Appendix I:
Six Categories of Forbidden Knowledge
From Forbidden Knowledge, pp. 327-337, by Robert Shattuck
Abridged and Edited by Richard Schwartz

My subject is too extensive and elusive to submit readily to system and theory. Nevertheless, a few categories have emerged in the course of my understanding these stories. Some sorting out of differences will allow me to take stock of earlier discussions and to seek the beginnings of order in so great a variety.

I propose six categories of forbidden knowledge.

1. Inaccessible, unattainable knowledge.
2. Knowledge prohibited by divine, religious, moral or secular authority.
3. Dangerous, destructive, or unwelcome knowledge.
4. Fragile, delicate knowledge.
5. Knowledge double-bound
6. Ambiguous Knowledge.

The categories overlap one another and also leave discernible gaps. But this recapitulation offers a modified perspective on both familiar and unfamiliar materials. the first four categories should be reasonable clear. The last two deal with features that will be harder to distinguish.

1. INACCESSIBLE, UNATTAINABLE KNOWLEDGE

Some aspects of the cosmos - or "reality" - cannot be reached by human faculties. That inaccessibility springs either from the inadequacy of human powers or from the remoteness of realms presumed to exist in ways inconceivable to us. We do not have to choose between the two epigraphs of the Chapter VIII. Both are true. But Socrates goes deeper than Einstein. Socrates' words prepare the way for Pascal's wager and Huxley's coinage of agnostic. Einstein's words draw a comic paradox out of Pascal's insistence that we know our reach, our portee, between the two infinities that escape us. My third epigraph for this book - Individuum est ineffatible - restricts us even more severely by implying that we cannot know even the particulars that lie closest to us, including ourselves.

The Judaic tradition of never uttering any name of the divine being represents his ineffability and his unknowability as categorical assumptions. In the mid-fifteenth century, the Catholic theologian Nicholas of Cusa wrote an influential boo,k De docta ignorantia, or On Learned Ignorance. "Absolute Truth Is Beyond Our Grasp." declares the title of his third chapter. The only way we can apprehend God is through faith operating as a negative theology of wisely looking the other way - leaned ignorance. Mystics such as Eckhart and St. John of the Cross profess a similar faith in the unattainable and the unutterable. Kant's Ding an sich - the noumenous Thing in Itself - may or may not exist. In any case phenomena or appearances that we are able to know in space and time will never lead us to noumenal. A contemporary philosopher, Colin McGinn, leans partially on Kant;'s noumenalism in developing a position he calls "the insolubility thesis." or "cognitive pessimism." McGinn's book, Problems of Philosophy; The Limits of Inquiry argues that human thinking is essentially unsuitable to grasp the experience and nature of states like consciousness and free will. He sidesteps the traditional question of knowledge by arguing that our access to truth may lie not in any faculty like reason, but in our genes. Untroubled by any Coppelia complex, McGinn welcomes the thought that we may all be automated.

Modern science contributes a number of illustrations of this category. In relativity theory, for example, one cannot refer to any universal now because nay meaningful sense of simultaneity is limited by the finite velocity of light. We simply cannot know what is happening now on a distant star until its light signal reaches us after millions of (light-) years.

In this category it is simply the nature of things, including ourselves, that prevents us from knowing everything. Even Einstein's optimism concedes this final ignorance.

2. KNOWLEDGE PROHIBITED BY DIVINE, RELIGIOUS, MORAL, OR SECULAR AUTHORITY

Adam and Eve, Prometheus, and Psyche contravened a prohibition. These classic stories relate the consequences of powerful impatience struggling against even more powerful interdiction. Similar motifs recur in modified forms in most quest stories including Dante's Divine Comedy (Peter Damian's warning in the Paradiso's and the tales of King Arthur and his knights (Perceval is too obedient). One of the most compact versions of this form of knowledge emerges from Hawthorne's short story "Ethan Brand." That intrepid figure sets out to seek the unpardonable sin; he discovers that he has already committed it by undertaking such a quest. It is in this category that the Wife of Bath effect (the desire brought on from restrictions and prohibition) comes into play. the second epigraph for this book points with a smile to the perverse human tendency to transform prohibition into temptation.

For reasons that scientists and officials would probably attribute to the sanctity of nattier or of humanity, we currently prohibit research that would modify the germ line of human inheritance. In the realm of commerce and invention, we have developed copyright law and patent law. Both systems establish regulations around intellectual property to permit its being published and exploited while at the same time protecting ownership for a reasonable period. Such limitations paradoxically serve openness and the exchange of knowledge. In order to reinforce the dignity of the autonomous individual, privacy law, of comparatively recent origin, sets up restrictions on what others can learn about us and how far they can intrude upon us. The world is not a transparent medium of unrestricted observation and communication. The principle of privacy sets limits on what we can rightfully know about others' lives. but nothing remains secure for long. Information technology has already begun to infiltrate our privacy.

These ancient and modern prohibitions on particular areas of knowledge sometimes stimulate human curiosity more that they dampen it.

3. DANGEROUS, DESTRUCTIVE, OR UNWELCOME KNOWLEDGE

Playing with fire - or firearms - provides the most obvious and urgent example of dangerous knowledge. In Chapter VI, I consider the atomic bomb, recombinant DNA, and the Human Genome Project as representing this category of forbidden knowledge. We have learned to fear the effects that developing technology may have on the Earth's environment. In writing Frankenstein , still close to adolescent fantasy, Mary Shelley aimed not at the environmental but at the human depredations of scientific hubris. In comparison to her insistently cautionary tale, Goethe's Faust floats in ambivalence. Faust's appetite for sheer experience in the Gretchen episode and his technological experiments in draining swamps strew damage and suffering in his wake. Yet the Lord saves him at the end - for always striving. How shall we read this immense patchwork of a play? Faustian man properly has as many detractors as admirers in our day.

Unlike Frankenstein, there is nothing cautionary about the Marquis de Sade's writings. Rather than execrate, they embody the cruelty, sexual mayhem, and generated killing that he preaches as a way of life for the rich and powerful. Those critics who find literary and moral virtues in Sade's work have much to answer for. Simple prudence should impel us to take careful account of such forms of dangerous knowledge. Like drugs and tobacco, they need careful labeling and, if they reach commercial broadcast media, judicious regulation.

4. FRAGILE, DELICATE, KNOWLEDGE

Words must be used like stepping stones: lightly and with nimbleness, because if you step on them too heavily, you incur the danger of falling into the intellectual mire of logic and reason. -Balsekar

The earlier chapter - Chapter IV - on La Princesse de Cleves and Emily Dickinson's veil poem examines forms of knowledge so sensitive that they may crumble and disappear in the moment of realization. One must approach one's own and other's deepest feelings and yearnings with circumspection for fear of driving them into hiding. the symbolist and decadent aesthetic at the close of the nineteenth century favored withdrawal from full-fledged experience and took refuge in a refined realm of language and imagination. In the poem "Art poetique" Verlaine chooses musicality, nuance, and veiled beauty out of which to compose his chanson grise.

For certain men and women, the sexual response falls into the delicate area far removed from conquest and aggressiveness. Some highly responsive men, for whom rape is unthinkable, reach full sexual arousal and circumstances that never exclude the possibility of fiasco. Not violence tenderness serves appetites.

A comparable discrimination of effects as a long existed in writing published under the threat of persecution for her heretical views. Before for the 17th century Europe, Leo Strauss observes, many original thinkers "wrote in the lines" in order to allow were readers in to "catch a glimpse of of forbidden fruit." The essential teaching often lay concealed inside a protective garment, and one-gamed access to it by patient interpretation. Maimonides "Guide for the Perplexed approached prohibited subject matter -- the secrets of the Hebrew Bible -- by employing the hints and indirections of esoteric writing. In some circumstances, the truth survives better veiled the naked. At the lowest order of magnitude in physics, particles always become so sensitive that the active observation affects their energy level and modifies the reading. We do not know in advance whether our approach to something or some one will destabilize the reading basically the hoped-for response in the TV camera crew can observe how it's mere presence on the scene modifies the nature of the events he was sent to record.

Fragile knowledge finds its natural holding the domain of discretion and privacy.

5. KNOWLEDGE DOUBLE BOUND

Objective and Subjective Knowledge

The fifth category differs considerably from the others will be harder to decline. Both common sense and the history of philosophy recognize two kinds, to tendencies of knowledge. We may approach, enter into, sympathize with, and unite the thing known in order to obtain subjective of knowledge. Or we may stand outside, observe, and anatomize, analyze, and ponder the thing known in order to obtain objective knowledge. Subjective or empathetic knowledge causes us to loose judicious perspective on the object; objective knowledge, in seeking to maintain that perspective, looses the bond sympathy.

We cannot know something by both meetings at the same time. The attempt to reconcile the two or to alternate between them leads to great mental stress. Orestes recoiled from his objective duty to avenge his father, Agammenon, because of the subjective revulsion to killing his mother, Clytemnestra. In explaining how best to comprehend sublime magnitude of the great pyramids in Egypt, Kant wrote with startling simplicity, "We must avoid coming to near just as much as remaining too far away" (Critique of Judgment, 1, 26). Flaubert was less judicious. "The less one feels a thing the more apt one is to express it as it is" (letter to Louise Colet, March. 4th, 1852).

For the Romantics in their reaction to Enlightenment reason, the distinction between the two modes of knowledge appeared to reach even deeper within us. Schiller devoted his sixth letter, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, to the dissociation of reason from feeling or imagination. "It was civilization itself which inflicted this wound upon modern man." Wordsworth discovered a similar division in the mind.

The groundwork, therefore, of all philosophy is the full apprehension of the difference between . . . that intuition of things which arises when we possess ourselves, as one with the whole . . and that which presents itself when . . . we think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind. As object to subject. (The Friend)

Wordsworth had picked up the terms from his fiend Coleridge. Thomas Carlysle delighted in mocking Coleridge's constant return in his rambling monologues to the snuffled words om-m-mject and sum-m-mject. A sentence in Chapter XII of Coleridge's intellectual autobiography, Biographia Literaria, makes thinking sound easy. "During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two priority belongs." The remainder of the chapter removes that impression of ease.

A powerful discussion of this double-bound blocking us from balanced or whole knowledge overwhelms the concluding chapters of Levi-Strauss' final pages develop a crescendo of tragic meditation over his doable bind. "There is no way out of the dilemma." His " sin" is to be balanced to two cultures, and, therefore, to none. comprehensible. He calls his predicament an "abyss," out of which he can communicate with no one - except perhaps a cat. The "tropics" of his book's title are profoundly "sad" for Levi-Strauss because they represent this personal and professional double bind. He paints it as lurking behind every inquiry of the mind into the nature of the world and the people in it. This form of forbidden knowledge known to the boldest explorers and the subtlest investigators implies a deep incompatibility between the human mind and the world around it - the converse of Einstein's happier observation: "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible." The character Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, probing the limits of savagery in Africa, finds himself across this abyss of unknowing and sacrifices his humanity. It is the response of desperation.
We can discern an even more sustained effort than Levi-Strauss' to surmount the conflict between objective and subjective knowledge in William James' The varieties of Religious Experience (1902). By using a case-history approach similar to the narrative style of Tristes Tropiques, James moves as close as he can to the religious experiences that concern him. He succeeds in showing a profound sympathy toward alien feelings without renouncing his detachment. But in the final chapter, he acknowledges a frustration similar to Levi-Strauss', though with less hyperbole. Referring to religion and mysticism, James concludes historically that "Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself."

Eight lines further on in the same passage, James suddenly and without explanation quotes in French the proverb "To understand is to forgive." What can he possibly have in mind? I believe James is here calling our attention fleetingly to the other side of the double bind. Exterior objective knowledge will never carry us to a full grasp of any subjective experience. On the other hand, as the French proverb suggests, full empathy with another experience of another life takes away from us the capacity to see it objectively and to judge it aright. My discussion of Billy Budd and The Stranger in Chapter V deals at some length with this interference in the reader's mind between one form of knowledge and the other. Each novel carries us so close to the principal character that we run the risk of being unable to form a judicious evaluation of the homicide he perpetrates. This filth form of forbidden knowledge arises from a familiar fissure at the heart of our thinking. Hard as we may try, we cannot be both inside and outside an experience of a life - even our own.

The closer one approaches to an event or to a person, the less securely one seems to know it. The trees obscure the forest. The more one knows, the less one knows. Perception itself requires a certain deistance. Empathy hides more than it reveals. p. 162

6. AMBIGUOUS KNOWLEDGE

I have not finished with the paradoxes that affect knowing, for it is necessary to follow where the stories lead. By 'ambiguous," I refer to a condition in which what we know reverses itself right under our noses, confounds us by turning into its opposite.

Take the end of Milton's Paradise Lost. Adam and Eve have repented of their sin and been granted 'many days' of mortal life - but not in Paradise. Then the Archangel Michael leads Adam to a hilltop and shows him the future, including the coming of Christ and his redemption of Adam's sin. Adam feels both 'joy and wonder' over a change he cannot understand

"O goodness infinite, goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good . . ."

Adam's universe has been totally transformed. Milton's lines represent the best known literary expression of the Fortunate Fall, a contradiction or reversal of interpretation that had been gradually adopted as Christian doctrine during the Middle Ages.

With no reference to Milton, the philosopher's philosopher Immanuel Kant concocted his own secular version of the reversal. In "conjectural Origins of the Human Story" (1786), he writes as if he were being interviewed as the author of a playful novel called Adam and the Eve. Kant explains that reason and imagination, the secular virtues of his 'flight of fancy,' finally bring about a 'fall' as double-edged as Milton's. "For the individual, who in the use of his freedom has regard only for himself, such a change was a loss; for nature, whose end for man concerns the species, it was a victory." In this short essay, Kant becomes sly and lighthearted enough to recast the Adam and Eve story.

Such a reversal of effect turns up in other places; the principle of vaccination, the Wife of Bath effect, the Eldorado reaction.* In these cases, respectively, poison or infection turns into remedy; what is forbidden becomes desirable; the ideal becomes intolerable. We come up against a pun or ambiguity in the very nature of things.

These forms of double meaning leave us confounded by paradox. Our mind reckons uncomfortably with contradiction affirmed. The fact that such a contradiction lies at the heart of Christian doctrine, of our immune system, and of other crucial human activities opens an area of uneasy knowledge. Under rare circumstances, A is not exclusively A; A is B while remaining A. We enter this chameleon world warily. The Wife of Bath's "Forbede us thying, and that desiren we" reports on the unstable human condition that John Locke looked out on from the other side; "Where there is no law there is no freedom."

Two further instances of ambiguous knowledge insist on being heard. Do writers fare best under repression and persecution or in a free society? After Easter European countries regained independence and the Soviet Union came to an end about 1990, respect for dissident literature diminished rapidly, and writers found their role difficult to reestablish in a market economy. At a 1992 Partisan Review conference on intellectuals in Eastern Europe, Saul Bellow cut through to the essential dilemma by wondering 'whether we need these colonial evils of dictatorship to keep us honest.' Years earlier, the Cuban dissident Herberto Padilla had turned the paradoxical situation into an incipient proverb. "The best poems have always been born beneath the jailer's lamp.' We shall not soon learn what combination or alternation of freedom and repression will make writers honest and responsible.

The second instance of ambiguous knowledge concerns a double duty that affects each one of us. We need to be faithful or our traditions and our knowledge, to our community and our history. And we also need to be able to respond with guarded flexibility and understanding to challenges to those traditions and that knowledge. To discharge that double duty without fanaticism while firmly maintaining a set of scruples based on reason and experience forms the challenge of an entire lifetime. How can we be faithful and unfaithful at the same time"? Over and over again in the tiny decisions of everyday life, we must do just that at every level of action and reflection, through every fluctuation of doubt and faith.

*When he reaches the utopian of Eldorado, Candide cannot abide the absence of outward conflict and the tranquility of mind that characterizes that sheltered land. In a similar and more complex response, in John Swift's, Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver loses his mind on his fourth voyage to the purely reasonable society of the Houyhnhnms.