Popular imagination has been enriched by the scientific concept of ‘the event horizon,’ in which the traveler unwittingly passes from a known state that can be shared to a point of no return where information can’t be recovered. At least, this is my thumbnail understanding of the concept. I can also Google it, but that would defeat the purpose.

Now, intuitively, I want to say that, insofar as men are capable of self-knowledge as much as they are of self-interested ignorance, it is in his quest to know himself that he is vulnerable to lapsing into the latter condition, unwittingly and irrevocably. Thereafter, he may become suspended in a narcotic state in which his secret longings may be met – to have the woods whisper only his name, to be held in eternal fascination in his words and gestures, to be forever embraced in a maximally felt subjectivity. If we hold to the reasoning that this insular state – Jameson’s ‘windless enclosure’ – obstructs transmission of affect and consciousness in general, how to hack this narcotic state and free the traveler would be the next problem.

However, I have since come to view the problem in its formulation as flawed for at least two reasons. One, the axiomatic that ignorance is an undesirable state does not hold, not even for the sake of argument. And if it can’t be assumed that nobody willingly chooses self-deception, it can hardly be claimed one ‘unwittingly’ lapses into this state which, incidentally and as an object of formal study has been termed “stupidity”:

“People become stupid ad hoc, that is, when they do not want to understand, where understanding would cause (castration) anxiety or guilt feeling, or would endanger an existing neurotic equilibrium…”(Otto Fenichel, “Direct Clinical Symptoms of the Neurotic Conflict” in The Psychoanalysis of Neurosis (Routledge, London; 1946, 1990)).

Fenichel thought “emotional resistances hinder” “spontaneous understanding” such that the “ego may be induced to keep its intellect permanently in abeyance” (181).

The other reason for rethinking the analogy of the event horizon with respect to self-knowledge is to allow hope to intervene in rejecting as not nearly sufficient the cautionary tale that man is irreversibly sealed to his fate of self-interested ignorance as his ‘punishment.’ If that is all there is to conclude about the matter, the point of my initial inquiry would again be defeated.

Not yet wanting to give up on the analogy, the ‘event horizon one unwittingly crosses’ would have to be the passage from self-ignorance to self-knowledge, where the latter state can’t be undone and all states of unknowing previous to it and all that rests on that set of assumptions are thereafter unrecoverable in the same uncomplicated way.

To rephrase then, the unwitting passage from a state of self-interested ignorance (which can be reversed) to one of greater self-knowledge with respect to the previous state of ignorance (which cannot be undone) – I call this irony, but not only in the worst sense of awakening to some Oedipal nightmare. Neither would I say ‘How bad can it be?’ or ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ Definitely not saying that. Only to say at that point you would need to adjust. And I think you can. Because, really, there is no other way to overcome your alienation from yourself and return to a grounded state.

Concerning the nature of the ‘preferred’ state of unknowing, I would not confuse this with the ‘blessed ignorance’ that requires the intervention of another, and that, in any case, nature is glad to give to man and animal alike in an effort to spare them knowledge of their suffering state.