“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” to quote T.S. Eliot, nor can it bear much truth. Just as our sensory organs filter out all but a fraction of what surrounds us, our minds deflect from consciousness a great deal of what we can bear only in small measures. Our ability to ignore, repress, and deny is matched only by our ability to believe the unbelievable and to give chimeric notions the power to found religions, nations, and institutions. The mind’s extravagant imagination—its freedom to wander far beyond the bounds of the real—lies at the root of the “poetic wisdom” that gave rise to the earliest human thinking and social organizations, according to Giambattista Vico, who in his New Science declared, “Ignorance, the mother of wonder, made everything wonderful to men who were ignorant of everything.”
For most of its history and prehistory, the human race has lived in various states of ignorance and wonder. Even today most of us will accept the disenchantments of knowledge only with great reluctance. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil:
From the beginning we have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom…. And only on this now solid, granite foundation of ignorance could knowledge rise so far—the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will: the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue!
The will to knowledge, which drove the rise of modern science, ushered in the world we live in today. It has brought us many blessings—far more than we tend to be grateful for—as has the principle of reason, which has freed us from many gross superstitions and age-old bondages. Yet knowledge and truth will always remain precarious ideals, for they dispel illusions that in the past made life meaningful—hence bearable. We pursue truth at the risk of our own happiness.
In the twenty-first century we know too much about the relativity of even the most absolute values, too much about the sheer indifference of the universe, and too much about the contingent, altogether improbable origins of life on Earth to will into being illusions that would shield us from what our will to truth has already revealed. Knowledge in our day and age can at most be willfully ignored.
The crucial difference between genuine ignorance and the will to ignorance is that the latter has none of the wonder that made “everything wonderful to men who were ignorant of everything.” In Ignorance and Bliss, the intellectual historian Mark Lilla sets out to investigate the will to ignorance that he believes has become virulent in our time:
The denial of evident truths seems to be gaining the upper hand, as if some psychological bacillus were spreading by unknown means, the antidote suddenly powerless. Mesmerized crowds follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise.
Lilla is less interested in discussing the different forms that resistance to truth takes than in probing its underlying psychology and cultural history. His book offers a diagnosis rather than a prognosis, claiming that resistance to truth has two main sources: ourselves and the external world that regularly thwarts our desires and ambitions. The two implicate each other: “Evasion of the self inside our heads is really a training exercise for evading the world outside our heads.” Lilla relies mostly on Freud and Saint Augustine for his diagnosis, yet the most incisive passage he quotes comes from Blaise Pascal, the author of the dictum Le moi est haïssable—“The self is hateful”:
The self wants to be great, and sees itself small; it wants to be happy, and sees itself wretched; it wants to be perfect, and sees itself full of imperfections; it wants to be the object of men’s love and esteem, and it sees that its defects deserve only their dislike and contempt. This embarrassment in which it finds itself produces in it the most unrighteous and criminal passion imaginable, for it conceives a mortal hatred against this truth, admonishing it and convincing it of its faults. It wants to annihilate this truth, but, unable to destroy it in its essence, it destroys it as far as possible in its own knowledge and in that of others.
This mortal hatred of truth, born of the ways the self falls short of its ego ideal, can easily extend to the external world, which provides the standards by which the self measures its own inadequacies. “The world is a recalcitrant place,” writes Lilla, “and there are things about it we would prefer not to have to recognize.” Yet how exactly do we go about avoiding such recognition when the world’s harsh realities and indifference to the self’s desires bear down on us all too unavoidably? Lilla does not tackle this psychological conundrum directly, nor does he offer a theory of self-deception. He suggests instead that “we all, like Oedipus, use tricks of self-deception to keep ourselves from acknowledging truths about ourselves,” and turns to Augustine’s conversion story in the Confessions to illustrate his claims.
Lilla sees Augustine as an Oedipus figure trapped inside “the walls of the unknowing self” prior to his conversion. The word “unknowing” is used loosely here, for prior to his conversion Augustine was all too aware of what was preventing him from giving himself over to God, namely his lust. For Augustine, the problem was one of will, not knowledge. He declared, “I did not wish to observe myself,” precisely because he knew what he would see: a self that sexual lust had rendered “twisted and filthy, covered in sores and ulcers.” To use dubious Freudian terms: Augustine’s avoidance of the truth was conscious, while Oedipus’s was unconscious.
In the end, it was God who played the role of Tiresias for Augustine: “You took me up from behind my own back where I had placed myself…and you set me before my face so that I should see how vile I was.” Lilla comments:
It takes a divine force to reveal him to himself…. Know thyself. That is all. No thunderclaps. No falling from horses. No rebirth. No vision of the Kingdom to come. His was a thoroughly human epiphany.
This is a baffling commentary, first because it flies in the face of the drama—some would say melodrama—of Augustine’s Confessions, above all its conversion chapter, and second because it makes of Augustine’s conversion a wholly human affair, whereas both Augustine and Lilla himself stress that God, or divine intervention, brought it about.
Lilla finds a great deal in common between Augustine’s narrative of self-evasion prior to his conversion and Freud’s work on neurosis. He goes so far as to say that “both saw us inhabiting a world where God seems absent, where we and everyone else are driven by unruly desires that churn our souls and set us at cross-purposes.” Here, too, one is puzzled by the claim that Augustine, like Freud, inhabited a world from which God was absent. The all-consuming obsession of Augustine’s Confessions is the self’s relation to God, while for Freud therapy is mostly about the self’s relation to others, either within the world or within the individual psyche. Lilla points out that Freud believed many of our defense mechanisms are triggered by the fact that we share the world with others. If I want to live in society, I must internalize the taboos it imposes on its members to keep them from cannibalizing one another. I repress my antisocial desires so they don’t clash with those of others. In Lilla’s words:
I begin to side with my jailers and adopt their point of view…[and] unless I maintain the illusion that I have chosen [the taboos], I will be paralyzed by frustration and unable to function in society.
Augustine’s preaching, by contrast, was far less concerned with how to function in society than with finding one’s way to the “city of God.”
Lilla makes a persuasive claim about the objective of Freudian therapy: to get the self to accept its “not-at-oneness” with itself. This not-at-oneness “is the source of our pain, but it also protects us from ourselves, allows us to navigate a world we share with others, and is even the source of our achievements.” Freud understood that “just to get through the day and think about tomorrow,” we must recognize some things and ignore others. Lilla’s Freud is a hero of forbearance and socialization who had a bleak view of reality (a lucid view, Lilla would say). The aim of psychoanalysis is to turn pathological misery into ordinary unhappiness. Getting through the day is good enough.
Along with Augustine and Freud, Plato and Socrates also loom large in Ignorance and Bliss. For Lilla, Socrates became one of the greatest truth tellers in history by making “inquiry into the world dependent on inquiry into the self.” In the Athenians’ animus against him, Lilla sees a deliberate will to ignorance rather than resentment of the one-upsmanship of the gadfly’s maieutic method. He finds nothing spurious about Socrates’ verbal manipulations, his bullying tactics, or his treatment of abstract nouns as substantive realities. Humiliating his interlocutors in public places was Socrates’ way of offering his fellow citizens a path to a better life. “Athens, c’est nous,” Lilla writes.
At some point we all decline the invitation Socrates makes to us to learn what really is the case…. Socrates says he doesn’t understand why anyone would get angry at someone who wants to help him. He’s right, it makes no sense. But every child wants to zip his own coat.
Lilla devotes the better part of his book to discussing what he considers three of the main “fantasies” promoted by the will to ignorance in our time: the positing of alternate realities reachable through esoteric forms of wisdom that transcend reason—in other words various types of spiritual mysticism; “the vain hope of preserving our original innocence, or achieving a second one, free from tragic knowledge of human limits, mortality, and evil”; and nostalgia, or the idea that there was once a bucolic, glorious, or prelapsarian state—when America was still great, for example, or when humans were hunter-gatherers, or when reason had not yet vitiated our spontaneity—which we have strayed from and can find our way back to. Lilla offers insightful discussions of these and other fantasies that circulate freely in our increasingly truth-averse world. He has little sympathy for any of them, championing instead a disenchanted yet honest view of reality.
Lilla claims that hardly any philosophers have devoted attention to the will to ignorance: “The more I read and thought about the psychology of knowledge-seeking and knowledge-resisting, the more alone I felt.” I can suggest a few thinkers to make him feel less alone. Giacomo Leopardi, for example, who in the early nineteenth century developed a full-fledged theory of the human need for illusion and whose corpus is full of sentences like those uttered by Tristan in the last of his Moral Essays: “The human race always believes, not the truth, but what is, or seems to be, suited to its purpose”; “I trample upon the cowardice of mankind, reject every childish consolation and deception…[and] accept all the consequences of a philosophy that is grievous, but true”; and finally, “The human race, which has believed and will go on believing so many idiocies, will never believe either that it knows nothing, or that it is nothing, or that it has nothing to hope for.”
For some reason Lilla ignores Jean-Paul Sartre in Ignorance and Bliss. This is bizarre, given that Sartre tackled the problem of self-deception more decisively than any other philosopher. Without any recourse to a theory of the unconscious, Sartre’s brilliant pages on mauvaise foi in Being and Nothingness tease out the covert mechanisms by which the self wills not to acknowledge what it in fact knows. (Several analytic philosophers—Donald Davidson, Alfred Mele, David Pears, and Dion Scott-Kakures, among others—have since taken up the logical problem of how a conscious self can both deceive itself and believe its own lies.)
I would also mention here Sartre’s contemporary Simone Weil. If there is one thing we willfully ignore, according to Weil, it is the reality of malheur—human affliction. “There is a class of people in this world who have fallen into the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary,” she wrote to her parents after seeing King Lear just over two weeks before she died. With Poor Tom and the Fool in mind, she declared, “These [fools] are the only people who, in fact, are able to tell the truth [in the play]. All the others lie.” She adds that
what makes the tragedy extreme is the fact that…because no one is aware that their sayings deserve the slightest attention—everybody being convinced a priori of the contrary, since they are fools—their expression of the truth is not even listened to.
Shakespeare’s fools are at least loquacious, whereas offstage the soul-destroying power of malheur reduces the afflicted to stammers and silence. Not only can most of us not bear either the sight or the reality of affliction, but “the afflicted themselves feel the same shock of horror at their own condition.” We willfully turn away from affliction not because we are callous or cowardly but because it reveals the degree to which humanity, when stripped down to its essence, is “a poor, bare, forked animal,” to recall Lear’s words. We “shiver and recoil” from it also because we recognize, somewhere deep within ourselves, that there but by the grace of God go I. “To put oneself in the place of someone whose soul is corroded by affliction, or in near danger of it, is to annihilate oneself,” Weil writes. She thought that when it comes to the truth of affliction, we exercise our will to ignorance on a daily basis.
Lilla devotes several pages of his book to the question of children and the way our culture swings between the extremes of considering them innocent on one hand and evil by original sin on the other. He subscribes to neither view and is more interested in the ways adults today conspire to remain childlike in their behavior and mentality. As he puts it, we are intent on “keeping everyone in the perpetual limbo of adolescence, rushing children into a state they are unprepared for, and allowing adults to remain there as long as they would like.”
We need a new term for this arrestation or retardation of development. Genuine adolescence is a stage of life that intensifies growth, transformation, introspection, and thoughtfulness. The greatest threat posed by the blockage of that maturation process is an unwillingness to think for oneself, or even to think at all. There is more to this unwillingness than willful ignorance. I would call it the will to defer or abstain—to defer to the thinking of others or abstain from thinking altogether. In short, a will to immaturity.
Immanuel Kant, whom Lilla mentions only in passing, gave the most discerning account of this will to immaturity in his short but influential essay “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (1784), which opens with the memorable sentence “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” Kant defines immaturity as the inability to think for oneself without the guidance of another. It is self-incurred when the cause is a lack not of rational capacity but of resolution and courage to exercise one’s own reason. Thus Kant’s motto for the Enlightenment is Sapere aude!—“Dare to know!”—by which he meant, “Have the courage to use your own understanding.”
Such courage is becoming increasingly scarce in our world, as more and more people have simply decided to let others think for them. Our willingness to outsource our thinking—whether to AI, Internet influencers, therapists, commentators, or would-be prophets—fosters the sort of thoughtlessness that Hannah Arendt believed undermined the public sphere and the world we share with others. The world that came into being with the will to truth is one that seems to be unraveling before our eyes as the authority of facts and the collective value of truth lose their binding power on society.
Although it mostly steers clear of commenting directly on the many contemporary manifestations of our will to immaturity, Ignorance and Bliss represents a renewed call for Sapere aude! That is probably why Lilla refuses to tell his reader what to think or what to do or how to live. By leaving open rather than foreclosing the many questions it raises, his thought-provoking book is true to its own message.
Each of the seventeen chapters in Emily Ogden’s short but remarkable book On Not Knowing has “how to” in its title: “How to Catch a Minnow,” “How to Give Birth,” “How to Step Over a Snake,” “How to Listen,” “How to Come Back to Life,” and so forth. There’s an important difference between knowing and knowing how. No matter how much we may think for ourselves, or exercise reason in the public sphere, or devote our lives to the pursuit of truth, we are often at a loss when it comes to coping with life’s unpredictable contingencies and challenges. Arendt spoke of the need to “think without a banister” when the world renders traditional norms and guidelines for thinking insufficient or useless. Living without a banister is the everyday experience Ogden recounts in the string of vignettes that make up her book.
It’s hard to say whether Ogden’s chapter titles should be read as extensions of the book’s title, hence “On not knowing how to catch a minnow,” “On not knowing how to love,” etc. This ambiguity pertains to her uncertainty principle, so to speak. For Ogden, life comes at us fast and furious, and we have no choice but to face its provocations without knowing how to, without adequate knowledge of what exactly we are supposed to do when events oblige us to act and react: “A person can want a clear view and not get it; a person can believe decisive action is required and yet not know how to begin.” There is no school for learning how to live, how to be a mother, how to die. There is only the school of predicament—of having to act with the awareness that the sum of human actions has brought our earth to the brink of disaster. “My school has destroyed a planet,” declares Ogden, referring to the modern world in general.
Unknowing is on every side of the predicament. Unknowing is there in the terminal flight into frozen innocence with which some of us try to protect ourselves from knowledge of our culpability. Unknowing is there, too, in the uncertainty one may feel when confronted with the problem of how to repair the damage.
Maybe it was because she didn’t quite know how to write On Not Knowing that this sui generis book combines autobiography, science, psychology, animal husbandry, and lusty literary vagrancies. The narrative strays a great deal, more than it should perhaps. Ogden is a professor of nineteenth-century American letters, which might explain why there is a considerable quotient of Melville in the spirit of her style, if not her style as such. One gets the impression that she takes Thoreau to heart when he declares, “I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience.” With a voice that frolics rather than drones, she injects a welcome erotic charge into academic writing.
Ogden has learned from literature not only how to inspirit her prose but also how to deal with uncertainty as an interminable existential condition. Literature is the ultimate school of uncertainty. It teaches awareness rather than knowledge:
When I talk about unknowing, I am not talking about the refusal to know what can be known…. I am talking about a capacity to hold the position of not knowing yet—possibly of not knowing ever. I’m talking about living with the dimness that I will mostly inhabit.
Anyone who reads a book thoughtfully experiences this kind of dimness, for the end of a literary work lies beyond its last page. “If there is a kind of unknowing that could serve now,” Ogden writes, “it is not the defensiveness of willful ignorance but the defenselessness of not knowing yet.” Not knowing yet keeps open the horizon of possibility, for the moment we know for sure, something has been foreclosed.
In a suggestive reflection on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Ogden remarks that “all over mythology we find people who have been told when they will die or what will kill them. It is supposed to be a curse. But this curse is also a wish.” Here she brings in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse,” who hides somewhere in us all and counters our “desire to be well” with destructive impulses. The impish desire to put an end to one’s life, for example, so as to put an end to not knowing when or how it will take place, is more common than we care to acknowledge. The narrator of Poe’s story ends up confessing to a crime he has gotten away with. Why? Because of a desire to know that he will hang on the morrow. “The crime is beside the point,” Ogden writes. “The point is to end the uncertainty of his days. He cannot find the capacity to live a life to which no definite term has been set.” In other words, not knowing yet is the condition of being alive, or as Ogden puts it, “Certainty also makes…life something less than a life.”
All of us know we’re going to die, though we usually don’t know when or how. Some people seek to evade that knowledge, others are willing to face up to it, yet even if we spend our lives studying philosophy in order “to learn to die,” as Montaigne put it, none of us knows how to die before death obliges us to find our way into it. Until then, if we believe Mark Lilla and Emily Ogden, we are best served by acknowledging what we do know with honesty and courage, and by cultivating the defenselessness of not yet knowing how the story ends.
English (US) · 