Kyoto School Non-Knowing

Kyoto School Non-Knowing names the convergence, argued in Boothby's reading of Nishitani, between the Buddhist paradox of enlightenment — satori understood as "a knowing of non-knowing" (docta ignorantia) — and the Lacanian structure of das Ding as the constitutively unknowable dimension of the Nebenmensch. The concept does not simply assert ignorance; it asserts a knowing that has its own content, namely the recognition that the most intimate real — whether the other person, God, or one's own subject — is irreducibly inaccessible to conceptual grasp. This "knowing" is therefore not a cognitive failure but a structural condition: it mirrors the Lacanian insight that das Ding is "from the outset what I call the beyond-of-the-signified," a locus of pure lack that cannot be collapsed into any positive representation yet nonetheless exerts a gravitational pull on all desire and meaning-making.

The theoretical force of the alignment is that both the Kyoto School and Lacanian psychoanalysis locate the sacred — or, in Lacan's idiom, the ethical — precisely at this point of constitutive unknowing. In Buddhist terms, the deepest intimacy with reality is achieved not through accumulation of positive knowledge but through a kind of learned, disciplined surrender to unknowing; in Lacanian terms, this maps onto the injunction to maintain fidelity to das Ding rather than to fill the void with imaginary substitutes. "Radical unknowing" thus becomes the shared ground on which Boothby constructs a structural homology between psychoanalytic and Buddhist accounts of what makes an encounter — with the other, with the divine, with one's own desire — genuinely sacred rather than merely comforting.

This concept appears in diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred (p. 181) as a pivot in Boothby's broader argument about the sacred. It functions as a cross-cultural specification of das Ding: where Lacan's Seminar VII frames the Thing as the "excluded interior" of the Nebenmensch — the portion of the fellow human being that resists all symbolization and memory-tracing — Kyoto School Non-Knowing names the experiential or contemplative orientation that arises when this structural limit is consciously embraced rather than defended against. In relation to the canonical concept of the Neighbour, the concept specifies that the "opaque, potentially malignant jouissance" harboured by the proximate Other is not an accidental obscurity but an irreducible feature — and that Zen enlightenment can be read as the disciplined acceptance of precisely that irreducibility. In relation to Extimacy, it names the felt or meditative correlate of the topology: what is most intimate (one's own Buddha-nature, one's own deepest desire) is simultaneously most exterior and unknowable, echoing the Lacanian formula that what is "at the heart of me" is "strange to me." Finally, in relation to Knowledge (savoir), Kyoto School Non-Knowing occupies a structurally analogous position to the Lacanian "knowledge that does not know itself" — but inverted: whereas unconscious savoir operates without the subject's awareness, docta ignorantia is a knowing that reflexively acknowledges its own limit, making unknowing explicit rather than symptomatic. The concept thus extends the Lacanian framework by showing that the void at the centre of das Ding can be approached not only through the detours of desire but also through a contemplative practice of deliberate epistemic surrender.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.181)

For Nishitani, the ultimate meaning of Zen enlightenment, or satori, is to recognize and embrace 'a knowing of non-knowing, a sort of docta ignorantia.'

The phrase "knowing of non-knowing" is theoretically loaded because it refuses simple ignorance: the genitive construction ("knowing of") installs a reflexive, second-order awareness — a subject that knows its not-knowing — which maps directly onto the Lacanian structure of das Ding as a "locus of pure lack" that is nonetheless positively operative in organizing desire and the subject's ethical orientation. The Latin anchor "docta ignorantia" (learned unknowing, from the Neoplatonic-Christian tradition) further signals that this is not mere epistemic failure but a cultivated, structural condition, aligning it with Lacan's insistence that the ethical relation to das Ding demands fidelity to a void rather than its imaginary filling.