Who hasn’t heard the phrase “ignorance is bliss” a thousand instances?
Like all cliches, it sticks as a result of it’s rooted in fact, however it’s price asking why ignorance might be so satisfying. If you learn the historical past of philosophy, you don’t discover all that a lot curiosity within the delights of ignorance. Instead, you hear loads concerning the pursuit of fact, which is assumed to be a common human impulse.
That’s not completely improper, after all. But denial and avoidance are additionally human impulses, usually extra highly effective than our have to know. So these drives — a have to know and a powerful need 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 University and the creator of a brand new guide known as Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know. It’s brief, elegantly written, and possibly the very best praise I can provide is that it reads like a guide that would’ve been written at nearly 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 contemporary insights that really feel related and timeless on the similar time.
So I invited Lilla on The Gray Area to discover why we settle for and resist the reality and what it means to reside constantly in that rigidity. As at all times, there’s far more within the full podcast, so pay attention and comply with The Gray Area 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 guide opens with a sort of parody of Plato’s well-known Allegory of the Cave. In the unique story, there are prisoners who spend their complete life sure by chains in a cave 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 identified. 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 dwelling in a world of shadows and is invited to climb as much as the solar after which lives up there till he’s advised to return again down and get different folks.
In my model of the story, he’s acquired just a little 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 kinds 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 mates and ultimately he’s taken again down. And so I begin the guide saying it’s an open query whether or not popping out into daylight is an efficient factor.
We need to know the reality, we need to see the world as it’s, however we additionally have to be unaware of sure issues and we actually, actually hate to confess our personal ignorance. So we’re continually taking part in this recreation of cover and search with ourselves. This is a weirdly untenable dance for people, don’t you suppose?
It is. People don’t need to really feel that they’re incurious and holding issues at arm’s distance and never fascinated by them. I feel a part of it’s that our opinions aren’t issues that we simply have in a bag that we pull out after they want expression, however fairly 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 kinds of defenses and attraction to bogus authorities so as to stay satisfied of your personal rational capacities and your independence. It turns into a sort of perverse factor the place you’re continually 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 grow to be a part of your worldview.
Is there a superb mannequin of a properly ignorant individual, somebody who climbs the mountain of data and says as soon as they attain the height, You know what? I prefer it higher down there within the cave!
I feel 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 is to acknowledge that you just’re genuinely and usually ignorant about issues and to proceed inquiring with the understanding of what you give you is tentative.
Especially proper now, we reside in a world the place we’re an increasing number of conscious of the uncertainty of our information as a result of issues modified so rapidly. It was very hanging to me throughout Covid simply how pissed off folks appeared to be by the truth that the general public well being authorities stored 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 indignant about that, however that’s the way in which science works.
But folks don’t prefer to reside that manner. They like to listen to from an authority that that is what you do. They need a health care provider who doesn’t hem and haw and doesn’t continually change the meds and say, “Let’s try this, let’s try that.” It’s very destabilizing. And so I feel now we have a craving to reside 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 guide with a citation from George Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda, saying that we thought loads concerning the energy of data, however we haven’t thought concerning 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 actually the case.
But ignorance can be energy if not realizing sure issues or leaving sure issues unexamined allow you to proceed in your life and never be paralyzed. I exploit an instance firstly of the guide: What would occur if we every had an LED display embedded in our foreheads and we might 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 would continually be seeking to see how persons are fascinated by us, and we might by no means develop a secure sense of ourselves.
There are a number of people who find themselves willfully ignorant, and there are many people who find themselves unaware of their ignorance, however then there’s this different species of cynicism you speak about within the guide that knowingly exploits ignorance. What’s the political significance of this?
People want certainty, and they’re going to demand it. And so political leaders, demagogues particularly, can present easy solutions to issues that appear very sophisticated and that stir folks in a manner that may be directed. That’s classically how a demagogue works and the way a demagogue turns into a tyrant.
Especially now, I’m not stunned that we’re dealing with aggressive ignorance amongst populists and people who are moved by populists. Making sense of issues proper now could be very troublesome 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 financial system depends upon a global financial system and that no nation has a full say in how that worldwide financial system operates, and it’ll proceed to have an effect on everybody in each nation?
It’s arduous to just accept the truth that our political leaders don’t management the financial system. And so that you go to whoever says he’s the reply, or whoever says she’s the reply. It could be very arduous, for all of us, to confront the current with an open thoughts and a deep sense of the tentativeness of our understanding of it.
At some level, now we have to ask: What’s the purpose of data? Do we wish information for the sake of data as a result of it’s inherently good, or is information solely useful if it’s helpful? And if realizing one thing isn’t helpful or if realizing one thing is definitely painful, why would we need to understand it?
The query that you just’re asking, for me at the least within the guide, can be a query of various sorts of human characters. There are some folks for whom one thing quickens inside each time the chance of latest information presents itself. Why that occurs, why the soul responds like that, is a thriller, and Socrates tells varied myths about why that may be, however it simply appears to be a reality and never everybody has it.
Do you suppose there’s something price realizing whatever the price?
Self-knowledge might be dangerous if it’s partial. That’s the story of Augustine within the Confessions in the mean time the place he says, “God ripped off the back of me,” which was this different face and all the pieces that everybody else might 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 might be limits to this sort of factor, however Socrates assumes that every one self-knowledge is ultimately going to be useful since you at the moment are clear to your self and that realizing itself makes folks good. Once you realize, the ability of your ignorance is now not holding you hostage.
Do you suppose that’s true? I don’t suppose so.
No, I don’t. And it’s arduous to imagine that Socrates actually thought that. You can see it in the way in which he offers with different folks within the Platonic dialogues, you see that he has lots of information about how folks fall wanting that.
Yeah, I might positively see a case being made for at all times eager to know summary truths and truths concerning the exterior world. But on the subject of self-knowledge, generally if you peer inward, what you discover is that you just’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 is a method wherein 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 reside with it. Just go along with it. You’re a contradiction.
I feel that’s simpler stated than executed, although it’s most likely sensible. But do you suppose there’s a hyperlink, possibly even a mandatory hyperlink, between self-knowledge and information of the exterior world? In different phrases, on some stage, do now we have to know ourselves so as to know the reality concerning 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 keep in mind spending a yr on the Institute for Advanced Study, and I’d generally go and sit on this place the place the scientists and mathematicians had been, and you may inform these folks simply had no self-awareness when it comes to how folks reacted to them. Perhaps they had been simply wrapped up of their issues they usually had been discovering issues.
On the opposite hand, one barrier to us in realizing issues concerning the world is to know what constitutes realizing, and that requires an evaluation of ourselves. And then the third sense, whereas not strictly mandatory, the train of attempting to know oneself is a sort of coaching train for inquiring concerning the world outdoors.
I do need to speak a bit about nostalgia, which you’ve written about earlier than and once more on this new guide. 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?
When it involves complete societies being nostalgic, I feel that it has to do two issues: One is illegibility. When the world turns into illegible, the current turns into illegible. That means you don’t know act, and in case you don’t know act, it’s deeply disturbing since you need to have the ability to management your atmosphere and management issues so you may attain your personal ends.
And so a dissatisfaction with the current and an absence of data about enhance issues are spurs to think about that, simply as being 8 years outdated appeared simpler and simpler than being 68 years outdated, that there was a time when life was ordered in a greater manner wherein we knew much less about varied issues or sure adjustments hadn’t occurred, and possibly we will reverse the machine or reverse the practice.
I do surprise what the upshot of all this considering and writing was for you personally. Have you modified your relationship to your personal ignorance because of this challenge?
I’d hope so. I feel I’ve a greater understanding of what philosophy is and what philosophy can do —
What is it that philosophy can and may’t do?
Philosophy that’s conscious of our ignorance is a step ahead. The best cognitive achievement of human beings is attending to possibly.