Ignorance and Bliss

October 7, 2024
Historian Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal) provides a freewheeling exploration of the human “will to ignorance,” a term coined by Friedrich Nietzsche to describe an attitude of “deliberate exclusion, a shutting of one’s windows... a satisfaction with the dark.” Analyzing ignorance in literary, religious, and psychological contexts, Lilla outlines Freudian notions of self-delusion as a tool to sublimate the “unruly desires that churn our souls”; religious and cultural taboos against the pursuit of knowledge; and the concept, reinforced by the Protestant reformation, Saint Paul, and some ancient theologians, of the pure, “empty” human soul as the ideal vessel in which creativity, genius, or holy inspiration occurs. Lilla’s conversational foray through a broad array of religious, philosophical, and historical examples produces many surprising, thought-provoking insights. For example, he notes that some Christian teachings frame children, whose innocence is a kind of ignorance, as “symbols that can orient us” in an immoral world, but they become symbolic “of the bad seed planted in our souls” if they fail to follow certain scripts. In other places, he stretches the point a bit thin (one chapter frames nostalgia as a kind of ignorance of the present, which Lilla then somewhat awkwardly links to fascism). Still, this will provide the intellectually curious with more than enough to chew on.

November 15, 2024
Essays on the ill-advised retreat from "evident truths" and the false comforts of certainty. In this "intellectual travelogue," Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia University and author ofThe Once and Future Liberal, muses on the unavoidable conflicts that arise between the will to knowledge and the will to ignorance. Ignorance, he asserts, is not a human flaw but essential to our "not-at-oneness" and to self-awareness in a world saturated with contradictory ideas and disturbing experiences. To react by embracing an unquestionable truth is to abandon the moral obligations we have to ourselves and others. This is a book about more than knowledge and ignorance, though. It is also about truth and delusion, certainty and uncertainty, authority and freedom, and dependence and autonomy. Today, when the turn "against reason" and "the resistance to knowledge" are particularly strong, navigating these tensions is even more necessary. Lilla draws his examples from classical myths, religious texts, and novels, as well as from Socrates, Plato, and Freud, and he groups his thoughts under the headings of evasions, taboos, emptiness, innocence, and nostalgia. He refers to nostalgia, for example, to point out how our aversion to knowledge is historical and social, as when national traditions distort history and function as strategic forms of ignorance, leading him to suggest that "innocence is central to the American political mythos." Lilla is a fluid, perceptive, and engaging essayist, with ignorance both the book's thematic motivation and the excuse for wandering onto adjacent intellectual terrain. Consequently, the will to not know, like a weak radio signal, fades in and out. The enjoyment of the book is in experiencing a supple mind and lucid writer. A welcome reminder that ignorance is not the antithesis of knowledge but essential to self-knowledge.

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