Introduction: How Do We Know What Cannot Be Known?

immanuel kant begins the first edition of his seminal 1781 treatise, Critique of Pure Reason, with a sentence that summarizes a dilemma faced by almost all scholars at some time in their scholarly lives. "Human reason," writes Kant—I am citing Norman Kemp Smith's classic English translation—"has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer" (Kant, Avii).

In making these remarks, Kant was only confirming a main current of the Western philosophical tradition. After all, Plato in his dialogues also dramatized the mythic life of the first person to be called a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, namely, Socrates. And this mythic figure, as Plato reimagines him for us, was a thoroughly vexatious fellow who abhorred the customary social lubricant of idle chatter and favored instead a systematic and very public contravention of received opinions (often producing not knowledge but what Cicero called paradoxa, his Latin rendering of the Greek cognate). In other words, Socrates (according to Plato) pursued wisdom in part by punching holes in Athenian windbags.

But how else might we discover the limits of what self-confi-dent people think they know, or—even more ambitiously, in the case of Kant—the limits of what we as a species can possibly know? And what might be the result if the search for knowledge, and for the limits to knowledge, were to devolve into an endless parade of paradoxes rather than producing any trustworthy results, however provisional? The answers to such questions, I suppose, will depend on the nature of our research and the objects of our inquiries.

As someone who teaches students aspiring to become journalists, I myself sometimes wonder if we are all fated to live in a world of shadowy assumptions, unwitting hostages of unexamined convictions, unrelenting propaganda, and our own all-too-human propensity to settle for snap judgments.

The papers that follow in this section focus on the kinds of research conducted in three disciplines within the humanities: modern literature, ancient history, and archeology. The cases studied are varied, but about one thing all three scholars agree: the unknowable is—at least in these fields—perhaps more important than what we think we can know.