How Is the Infinite Known? — Directional Cognition

1. The Question of Knowability: Both Extremes Collapse

In the previous essay we saw: the mind grasps the abstract by setting out from concrete experience. But what if what is to be grasped is the infinite — without end or limit? How can a finite mind apprehend the boundless?

History has given two extreme answers to this question:

Absolute Unknowability ⇄ Naïve Knowability — Both Inadequate

Absolute Unknowability

Huxley's agnosticism: even God's existence cannot be definitively known. Wittgenstein more radical still: 'What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.'

Subject closed, language jammed

No orientation possible

⇒Not fully knowable, not fully unknowable — known *directionally*.

Partial / Directional Knowability

Apophatic theology: define God by what He is not. Aquinas: attributes by 'analogy'. Classical Islamic kalām: bilā kayf — accept the attributes, do not ask how concerning the essence.

Not absolute silence — bounded language + pointing

The Islamic formula: the tanzīh–tashbīh balance

Islamic intellectual history formulates this question as the tanzīh–tashbīh balance:

— Tashbīh: to express God through the concepts we already know — al-Raḥmān, al-Raḥīm, al-Samīʿ, al-Baṣīr.
— Tanzīh: yet these concepts do not bound Him; they do not liken Him to the created.

فَاطِرُ السَّمٰوَاتِ وَالْاَرْضِ جَعَلَ لَكُمْ مِنْ اَنْفُسِكُمْ اَزْوَاجاً وَمِنَ الْاَنْعَامِ اَزْوَاجاً يَذْرَؤُكُمْ فِيهِ لَيْسَ كَمِثْلِهِ شَيْءٌ وَهُوَ السَّمِيعُ الْبَصِيرُ

42:11

Al-Shūrā 42:11 — لَيْسَ كَمِثْلِهِ شَيْءٌ — 'There is nothing like Him.' The purest verse of tanzīh — it does not cancel the expression of the attributes; it cancels the identification of those attributes with their creaturely counterparts.

2. A Mathematical Lens — Three Kinds of Knowledge

Let's think through a variable. Take X:

Three Knowledge-States of X

The Variable X — Knowability Structure

X = 100

You know it exactly — but you have bounded X to 100. Static, closed knowledge.

X ∈ ℤ (X is an integer)

You know almost nothing about X — category-knowledge, not content.

X → ∞

You cannot know X absolutely — but you know its direction. Dynamic, open knowledge; not finished, but directional.

The third state is a different kind of knowledge. Not static — dynamic. Not finished — open. The infinite can be known only in this third mode.

3. Allāhu Akbar — The Formula of Dynamic Cognition

The phrase 'Allāhu Akbar' is exactly the formula of this dynamic cognition. Akbar means both 'greater than' and 'greatest'. It has two dimensions:

Comparison ⇄ Transcendence — The Two Faces of Akbar

(1) Comparison: 'Whatever you place beside Him'

Whatever you place beside X — wealth, status, the cosmos — X is always greater. If value matters in your choosing, you must always choose X.

The opening 'Allāhu Akbar' of prayer (29:45) — all agendas instantly drop to a lower place

⇒Cognition is not static — **every new grasp becomes a step to the next.**

(2) Transcendence: 'Whatever you think Him to be'

Whatever you think X to be, X is greater than that thought. The moment you say 'I have understood', you have shown that you have not.

Al-Ikhlāṣ 112:4 — There is nothing equal to Him

اُتْلُ مٓا اُوحِيَ اِلَيْكَ مِنَ الْكِتَابِ وَاَقِمِ الصَّلٰوةَ اِنَّ الصَّلٰوةَ تَنْهٰى عَنِ الْفَحْشٓاءِ وَالْمُنْكَرِ وَلَذِكْرُ اللّٰهِ اَكْبَرُ وَاللّٰهُ يَعْلَمُ مَا تَصْنَعُونَ

29:45

Al-ʿAnkabūt 29:45 — Allāhu Akbar at the start of prayer — saying it means 'Allah is greater than everything'; when one enters prayer, it drops every worldly agenda to a lower layer in a single move.

وَلَمْ يَكُنْ لَهُ كُفُواً اَحَدٌ

112:4

Al-Ikhlāṣ 112:4 — وَلَمْ يَكُنْ لَهُ كُفُوًا اَحَدٌ — 'Nothing is equal to Him.' The shortest formula of transcendence.

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lā uḥṣī thanāʾan ʿalayka, anta kamā athnayta ʿalā nafsik — 'I cannot enumerate Your praise; You are as You have praised Yourself.'

— Hadis — Müslim, Salât 222; Ebû Dâvûd, Salât 148

4. From the Bounded to the Boundless — A Recursive Journey

But where does this dynamic journey begin? From our own experience.

Consider a child. The largest number he knows is 100. When you say 'infinity', he imagines it as a little beyond 100. As his knowledge expands, so does his perception of 'infinity'.

The same holds in the cognition of divinity. We use our own finite experiences as windows opening onto the infinite:

— You feel compassion toward a chick. Then you think: 'If this little compassion of mine is this, what could the compassion of the One who made me be?' From your small compassion, you find a road to boundless compassion.
— You say: 'I own this house'. Then: 'I too have an Owner. And the whole cosmos has one…' From the sense of ownership, you build a bridge to absolute ownership.

A recursive (self-referential) thinking that, at every turn, reaches a wider perception than the previous one. The tool by which we walk, through analogical comparison, in directional motion toward the divine infinite.

This tool — which lets the human say 'I' — is in truth a trust (amāna); it has a relative, suppositional existence, granted on the ground of farḍ-i muḥāl (counterfactual supposition) for a mental, suppositional, temporary use. The moment you take your own 'I' to be the real, the tool ceases to be a means and becomes an end — and the recursive journey halts.

5. Practical Dhikr: al-Ḥamdu li-llāh ↔ Subḥān Allāh

The tanzīh–tashbīh balance is present in daily dhikr too:

— Al-ḥamdu li-llāh is a tashbīh: returning the credit, praise, goodness in a thing to Allah.
— Subḥān Allāh is a tanzīh: keeping defect and imperfection far from Allah.

Like looking at an object in daylight — you ascribe the light to the global Sun, and the shadows to the local structure of the object. (This is treated in detail in the 'Local-Global Perspectives' essay.)

Felsufi's cross-tradition synthesis — useful, not identical

In this essay Felsufi gathers under the heading of 'partial/directional knowability' the frames of Huxley/Wittgenstein (agnostic), apophatic theology (Christian), Aquinas (Thomist analogy), and Islamic kalām (bilā kayf, tanzīh–tashbīh). This is a contemporary comparative reading — analytically powerful. But within classical Islamic kalām: bilā kayf (Sunni) and negative theology (Christian apophatic) bear methodological resemblance but are not identical (e.g., Thomistic analogia entis carries an ontological commitment without a direct counterpart in Islamic kalām). The 'X → ∞ analogy' is a pedagogical device; it has no formal place in classical kalām. Felsufi's synthesis is a bridge for the modern reader — it does not replace the classical kalāmic formulation but offers it a complementary lens.

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The recursive structure works not only for grasping divinity, but for reading life itself. Simulation within simulation. Dream within dream. Instagram within life, life within truth… (This is taken up in the next essay — 'Inception Lives'.)

— Felsufi