The drive to pursue wisdom is engrained in every human being, right? So many have believed. But in his new book, Ignorance and Bliss, Mark Lilla argues that a certain “will to ignorance” is also part of the human experience. Like Plato’s Thrasymachus, many in the modern world want to throw up their hands in resignation rather than commit themselves to the pursuit of truth. Lilla offers an explanation for this phenomenon, drawing on philosophy, religion, psychology, and history. He joins James Patterson to discuss the book.

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Ignorance and Bliss by Mark Lilla

Transcript

James M. Patterson:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Our guest today is Professor Mark Lilla. He’s professor of humanities at Columbia University. Today, we’ll be talking about his book, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know. Many of our listeners may be familiar with other works by Professor Lilla, including The Stillborn God and The Reactionary Mind. He has been prolific and influential in many of his works, and I don’t doubt that today, our discussion will show that his most recent work deserves as much attention as his previous. So Professor Lilla, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Mark Lilla:

Very good to be here. Thank you.

James M. Patterson:

So, Professor Lilla, the book has a very provocative subtitle, “On Wanting Not to Know.” What is it about knowledge that poses a threat to human beings and why is it that sometimes we misunderstand that, especially those of us who are in what we might call the knowledge business?

Mark Lilla:

Yeah, well, as I try to suggest in the book that the struggle between wanting to know, curiosity, and wanting not to know, which is a resistance to knowledge, that those two forces are present in our minds all the time. And we go through life on the one hand, pushing on the accelerator, on the other pushing on the brake. And there are some good reasons for that that seem to be embedded just in the nature of human life and social life.

But there are also ways in which it becomes pathological and it becomes pathological if we are resisting knowledge that’s important to know to make public decisions, for example. And it also can be threatening if it leads us to entertain various fantasies of finding an alternative to reason and also the fantasy of going back to an older utopia or a forward utopia rather than to confront the present. So it begins with us and it begins with our struggle over recognizing what we ourselves as individuals are.

James M. Patterson:

On page 14 of the book, you have a great typology of these sorts of figures. You say that one such illusion is a secret, esoteric way of being in the world that gives access to previous truths. Another is the vain hope of preserving our original innocence. And a third is the scape of the historical present to an imagined past bucolic simplicity. So let’s start with this secret, esoteric way of being. In what sense is this ignorance? Isn’t it supposed to be that there’s some sort of exclusive knowledge?

Mark Lilla:

Yeah, no, that’s the right question. And I see it as, in fact, a way of avoiding the hard work of sorting through our experience and coming to our own conclusions and also being skeptical of our own hypotheses and testing them. And so the mystical idea, and it takes on many forms, but the mystical idea is that reason is the problem and that the knowledge you think you have up to now is all error.

And the reason is you, as a simple human with weak reason, are incapable of understanding fundamental things about human existence, about the cosmos, about ethics, or anything. And therefore you have to go through a process of emptying yourself of the false opinions that you have, shutting off the reason machine and then opening yourself to a revelation which can only enter if everything else is off. It’s like a hydraulic system. You can’t have both.

And so on the one hand, the draw of the mystical experience is that it will give you truth once and for all, but truth-seeking is not a … You can’t retire from it. That to seek knowledge is also to test it and to keep trying to see if what you think is the case actually matches your experience and evidence and so on, whether it makes any logical sense. And so it’s a way of declaring victory and walking home. And that is not the way that you live a life in the light of truth, which requires a skeptical pursuit of it.

James M. Patterson:

One of the passages in the book that really got to me was this discussion. Now, make sure I get this right. Is it misologues? Is that how you wanted to?

Mark Lilla:

Mm-hmm.

James M. Patterson:

Yeah, whose sort of expression you give to Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic, saying about him, Thrasymachus has snapped in his conversation with Socrates and the Republic, and he says that like many people, misologues are like many people in Thrasymachus, they like telling their own conversion stories. I once was naive about the world, but after X, the last election, the recent war, the endless scandals, the world’s indifference [to] fake news, I got wise. What’s so bad about this in terms of doing philosophy, these misologues, what do they do that’s so harmful?

Mark Lilla:

Well, the term misologues was actually coined by Plato in these dialogues to describe a certain sort of person. He makes a likeness with misanthropy and he says that the reason we become misanthropic is that we have various bad experiences with people and we put our hopes in them and they’re disappointed. And at a certain point we crack and we give up on the human race. And he said the same thing can happen with the exercise of reason. That if we try to understand something in the world and think that we do, only to discover that it’s false or some argument someone convinced us of also turns out to be false, we begin to think or we might start to begin to think that the enterprise itself is pointless, that all of this arguing and reason-giving and examination of evidence really is just undergone or it takes place because people want to occlude what is actually happening in the world.

And so this character Thrasymachus is hearing arguments about justice and whether justice is worth choosing for its own sake. And Thrasymachus throws up his hands and he says, “This is a ridiculous conversation. We all know that justice is the advantage of the stronger.” And so then they go and have an argument about that and then Thrasymachus sort of pouts and shuts up until later on in the book.

And so it’s when we lose faith in our quest for knowledge that we become susceptible to just any sorts of falsehoods and simply standing our ground, shutting the doors and windows of our little cabin, putting a barking dog outside the door so no new information can come in. And what connects these two things in Socrates’ view is what we lack is an art of judging the things that we’re engaged in. So for example, the reason we did get disappointed with people is not that people are somehow presenting themselves differently from the way they are, but rather that we lack the art of choosing and seeing which people are worth putting our trust in, even our love in, and won’t be disappointed. So there’s an art of an investing our emotions.

Similarly, when it comes to arguments, people who engage in a little philosophy and throw up their hands and say it’s just a crock, don’t have the art of shaping arguments and understanding what they can and can’t do. And for Socrates, the most we can do is set out a hypothesis, put our chips on that to keep questioning it, keep looking for evidence that disconfirms it. And when we discover that it’s wrong and that there’s a superior argument or way of looking at the world, we should rejoice. But something in us doesn’t want to rejoice. We get attached to our arguments. And so it was very difficult to follow through in practice that philosophical art in the way that Socrates described it.

James M. Patterson:

That’s very true. When it comes to our attachments, there’s a sort of honor that comes with defending the position even to your own sort of intellectual death. There is also this great discussion here of veil snatching. I’m not sure how much this relates to the idea of a misologue, that’d be actually an interesting thing for you to talk about, but veil snatching is this story about being bound up in a desire to rip the veil off the statue of Isis in order to learn the truth. What happens when you rip that veil off?

Mark Lilla:

Well, the story is quite extraordinary, and it was fictionalized in a poem by Friedrich Schiller, the German poet, eighteenth century poet, and he imagines that a young man from Europe goes to Africa to Egypt and he wants to go to Sais, which is where apparently there’s a statue of the goddess Isis, who’s the holder of wisdom, but there’s a veil over her eyes because to see the truth, the whole truth, it had nothing but the truth all at once would be paralyzing and we’re not prepared for it.

And therefore you have to go through, in the cult of Isis, you had to go through all sorts of training and learning di