Ignorance and Bliss
On Wanting Not to Know
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"A wise and wonderfully enjoyable book. Mark Lilla treats weighty matters with a light touch, in an elegant prose style that crackles with dry wit . . . Invigorating." —John Banville, The Guardian
A dazzling exploration of our wish to remain innocent and ignorant—and its consequences.
Aristotle claimed that “all human beings want to know.” Our own experience proves that all human beings also want not to know. Today, centuries after the Enlightenment, mesmerized crowds still follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise. Why is this? Where does this will to ignorance come from, and how does it continue to shape our lives?
In Ignorance and Bliss, the acclaimed essayist and historian of ideas Mark Lilla offers an absorbing psychological diagnosis of the human will not to know. With erudition and brio, Lilla ranges from the Book of Genesis and Plato’s dialogues to Sufi parables and Sigmund Freud, revealing the paradoxes of hiding truth from ourselves. He also exposes the fantasies this impulse lead us to entertain—the illusion that the ecstasies of prophets, mystics, and holy fools offer access to esoteric truths; the illusion of children’s lamb-like innocence; and the nostalgic illusion of recapturing the glories of vanished and allegedly purer civilizations. The result is a highly original meditation that invites readers to consider their own deep-seated impulses and taboos.
We want to know, we want not to know. We accept truth, we resist truth. Back and forth the mind shuttles, playing badminton with itself. But it doesn’t feel like a game. It feels as if our lives are at stake. And they are.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
