Unknown reality is a relative historical condition, not a metaphysical unknowable

Evidence

Accepting the affirmation that our knowledge of things is nothing other than ourselves, our needs and interests, that is that our knowledge is superstructure (or non-definitive philosophy), it is difficult not to think in terms of something real beyond this knowledge—not in the metaphysical sense of a “noumenon”, an “unknown God” or an “unknowable”, but in the concrete sense of a “relative” ignorance of reality, of something still unknown, which will however be known one day when the “physical” and intellectual instruments of mankind are more perfect, when, that is, the technical and social conditions of mankind have been changed in a progressive direction. We are then making an historical prediction which consists simply in an act of thought that projects into the future a process of development similar to that which has taken place from the past until today. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1309

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Redefines the unknowable as a historically contingent gap in knowledge, tying epistemology to the technical and social conditions of production.
• XREF: This converts the Kantian noumenon into a historically open horizon — the same move later critical theory makes against positivist closure; connects to the reader’s scaffolding project on the construction of the ‘Other’.

Related

• Knowledge and objectivity are only knowable in relation to humanity (similarity 0.83)