Volume 1, No. 2:

In Praise of Ignorance
Liberal Education and Literature
Eurocentrism and Pluralism
Socrates and the Homeric Gods
Freedom and the Supersensible
On Private and Public Values
The Epistemology of Panic

In Praise of Ignorance

by Lewis White Beck

Aristotle's Metaphysics begins with one of the most austerely splendid sentences ever written by a philosopher. It is: "All men by nature desire to know." Three centuries later Cicero commented upon this passage as follows: "The love of knowledge is so inborn in us that no one can believe that human nature is attracted to it by any thought of reward. Do we not see how boys are not frightened away, even by fear of being whipped, from inspecting and investigating things? Do we not see that if they are driven away from something they approach it again and are delighted to learn something about it?… And those who delight in the higher branches of study and learning, do we not see that they have no care for their health or surroundings, but are captivated by knowledge, and make up for the greatest labor and by the pleasure they take in their learning?" But Cicero, as so often, doesn't know when to leave well enough alone, and in an astonishing passage which I will not translate speculates that the sailors with Ulysses were more fascinated by the thought of what they could learn from the Sirens than they were by the sound of their song. Cicero goes on and on until the reader longs for the dignity of Aristotle's simplicity, and even begins to doubt the truth of what he and Aristotle were saying.

Samuel Johnson didn't doubt it; he denied it. "Mankind," he said "have a great aversion to intellectual labors; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it." In saying this he was not just speaking of the rest of humanity. In one of his more perverse moods, when, according to Boswell, "there was no arguing with him at the moment," this most learned of men said: "If it rained knowledge I'd hold out my hands: but I would not give myself the trouble to go in quest of it."

Anyone engaged in the work of education is more likely to agree with Johnson than with Cicero and Aristotle. For every student who, as Cicero says, is "attracted to knowledge by no thought of reward," there are a hundred who learn in order to get a good grade. Cicero apparently forgot that there are students who sleep through lectures, and teachers who bluff their way through lectures which a little learning would improve. If Cicero were right and Johnson wrong, the task of education would be much easier for the faculty and much pleasanter for the students.

I have, therefore, decided to speak in praise of ignorance to those learned folk who are being publicly acclaimed for having escaped from its toils. I want to remind you of what you are missing by spurning and turning your back upon ignorance. We must never forget that we are still ignorant. We must not become pedants, who make a useless and offensive show of their learning. We must avoid the vice of pride, the habit of thinking that what we know is more important than what we do not know. It would be better to have remained ignorant than to become pedantic, self-deceived, and proud. Becoming emancipated from the bondage of ignorance ought to lead to decorum, self-knowledge, and humility. It is ignorance that is often the foundation of pride. The ignorant are proud because they do not know how ignorant they are. The person who learns realizes how little he knows and how much remains to be known. Sir Isaac Newton was not a man famous for his humility, but he said: "I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble, or a prettier shell, than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

We are all ignorant, but not all ignorant in the same way. We can distinguish many kinds of ignorance. First, there are antecedent ignorance and consequent ignorance. Antecedent ignorance is the ignorance in which we all begin. Most of us climb out of it through informal and formal education. Consequent ignorance is what the educated and the wise experience when they realize that their questions outstrip their answers. Only death ends that kind of ignorance.

Let me tell you about Socrates, who believed he would be wiser after death than before. The Oracle at Delphi had said that he was the wisest of the Greeks. This puzzled Socrates, who was not convinced of his supreme wisdom and set out to find a man wiser than he. He met many who thought they were wiser, but with skillful questioning he discovered that they were misinformed and, in many cases, fools. They professed to have knowledge they did not have. Thus did Socrates confirm the oracle: he was the wisest Greek because he knew that he knew nothing, while the others knew nothing, period. The recognition of ignorance is the first step towards escaping from it. Now, of course, the Greeks did not know nothing. No one can be so ignorant as to know nothing. Ignorance is measured by a social norm, and we decide on someone's degree of ignorance according to expectations which are formed in and by social groups. The antecedently ignorant person is not one who knows nothing, but one whose knowledge is at a minimum, whose knowledge falls below some socially acceptable threshold, or is limited to the bare necessities of life known to everyone. Do not underestimate the importance of the knowledge possessed by the ignorant: it is knowledge of things so important that they cannot be left to the accidents of education; they are matters of common sense, almost of instinct. Nature would have poorly provided for the human race had she made us so ignorant that we would have to be educated before we knew enough to come in out of the rain. Most of the daily activities of life are carried on the basis of what antecedently ignorant people know very well. What the antecedently ignorant do not know and will have to learn, can usually be learned with little or no difficulty. We do not blame children for being antecedently ignorant, but we do censure older people who remain childishly ignorant. Antecedent ignorance is both innocent and remediable. The next kind of ignorance is invidious ignorance. ("Invidious" means tending to arouse envy, or to be discriminatory.) By invidious ignorance I mean ignorance of such a kind that when we say a person is ignorant we distinguish between him as he is and him as we think he ought to be, or between him and his less ignorant fellows, so that he might well be envious of them in point of knowledge. I indicate that one student is invidiously ignorant by giving him a lower grade that I do his classmates. When I do so I show that he does not know something he ought to know, something which he could legitimately be expected to know, and something which lay within his power to know. The classroom formalizes and quantifies degrees of invidious ignorance, but society, without quantizing, even more severely punishes invidious ignorance; it consigns people who are invidiously ignorant to different kinds of work, social status and wages. Invidious ignorance is punished, and it is not innocent. It is, fortunately, to a large extent remediable. Remedying it is the business of education. Cardinal Newman wrote: "Do not say the people must be educated when after all you only mean amused, refreshed, soothed, got into good spirits and good humor, or kept from vicious excesses." This advice is often ignored in modern schooling, but the whole business of educational institutions is, or ought to be, to educate, and to remedy invidious ignorance. When it is the ignorance of the students that is at stake, we call it teaching; when it is the ignorance of the faculty, we call it research. If it were not for invidious ignorance, therefore, we would neither need nor have educational establishments. But there would also be no human beings. We would be a race of animals who could not learn from each other. If we lived at all, it would be because nature had supplied us with sufficient automatic mechanisms of adjustment, as she has the insects. Nature might have provided the human species with skills in technologies, as she has some insects, and might have done it on an infinitely higher level than any lower animals possess. But she would not have endowed us with any need and capacity to learn, with any cultural heritage to pass on from one generation to another; we would be less than human. To err is human, but even more human is the art of learning from our erring. Remediable ignorance, therefore, is one of the inestimable treasures of the human species. Surely, then, we should be grateful to ignorance, and glad that we have so much of it. Long live ignorance. I will say some more nice things about it. Let us not forget the most famous praise of ignorance that exists, Thomas Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College." It is the source of the trite lines, "Where ignorance is bliss/ 'tis folly to be wise." Gray was thinking of his carefree days at Eton, which would have been poisoned for him had he then known of the misfortunes and miseries which awaited him and his fellows in later life. There are many things we would prefer not to know. One of the most awesome scenes in the whole of literature is where Oedipus needs to know but fears to know the truth about who he is. The chorus warns him against seeking this knowledge, and entreats him to rest in his ignorance. Most of us, fortunately, do not have Oedipus' fate and irresistible need to know it. We surround ourselves with protective myths and illusions. Sometimes we suspect that our myths are illusory yet we still cling to them, like children fighting down their doubts about the identity of Santa Claus. Literature and history are important sources of self-knowledge, but they are also inexhaustible sources of life-supporting illusions, and bed-time stories for times when the facts seem too ominous to bear. Pseudo-sciences like astrology exercise their hold because of the human need to be fooled. When our knowledge about the real world seems too terrible, or our ignorance seems too incapacitating, we nurture pleasing fantasies which confine us to ignorance, and give us, for the moment at least, some satisfaction. The second good thing to say about ignorance is that it is cheap. It is even free. Knowledge has a price. All of us who have had, or who are now getting, an expensive education know the costs in money, but I am thinking of costs of another kind. Getting education takes a lot out of a person. Erasmus in his Praise of Folly describes a man "who wore out his whole boyhood and youth in pursuing the learned disciplines. He wasted the best time of life in uninterrupted watchings, cares, and studies; and through the remaining part of it he never tasted so much as a tittle of pleasure; always frugal, impecunious, sad, austere, unfair and strict towards himself, morose and unamiable to others; afflicted with pallor, leanness, invalidism, sore eyes, premature old-age and white hair; dying before his appointed time. By the way, what difference does it make that a man of that kind dies? He has never lived." Such a life may be too high a price to pay for knowledge. It is too high a price if the knowledge is to be used only for getting and keeping some specific job, for that sacrifices the whole to the part. One pays too high a price for knowledge if what he learns does not permit him to make a living in a productive, socially useful, and personally satisfying way, and to live a life of enlightened awareness, enlarged imagination, and refined taste. If you do not achieve these, you might be better off ignorant. The third good thing to say about ignorance is that it is not a vice or a sin, but only a privation. It is not something positively evil, but may indeed be endearing when accompanied by becoming innocence and modesty. We sometimes cherish the man or woman who is ignorant of "the ways of the world," and we bemoan the loss of innocence and ignorance which comes with increasing age, experience, and sophistication. There are intellectual virtues, such as intelligence, wisdom, skill, objectivity, impartiality, truthfulness, accuracy of perception, good judgment, and precision in communication. There are intellectual vices, such as blamable error, sloppiness, carelessness, one-sidedness, prejudice, illogicalness. Though ignorance is not among the vices, it is usually based upon some vice, such as laziness or pride or blind partisanship. When we morally condemn the ignorant, it is usually because we condemn the underlying cause of it, which is often some despicable character trait. These three points constitute my praise for ignorance. When, as some say, every good thing is either a sin or fattening, it is all the more gratifying to find something that is bliss, cheap, and not a sin. (Besides, it isn't fattening either.) No wonder most people are content to be, in fact are proud to be, ignorant. Dr. Johnson was right, and Cicero and Aristotle were wrong. With St. Paul I say: "If any man be ignorant, let him be ignorant." But I have not yet even touched on what may be the highest praise that ignorance deserves. Some, including St. Paul, hold that ignorance is a sign of something very deep and very important in human nature, something we ought to cultivate instead of eradicate. Consequent ignorance is the ignorance which remains after all our efforts to achieve knowledge. There are three kinds of consequent ignorance: First, there is personal ignorance, or ignorance which is peculiar to each individual. For instance, I am personally ignorant of the date of the Battle of Lepanto, but I could find it out by asking you. You remember the date of the battle, but forget the name of the admiral who fought it, though you could find it out by asking me. But there will forever remain vast areas of facts I do no know, and vast areas you do not know; but, fortunately, these areas do not completely overlap, so we are able to help each other. Second, there is the ignorance of the undiscovered. These are matters which no one knows. For example, no one now knows whether there is extra-terrestrial life; no one now knows who the "distant beloved" was to whom Beethoven wrote. Notice I said: no one now knows. There is no intrinsic reason why answers to these and like questions cannot become known. It is precisely the task of research to answer such questions, and with a great deal of work, a little good luck, and the imagination of genius, our ignorance of the undiscovered can be remedied. The third kind of consequent ignorance - the one I am most interested in - is indefeasible ignorance. There may be things which we cannot know, cannot even in principle know. Nothing we can do can defeat this ignorance, so I call it indefeasible, or irremediable ignorance. It would be ignorance dependent upon some inherent character of the human mind, some unconformity between our cognitive capacities and the facts. I am not speaking of things we are ignorant of because we do not have the time, the interest, the opportunity, and the scientific instruments or historical documents which would enable us to know them. I am speaking of things which may be intrinsically unknowable, things of which we are destined to be forever ignorant however earnestly we pursue knowledge of them. Please note that I have not said that there is this kind of ignorance. But so many have asserted it, with such passionate intensity, even to the point of martyrdom, that we must take the arguments for and against it very seriously. We can hardly understand our history, or ourselves as products of history, without appreciating the nature and impact of this belief. We must understand the conflicts between it and the opposed belief, equally pervasive, in what Wordsworth called "man's unconquerable mind." The issue between them is one of the most fundamental in the history of civilization. Its metaphysical roots are found in Plato's division of reality into two spheres - a world of illusion which we think we know by means of sense perception, and a world of reality which cannot be known in this way. The world which cannot be known by the senses is the locus of eternal perfection and divinity, the source of values, and the object of human desire and aspiration. There have been three principal attitudes to that Platonic world of ultimate but hidden reality: The first is to hold that this world does not exist. It, rather than the sense world, is illusory. It is a product of human imagination seeking solace which it cannot find in this world, which is the only real world and the only object of knowledge. Our ignorance of this world is defeasible, and is ever diminishing with the progress of knowledge. There is no indefeasible ignorance of the other Platonic world, because that world does not exist at all. This was the attitude of Marx and Nietzsche, positivistic philosophers, and many scientists. The second view is that of many philosophers who hold that that other Platonic world does exist and that it can be known by philosophical reasoning or mystical insight or both. Here all our ignorance of both this world and the other higher world is defeasible ignorance. This was Plato's own view, and in Hegel's brave words: "The initially hidden and precluded essence of the universe has not the strength to resist the courage of knowledge." Finally, there is the third view, that the other Platonic world does exist, but that there is no way in which the human mind can know it. We are indefeasibly ignorant of it. But that transcendent world is of such paramount importance to human beings that we cannot be indifferent to it as we are to most things of which we are ignorant; the attitude we should take to it is not one of claiming knowledge, but of professing faith. Because of our indefeasible ignorance of the most important things - God, the state of the soul, the destiny of the human race - we have need of an act of faith that is not just a poor substitute for an act of knowledge, but is laden with an existential significance lacking in knowledge. In various forms this view has been developed by Thomas Aquinas, Pascal, Kant, Kierkegaard, and William James. It is not my place to tell you whether there is indefeasible ignorance of ultimate reality. I am ignorant of whether there is or is not. But you should think of these things because there are no things more important, though there are no questions more difficult or less answerable. But one's whole life may be changed if one changes his mind about these questions.