I borrow this title from an English mystical text written at the end of the fourteenth century, The Veil of Unknowledge, which has long been part of my life. The explicit aim of the book is to tear away this veil of unknowledge, or to give us the means to do it ourselves. The image of the veil invites a reciprocal gesture of raising, tearing, piercing. The desire that motivates this act goes beyond the veil, toward Isis and the truth, the naked figure we're endeavoring to know. Once we have cleared away the obstacles and gained a clear view of her, we—and she—are transformed.

For more than forty years, Diogenes has been striving, with the limited resources at its disposal, to mark the progress of the human sciences around the world. The journal emerged from the encounter between an institution and a person. The institution was the Conseil international de la philosophie et des sciences humaines (CIPSH) that was founded under the auspices and on the initiative of UNESCO with the aim of regrouping a variety of different international associations in the field of Geisteswissenschaften; the person was Roger Caillois, then an international civil servant with UNESCO. The CIPSH wanted to equip itself with an organ of international scholarly communication that was capable of serving as a bond and link between its various member associations.

Why are we holding UNESCO's Philosophical Encounters and why have we chosen the question “What do we not know?” as the topic of the first one of these meetings? It is in order to respond to these two questions that Judith Schlanger has asked me to write a few lines. She added—for the record. What record, I then thought to myself, if—as I am sending her these pages—nothing has taken place yet? Unless it was the intention, the idea so to speak, that was to be recorded. What seemed to me to be premature, then appeared to come rather late, i.e. to explain, after the event, as if going backwards, the reasons for the creation of the Philosophical Encounters and the choice of their first theme. We know that in the legal profession the summaries of the discussions that precede the adoption of a law allow us to understand its spirit; on this basis, could one not imagine a chronicle of ideas kept by whoever that would illuminate the life of the organization? Perhaps something similar is lacking in the history of an institution like UNESCO. Everything is being preserved in it, as if in a gigantic, impenetrable memory, because it never fell to anyone to preserve the thread of the original intentions. Whatever fate the future may have reserved for UNESCO's Philosophical Encounters, given their experimental nature, I will attempt here to describe the intentions. For whatever purpose if may serve!

Our subject is what we do not know; and this is a meeting under the auspices of philosophy—a meeting, indeed, designed to advance UNESCO's programme in philosophy. The conjunction of this subject and these auspices already confronts us with certain questions. How is philosophy related to ignorance?

Whatever our profession we are all engulfed in daily life and in the obscurity and density of the mental world. Who is this “I” that finds expression in such a wide variety of societies, in the convictions of the group and temperament of the individual self, in all that I perceive imperfectly and that makes me me? What does this sometimes slippery, sometimes thorny “I” say about the various attitudes towards knowing: the things I desperately want to know, things I believe myself capable of dispensing with, those I fear knowing?

In the invisible darkness which shrouds each one of us as an individual, and at the same time shrouds all forms of knowledge, there are things which we do not know, things which thrive in the interstitial spaces between established forms of knowledge. The attitude towards such things of those who reflect on the state of knowledge seems to convey a self-evident fact: we wish to know those things that we do not know. To put it more aptly, we are bound to want to know those things. How could it be otherwise? If humankind is regarded as a vast collective brain which stores up its knowledge, preserving that acquired in the past, gathering and centralizing new information from all sources and making sure that it is passed on, how could we wish to do otherwise than continue to broaden this domain of enlightenment and intelligence?

The problem of lying to, or deceiving oneself is currently one of the most debated in analytical philosophy. Now, since analytical philosophers are aware that Sartre defined "bad faith" as lying to oneself, as self-deception, and since moreover they find relatively coherent arguments in Sartre's text, they do not hesitate to include these arguments in their debates, if only to contest them. "To be dead is to be a prey for the living," one reads in Being and Nothingness (p. 695). One imagines Sartre rolling over in his grave. For this philosophy of mind is truly the Other of Sartre's philosophy. Yet, at the price of a treacherous translation, this philosophy gets something from Sartre, and perhaps gives him something in return.

In a slightly surreal, perhaps even monstrous way, I am going to make the two philosophies engage in a dialogue on the problem of lying to oneself.

As we approach the end of the twentieth century, humanity is facing a crisis in definition and ways of thinking across the boundaries of identity, politics, and culture. This paper briefly addresses unusual forums and forms for expressing the anxiety surrounding change and the ability to analyze it, forms linked to the media and its intensive focus on particular “human interest” stories, but also to the uncertainty that a lack of precedent for thinking creates. One of the questions that most interests me is how the malaise of society and the malaise of political change is expressed through the debates around maternity, birth, and the custody of children, how socio-political problems are made intelligible through dramatization of individual struggle involving family relations. What is compelling is the way in which certain stories followed by the media gravitate around facts that speak of what we do not know. Recent advances in reproductive technologies have put into question the belief (whether implicit or explicit) that biology, as a teleological process, can hold cultural chaos in abeyance. The doors have been opened wide as the definition and status of mother, father, and child have all been deeply questioned. Yet at the very moment when the so-called nuclear family is endangered, it is the extraordinarily powerful metaphor of the family that rings insistently in social and political discourse. There is a sense that the threat to the family signals a disintegration of order, leaving the contemporary sense of self bereft of a discourse that can represent universal order.

Human experience is rich in singular bursts and flashes that not everyone can participate in, that can only be the doing of a very small number of persons, and yet which, exceptional or strange as they are, have the capacity to enlighten us all. The extraordinary has something to say about the ordinary. Sometimes individuals travel alone along divergent paths, seeking a destination that perhaps only they can anticipate. In such cases the method used is not one that proceeds from the unknown to the known, from what the infant or newcomer doesn't know to what science or society considers as established knowledge. For those who travel to the zenith of experience, discoveries are of a different order because the person is transformed by them.

Terra incognita: the space is vibrant with reality and yet, as to its essentials, it eludes, like a hypothesis, all the modes of knowledge that I have at my disposal, and it appears that it ought to remain unaffected by every research procedure, whether intuitive or discursive, indirect or direct, whatever its process of creation, through experience, conscience or reasoning. Moreover, I have to speak without the protection of any critical distance, since the question that has been put to me concerns the status of the unknowable in my own work. This means that we are talking about a testimony that already implies the transgression of several taboos. During a radio interview, Matisse once explained: “I said to my young students: Would you like to paint? First of all, you will have to cut off your tongue, because this decision deprives you of the right to express yourselves in any other way than with brushes.” If what the painter wants to say could be expressed in words, he would be a novelist, a poet, or a philosopher rather than a painter. Further, I believe that there is an antinomy today—and perhaps even a kind of open conflict, a permanent tension—between painting and writing. It is partly this conflict on which my research is based. Everything that follows should therefore be taken with caution. These are sketches and random ideas; extracts from reflections haphazardly jotted down during my work, arranged in some order only for the purposes of this article.

Socrates’ exact words are unknown. Nor do we know precisely what the Buddha said. All we have, in both cases, are statements attributed to them. Our ignorance of their own words is irremediable. This is not the only trait that these two contemporaries share. The statements ascribed to them are similar in many ways, particularly the therapeutic concern that motivates them. Both the Athenian and Prince Gautama strive to cure the ravages of ignorance, to treat the ills ignorance engenders and eliminate its source. This common aim produces comparable results, such as the use of dialogue to remove illusory questions rather than the teaching of a doctrine.

The adverse report of the Academy of Sciences, published in 1784, failed to put an end to the proselytism of Mesmer's early followers, nor did it scale down their ambitions to gain scientific recognition. The allure of mystery, the taste for wonders and the call of the unknown prevailed, and throughout that century numerous clashes occurred between the scientific establishment and those demanding its recognition. Their demand was founded not so much on a theoretical construct as on people's personal experiences as actors or witnesses, which were perceived to be true simply because they were nearly always profoundly disturbing. The fact is that, despite the observations of scientists such as Faraday, anyone could put questions to an ecstatic in a state of trance, have a medium summon the dead, or communicate with the “other world” by table-turning. Insofar as it rejected the validity of the most commonly accepted “research programmes”, the challenge to the institutions that were the guarantors of received knowledge was a major one.

Let us think about metaphysics not as the subject matter of a discipline—as classical rationalism puts it—but as the “natural place” that arouses our curiosity. Let us see in it something that completes and exceeds, shelters and disables, inspires and invalidates all the questions raised by the effect of a primeval impulse. Rather than metaphysics we should hence speak of “the metaphysical,” a horizon rather than a form of knowledge which vainlessly tries to emulate divine wisdom, we are forced to ponder our point of view, the inquisitive gaze cast on that horizon, not so much as determining a position—since horizons tend to dissipate positions, to blur all point of references—but as a sign revealing a disposition, i.e., the trace of an attitude. As an attitude, this dis-position is a disruption or decentering of our habitual positions concerning the world and a bias that stimulates us to demand another kind of responses to questions which obviously are not those of every day.

In all societies certain groups of people make knowledge their way of life, dedicating themselves to research and the acquisition and use of knowledge. Thus sorcerers and priests, shamans and scientists, make up special—albeit minority—groups to whom society acknowledges an extremely important role.

The scientist and the layman are separated by a void which for more than a century has been occupied by various communication networks. It constitutes the domain of that which, in French, is rather inelegantly termed “la vulgarisation scientifique” and, in English, is known as “the popularization of science.”

Although the historian confronts the question of what is not known in the same terms as does any other researcher no matter his or her discipline, the conditions of the debate are different for the historian because of the problematic nature of the science of history. While practically all the other sciences, including the social sciences, struggle against ignorance by seeking to discover and establish laws that will govern the facts, history must always face, in spite of its ever more sophisticated techniques, the contingency of its materials, which are fundamentally human. The materials of history can not—in spite of what some have asserted—be contained within any single, all-encompassing mode of reasoning that would allow for the creation of constitutive abstract models. In spite of this reality the historian persists, like Sisyphus, in organizing knowledge. Man apparently has no choice but to believe that his activities have some logical basis. The historian therefore collates facts in order to develop cognitive and interpretive structures that will be durable. What gives the discipline of history its epistemological originality is the painfully central role it accords to the question, “What do we not know?” Man wants to know, believes he knows. The ignorance of historians thus seems especially upsetting when applied to our own century. How could the methodological progress of the science of history, along with the professionalization of the historian's craft, have led to an actual increase of uncertainty concerning a period so close to us in time? Today's man-in-the-street—endowed only with his memory, which seems so rich in “truths”—finds it hard to believe that any event or structure of the twentieth century could remain unknown. Limiting our inquiry to the twentieth century is not, however, justified solely by the practical consideration of trying to gain a better grasp of our times. Indeed in this brief article devoted to the relationship between ignorance and the history and historiography of the twentieth century, we will not attempt to inventory all the events, persons, mentalities or economic facts which historical knowledge has until now been incapable of explaining. Unlike the other sciences, whose struggle against ignorance is accomplished by a gradual process of nibbling at the margins of the unknown, the discipline of history must always keep in mind that the masses of granite that form the foundation of History are in fact but a body of statements that can only aspire to the status of truth. The aim of our inquiry— without of course claiming to be exhaustive—will therefore be to identify the nature of the obstacles that lie in the historian's path. These problems are of three kinds. The first concerns access to knowledge, and is tied—although not exclusively—to problems of the techniques of historical research. The second concerns the difficulties related to conceptualization and therefore to the uses of knowledge. There can be no knowing without know-how. Finally, the third pertains to the lack of permeability between history and the other human and social sciences, which creates for the historian the challenge of interdisciplinary exchange.

“All men naturally desire to know” : this is the celebrated assertion with which Aristotle begins the first book of his Metaphysics. According to him, human beings’ desire to know is as natural to them as their desires for food, rest, or amusement. These latter “natural” urges are responses to certain deficiencies—hunger, tiredness, and boredom; similarly, the desire to know is a response to a deficiency of knowledge. As Thomas Aquinas puts it, the urge to know (libido sciendi) is as much a characteristic of human beings as the urge to feel or to dominate (libido sentiendi and libido dominandi), and all three, essential though they may be to human nature, must be kept under control. My purpose here is to examine the limits of the desire to know: in what way may our desire to know go beyond the bounds of the “knowable”?

Let us begin by making a rather obvious remark: the meaning of the question of ‘what we do not know’ varies according to whether or not the word “yet” is explicitly or implicitly included. It comes as no surprise that it should be in physics, the science in which, ever since Galileo and Newton, the quest for knowledge has been so amply and unexpectedly rewarded, that we find the most dramatic examples of both possibilities: one in which theory points to knowledge not yet acquired, knowledge which is still to be conquered, but which, once attained, should constitute its final triumph; and one in which “we do not know” may be taken as the conclusion of established knowledge. We do not (yet) know how to unify the four fundamental forces of interaction in a single theory, and yet that eventuality is already being called the theory of everything (TOE). Since interaction is the principle on which physics now bases all its explanations, and since physical explanations are in principle valid for everything that exists, the unification of the forces of interaction must therefore be the science of the principles of everything that exists. On the other hand, we do not know at what moment a particular radioactive nucleus will disintegrate. In this case, our knowledge of physics makes it impossible to use the word “yet”: radioactive disintegration is described in terms of a “lifetime,” which means that each nucleus within a given population has, at any one moment, the same probability of disintegrating, and that this probability is not a function of any variable which we can identify and manipulate. In this case, our knowledge asserts that we cannot know now and will not be able to know for as long as our present knowledge remains valid.