The Problem of Finite Knowledge

 Back to my current interests and problems. 

I continue to be perplexed by the problem of finite knowledge. That seems on the surface to be a contradiction. Either I know something or I don't. Applied to Thomas Aquinas, either I grasp the universal and know what some x is – a triangle, water, an atom, justice, man – or I don't. Yet bring mortal and embodied, I only know x finitely, not as God knows it (or in an absolute sense), and therefore not as it really is in its full being. I seem back to Kant: I can’t justify my saying that I know the thing-itself. To say my glimpse of the truth is a participation in the mind of God from a finite point of view (Aquinas) somehow doesn't fully resolve the tension, the gap between knowledge as finite and infinite. More precise would be to say: I have every reason to believe I know some aspect of x, but can't go beyond that.  – I want to try to think through this, again.

 

 

I. The Problem

  At first glance, knowledge seems binary: either I know what x is, or I do not. If I know what a triangle is, then I grasp its essence: a three-sided plane figure. That is, I not only know this or that particular triangle but all triangles whatsoever. I recognize them as triangles because I know what makes them triangles. (This is the faculty that elevates us above other animals, gives meaning to the expression “made in God’s image,” and grounds the Thomist argument for the immortality of the soul.) If I know what justice is, then I grasp its essence: giving each his due, etc. So the puzzle arises: if I grasp the essence (the universal), then I know the thing. But if I only grasp it partially, then do I really know it at all? This creates an apparent contradiction. Knowledge seems to require completeness, yet human knowledge is finite.

 

II. Some examples to deepen the problem

 1. Take something simple: water. Ancient people knew water. They were not merely experiencing appearances. They knew that it quenches thirst, flows, freezes, evaporates, etc. They had genuine knowledge of the real thing. Later science discovered that water = H₂O, i.e., molecular bonding, etc. This deepens understanding but does not reveal that earlier people only knew an appearance. They knew the same reality under a more superficial aspect.

 

2.  As a child living far away from a city, I recall looking at the night sky. I know at first something simple: “Those are stars.” I had grasped an aspect of reality: luminous points in the night sky. But then deeper knowledge unfolded. With my telescope I saw that stars are not points; they are distant suns. I learned from reading that some are vastly larger than our sun, some are clusters or galaxies. The essence of what a star is seems to change radically. My  earlier concept was true but extremely shallow. Had I gone on to study astrophysics (my childhood dream), I would have learned that stars are nuclear furnaces, that hydrogen fuses into helium, that their life cycles involve gravitational collapse and supernovae, that heavier elements originate in stellar death, etc. etc. Again the understanding deepens dramatically. What looked like a dot in the sky becomes a dynamic thermonuclear process in spacetime.

    Even the astrophysicist’s understanding remains partial. They still cannot know the full interior dynamics of every star, every causal interaction in stellar evolution, the ultimate structure of the cosmos, etc. So knowledge deepens but never exhausts the reality. This illustrates part of Aquinas’s idea that the intellect grasps the essence truly but not exhaustively.

 

3. Now consider the inner life of another person, like my son. I genuinely know a lot about his character, his temperament, what kind of person he is becoming. I can truthfully say many things about him: “He is generous,” “He is thoughtful,” “He is somewhat insecure,”etc.  This is real knowledge of who he is. Over the years you discover things that transform my understanding: hidden struggles, deeper motivations, fears you never suspected, strengths that only appear under pressure. Etc. My earlier understanding was real but surface-level. My knowledge of his “essence” as a person deepens. But even if we lived together for a hundred years, there would still be depths of his interior life I could never know simply because I cannot inhabit his consciousness, experience his memories as he does, feel the precise texture of his inner life, etc. No telescope or microscope can reveal this. It is not a technological  or scientific limitation, but one in principle, bound to my being as a finite, mortal, fallible person of flesh and blood. Only a being that knows the interior act of existence of every mind (i.e., God) could know that fully.

     This example shows three layers of truth. I truly know my son; deeper understanding can radically transform earlier understanding, i.e., my conception of him deepens over time; yet complete comprehension is impossible. The interior life of another person can never be totally transparent to any of us. A human person contains more intelligible depth than another finite intellect can fully apprehend. This expresses the Thomistic idea that being always exceeds the concept. So the paradox becomes clearer: You really know something. But what you know always contains more intelligibility than your concept captures. Reality is richer than any finite act of understanding – as far as we know.

      The other power that raises man above animals and make us more truly a finite image of God is the capacity to love, which in this case does essential cognitive work. Many thinkers (Murdoch, Weil, Gaita) say that love deepens knowledge. It doesn’t omniscient, of course, but it does (to the extent it is pure) allow us to understand more truly. The beloved becomes less reducible to our concepts. We see more, yet also recognize that there is always more to see.

     Finite knowledge does not grasp the whole intelligibility of a thing; it grasps the thing itself under a limited aspect, while the depth of its being always exceeds the grasp.

 

4.  But how about an example where deeper understanding, if we had it, which ex hypothesi we don't, would radically overturn what we think we know? A case where we believe we know the essence of x but a deeper understanding – if it were available – would radically overturn that understanding. But such deeper knowledge is in principle unavailable to finite human knowers.

    Take the phenomenon of conscious experience. At the surface level we believe we know what it is. It involves thoughts, sensations, emotions. In fact, many philosophers would say this is the most certain thing we know. Yet suppose (purely hypothetically) that reality at its deepest level contains forms of awareness radically different from ours like forms of consciousness not bound to brains (angels and demons), forms of awareness operating in dimensions of reality we cannot perceive, or levels of mental activity incomprehensible to human cognitive structures. In that case, our present concept of “consciousness” might be as primitive as a child’s idea of a star. We just couldn’t know it. What we think we understand as the essence of consciousness might actually be only a tiny corner of a vastly richer phenomenon. We would be like dogs watching TV or trying to understand calculus or poetry. Human beings might simply lack the conceptual capacities required to grasp certain structures of reality.

 

 5. Another example of this type: time. We believe we know what time is: moments pass, the present moves into the future, causes precede effects, etc. But physics already destabilizes this picture. Relativity understands time as intertwined with space; simultaneity is relative; the universe may exist as a four-dimensional block. This is like the examples of water and stars perhaps.

   Now imagine a deeper level of reality in which time itself is not fundamental. Perhaps the universe is built from structures where temporal sequence is only an appearance. If that were true, then our ordinary understanding of time might be radically misleading. Yet our minds may be incapable of conceiving reality without temporal ordering, because our thinking itself unfolds in time. Thus we might never fully grasp what time truly is.

 

6. Or take Being itself. We think we know what it means for something to exist. But Aquinas holds that only God knows being fully, because God is subsistent being itself. Finite minds know beings through their forms, but the act of existence itself remains partially hidden. If we could grasp existence as God does, the entire structure of reality might appear utterly different from how it appears to us. Our current metaphysical categories might prove radically inadequate. Yet such knowledge would require infinite intellect, which finite creatures cannot possess.

    

      The last three examples are different from the first three. We may truly grasp an aspect of x, yet the deeper nature of x might transform our understanding so radically that our present concept would look naive. So knowledge is not simply true vs false. Rather it can be perhaps true but shallow, true but distorted by cognitive limits, true within a restricted horizon. Appearance need not be an illusion but can’t be equated with full reality.

   For all we know, we could be like creatures living on a two-dimensional surface. Such creatures understand shapes perfectly in two dimensions. Then a sphere passes through their plane. To them it appears as a circle that grows and shrinks. They may develop a correct geometry of circles. But the true explanation, i.e., the sphere, belongs to a dimension they cannot perceive. Their knowledge is not false, but fundamentally incomplete in a way they cannot remedy.

 

III.

  I said that we have every reason to believe we know some aspect of x, but cannot go beyond that. The point is that finite intellects always operate within a horizon. Reality may (or may) extend beyond that horizon in ways we cannot even fully imagine. But within the horizon we still have genuine knowledge. This is how I understand Aquinas. When the intellect knows something truly, it is really in contact with the thing itself. The limitation lies not in falsity  or illusion but in the mode of knowing. Human intellect grasps reality under finite conditions of intelligibility. God grasps reality as the total intelligible order of being. In other words, finite knowledge can genuinely grasp reality while remaining vulnerable to conceptual revolutions that reveal how limited that grasp was.

     For Aquinas we can know something truly without knowing it completely.

We know what a triangle is but we do not know every theorem derivable from triangles, every property triangles could have in every geometry, every application of triangular relations in physics, etc. But our knowledge of “triangle” is still genuine knowledge. Why? Because we grasp the form (idea,essence) truly, though not its total intelligible depth. Aquinas writes: the intellect apprehends the essence according to its own mode. Human intellect grasps reality under a limited intellectual light.

    Thomas uses the image of light. Imagine a vast landscape illuminated by the sun. A person standing with a lantern sees part of the landscape. Two things are true simultaneously: What he sees is real. He does not see the whole. His knowledge is true but partial. God's knowledge is like the sun illuminating the entire landscape simultaneously. Human knowledge is like a lantern revealing real features but only within a radius. So the finitude lies in scope.

IV. 

   But I think the problem goes deeper than this standard Thomistic answer. If I only know some aspect of x, how do I know that my grasp really corresponds to what x truly is? In other words: How do I avoid merely grasping an aspect available to or perhaps even “constructed” by my intellect (or culture) rather than the thing itself? The modern anxiety is of course that perhaps we never know the thing itself, only our conceptual framing of it. My worry is how we can say we know anything genuinely if what we know can in principle be overturned by full understanding, which we do not in principle have.

    So my suggested this reformulation – “I have every reason to believe I know some aspect of x” – is actually very close to what many contemporary Thomists say, especially thinkers influenced by phenomenology. My point, perhaps learned from Hans-Georg Gadamer as well as Thomists like Josef Pieper and W. Norris Clarke, is that knowledge is real but always revisable (within limits), always open to deeper disclosure. Being always exceeds conceptual capture (as far as we can know). Our concepts grasp real being, but being always overflows the concept (Clarke). We know the thing under an aspect. I know my son but I do not know every aspect of his soul. He continues revealing himself and my understanding deepens over time. It is possible, but not certain, that if I could see him through God’s eyes that I wouldn’t recognize him at all. But perhaps much that I thought I knew would make perfect sense. In any case, it would be absurd just to assert that I did not, cannot know him.

     The danger of classical metaphysics is that it can sound too confident: “We grasp the essence.” But what we encounter is more like glimpses, partial articulations, ongoing clarification. Human knowledge is genuine contact with reality, but always under finite intellectual conditions and therefore always open to further disclosure.

     The deepest way of knowing a person (or even reality) is not conceptual mastery but attentive love (love nearly untainted by the fat, relentless ego). It doesn’t make us infinite but it does open us more fully to the real. I love what Iris Murdoch wrote: “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”