Unthinkable

There appear to us certain ideas and phenomena that are common to existence which, curiously, and quite tellingly, resist rational analysis. Four examples will suffice: one from biology (death), one from theology (god), one from cosmology (black holes), and one from aesthetics (the sublime).

First, biology: death is unthinkable. As Ludwig Wittgenstein noted, death is not an experience of life, only dying. We do not experience death, for death is the cessation of experience. We cannot “think” death, at all, and yet it is not too much to say that all of our days are imbued with and defined by death.

Second, theology: god is unthinkable. At least, most monotheistic classical definitions of the divine underscore this unthinkability, “god” as something or someone along the lines of what Saint Anselm of Canterbury described as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived,” an absolute transcendent. The idea of divinity has of course figured most prominently in the history of human thought, while the referent of the idea nevertheless remains beyond rational approach.

Third, cosmology: black holes are unthinkable. Beyond the event horizon or outer most edge of these supermassive galactic giants and their multitudinous presence throughout the cosmos, all matter, all knowledge, and even the opportunity for observation are utterly crushed out of existence. We “see” only indirectly the dark presence of these vacuous entities wherein reason has no place or possibility.

Fourth, aesthetics: the sublime is unthinkable. First examined in ancient Greece by Pseudo-Longinus, and later taken up with great consideration by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant during the European Enlightenment, the sublime is a concept(?) or a catalyst(?) and altogether the occasion of evoking an experience, simultaneously of wonder and terror, awe and dread, as one might come to when standing on a precipice before a great ravine or abyss in the natural world, and suddenly struck in the senses by the uneasy immensity but also sheer beauty of what surely surpasses even the best attempts by thinkers and writers to circumscribe such an aesthetic.

Death is unthinkable. God is unthinkable. Black holes are unthinkable. Sublimity is unthinkable. So what? This veritable resistance to reason found among these four is, minimally, a caveat against epistemic chauvinism, intellectual hubris, or any other similar myopia of the mind and, more importantly, an invitation to instead arouse alternate ways of intuiting and celebrating the strangeness of being; through the body, through the affections, and through faith in those elements and aspects of existence that stubbornly defy the limits of logic, language, and our obsession with learning unilaterally.