Among the many things Freud got right was that our myths, like our dreams, often mean more than they mean to mean; sometimes they enact the fulfillment of a wish we dare not admit to ourselves.
[…]The source of the proverb “Ignorance is bliss” is a poem by the 18th-century English poet Thomas Gray, who wrote in passing: “Where ignorance is bliss,/ Tis folly to be wise.”
[…]Malleable though it may be, this equation of knowledge with happiness can be found at the very root of the Western philosophical tradition—one is tempted to say, it is the root. Plato´s Republic takes a long detour through the issues of politics in order to establish to the satisfaction of two young men that knowledge, virtue, and happiness are identical. […] But genuine knowledge, were we to achieve it, would be happiness; that is the Socratic position.
[…]Of course, there have been important modifications. Aristotle contrasted intellectual virtue with the moral virtues and distinguished the kinds of happiness each could bring; the Stoics and Skeptics, ancient and modern, raised doubts about our capacity for knowledge and the existential posture we should adopt toward ignorance; Kant tried to wean us from vain metaphysical speculations and to refocus our attention on the moral duties revealed through practical reason; Marxists and structuralists cast dark shadows of ideological suspicion on any claim to impartial knowledge; American pragmatists attempted to reorient our thinking from the search for unshakable principles to the continuous revision of intellectual constructs in line with practical demands and interests. Yet in every one of those cases […] knowledge as such is never considered to be a potential source of unhappiness, or ignorance a kind of bliss.
There is, however, a countercurrent […] it is possible to distinguish two different indictments: the charge that the pursuit of knowledge is impious, and the charge that the acquisition of knowledge corrupts the young.
[…]Kant´s challenge—”Sapere aude!,” dare to know […] for many centuries, curiosity had been considered a serious vice, closely associated with vanity, and both were taken to be targets of divine retribution.
[…]The mythological warnings against curiosity are many and well known…
[…]In seeking knowledge of God, we must seek wisely, and wisdom, it turns out, is not derived from the knowledge we pursue: Wisdom is acquired through piety, and tempered by fear.
[…]…words of Ecclesiastes…”In much wisdom is much vexation, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow” (1:18).
[…]Martin Luther followed in this line when he held up Abraham as an example of someone who knew how to “imprison his reason”: “Listen, Reason, thou blind and stupid fool that understandest naught of the things of God…”
[…]The foolishness of God is wiser than men.” Ever since St. Paul, the holy fool has been a central motif in the Christian imagination, and he appears and reappears in various guises in the secular literature of Christendom.[…] The Christian holy fool is taken to be pious, and therefore happy, because he is ignorant—because his ignorance is preferable to the wisdom of men. But why should this be? It might perhaps be more reasonable, theologically speaking, to assume that his ignorance would tempt him into impiety or sin, because he would know no better. There seems to be no explicit sanction for this sort of ignorance in Judaism. […] But in Christianity there is such a sanction for ignorance, in explicit opposition to the Jewish ideal of being learned in the law.
[…]For it was Jesus himself who, when asked by his disciples who is the greatest in heaven, answered by calling a child to him and saying:
Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever, therefore, shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18:3-4).
And again:
[…]Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein (Mark 10:14-15).
…what lambs and children share is a lack of maturation, the assumption being that the forces of nature that develop a creature to its final end actually spoil it…But the images imply something more, which is that development itself, whether natural or artificial, is suspect because it occurs at the cost of innocence (even Thomas Aquinas did not succeed in uprooting that assumption from the Christian mind).
[…]Among the many spiritual and social forces that corrupt our childlike innocence, St. Paul and Tertullian singled out for special condemnation the pretension to wisdom, especially through philosophy. […] Believers are to shun philosophy not only because it questions revealed truths and propagates falsehoods, but because it robs us of that innocent, childlike ignorance into which we are reborn through Christ Jesus.
[…]In the mid-17th century, Pascal could still write that “the greatest illness afflicting man is his nervous curiosity about things he cannot know,” but he was the last great religious critic of this vice until Kierkegaard.
A century after Pascal […] Jean Jacques Rousseau […] sang the praises of “the happy ignorance in which eternal wisdom has placed us. […] Never before the appearance of Rousseau´s writings had the lives of simple people and simple minds appeared so attractive and the pursuit of knowledge seemed so perverse and destructive of happiness.
Yet Rousseau was no Tertullian, let alone a Luther, and therein lay his power. Rousseau was willing to concede that the happy ignorance of the natural state left us stunted, and that we could perfect ourselves only by leaving it and developing our mental faculties. Such a move was necessary, and inevitable. Yet it also meant the loss of the only complete happiness we will ever have known, and it carried the threat of moral corruption. Our blessed innocence could not be recovered, certainly not through the kind of Christianity preached by St. Paul, Tertullian, and Luther. Instead, the most Rousseau thought possible was the establishment of a counterideal of sincerity and authenticity, to be cultivated by a new education devised to keep our curiosity well directed and within moral bounds.
[…]The most profound figure to think through this myth of innocence and make it his own was undoubtedly Friedrich Nietzsche. […] Nietzsche begins his famous essay “On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life” not with the words of the Gospel, “Consider the lilies of the field,” but with the exhortation “Consider the herd grazing before you”—for it is the cow, slowly nibbling its grass, ignorant of the past and unconcerned about the future, that inspires Nietzsche´s admiration. […] Man´s new historical knowledge weighs him down; he knows what great men have achieved and feels himself to be small; he knows that other civilizations have risen and collapsed, and feels his own to be contingent and ephemeral. Man´s pursuit of knowledge, now extended from the physical world to the historical world, has rendered him smaller than he once was: The more he knows, the less he is, and the less he is, the less happy he is. “Whoever cannot settle on the threshold of the moment forgetful of the whole past,” Nietzsche writes, “whoever is incapable of standing on a point like a goddess of victory without vertigo or fear, will never know what happiness is, and worse yet, will never do anything to make others happy.”
In his later books, Nietzsche developed a whole psychology based on his insight that two antagonistic drives are at war in the human soul: the will to knowledge and the will to ignorance.
[…]…a common chord of moral doubt about the Socratic equation of knowledge with happiness. I stress the moral to distinguish this kind of skepticism from epistemological doubts about the possibility of genuine knowledge. Epistemological skepticism raises genuine issues about the status of modern science, but it does so in the skeptical spirit of the sciences themselves. […] Moral skepticism about the pursuit of knowledge in general, and the modern sciences in particular, is of a different order: It accepts that genuine knowledge and science are possible but questions their worth, on the assumption that the issue of “worth” is not one the sciences can decide.
[…]The moral critique of science runs back many centuries, but it lacked a coherent and responsible voice in the century just past, though it did echo disturbingly in the thought of Martin Heidegger. The sciences have come under attack recently by academic critics who believe themselves to be inspired by Nietzsche, yet these critics stubbornly avoid discussing the morally ambiguous ideal Nietzsche defended: the “health” of the species. In reading our contemporary critics, one senses the moral revulsion against science that animates them and wonders why they don´t examine the nature of that revulsion. Instead, they cast a shadow of suspicion on the knowledge claims of science, which are entirely beside the point. The deeper issue is not whether knowledge through science is possible (it is); the issue is whether that knowledge is good, and on this question serious minds have been divided since the very beginning of our civilization.
In her novel Daniel Deronda (1874-76), George Eliot writes, “It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance?” …if we are to judge by the history of our sacred and profane literature, the wills to knowledge and ignorance are permanent features of the human psyche.
[…]When the Spanish thinker Miguel de Unamuno heard Goethe´s apocryphal last words—”Light, light, more light!”—he famously retorted, “No, warmth, warmth, more warmth! For we die of the cold, not of the darkness. It is not the night that kills, but the frost.”
Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Summer2001)
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