Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn’t—it’s human.
—Desiderius Erasmus
We are all well acquainted with ignorance: it is our native state. We begin our lives in ignorance and in need. Human beings are, to a dramatic extent when compared with other creatures, born in an “unfinished” condition, incapable even of survival without a long period of nurturance under the protective guidance of elders. As Rousseau declared, “We are born weak, we need strength; we are born entirely destitute, we need help; we are born stupid, we need understanding. All that we lack at birth and need in maturity is given us by education.”1 Fortunately, we are also uncommonly keen learners. Through the processes of human development, socialization, and education, we rapidly discover and construct the world in which we live and move and have our being. The imperative to learn is primal: not only to thrive, but simply to survive, we must escape the profound ignorance that shrouds us at our birth. No wonder we fear ignorance.
But fear is not the only possible reaction. Ignorance is our first place, and we may recall it with nostalgia. Knowledge carries costs, and we are forever changed by our knowing. When, with curiosity or compassion, we reflect on what it would be like to dwell in ignorance or in some similar state, our thoughts may lead in different directions. Indeed, our imaginings may diverge sharply: our “places of ignorance” may be as far apart as hell and heaven.
The state of ignorance may be envisaged as a dark and terrible place. Ignorance is a swamp that harbors superstition, confusion, and fear, that breeds error and prejudice. It is the horror we must escape to survive. Only adult care and interaction, reason, and a proper education can dispel this miasma, illumine our path, pull us from this quagmire to the terra firma of knowledge and understanding, and equip us to find the bedrock of truth. In the Enlightenment, this heroic view gave rise to the “new learning” of science and to social reforms that established ever more inclusive and extensive schooling. Just as learning liberates us from our individual ignorance, so do universal education and scientific progress free us from our collective ignorance.
In such accounts, ignorance is never merely a neutral place, a mere locus; it is a plight, a predicament, a trap. These are charged images, and their suspenseful negativity invokes a positive possibility: an escape to a better place.
The contrasting vision is bright and shining. Ignorance can be imagined rosily as a place of sweet innocence, as a condition or time before we were sullied by knowing things that have left us worldly and jaded. In such a place, there are no worried, fearful brows; no hollowed and wearied souls drained by the burdens and toxins of knowledge. Rather, there is purity, freshness, goodness. It is a precious place—a golden valley, a magical garden, a paradise. It is also unavoidably a delicate and endangered place, which forewarns of a tragedy, a fateful fall, a despoiling of innocence. Idle curiosity and the restless, ruthless pursuit of knowledge are seductively corrupting. We must protect such unknowing innocence, for knowledge is indelible. Be forewarned: as Glen MacDonough lyricized Toyland, “Once you pass its borders, you can ne’er return again.”2 You would be left only with a sense of loss and remorse, a searing nostalgia, and a chastened and wistful exile. Better to dwell secure in ignorance and protect the thrall of innocence.
These contrasting, dramatized visions of ignorance are mythically profound. Do they really represent two different places? How exactly do they differ, or might they be the same place? What is it like to dwell in ignorance—not just to look back on it, yearn for it, or recoil from it—but to dwell within it? How and why would one depart from such a place? To explore these places of predicament and paradise, I turn inevitably to reconsider two of the oldest and most familiar places of ignorance in the Western heritage: Plato’s Cave and the Garden of Eden. The spelunking will occupy this chapter; in the next, we’ll cultivate the garden.
The most memorable image of ignorance occurs in what is probably the most famous passage of all philosophy: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in the Republic.3 Recall the scenario: human beings dwelling in the darkness of an underground cavern, bound at the legs and neck so that they cannot move, even to turn their heads. They have no other memory of life, since they have been imprisoned in this way since childhood. Before them, they see only moving shadows that are cast by objects unknown to them, illumined by a flickering fire that we are told lies somewhere behind them. They know nothing of this except the shadows and hear only echoes from the voices of their keepers, whom they have never seen. In such a benighted state, they pass their days.
This place of ignorance is not only a dark cave; it is a prison, a deprivation chamber. As we imagine this predicament, what we are likely to feel acutely is an epistemic claustrophobia, the absence of freedom in any meaningful sense, and the numbness and despair that would set in from such a deprived routine. Freedom is primordially the ability to move our body. Beyond being our basic capacity for meeting our needs, bodily movement, including change of place, leads us to new experiences, permits learning, and generates perspective. But confined in such profound ignorance, the world of experience is severely restricted. Plato regards such a plight as worse than imprisonment, worse than servitude, more like death: he says, quoting the Odyssey, “Better to be the humble servant of a poor master and to endure anything, than to live and believe as they do”—and the Homeric reference here is to the dead who dwell in Hades.4 As Plato expects, we feel deep sadness at the absence of any chance to understand anything, to achieve anything of value, or to experience anything of beauty. The horror of ignorance is incapacity.5
This account of their predicament is not, of course, one that the prisoners themselves would—or could—offer. They do not and cannot understand their situation, since all of life’s experiences are but shifting shadows and echoes. Plato says that the “prisoners would in every way believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows.” Indeed they would not suspect that the things they see are but shadows, nor even have the concept of a shadow. They pass the time in trivial games of shadow-prediction, unaware of their keepers, the fire, or the parade of objects behind them. Though they are troglodytes in extremis, they do not feel claustrophobic or deprived. The actual circumstances of their confinement in the dark cavern, the possibility of a way up and out, and indeed the notion that there may be an incandescent world of wonders to ascend to, are unknown and unsuspected. Life is what it is, what it has always been; they do what they do and feel what they feel because they know nothing else. They are ignorant. But we know … and it is terrifying. Because Plato has, through his narrative, given us privileged knowledge of their situation, we know what they do not; we can affirm their ignorance.
The Cave is a fiction, of course. With a shudder, we gratefully distance ourselves and our lives from that bizarre place and its “strange prisoners.” We breathe deeply the air of the sunlit world. But then, almost off-handedly, comes Plato’s stark and chilling statement: “They’re like us.”
Are we like these cave dwellers? Is this gloomy cave the image of the womb from which we were all thrust unknowing into the light? But do we not then quickly overcome this primal oblivion—or do we all still dwell in a place of such abysmal ignorance? To think this through, I want to reverse Plato’s approach: rather than describing how we may know the truth, let us consider how we recognize ignorance.
Obviously, no one is born educated; and every educated person is, at any given moment, ignorant about many things. Often, it is easy to pinpoint our ignorance quite precisely. Though you may have acquired considerable knowledge about a subject, say, automobiles, you may not know a particular arcane fact—for example, the number of carburetors that were standard in a 1955 Singer roadster. You simply lack a piece of information. In this common form of factual ignorance, should the question arise, you are able to specify exactly the datum you lack. Based on what you already know, you comprehend fully what you need to learn, even before you learn it—you know what to “look up” or to search for. And you even already know the sort of fact that will constitute the answer—“one” or “two,” for example, and not “one hundred” and certainly not “red” or “mammalian” carburetors.
Suppose, however, that you had never heard of the Singer automobile. Despite your familiarity with antique automobile manufacturers and models, you might be surprised to learn of a make or model that had escaped your notice. Or, imagine that you, somewhat less expert, only knew the names of a few sports car manufacturers. In either case, you would have some sense of what acquiring such new knowledge would be like; you could specify its parameters beforehand. You would grasp in a general way what learning about an unfamiliar auto maker would entail; and given that possibility, you could identify what it is you do not know—albeit with less precision than in the first case. Such factual ignorance can be delineated in this way because you possess other general, relevant knowledge (in this case, knowledge about cars, their manufacturers, the meaning of “roadster,” and so on). In these ordinary situations, it is the knowledge we possess that serves to awaken and focus our sense of our own ignorance.
Our world is vast, however. There are whole realms of knowledge of which each of us is ignorant, though the list, if we could make one, is different for each person. You may be unusually well educated, perhaps possessing expertise in several fields, and yet, when it comes to, say, ichthyology or Chinese porcelain or deltiology or Sanskrit grammar, you are lost. In such cases, our sense of what we don’t know isn’t as sharp; we are less sure that we understand what it would mean to know such things. Nevertheless, if we know the meaning of the relevant terms, if we are familiar with parallel or related subjects, we may have some sense of what such missing knowledge would involve. (If you know English, Latin, and Greek grammar, for instance, you will have a clearer idea of what it would mean to learn Sanskrit grammar than if you had never studied any grammar.) Of course, you might really have no desire to learn about such facts or fields; indeed, you might ignore them, avoid them, or even resist attempts to be informed or taught about them. Or, you might decide to master them or to learn more about them. In these cases also, we can identify what we have not learned, at least to some level of specification.
So, let us pause to amend a fundamental point made earlier: ignorance may be recognized and ascribed only from the perspective of knowledge, and the knowledge we possess determines the degree of specificity of the ignorance we recognize and serves to characterize the ignorance and its importance. This is why we readers of Plato can recognize that cavern as a place of profound ignorance, lacking in truth and sustained by deception.
Utter ignorance, however, for which the dictionary offers the term ignoration, is yet more profound: the prisoners in Plato’s Cave do not know what they do not know; they do not even know that they do not know. They dwell in ignorance, but cannot recognize it. Ignoration is thus a predicament, a trap—one that is not comprehended by those who are caught in it and dwell there. In a sense, they are not in a place at all: theirs is rather a placelessness in which one doesn’t even know one is lost.
Fortunately, this trap, like a Chinese finger puzzle, has a simple solution: learning. And yet, it is remarkable that an escape occurs—how does one come to learn what one does not know one does not know? After all, the prisoners have no ability to free themselves; more to the point, they have no motivation to escape, since even that desire would presuppose a sense of possibility they lack. Their bondage seems natural to them; it is their form of life; nothing better calls to them. They cannot see their ignorance as ignorance. As the influential Muslim philosopher Al-Ghazzali put it: “Heedlessness is an illness which the afflicted person cannot cure himself.”6
In Plato’s account, the unenlightened must rely on accident or the beneficent intervention of others for the critical first step: a prisoner is released from his bonds by happenstance (phusei)7 or by an implied other—“one of them was freed.” What follows his release is not a swift and purposeful escape motivated by eager anticipation of the waiting outside world; it is only the slow, hesitant, gradual, painful process of learning itself. The newly released prisoner is hardly keen for enlightenment: he is “compelled to stand up, to turn his head,” and he is “pained and dazzled and unable to see the things whose shadows he’d seen before.” He is stupefied and wants to return to life as he knew it. Plato asks, “And if someone dragged him away from there by force, up the rough, steep path, and didn’t let him go until he had dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t he be pained and irritated at being treated that way?” Who the “someone” is doesn’t matter at this point (except that it cannot be another prisoner), but it is clear that this is an educational intervention: it is necessary for finding the truth, it is initiated from without, and it is initially coercive, requiring the forceful overcoming of the learner’s resistance. “He’d need time to get adjusted before he could see things in the world above,” Plato acknowledges. But eventually, as understanding flows into him, “he’d count himself happy for the change and pity the others.” He finally comes to know the sunlit world of wonders; and then he understands, with horror, what his condition was in the Cave. And, as we have heard, he would rather undergo anything than return to that place of ignorance.
Plato thus legitimates the claim of educational paternalism, the infamous, age-old dictum that parents say to their children and teachers repeat to their students regarding all sorts of coerced activities: “You will thank me for it one day, because then you will understand.” His justification rests on the distinctions between knowledge, mere belief, and ignorance, and on the transformation of the soul that learning can produce. Regardless of the likelihood of later gratitude, however, if accident or intervention or coercion is required to start one on the path of learning, then the escape from utter ignorance is not self-motivated.8 And that does not seem surprising. Would it be reasonable to pursue a goal that one does not possess and cannot envision? A self-initiated escape would not be a reasonable decision or even a live option.
But that explains only why the prisoner would not seek to escape. What explains his resistance to freedom and the need for coercion? One factor is that, in general, human beings tend to prefer cognitive comfort, the reinforcement of the familiar, to an encounter with the unknown. Learning may disrupt our cognitive comfort; it displaces us. Education requires us to revise or abandon our routines, recipes, and rituals—life as we know it—and to do so we must overcome a kind of natural cognitive inertia. A place of ignorance can be a sturdy nest of cognitive comfort for those who dwell within.
Plato’s benighted Cave dwellers believe they already know the important truths.9 We know, of course, that their “knowledge” is not worthy of the name; it is no more than pointless familiarity with contrived images. And when forced to widen their experience and confront their illusory situation, they are nonplussed, irritated, and even pained. We understand. It is painful for any of us to accept the revelation that our precious “knowledge” is false, that we have been deluded, and to confront the radical implications: assumptions discarded, insights misguided, principles betrayed, relationships undone, lives altered, and worlds shattered. False knowledge can be sticky; it is difficult to remove it and all it implies from our worldview—even when we acknowledge its falsity. Belief can be a bulwark against learning. The ignorance that hides in false knowledge is disguised as the very learning it defies.
These considerations may cause us to question whether Plato’s Cave is, after all, a place of utter ignorance. It may indeed be home to deep ignorance, but the prisoners have beliefs about the shadows, make cognitive claims, and seem confident that what they believe is true—however deluded they may be. Actually, some of their beliefs are confirmed by their experience—some prisoners are adept at identifying shadows and remembering the sequences of their appearance.10 Perhaps it is impossible to describe a human situation of complete and total ignorance, ignoration so abysmal that no thin shaft of understanding penetrates it. One wonders how beings in such a situation could survive without any knowledge, without a single belief that is true. And one wonders what a mental state of ignoration would be: a tabula rasa—the hypothetical blank slate of the mind before it receives outside impressions? Consciousness without memory? Awareness without conceptualization? Prenatal mind? Analytic epistemology would interpret utter ignorance in this way: “S is completely ignorant if and only if there is no p such that S knows that p.” There is nothing S knows, including the fact that S knows nothing. Some would claim that bowling balls are utterly ignorant, but if any human being fits this description, it surely would be an odd case.11
To ascribe ignorance as a mental state is to imply a capacity for learning, which in turn implies a capacity for knowing. A potential for knowledge is embedded in ignorance. Moreover, the ascription of ignorance is relational; it is made from the vantage point of someone’s knowledge about the lack of knowledge in an otherwise knowing creature. Ignorance and knowledge are concepts that cannot stand alone: they presuppose each other. It seems as convoluted to describe absolute and complete ignorance as is to describe absolute and complete knowledge. Ignoration and omniscience are comprehendible only as limiting concepts.12
We will revisit the issues of resistance to learning and preference for ignorance later on, but at the moment I need to return to the still unanswered question: are we like Plato’s Cave dwellers—not just in infancy, but throughout our adult lives? It seems we are, at least in one important way: I refer to the unsettling fact that we too are haunted by things we do not know we do not know; and we cannot imagine how drastically those unknowns would alter our lives and our view of the world.
One clear-cut typology of ignorance has become a meme in popular culture: the famous parsing by Donald Rumsfeld. Secretary of Defense during the presidency of George W. Bush, Rumsfeld enjoyed acerbic interactions with reporters who frequently pressed him to reveal information. But at one news conference, in a typically barbed response, he gave a pithy and now widely quoted mini-lecture: “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”13
To identify something as a known unknown, I must be able to specify with accuracy the object of my ignorance (as in my earlier automobile examples). But it is the contents of that third category, the “unknown unknowns,” that bedevil all our plans—which was Rumsfeld’s point. They seem to make ignorance the place we cannot escape. That there are such truths seems obvious, though what those truths are we cannot say—we cannot, by definition, even offer a single example. Rumsfeld’s assertion that there are things “we don’t know we don’t know” is true but noninstantiable: it is logically impossible to specify an instance (except in referring to oneself retrospectively, by which point it is known); any attempt to do so results in a self-contradiction.14
Nevertheless, our confidence that there are unknown unknowns is well grounded. Hindsight regarding our own life histories convinces us about our personal cluelessness: our lives are full of surprises, serendipities, shocks, discoveries, and comeuppances. And we know enough of the history of the human race to be convinced of the point regarding our collective knowledge, as well: think how each epoch brings events and inventions that were not only unknown, but could not have been imagined, in earlier periods. We can generalize about our unknown unknowns; but merely to observe that they likely include facts, concepts, relationships, and so on provides no cognitive advance because we cannot cite an instance. Whether “we” refers to ourselves, someone else, a group existing at a given time, or all humanity, “we” are always and by necessity ignorant of the full content and the extent of our own ignorance. And in that respect, we are indeed like Plato’s Cave dwellers.
A reader of Plato’s Allegory might protest that surely we are quite different from the prisoners in that our knowledge is much greater. Granted; however we might go about comparing our knowledge with theirs (and tricky as this may prove to be), it seems obvious that our knowledge is much greater—richer in concepts, more comprehensive in scope, deeper in its network of epistemic explanations, wider in the range of activities and technology it supports, and so on. Conspicuously, we know important facts about their situation that they do not. But it is the entirety of our ignorance that we cannot compare, because we have no valid method of assessing the extent of our ignorance; there is no way to take the measure of what we do not know we do not know.
The Rumsfeldian parsing introduces a second-order level of discourse or metacognitive perspective. This distinction was well known years before Rumsfeld, of course, and most scholars recognize that there are actually four categories, not just three:
These four categories were summarized in a paper by philosopher Ann Kerwin nearly a decade before Rumsfeld’s quote.15 She labels the four types as follows: (1) Known knowns are “explicit knowledge.” (2) Known unknowns comprise our “conscious ignorance.” (3) Unknown unknowns she calls “meta-ignorance.” (4) Unknown knowns are forms of “tacit knowledge.”
One can group these four possibilities in several ways. While the first is the category of certified knowledge in the fullest sense, the other three involve ignorance (not knowing) in various ways. Together, the first two categories mark epistemic self-awareness, while the last two mark obliviousness. The first and fourth categories refer to knowledge that is, in some way, possessed. The second and the third involve substantive ignorance. Incorporating metalevel states not only introduces valuable conceptual distinctions, it also defines and differentiates epistemic mental states. It does not, however, explicate the meaning of “known” or “unknown”; indeed, it doubles the problem—or perhaps triples it, if one includes their relationships.
The fourth category—the category omitted by Rumsfeld16—seems odd and perhaps self-contradictory, since it requires that I don’t know something that in fact I know. What could it mean to say that I know something, but not know I know it?
This missing fourth category was also noted by Slavoj Žižek, who interpreted it as that which we willfully refuse to acknowledge that we know (“the Freudian unconscious, ‘the knowledge which doesn’t know itself’”), and who therefore found Rumsfeld’s omission psychologically significant.17 Žižek’s analysis suggests that the sense of “knowing” is different on the two levels. One might know something unconsciously or dimly, but have forgotten it or buried it in a willful denial. (Willful ignorance is a focal topic of chapter 6.) Others, however, who deny any degree of elasticity to the conditions for knowledge, may think that one cannot really know something without knowing that one knows it—and therefore rule out the fourth category as an impossible null set. Perhaps Rumsfeld is among them.
I agree that because these terms function differently on the two levels of cognition, there is no direct contradiction. But I prefer Kerwin’s interpretation of the fourth category as tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge and willful ignorance are quite distinct. Ignorance that is willful involves ignoring, the suppression or denial of what one knows, or the refusal to learn. Tacit knowledge is knowledge one may possess and apply successfully without being able to articulate it or even recognize its correct formulation. Contrasted with explicit knowledge, such tacit knowledge is, as I noted earlier, usually identified as a component of skills in which we seem to “know more than we can tell.” Famous examples of tacit knowledge are the principles by which we ride a bicycle or recognize faces. Michael Polanyi introduced the term in 1958, noting that when we ride a bike, we must continually adjust our movements to meet a complex formula that keeps us balanced—a formula that is “followed” but not known to, or even recognized by, successful cyclists.18 The criteria we use for facial recognition are amazingly complex—as the gradual development of facial recognition software has shown—and yet we are quite expert in applying them. But even when what is known tacitly can be carefully distilled into propositional form—as Polanyi did with the principle of bicycling—it is unlikely that the result will be useful in learning the skill.
The confusing possibilities of unknown knowns suggest a salient point: different explications of what is entailed in knowing something generate hierarchies of stringency. Modern epistemologists, pressed to distinguish genuine knowledge from mere belief, have tended to adopt the most stringent standards. When the standard for possessing sufficient justification for one’s belief is set very high, it assures the impossibility of being wrong. In short, it seems that certainty is necessary for genuine knowledge.
One assumption of this sort of analysis is that knowing does not admit of degrees or alternate forms. One either possesses it, or one does not. But when we think of knowing as a mental state, that duality is Procrustean. Believing is more psychologically complex than an on-or-off condition: believe it or not. Justification can be strong or weak. Awareness is a spectrum. What does my knowing X require of me?
I will take up these issues in the epilogue as part of a claim for revisions in epistemology. The relevant point here, however, is that they imply different meanings of not knowing. To be ignorant of X, depending on context, may be interpreted as being unaware of X, being unable to articulate X or recognize its articulation, being unable to recall X when given an appropriate prompt, or even being unable to justify the claims involved in X. It seems that if multiple factors are necessary for genuine knowledge, the absence of any one or any particular combination of them describes a form of not-knowing, of a failure of knowledge. Thus the formal structure of ignorance becomes multiplex and more complex than that of knowledge.
What about false knowledge—is it covered in this four-fold typology? On the one hand, it is a variety of unknown unknowns because, when I have false knowledge, I don’t know that I don’t know. I am deluded and unaware, as were Plato’s prisoners: they lacked true knowledge and also had false beliefs: that their cavern was the only place, that shadows were “real” objects, and so on. On the other hand, simply having false information (say, having an incorrect phone number) also seems quite different from having unknown unknowns (say, Aristotle’s not-knowing that he didn’t know about DNA). The difference is that in false knowledge, I have a first-order belief that I (mistakenly) take to be true; I believe that I know X, but in fact I don’t. Should I apply that mistaken belief in learning or acting or judging, I would likely commit an error. (I believe I know the phone number, and I realize my error when I place the call.) But I can have no beliefs about broader unknown unknowns that would yield mistakes. (Aristotle had no false beliefs related to DNA because he could have no beliefs at all about DNA—and therefore could not have made an error derived from such a belief.) Even the holding of a false belief implies a level of knowledge sufficient for a possible correction.
Because the presence of such a belief is a crucial factor in the explication of the concept of false knowledge and its quality as a mental state, we will do well to treat it as a separate and distinct type of unknown unknowns; it not only entails meta-ignorance, it involves cognitive error.
Self-knowledge is precious. Self-ignorance can be horrific and may threaten our very selfhood. It has often seemed that self-knowledge is special, privileged, and unmediated. Yet we know that delusions, self-deceptions, and deep repressions are possible; memory can be faulty or false; self-perception is distorted. Nonetheless, we likely believe that we know ourselves better than anyone else knows us, in part because of our unique access to our own mental life. Humans have introspection, the ability to monitor or inspect our own mental states and motives directly. But the reliability of introspection has been severely challenged by recent psychological research, and some philosophers have even denied its very existence.19 Self-insight, it seems, is subject to the same sorts of false knowledge and ignorance as knowledge of others and the world. Thus, all four categories may apply to self-insight, including unknown unknowns.
There are strikingly extreme versions of self-ignorance. Agnosognosia (also spelled anosognosia) is a pathological defect of self-awareness, a condition in which a person is unaware of an obvious personal disability, debilitation, or injury. Even a patient who is paralyzed may not realize or acknowledge her paralysis; an amputee may not be aware that he has lost a limb. Of course, anyone might, at least temporarily, be unaware of a hidden health problem, but the unknown unknowns in cases of agnosognosia (at least before diagnosis) comprise extreme self-ignorance, since what is denied or ignored is so obvious and indubitable to others. Amnesia, the sudden loss of memory, may result from several causes and manifest several forms; but severe cases involve the loss of identity. Amnesia, however, is a matter of known unknowns, since the patient typically is aware of and anxious about the loss.
Plato’s troglodytes, among their cognitive privations, certainly lack self-knowledge. They are unaware they are prisoners, oblivious to being manipulated by others, deluded by illusions about the world, and ignorant of their own capacities and possibilities. Where the unknown unknowns are so life-pervasive, and where false knowledge is deeply embedded, a threshold of self-ignorance is crossed, and disillusionment becomes impossible without assistance.
There are those, of course, who doubt that genuine knowledge is a human possibility, who doubt we can find any cognitive touchstone or point of epistemic leverage from which we can truly come to know anything at all. They doubt that anyone has ever escaped the Cave and that such liberation is possible. If we really have no knowledge and can acquire none, then our ignorance is irremediable. It is more than a predicament; it is our doom.
The skeptical claim is that even if a belief of ours happens to meet all other conditions of knowledge, we could never really know that we know it—and genuine knowing must meet that condition as well. These second-order doubters would back us into the trap of utter ignorance. What could one do in the face of such smothering ignoration? How could one live?
The ancient Skeptics took this position, believing humans incapable of grasping truth or of distinguishing it from falsehood, and claiming that the universe is everywhere incomprehensible to us, a condition named acatalepsia. They advocated epoché, “a suspension of judgment”—all judgment. How, we might wonder, could one live without judging? Pyrrho of Elis, one of the patriarchs of Skepticism, lived precisely that way, according to Diogenes Laertius: “[Pyrrho] was consistent with this view [Skepticism] in his manner of living, neither avoiding anything nor watching out for anything, taking everything as it came, whether it be wagons or precipices or dogs, and all such things, relying on his senses for nothing. He was kept alive by his acquaintances who followed him around.” Diogenes himself seems skeptical of this legend, noting dryly that “Aenesidemus, however, says that he [Pyrrho] only theorized about the suspension of judgment, whereas he did not actually act improvidently. He lived to be ninety years old.”20 We simply could not survive without making judgments (think: is this edible or not?). Even the storied Pyrrho survived only by relying on others who made judgments for him—Wagon approaching! Precipice on your left!
Skepticism comes in many varieties, of course, some milder than others, with different prescriptions for attitudes and behavior (though in general, skeptics have been long on critique and short on constructive recommendations). The more doctrinaire skeptics make the world a place of utter ignorance.21 It is not, though, my purpose here to offer a full-scale discussion of skepticism. But I do want to make three salient points, all of which have resonance in later chapters.
First, I believe that epistemological agnostics, radical skeptics, and nihilists self-destructively set the bar for knowledge too high. In the way that perfection can be the enemy of the good, absolute certainty can be made the enemy of knowledge. To be uncertain is to be ignorant, but it is also to know something. Second, to reiterate: claims about ignorance—and about knowledge—can be made only from the perspective of knowledge. To advance the skeptical position—to demonstrate that our senses are fallible, to reveal that our justification is faulty, to assert that we cannot encounter “things-in-themselves”—is to make such claims: to rely on and apply knowledge already possessed and, therefore, to declaim from a perspective of knowledge. To assert our ignoration is to contradict ourselves. Therefore, third, acknowledging the inevitability and immeasurability of our ignorance need not lead to skepticism or nihilism.