Unknown knowns
I encountered (through Timothy Morton’s new book Hell) this incredible passage from Slavoj Žižek about “unknown knowns”:
In March 2003, Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: "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 know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the "unknown knowns," the things we don't know that we know-which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the "knowledge which doesn't know itself," as Lacan used to say.
(The whole article is well-worth reading. It’s a meditation on what the Abu Ghraib scandal exposed about the “obscene underside” of American values).
Upstream knowing
In coaching one of my favorite questions to ask clients is: What do you already know about this? Something about the energy of the question usually takes clients to their body, not their head, and in their body they frequently encounter knowing that precedes, or is upstream from, the knower that they identify themselves as.
As Žižek illustrates, that upstream knowledge is not always pleasant or satisfying. It may come at some expense to who we thought we were. It may mean the end of a relationship, as Taylor Swift sings in The Moment I Knew:
And it was like slow motion
Standing there in my party dress
In red lipstick
With no one to impress
And they're all laughing
And asking me about you
But there was one thing missing (missing, missing)
And that was the moment I knew
But even when it’s painful, the unknown known has authority to it. That authority becomes fertile ground for new developments.
Mechanics
I think it’s Morton who describes unknown knowns as the fourth quadrant. Who am I to resist drawing a 2x2:
As far as I can tell there are two ways to experience unknown knowns. The first is to drop right in. The second is to make one’s way along the blue arrow, from the concrete to the nebulous, the contracted to the expansive. Kenneth Folk has a meditation instruction that reminds me of this progression.
It seems right to me to suggest the kind of knowing we’re talking about is actually on the other side of the bewildering, wide open, unknown unknown. So one may need some capacity to be with that.