-knowing are symmetrically intertwined, seems the closest approach we may attain to Truth.
     The view of those pursuing the apophatic conception of Ultimate Reality makes an even stronger claim: that the divine is “the affirmation of all things, the negation of all things, and beyond all affirmation and denial.” Nirvana etymologically refers to being extinguished, blown out like an oil lamp, yet it is the goal of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Recent studies have pointed out significant parallels between these spiritual traditions and the discoveries of modern physics. [7]
     What can it mean that the positive and negative charges in the universe are equal? Surely the same should be true of matter and antimatter, though, for the present, these seem stubbornly unequal. [7] When one totals up the entire cosmos the answer must be zero, but a simple blank is not the result, or we would not be here wondering. On the contrary the observer, knowing and not knowing at the same time, gazing through the optical lens of ordinary vision corrected by the additional lens of philosophic speculation, sees most often instead the phantasmagoric phenomena of the world which are both there and not there. We know only by not knowing and see only by blindness.



1. Among the classic statements of this idea is the second poem in the Dao de Jing. As it is critical to the concepts to follow, I include a translation of a portion of that poem in James Legge’s clunky old translation for which, despite all its awkwardness (and its author’s Christian bias), I retain an affection: “All in the world know the beauty of the beautiful, and in doing this they have (the idea of) what ugliness is; they all know the skill of the skilful, and in doing this they have (the idea of) what the want of skill is. So it is that existence and non-existence give birth the one to (the idea of) the other; that difficulty and ease produce the one (the idea of) the other; that length and shortness fashion out the one the figure of the other; that (the ideas of) height and lowness arise from the contrast of the one with the other; that the musical notes and tones become harmonious through the relation of one with another; and that being before and behind give the idea of one following another. Therefore the sage manages affairs without doing anything, and conveys his instructions without the use of speech.”

2. This tidy phrase is, of course, the title of Paul de Man’s virtuoso critical performance. Deconstruction, with its insistence on the statement which is sou rature, “under erasure,” directly engages the dialectic of knowing and not knowing.

3. In fact this gap may well be considered an example of my own ignorance or blindness fostering a new conclusion. The catuṣkoṭi is closely paralleled by reports of the philosophy of Pyrrho of Elis in Sextus Empiricus. As Pyrrho is known to have traveled east with Alexander where he conferred with Persian magi and Indian yogis it is likely that he returned with some Eastern ideas. See Diogenes Laertius 9.61. For a useful sketch of parallels between Pyrrh and Madyamika, see Thomas McEvilley, “Pyrrhonism and Maadhyamika,” Philosophy East and West xxxii, 1 (January 1982), 3-35.

4. Note that, unlike some of the Asian thinkers I accept all these propositions as finally equal in truth value. For some they are alternatives among which one must choose.

5. Eriugena's translation of the pseudo-Dionysius “omnium positio, omnium ablatio, super omnem positionem et ablationem inter se invicem.” (Patrologia Latina CXXII 1121 c-d).

6. The seminal work was Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics. Capra was qualified both as a particle physicist and a psychedelic veteran. His books have, not surprisingly, had a mixed reception. I have not read them.

7. This is called baryon asymmetry.

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