A few years ago, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld made the newspaper’s “zany” column. He stole the prize for garbled speech from his boss, George W., when he had announced, “there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
What does that mean?
It turns out that Rumsfeld had been reading a philosopher named Bernard Lonergan. (More likely, he was trying to repeat something he heard from a Lonergan scholar and neo-con, Michael Novak, who was Bush’s envoy charged with attempting to get Pope John Paul II to bless the Iraq invasion.) Lonergan used to talk about horizons as “the bounding circles that are the limits of one’s field of vision.”
Horizons, as Lonergan noted, shift as we move, and if we climb to some higher standpoint, a previous horizon expands to include a grander vista. In just the same way, the realm of things that we know has a horizon.
Beyond that horizon is a realm of things that are questionable; we know only enough about these things to ask questions, and when we succeed in finding answers for our questions, the prior horizon of what we know expands.
The realm of the questionable also has a horizon, and beyond that horizon is the realm of absolute ignorance. Absolute, because we don’t even know that we don’t know anything about it. For example, the realm of nanotechnology—before someone mentioned it to me and I became curious—simply didn’t exist for me. Now my horizons have shifted and nanotechnology is in the second realm of things I know just enough about to have questions about them.
When accurately quoted and explained, Lonergan sounds much like Albert Einstein. The great physicist noted, “As a circle of light increases, so does the circumference of darkness around it.” The more we know (the first realm of knowledge), the more questions we have (the second realm) and the greater our awareness of how vast must be the circumferance of darkness (the third realm of ignorance).
Lonergan’s horizon analysis was intended to celebrate the uniquely human activity of asking questions. Questioning expands the horizon of knowledge and the pushes out the circumference of ignorance. Rather than reduce, it increases the realm of what can possibly be known. Questioning leads us into mystery.
Questioning makes us human. It expresses an unstructured wonder that awakens early in infancy when children begin pestering their parents with the incessant “why?” In moments of release from the struggle to survive, all of us ask “what if?” play with images and sounds that explore the unknown (the second realm), wrestle with the difference between the real and the apparent, ponder what is to be done or not done, retrieve what we think to be “the past” and imagine what we hope will be “the future.”
Wonder summons forth a series of mental operations until questions about what something is, whether it is so and whether it ought to be so have been satisfied. It opens up the realm of moral consciousness in which desires and feelings are transformed into values or judgments about what is worthwhile. It involves us in having to take responsibility for the truth of what we affirm or deny. And, whereas the taken-for-granted environment of our daily, non-questioning life is solid and predictable, the horizon opened up by wonder and questioning is filled with tentative insights, provisional judgments and changing values.
It is Rumsfeld’s description of the second realm, the realm of questioning, that he garbles the most. Could it be that he was most comfortable with what he knew and with the existence of absolute ignorance, but uncomfortable in the realm of questioning?
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