The Edge of Knowing

What can reason, mystical speech, metaphysical system, poetry, and science reveal, and where must each bow?The Edge of Knowing follows the human instruments of knowledge to their limits. It begins with Western philosophy, from Parmenides and the first road of Being through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, medieval thought, modern reason, and Wittgenstein’s ladder. It then enters mystical speech, where negation, paradox, love, ordinary shimmer, secrecy, alchemy, and holy folly say and unsay the Real.The ascent continues through Plotinus, Proclus, and Pseudo-Dionysius, where the One, the ladder, and dazzling darkness test the reach of metaphysics. Poetry takes over where prose runs out, through Dante, Persian Sufi poets, Tagore, Rilke, Kabir, Blake, Eliot, and Dickinson. Science closes the movement with its austere power to measure the world and its honest encounter with what its maps cannot contain.The reader encounters arguments and systems, but also images, poems, equations, pauses, and failures of speech. Each becomes a way of testing how far thought can travel.This volume does not reject knowledge. It gives each discipline its dignity, then asks it to reveal its boundary. Clarity matters. Precision matters. Yet map and ground are not the same, and the instrument becomes most truthful when it knows what it cannot possess.