The unknowable and the as-yet-unknown are experientially identical. Both are experienced as nonsense. The essential difference lies entirely in trial – in making known, what is knowable is shown to be knowable in its becoming known.

The understood and misunderstood are experientially identical. Both are experienced as sense. The essential difference lies entirely in trial – in questioning, what is known is shown to be not known in its becoming questionable.

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To be clear, it is not isolated facts that are knowable or unknowable, understood or misunderstood – it is the taking of facts together with the rest of our knowledge, so the whole is organically integrated. The act of trying to understand is alternating between analysis (from Greek analusis, from analuein ‘unloose,’ from ana– ‘up’ + luein ‘loosen’) synthesis (sunthesis, from suntithenai ‘place together’), until the idea is understood as a concept (from Latin concipere, from com– ‘together’ + capere ‘take’), which means not only that the parts of the idea are rendered known (related to the rest of one’s knowledge), but they are related in familiar modes (tacitly through analogy or explicitly through categories or logic) to the rest of one’s knowledge and made familiar in part and whole.

Through understanding, we integrate particular facts into the whole of our knowledge. Exterior facts are drawn into the interior of our intellects. We chew on them, break them down, analyze them into intelligible bits — which can be absorbed within our own body of knowledge. We analyze in order to synthesize.

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Some facts and ideas we find distasteful, and we refuse them. Other facts and ideas we find very agreeable, and we consume them almost without thinking. Some people have definite tastes in knowledge. Some don’t, and have no sympathy for picky eaters.

Some facts and some ideas are inedible to certain people. They simply cannot digest them at all without disrupting their whole system. Others find all-too-digestible facts bloating and painful. They need something to raw and rough and unprocessed to break down or they go into a stupor, lose their appetite or even need to throw up.

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The Truth. The facts. The Way Things Are. Realism.

This attitude toward knowledge nearly always means forced membership in the intellectual Clean Plate Club. Eat what’s before you. But what’s before you is a meal someone has served up. How was the food chosen?

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We stabilize our total sense of things — what has been called a meaningful totality — which is not a mere sum of known facts but also the understandings by which facts are known, which means knowing in principle — through treating the as-yet-unknown as unknowable and the possibly misunderstood as obvious and unquestionable.

We stabilize our meaningful totality by acting on the belief that whatever is knowable is in principle already knowable and everything else is either pointless speculation or nonsense. Of course, we will never know every fact, but that’s no problem. What matters is that we are equipped to understand things in broad outline, and ready to understand and respond to whatever comes our way.

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What does it feel like to question something familiar and obvious and discover its uncanniness? What does it feel like to confront something uncanny but unmistakably relevant to us? Not-yet-understood, but demanding understanding?

It fills us with anxiety. When we try to understand beyond our limits we get a taste of what makes infants cry in their cribs: chaos.

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The impatience of the executive is how he maintains stability of totality. He intimidates those around him with his aggressive brusqueness, and prevents anyone from saying anything to him that he cannot digest effortlessly. He is never confronted with his own limits.

The elevator pitch. The executive summary. These forms flatter the philosophical limits of the business world.

To make yourself perfectly understood in under 5 minutes means to operate within the limits of the easily known.

The etiquette surrounding executives preclude anything new being said. And that is entirely the point of the etiquette. (– and perhaps of all etiquette?)

CEOs are like kings surrounded by flattering courts, who don’t exactly lie, but don’t tell the complete truth out of fear of offense. And, again, it’s not the fear of disclosing particular unpleasant facts — that is actually valued by CEOs, because this allows them to demonstrate openness. What is impermissible is embarrassing a CEO with anything beyond his intellectual horizons, which is the shared horizon of the business world.

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“Don’t waste my valuable time” actually means “Don’t remind me that I am not god.”

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The old business horizons are breaking down rapidly. The old shared vision of modernity is no longer inspiring. The high hopes of postwar America are a joke to some and a matter of piety to others, and all that separates the two is whether one instinctively  ridicules or worships the senseless. Modernity and its objective realism has become boring and tedious and it has thoroughly worn out its welcome in our lives. And boredom, far more than refutations spell the end of a thing. (Nothing bears scrutiny except that which we do not wish to scrutinize.)