Now to mightily test both reader and writer. I should warn that when I first encountered this concept it took some time to take on board, even though I had some experience of using epistemics at the time.

United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, has been credited with saying, “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.”

This was said in the context of entering into the Iraq war. Unfortunately, the expression ‘known unknowns’ and the context in which he placed the great issue of the ‘unknown unknowns’ tended to localise the latter into a state well beneath its actuality. It helps to simply consider the known and the unknown. There are many educated people today who believe that almost everything that can be known is now known and that science will soon reveal the little bit that is still not known. Nothing could better illustrate the gap between the level of awareness of these individuals and that of someone who has truly encountered the unknown.

The unknown is mind-bogglingly vast. It stretches both out into the apparent infinity of the physical universe and into the ‘interiority’, the vast spaces within the universe which the physicists still do not understand. It reaches down beyond the structure of material and reaches out to the ‘limits’ of space and into the past and the future. It encompasses our own imaginations and our sense of awareness. Far from us already knowing almost everything, the unknown vastly exceeds what we do know, or think we know. This puts both fanatical believers and fanatical unbelievers into the same camp of believers that all or nearly all is known.

Awareness is the opposite of unawareness. We can be in ignorance of both the unknown and of the limitations in our own awareness. An expanding awareness allows us to accept a great unknown. Psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Žižek went beyond the categories above to one where we intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know something. This could include such ‘appalling vistas’ as the Abu Ghraib expression of the US ‘liberation’ of Iraq. ‘Appalling vistas’ was the expression used by Great Britain’s Lord Denning when he refused to allow an appeal against an injustice on the basis that it was better to suffer the injustice than face the appalling vista that the police and prosecution had lied.

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