The Unthinkable

The pebble is a perfect creature, equal to itself, mindful of its limits.
—C. Milosz

HAMM. I’ve made you suffer too much
(Pause)
Haven’t I?
CLOV. It’s not that.
HAMM (shocked). I haven’t made you suffer too much?
CLOV. Yes!
HAMM (relieved) Ah you gave me a fright!
(Pause. coldly)
Forgive me.
(Pause. Louder)
I said, Forgive me.
CLOV. I heard you.

Can there ever really be the right amount of suffering? Isn’t suffering -any suffering-meaningless and what of the attempts to explain or justify it? How can one talk about an amount of suffering? Can we ever know the cause of it? What does it mean to say that we are commanded to forgive?

Perhaps all thought is premised on the notion that we can know who we are, that we can figure out the roots of our condition. To think is to believe that we are God, that we can will ourselves into existence, that we can know ourselves perfectly and see sub specie aeternitatis: I think therefore I am. To think is also to create meaning when there may be none, to see a pattern out of contingent , haphazard events. Thought imposes order and also takes us to a timeless zone. Where are we when we think? Thought, then, is perhaps nothing but a way of staving off death, of clawing back some of our humanity from the inorganic that weighs us down. To reduce something to a thought, a concept, is to capture it, to name it. But if we did not think in the first place death would be of little concern to us.

Are there limits to what we can know? In the wake of the Pope’s recent words should we stress the harmony of thought and the world, the contours of the mind with those of the universe? Can we once again talk about the cosmos, about how everything has its own place and time, how there is the right amount of every thing under the sun?

Are there things that we simply cannot know, that lie beyond the bounds of reason? Does it make sense to claim that we know the limits of what we can know? For the Occassionalists the Divine Will is shrouded in mystery. Does it follow from this that the universe is one of chaos, arbitrariness and that only, or is it possible that there just the right amount of chance in our lives? On the other hand, the philosophers would promote where reason is completely autonomous, that the divine can be known independently of Revelation. Does this imply a limitation of divine freedom? Is God constrained to work within the laws that He himself has created as the deists would maintain?

Ebrahim Moosa: ‘Metaphysics of Belief’:

Something can suggest multiplicity from one angle and unity from another. Abu Bakr would say ‘to acknowledge the inability to comprehend somethign is itself a form of comprehending.’ Is there an intermediate position between the Aristotelian one of a fixed universe and mechanical processes and one of unbounded freedom, a universe that remains essentially open? Might not evolution with its mixture of randomness and necessity be one such position? The range of possibilities of nature may be fixed but unknown: necessity is the veil of God.

God creates our acts eternally but we acquire them (choose them) in time. Perhaps, then, the question of possibilities and the degree of freedom with which they are generated is really a question of time-and that remains a mystery. The world is a unity in so far as it is timeless. Creation is both a timeless act and an unending process, the ‘twinkling of an eye’ and something that is extended in time and space.

The opposite of the philosophers’ stance is , then, not a world of complete randomness and the negation of reason, but the admissibility of the fact that she is woven from two strands: freedom and truth. The mathematical and the biological co-exist and who is to say where one ends and the other begins? From Ghazali’s point of view the ultimate cause of things is not in nature (does this allow for other, partial causality?). The philosophical critique of philosophy is only a setting of limits of what one can conceive and what is unthinkable; it is not the negation of thought altogether. It is there being just the right amount of thought. For the philosophers, the ‘principles of existence’ cause cotton to burn whereas for Ghazali fire is only an instrumental cause, not a necessary one. For the former, temporal events follow from the principles inherent in the nature of things and God has wound the clock up, as it were, distancing himself from the laws that now govern things autonomously. God has repented.

Can there ever be a breach in such a framework, are miracles or square circles possible? Everything rests on the word ‘possible’ Is it possible to imagine or know the impossible? Is imagining and knowing (by reason) the same thing or does the heart of the problem lie along this fissure? The philospher’s critique of Ghazali rests on attributing to his position the belief that anything is indeed possible: that water can be turned into wine , that a book may be transformed into a horse had God willed it so. Is it really only our habitual experience that tells us that the book is indeed a book and is this an argument from experience or thought itself? Ghazali turns the argument on its head and says that it is they who are the nihilists by going against reason. For in the hypothetical argument it is they who are using the possibility of the impossible.

I think what Ghazali’s position is is this: One may be able to imagine anything is possible but its realisation is beyond the bounds of reason. If that is the case, how can one say that one knows that the impossible is impossible? If something impossible actually happens then it ceases to be a miracle or impossible. Their perspective cannot admit the possibility of the impossible in the first place.
Another angle to the problem is to focus on what we can perceive..i.e subjectivity. Perhaps we can only conceive of a range of possibilities and there are other beings for whom what we deem impossible is merely one of many possibilities. Can one rule out, can one know that there aren’t other levels of reality and being? In such arguments, it may be that it is our limited knowledge that rules out ‘anything’. With God all things are possible.

So, the main line of defence seems to be that there are possibilities that may or may not occur. The theoretical possibility of something (in the imagination) is distinct from it existing, from the necessity of it existing. A miracle, because it is not a habitual occurrence, is beyond the scope of reason and knowledge.

Ghazali: there are three things of value: an articulate book, an abiding tradition, and the ability to say I do not know. This allows us to create room for knowledge and wonder. There is the possibility of not-knowing, of a non-totalizing order of reality. Rationality binds us to one level of reality whereas the truth may be that there are multiple notions of time and reasoning and these co-exist contrapuntally within a single narrative. There can be different ontological levels in relation to the thinking self: what is true in the order of love may not be true in the order of being.

Might it not be said that the slight asymmetry, the minuscule preponderance of matter over anti-matter is what gives rise to the universe? Not a blotting out of existence , but only of some of its possibilities, certain lines of development? That in addition to the mathematical, the inevitable, and the realm of necessity, the streaky, the irrational and the fragmentary also work their way into the what is possible? How, it might be asked, can there be a ‘flaw’ in creation or ugliness and suffering. But at the same time we are reminded that even in the ‘garden’ there was the snake of anarchy.

As there are figures of speech are there, too, figures of speechlessness? What else is death but an inevitability that cannot be known? Death is in the heart of life and therefore a possibility and yet still we cannot experience it, still it remains unknowable. It is a private matter, private matter. Is this not a refutation of the philosophers? And this, it seems, remains unanswerable -and therefore why is it still a question: how is it that we who cannot imagine or experience death, for whom it is an impossibility, think that it is something that is made possible. If God can imagine a death for us then we imitate Him in this: the camps were nothing , nothing but the imagining and the making of the impossible. And have we not ‘killed’ God as well? We come to realise the unpalatable: that at the heart of life, the heart, the human spirit, there is the possibility of the impossible, the inhuman, the non-human.

To be able to act is human; For 'anything' to be possible is inhuman