CONFERENCEOn the border between the known and the unknown, a man has lived on Earth since the dawn of times. Life as we know it – as being a human in the myriad of life-forms and the spectrum of the possibilities of that being itself – is, in its essence, this border. However, there have been different ways in which a man has thought and talked about the relationship between the known and the unknown in life, and how he has shaped these relationships through his actions. The known has acquired the features of the safe, familiar, and transformed into the usual. The usual has turned into the customary, and this – into the commonplace. The unknown has caused fear and confusion, yet precisely because of that, it has prompted to forge a special relationship with itself. This relationship with the unknown takes a distinctive form in the modern sciences and the Enlightenment. Modern times, in the course of the development of contemporary sciences and innovations of modernity, perceive the challenge in the “unknown” – implying that one day we will know what is currently unknown. However, for this time, the currently unknown is not only a lack of knowledge and thus – the worthless, which acquires its value only when has become known. No, reality itself entices and attracts precisely in its infinite “yet unknownness” and potential knowability. The relationship with the unknown has acquired a combination of cognizability and the promise of potential knowledge. Therefore, the symbolic figures of the modern age are those who both aspire to know and preserve the attraction of the unknowability of reality as a potential infinite cognizability. The modern era has sought such figures in the rapidly developing natural sciences, as well as in the social sciences and humanities. This era has glorified the researcher, who is dedicated to his studies and solving the riddles posed by reality, as the one who stands on the border of the known and the unknown. Has the modern age entirely passed over the authority of the border guard on the border between the known and the unknown to the scientist as a researcher who enters into a relationship with the unknown, and to the scientist as an expert who knows what is already known? Furthermore, is the paradigmatic understanding of the unknown as potentially infinitely cognizable the only one that shapes the modern age? Since Romanticism’s objection, which it put forth to the Enlightenment, the relationship between the known and the unknown has not been exclusively unambiguous. It is Romanticism (inspired by the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte), which rises beyond supporting the potentially infinite exploration of the world (and radically departing from the idea of the world as a static, finite, clear order). Romanticism also reveals the immanent infinity of man’s inner world, which opens new possibilities for literature. For a good reason, Friedrich Schlegel wrote about the self as countless Selves – about the self as an open system. Accepting and enduring such outer and inner worlds of open, infinitely cognizable (and thus never subject to a complete transformation into a space of static security) – this is the challenge of modern man, who since the time of Romanticism has created many a new existential tension unknown to the pre-modern era, as well as engendered structural socio-political problems.
However, Romanticism’s relationship with the unknown is more complex and cannot be reduced to the overall paradigm of the unknown as potentially cognizable, initiated by the modernity and the Enlightenment. The Romanticists are the ones who want to understand the unknown not only as the infinitely describable in literature and the infinitely cognizable in the sciences, but also as the uncontrollable, ungraspable and precisely because of that – the real. Knowledge, once acquired, applied, turned into the education system as something to be learned, depletes the world – it turns into a field, cultivated and processed only by human activity, cognition, language, which is driven to expand by “capturing”, “controlling” and “making it available”. The available becomes the usual, the convenient, the grasped. The world loses its amazingness and, thus, its reality. Paradoxically, it is not the realists, but the Romanticists who (admittedly, within their understanding of reality) in modern times do not want to lose the opportunity to meet the unknown as real. This chord of Romanticism can be observed later in the philosophy and literature, in art and the study of the psyche of the 20th century. This chord also resonates in the early 21st century, although it often is hard to hear over the noise emitted by labours aiming to achieve the known as the controllable and unquestionable.
The unknown as the real scares no less than the unknown lurking on the periphery of the world of pre-modern societies, yet its presence makes life real. It is described from different perspectives in the book “On the Border of Known and Unknown”.
Dr. phil. Raivis Bičevskis
Head of Department of Philosophy and Ethics, Faculty of Humanities of the University of Latvia, Tenured Professor in Social Philosophy,
Full Member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences
Uz zināmā un nezināmā robežas. Sast., zin. red. I. Kivle, R. Bičevskis. Rīga: LU Akadēmiskais apgāds, 2024. 184. lpp.