Parsing the un- of Unknowing, I: Negation and Reversal

            There is not one un– prefix in the English language, but at least two.  Which of these is at work in the expression cloud of unknowing? 

            Morphologically, we can infer two possible constituent structures for the word unknowing:

1. [ [ un know ] _verb ing ]  —>  negation of the verb
2. [ un [ know ing ] _{verbal noun} ]  —>  reversal of the action of the noun

            In the first case, unknowing refers to an ongoing state of ignorance.  This is similar to the negation of known evoked in the expression unknown.  One enters the cloud, and therein one’s ignorance subsists unperturbed. 

            In the second, unknowing refers to the transition to ignorance from a knowing state.  When she sleepwalks, Lady Macbeth moans “What’s done cannot be undone,” consistent with this sense.  Or, as elsewhere she cries out: “The raven himself is hoarse that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan under my battlements.  Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts! Unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty . . .”

            (It is also conceivable — if, perhaps, not very likely — that the prefix un– has effect as an intensifier, pointing to a more intense knowing.  This construction is attested in Middle English, such as in two contrasting uses of the word unforht as unafraid [line 111] and very afraid [line 117] in The Dream of the Rood.  One could speculate, not without gratification, about unknowing as a very high state of knowing.  But this perhaps takes liberties with the text, and is hard to square with the otherwise resolutely apophatic character of its claims.)

            One key to parsing the sense of unknowing — as negation or reversal of knowing — could plausibly come from thinking about the meaning of knowing to its Middle English author.  In the present day, knowledge and its relatives is a very overwrought word.  One supposes that this reflects a reduction of all knowledge to knowledge of material entities and relations, with feeling consigned to deal with the rest (viz., “multiple intelligences”).  That step comes next.