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, however it’s price asking why ignorance could be so satisfying. When 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 lots concerning the pursuit of fact, which is assumed to be a common human impulse.
That’s not totally fallacious, 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 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 College and the writer of a brand new e book known as Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting To not Know. It’s quick, 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 contemporary insights that really feel related and timeless on the identical time.
So I invited Lilla on The Grey Space to discover why we settle for and resist the reality and what it means to stay repeatedly in that rigidity. As at all times, there’s far 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 authentic story, there are prisoners who spend their complete life certain by chains in a cave shadows being forged on a wall, and so they 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 advised to come back again down and get different folks.
In my model of the story, he’s bought a bit of pal 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 mates and finally 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 recreation of conceal and search with ourselves. It is a weirdly untenable dance for people, don’t you assume?
It’s. Individuals don’t wish to really feel that they’re incurious and holding issues at arm’s distance and never occupied with them. I feel a part of it’s that our opinions should not issues that we simply have in a bag that we pull out once they want expression, however fairly they really feel like prostheses, like an additional limb, and if somebody refutes our argument or mocks it, it appears 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 enchantment to bogus authorities with the intention to stay satisfied of your individual rational capacities and your independence. It turns into a sort of perverse factor the place you’re always attempting to patch issues collectively to indicate to your self and others you perceive, and within the meantime, you can begin pulling in some preposterous issues that develop into a part of your worldview.
Is there a superb mannequin of a correctly ignorant particular person, somebody who climbs the mountain of data and says as soon as they attain the height, 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 individual ignorance. That’s to acknowledge that you just’re genuinely and customarily ignorant about issues and to proceed inquiring with the understanding of what you provide you with is tentative.
Particularly proper now, we stay in a world the place we’re increasingly conscious of the uncertainty of our information as a result of issues modified so shortly. It was very putting to me throughout Covid simply how annoyed folks appeared to be by the truth that the general public well being authorities stored altering their recommendation. First they mentioned it was all about washing your palms, after which they mentioned it was all about masks and so forth, and so they get indignant about that, however that’s the way in which science works.
However folks don’t prefer to stay that approach. 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 always change the meds and say, “Let’s do that, let’s attempt that.” It’s very destabilizing. And so I feel now we have a craving to stay standing on strong floor, however we don’t stand on strong floor.
Do you assume 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 lots 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 pressure on the market, which is actually the case.
However ignorance can be energy if not understanding sure issues or leaving sure issues unexamined allow you to proceed in your life and never be paralyzed. I take advantage of an instance firstly of the e book: What would occur if we every had an LED display screen 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’ll be able to’t management your ideas, proper? We’d always be seeking to see how persons are occupied with us, and we might by no means develop a secure 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?
Individuals want certainty, and they’re going to demand it. And so political leaders, demagogues particularly, can present easy solutions to issues that appear very difficult and that stir folks 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 people who are moved by populists. Making sense of issues proper now could be very tough as a result of we simply don’t know numerous 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 is determined by 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 extremely 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.
Sooner or later, now we have to ask: What’s the purpose of data? Do we would like information for the sake of data as a result of it’s inherently good, or is information solely helpful if it’s helpful? And if understanding one thing isn’t helpful or if understanding one thing is definitely painful, why would we wish to realize it?
The query that you just’re asking, for me a minimum of within the e book, can be a query of various sorts of human characters. There are some folks for whom one thing quickens inside at any time when the chance of recent information presents itself. Why that occurs, why the soul responds like that, is a thriller, and Socrates tells numerous myths about why that could be, however it simply appears to be a truth and never everybody has it.
Do you assume there’s something price understanding whatever the price?
Self-knowledge could 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 again of me,” which was this different face and every thing 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 may very well be limits to this type 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 understanding itself makes folks good. As soon as you realize, the ability of your ignorance is now not holding you hostage.
Do you assume that’s true? I don’t assume so.
No, I don’t. And it’s onerous to consider that Socrates actually thought that. You’ll be able to see it in the way in which he offers with different folks within the Platonic dialogues, you see that he has a variety of information about how folks fall in need of that.
Yeah, I might undoubtedly see a case being made for at all times eager to know summary truths and truths concerning the exterior world. However in relation to self-knowledge, generally whenever you peer inward, what you discover is that you just’re only a bundle of contradictions that may’t be squared, and I’m unsure it’s essentially good to be intimately acquainted with that and to get hung up on that.
There may be a method during 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 mentioned, and his recommendation is to stay with it. Simply go along with it. You’re a contradiction.
I feel that’s simpler mentioned than executed, although it’s most likely smart. However do you assume there’s a hyperlink, perhaps even a obligatory hyperlink, between self-knowledge and information of the exterior world? In different phrases, on some stage, do now we have to know ourselves with the intention to know the reality concerning the world exterior ourselves?
I can consider a pair solutions to that. I’m unsure which one can be mine. One is that these items are removable. I bear in mind spending a yr on the Institute for Superior Examine, and I’d generally go and sit on this place the place the scientists and mathematicians have been, and you could possibly inform these folks simply had no self-awareness when it comes to how folks reacted to them. Maybe they have been simply wrapped up of their issues and so they have been discovering issues.
However, one barrier to us in understanding issues concerning the world is to know what constitutes understanding, and that requires an evaluation of ourselves. After which the third sense, whereas not strictly obligatory, the train of attempting to know oneself is a sort of coaching train for inquiring concerning the world exterior.
I do wish to speak 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?
In the case of 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. Meaning you don’t know methods to act, and for those who don’t know methods to act, it’s deeply disturbing since you need to have the ability to management your atmosphere and management issues so you’ll be able to attain your individual ends.
And so a dissatisfaction with the current and an absence of data about methods to enhance issues are spurs to think about that, simply as being 8 years previous appeared easier and simpler than being 68 years previous, that there was a time when life was ordered in a greater approach during which we knew much less about numerous issues or sure adjustments hadn’t occurred, and perhaps we will reverse the machine or reverse the practice.
I do marvel what the upshot of all this pondering and writing was for you personally. Have you ever modified your relationship to your individual ignorance on account of this mission?
I’d hope so. I feel 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.
