Who hasn’t heard the phrase “ignorance is bliss” a thousand occasions?
Like all cliches, it sticks as a result of it’s rooted in reality, but it surely’s value asking why ignorance might be so satisfying. In the event you learn the historical past of philosophy, you don’t discover all that a lot curiosity within the delights of ignorance. As a substitute, you hear quite a bit in regards to the pursuit of fact, which is assumed to be a common human impulse.
That’s not solely incorrect, in fact. However denial and avoidance are additionally human impulses, typically extra highly effective than our must know. So these drives — a must know and a powerful want by no means to by no means discover out — are sometimes warring inside us, shaping our worldview, {our relationships}, and our self-image.
Mark Lilla is a professor of the humanities at Columbia College and the writer of a brand new e-book referred to as Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting To not Know. It’s brief, elegantly written, and perhaps the very best praise I can provide is that it reads like a e-book that would’ve been written at virtually any level in fashionable historical past. It engages one of many oldest questions in philosophy — to know or to not know? — and manages to supply recent insights that really feel related and timeless on the similar time.
So I invited Lilla on The Grey Space to discover why we settle for and resist the reality and what it means to dwell repeatedly in that pressure. As at all times, there’s rather more within the full podcast, so pay attention and observe The Grey Space on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you discover podcasts. New episodes drop each Monday.
This interview has been edited for size and readability.
The e-book opens with a sort of parody of Plato’s well-known Allegory of the Cave. Within the unique story, there are prisoners who spend their complete life sure by chains in a cave taking a look at shadows being forged on a wall, they usually mistake these shadows for actuality as a result of it’s the one actuality they’ve ever recognized. What’s your spin on it?
In Plato’s version, a stranger is available in and turns one of many prisoners round in order that he realizes that he’s been residing in a world of shadows and is invited to climb as much as the solar after which lives up there till he’s instructed to return again down and get different individuals.
In my model of the story, he’s acquired a bit of buddy with him, a younger boy who additionally goes up. When it comes time to return down, the person tells him he can keep up staring on the varieties and being within the pure daylight and seeing what’s, and it seems he’s determined to return. It’s a chilly life. All of his fantasy and creativeness have dried up. He misses his digital associates and ultimately he’s taken again down. And so I begin the e-book saying it’s an open query whether or not popping out into daylight is an effective factor.
We wish to know the reality, we wish to see the world as it’s, however we additionally should be blind to sure issues and we actually, actually hate to confess our personal ignorance. So we’re always taking part in this sport of disguise and search with ourselves. It is a weirdly untenable dance for people, don’t you suppose?
It’s. Folks don’t wish to really feel that they’re incurious and holding issues at arm’s distance and never excited about them. I believe a part of it’s that our opinions should not issues that we simply have in a bag that we pull out after they want expression, however slightly they really feel like prostheses, like an additional limb, and if somebody refutes our argument or mocks it, it seems like one thing fairly intimate has been touched.
And so that’s an incentive to not admit your ignorance and to construct up all types of defenses and attraction to bogus authorities as a way to stay satisfied of your personal rational capacities and your independence. It turns into a sort of perverse factor the place you’re always attempting to patch issues collectively to point out to your self and others you perceive, and within the meantime, you can begin pulling in some preposterous issues that turn out to be a part of your worldview.
Is there a superb mannequin of a properly ignorant particular person, somebody who climbs the mountain of data and says as soon as they attain the height, You already know what? I prefer it higher down there within the cave!
I believe you’re leaving out an possibility, and that possibility is one thing that Socrates explores within the different Platonic dialogues, which is studying from your personal ignorance. That’s to acknowledge that you simply’re genuinely and customarily ignorant about issues and to proceed inquiring with the understanding of what you give you is tentative.
Particularly proper now, we dwell in a world the place we’re an increasing number of conscious of the uncertainty of our data as a result of issues modified so shortly. It was very putting to me throughout Covid simply how pissed off individuals gave the impression to be by the truth that the general public well being authorities saved altering their recommendation. First they stated it was all about washing your arms, after which they stated it was all about masks and so forth, they usually get offended about that, however that’s the way in which science works.
However individuals don’t wish to dwell that approach. They like to listen to from an authority that that is what you do. They need a physician who doesn’t hem and haw and doesn’t always change the meds and say, “Let’s do this, let’s attempt that.” It’s very destabilizing. And so I believe we’ve a craving to dwell standing on strong floor, however we don’t stand on strong floor.
Do you suppose that ignorance additionally has an influence that we overlook?
Yeah. I started the e-book with a citation from George Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda, saying that we thought quite a bit in regards to the energy of data, however we haven’t thought in regards to the energy of ignorance. And what she means is the ability of people who find themselves ignorant to mess issues up in life, that it’s a sort of social power on the market, which is definitely the case.
However ignorance can also be energy if not realizing sure issues or leaving sure issues unexamined allow you to proceed in your life and never be paralyzed. I take advantage of an instance at the start of the e-book: What would occur if we every had an LED display embedded in our foreheads and we may learn the ideas of everybody round us?
Social life would grind to a halt as a result of you may’t management your ideas, proper? We might always be trying to see how persons are excited about us, and we may by no means develop a steady sense of ourselves.
There are many people who find themselves willfully ignorant, and there are many people who find themselves blind to their ignorance, however then there’s this different species of cynicism you speak about within the e-book that knowingly exploits ignorance. What’s the political significance of this?
Folks want certainty, and they’ll demand it. And so political leaders, demagogues specifically, can present easy solutions to issues that appear very difficult and that stir individuals in a approach that may be directed. That’s classically how a demagogue works and the way a demagogue turns into a tyrant.
Particularly now, I’m not stunned that we’re dealing with aggressive ignorance amongst populists and those that are moved by populists. Making sense of issues proper now may be very tough as a result of we simply don’t know varied issues as a result of our expertise is so new. For instance, what do you do about the truth that the state of any nation’s economic system will depend on a global economic system and that no nation has a full say in how that worldwide economic system operates, and it’ll proceed to have an effect on everybody in each nation?
It’s onerous to simply accept the truth that our political leaders don’t management the economic system. And so that you go to whoever says he’s the reply, or whoever says she’s the reply. It is rather onerous, for all of us, to confront the current with an open thoughts and a deep sense of the tentativeness of our understanding of it.
In some unspecified time in the future, we’ve to ask: What’s the purpose of data? Do we would like data for the sake of data as a result of it’s inherently good, or is data solely worthwhile if it’s helpful? And if realizing one thing isn’t helpful or if realizing one thing is definitely painful, why would we wish to comprehend it?
The query that you simply’re asking, for me at the very least within the e-book, is known as a query of various sorts of human characters. There are some individuals for whom one thing quickens inside at any time when the chance of latest data presents itself. Why that occurs, why the soul responds like that, is a thriller, and Socrates tells varied myths about why that could be, but it surely simply appears to be a reality and never everybody has it.
Do you suppose there’s something value realizing whatever the value?
Self-knowledge might be dangerous if it’s partial. That’s the story of Augustine within the Confessions in the meanwhile the place he says, “God ripped off the again of me,” which was this different face and the whole lot that everybody else may see, however I couldn’t after which God holds it in entrance of me, and I see myself, and in that second I’m so horrified that one thing clicks and I give myself over.
So there could possibly be limits to this sort of factor, however Socrates assumes that every one self-knowledge is ultimately going to be useful since you are actually clear to your self and that realizing itself makes individuals good. As soon as you already know, the ability of your ignorance is not holding you hostage.
Do you suppose that’s true? I don’t suppose so.
No, I don’t. And it’s onerous to imagine that Socrates actually thought that. You possibly can see it in the way in which he offers with different individuals within the Platonic dialogues, you see that he has plenty of data about how individuals fall wanting that.
Yeah, I may undoubtedly see a case being made for at all times eager to know summary truths and truths in regards to the exterior world. However in the case of self-knowledge, generally if you peer inward, what you discover is that you simply’re only a bundle of contradictions that may’t be squared, and I’m undecided it’s essentially good to be intimately acquainted with that and to get hung up on that.
There’s a technique through which it’s, and that’s the Montaigne possibility. The image Montaigne offers of us within the essays is that we’re precisely what you simply stated, and his recommendation is to dwell with it. Simply go together with it. You’re a contradiction.
I believe that’s simpler stated than completed, although it’s most likely sensible. However do you suppose there’s a hyperlink, perhaps even a vital hyperlink, between self-knowledge and data of the exterior world? In different phrases, on some stage, do we’ve to know ourselves as a way to know the reality in regards to the world outdoors ourselves?
I can consider a pair solutions to that. I’m undecided which one could be mine. One is that this stuff are removable. I bear in mind spending a 12 months on the Institute for Superior Research, and I might generally go and sit on this place the place the scientists and mathematicians had been, and you could possibly inform these individuals simply had no self-awareness by way of how individuals reacted to them. Maybe they had been simply wrapped up of their issues they usually had been discovering issues.
However, one barrier to us in realizing issues in regards to the world is to know what constitutes realizing, and that requires an evaluation of ourselves. After which the third sense, whereas not strictly vital, the train of attempting to know oneself is a sort of coaching train for inquiring in regards to the world outdoors.
I do wish to discuss a bit about nostalgia, which you’ve written about earlier than and once more on this new e-book. At what level in our journey of data, as people and societies, are we overtaken by nostalgia? At what level are we simply longing to return to a earlier time after we didn’t know what we now know?
With regards to complete societies being nostalgic, I believe that it has to do two issues: One is illegibility. When the world turns into illegible, the current turns into illegible. Which means you don’t know tips on how to act, and for those who don’t know tips on how to act, it’s deeply disturbing since you need to have the ability to management your setting and management issues so you may attain your personal ends.
And so a dissatisfaction with the current and an absence of data about tips on how to enhance issues are spurs to think about that, simply as being 8 years outdated appeared easier and simpler than being 68 years outdated, that there was a time when life was ordered in a greater approach through which we knew much less about varied issues or sure modifications hadn’t occurred, and perhaps we will reverse the machine or reverse the practice.
I do surprise what the upshot of all this pondering and writing was for you personally. Have you ever modified your relationship to your personal ignorance because of this undertaking?
I might hope so. I believe I’ve a greater understanding of what philosophy is and what philosophy can do —
What’s it that philosophy can and might’t do?
Philosophy that’s conscious of our ignorance is a step ahead. The best cognitive achievement of human beings is attending to perhaps.
