Who hasn’t heard the phrase “ignorance is bliss” a thousand times?
Like all cliches, it sticks because it’s rooted in truth, but it’s worth asking why ignorance can be so satisfying. If you read the history of philosophy, you don’t find all that much interest in the delights of ignorance. Instead, you hear a lot about the pursuit of truth, which is assumed to be a universal human impulse.
That’s not entirely wrong, of course. But denial and avoidance are also human impulses, often more powerful than our need to know. So these drives — a need to know and a strong desire never to never find out — are often warring within us, shaping our worldview, our relationships, and our self-image.
Mark Lilla is a professor of the humanities at Columbia University and the author of a new book called Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know. It’s short, elegantly written, and maybe the highest compliment I can give is that it reads like a book that could’ve been written at almost any point in modern history. It engages one of the oldest questions in philosophy — to know or not to know? — and manages to offer fresh insights that feel relevant and timeless at the same time.
So I invited Lilla on The Gray Area to explore why we accept and resist the truth and what it means to live continuously in that tension. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The book opens with a kind of parody of Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave. In the original story, there are prisoners who spend their whole life bound by chains in a cave looking at shadows being cast on a wall, and they mistake those shadows for reality because it’s the only reality they’ve ever known. What’s your spin on it?
In Plato’s edition, a stranger comes in and turns one of the prisoners around so that he realizes that he’s been living in a world of shadows and is invited to climb up to the sun and then lives up there until he’s told to come back down and get other people.
In my version of the story, he’s got a little friend with him, a young boy who also goes up. When it comes time to go back down, the man tells him he can stay up staring at the forms and being in the pure sunlight and seeing what is, and it turns out he’s desperate to return. It’s a cold life. All of his fantasy and imagination have dried up. He misses his virtual friends and eventually he’s taken back down. And so I start the book saying it’s an open question whether coming out into sunlight is a good thing.
We want to know the truth, we want to see the world as it is, but we also need to be ignorant of certain things and we really, really hate to admit our own ignorance. So we’re constantly playing this game of hide and seek with ourselves. This is a weirdly untenable dance for humans, don’t you think?
It is. People don’t want to feel that they’re incurious and holding things at arm’s distance and not thinking about them. I think part of it is that our opinions are not things that we just have in a bag that we pull out when they need expression, but rather they feel like prostheses, like an extra limb, and if someone refutes our argument or mocks it, it feels like something quite intimate has been touched.
And so that is an incentive to not admit your ignorance and to build up all sorts of defenses and appeal to bogus authorities in order to remain convinced of your own rational capacities and your independence. It becomes a kind of perverse thing where you’re constantly trying to patch things together to show to yourself and others you understand, and in the meantime, you can start pulling in some preposterous things that become part of your worldview.
Is there a good model of a wisely ignorant person, someone who climbs the mountain of knowledge and says once they reach the peak, You know what? I like it better down there in the cave!
I think you’re leaving out an option, and that option is something that Socrates explores in the other Platonic dialogues, which is learning from your own ignorance. That is to recognize that you’re genuinely and generally ignorant about things and to continue inquiring with the understanding of what you come up with is tentative.
Especially right now, we live in a world where we’re more and more aware of the uncertainty of our knowledge because things changed so quickly. It was very striking to me during Covid just how frustrated people seemed to be by the fact that the public health authorities kept changing their advice. First they said it was all about washing your hands, and then they said it was all about masks and so on, and they get angry about that, but that’s the way science works.
But people don’t like to live that way. They like to hear from an authority that this is what you do. They want a doctor who doesn’t hem and haw and doesn’t constantly change the meds and say, “Let’s try this, let’s try that.” It’s very destabilizing. And so I think we have a yearning to live standing on solid ground, but we don’t stand on solid ground.
Do you think that ignorance also has a power that we overlook?
Yeah. I began the book with a quotation from George Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda, saying that we thought a lot about the power of knowledge, but we haven’t thought about the power of ignorance. And what she means is the power of people who are ignorant to mess things up in life, that it’s a kind of social force out there, which is certainly the case.
But ignorance is also power if not knowing certain things or leaving certain things unexamined permit you to continue in your life and not be paralyzed. I use an example at the beginning of the book: What would happen if we each had an LED screen embedded in our foreheads and we could read the thoughts of everyone around us?
Social life would grind to a halt because you can’t control your thoughts, right? We would constantly be looking to see how people are thinking about us, and we could never develop a stable sense of ourselves.
There are lots of people who are willfully ignorant, and there are lots of people who are ignorant of their ignorance, but then there’s this other species of cynicism you talk about in the book that knowingly exploits ignorance. What’s the political significance of this?
People need certainty, and they will demand it. And so political leaders, demagogues in particular, can provide simple answers to things that seem very complicated and that stir people in a way that can be directed. That’s classically how a demagogue works and how a demagogue becomes a tyrant.
Especially now, I’m not surprised that we’re facing aggressive ignorance among populists and those who are moved by populists. Making sense of things right now is very difficult because we just don’t know various things because our experience is so new. For example, what do you do about the fact that the state of any nation’s economy depends on an international economy and that no country has a full say in how that international economy operates, and it will continue to affect everyone in every country?
It’s hard to accept the fact that our political leaders do not control the economy. And so you go to whoever says he’s the answer, or whoever says she’s the answer. It is very hard, for all of us, to confront the present with an open mind and a deep sense of the tentativeness of our understanding of it.
At some point, we have to ask: What’s the point of knowledge? Do we want knowledge for the sake of knowledge because it’s inherently good, or is knowledge only valuable if it’s useful? And if knowing something isn’t useful or if knowing something is actually painful, why would we want to know it?
The question that you’re asking, for me at least in the book, is really a question of different kinds of human characters. There are some people for whom something quickens within whenever the opportunity of new knowledge presents itself. Why that happens, why the soul responds like that, is a mystery, and Socrates tells various myths about why that might be, but it just seems to be a fact and not everyone has it.
Do you think there’s anything worth knowing regardless of the cost?
Self-knowledge can be harmful if it’s partial. That’s the story of Augustine in the Confessions at the moment where he says, “God ripped off the back of me,” which was this other face and everything that everyone else could see, but I couldn’t and then God holds it in front of me, and I see myself, and in that moment I’m so horrified that something clicks and I give myself over.
So there could be limits to this kind of thing, but Socrates assumes that all self-knowledge is in the end going to be helpful because you are now clear to yourself and that knowing itself makes people good. Once you know, the power of your ignorance is no longer holding you hostage.
Do you think that’s true? I don’t think so.
No, I don’t. And it’s hard to believe that Socrates really thought that. You can see it in the way he deals with other people in the Platonic dialogues, you see that he has a lot of knowledge about how people fall short of that.
Yeah, I could definitely see a case being made for always wanting to know abstract truths and truths about the external world. But when it comes to self-knowledge, sometimes when you peer inward, what you find is that you’re just a bundle of contradictions that can’t be squared, and I’m not sure it’s necessarily good to be intimately acquainted with that and to get hung up on that.
There is one way in which it is, and that’s the Montaigne option. The picture Montaigne gives of us in the essays is that we’re exactly what you just said, and his advice is to live with it. Just go with it. You’re a contradiction.
I think that’s easier said than done, though it’s probably wise. But do you think there’s a link, maybe even a necessary link, between self-knowledge and knowledge of the external world? In other words, on some level, do we have to know ourselves in order to know the truth about the world outside ourselves?
I can think of a couple answers to that. I’m not sure which one would be mine. One is that these things are detachable. I remember spending a year at the Institute for Advanced Study, and I would sometimes go and sit in this place where the scientists and mathematicians were, and you could tell these people just had no self-awareness in terms of how people reacted to them. Perhaps they were just wrapped up in their problems and they were discovering things.
On the other hand, one barrier to us in knowing things about the world is to know what constitutes knowing, and that requires an analysis of ourselves. And then the third sense, while not strictly necessary, the exercise of trying to know oneself is a kind of training exercise for inquiring about the world outside.
I do want to talk a bit about nostalgia, which you’ve written about before and again in this new book. At what point in our journey of knowledge, as individuals and societies, are we overtaken by nostalgia? At what point are we just longing to go back to a previous time when we didn’t know what we now know?
When it comes to whole societies being nostalgic, I think that it has to do two things: One is illegibility. When the world becomes illegible, the present becomes illegible. That means you don’t know how to act, and if you don’t know how to act, it’s deeply disturbing because you want to be able to control your environment and control things so you can reach your own ends.
And so a dissatisfaction with the present and an absence of knowledge about how to improve things are spurs to imagine that, just as being 8 years old seemed less complicated and easier than being 68 years old, that there was a time when life was ordered in a better way in which we knew less about various things or certain changes hadn’t happened, and maybe we can reverse the machine or reverse the train.
I do wonder what the upshot of all this thinking and writing was for you personally. Have you changed your relationship to your own ignorance as a result of this project?
I would hope so. I think I have a better understanding of what philosophy is and what philosophy can do —
What is it that philosophy can and can’t do?
Philosophy that is aware of our ignorance is a step forward. The greatest cognitive achievement of human beings is getting to maybe.
