Man: The Imperfect Librarian

Jorge Luis Borges via Wikimedia Commons

I’m not particularly fond of quoting United States Defense Secretaries, but Donald Rumsfeld's attempt in 2002 to articulate a theory of knowledge is actually quite interesting:  

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.

As the philosopher Slavoj Žižek rightly pointed out, what Rumsfeld should have added was a fourth category, the unknown known, those things which we intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know.

This philosophical framework derives from the world of project management and risk assessment. And the story is that Rumsfeld acquired it from NASA. But this doesn’t make it any less useful. It’s a helpful way of viewing the world around us and understanding the limitations of human knowledge.

I’m going to consider the concept in the context of a marvellous short story, "The Library of Babel", by the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. Noted for his love of labyrinths, mystery and fable, Borges conceives the Library as a metaphor for a geometrically defined cosmos:

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the centre of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below-one after another, endlessly.

The Library has existed for eternity and contains all books that have been written or will be written:

All-the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogues, a proof of the falsity of the true catalogue, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus.

This was initially a source of hope for its inhabitants. The Library would reveal the fundamental mysteries of mankind – of its origins and of time itself. Men scour the hexagons for answers to the eternal questions. But certainties are replaced by depression, exhaustion and the emergence of mystical sects. One of which claims ‘that the rule in the Library is not "sense,' but "non-sense,' and that "rationality" (even humble, pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception.’  

The light in the Library is ‘insufficient, and unceasing’. Readers will always struggle to decipher texts. But will always be presented with the temptation to make the attempt. And since nothing exists outside the Library, the question is posed: how we can ever really hope to understand something we are part of?

The narrator concludes on an apparently despondent note, ‘The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal… I suspect that the human species - the only species - teeters at the verge of extinction.’ But he assumes that the Library will endure. And that mankind may yet discover the order behind the apparent disorder.

Borges was writing in 1941. In the dark days of World War II. His pessimism was understandable. But there’s something more interesting going on here.  

We live in an age where scientific progress is regarded as unstoppable. Our knowledge of the physical universe – from sub-atomic particles to galaxies tens of billions of light-years away – is continuing to expand. Just as the universe is continuing to expand. In fact, we now know that this expansion, along with the presence of dark energy, means that 97% of the observable universe is already unreachable, even at the speed of light.

Despite huge advances in science, our understanding of the world inevitably remains incomplete. The Holy Grail of physics – the Theory of Everything – which would unite the really big stuff (general relativity) with the really small stuff (quantum mechanics) – remains elusive. And maybe that’s the point.

Scientists recognise that our understanding of the Universe is hampered by the fact of our participation in the universe. The deterministic certainty that impelled French scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace to argue in 1814 that if someone knows the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe, they could compute the future state of the universe, has been replaced by recognition of the limitations to human comprehension.

Borges’ narrator states that 'Man is the imperfect librarian’. Because they can access parts of the Library, the librarians ‘suffer dangerous illusions of what is knowable.’ Unfortunately, having knowledge of a part of our world doesn’t necessarily mean that we have knowledge of it all.

For all that, we do know that the universe exists. We also know that we can work towards a better understanding of what reality is and how it functions. Complete knowledge is impossible. But, as Samuel Beckett said, “You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.”