The American economist Thomas Sowell observed, “It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” It’s a strange paradox that one requires significant knowledge to recognize their own ignorance.
In his new book Ignorance: A Global History, the British historian Peter Burke explains that the traditional definition of ignorance is simply, “the absence or deprivation of knowledge.” However, this conventional definition is sometimes criticized as too broad, requiring distinctions. In English, for instance, ‘ignorance’ is sometimes distinguished from ‘nescience’ and both from ‘non-knowledge.’ There is also ‘unknowing,’ a term that goes back to the anonymous fourteenth-century author of a treatise on mysticism.
Burke writes,
A long tradition, from Augustine onwards, has criticized ‘vain’ curiosity, implying that a certain kind of ignorance is a wiser option. Early modern clergy, whether Catholic or Protestant, were generally hostile to curiosity, ‘treating it as a sin, usually venial but sometimes mortal’. It has been presented as mortal in the legend of Faust, which has inspired plays, operas and novels. When Kant used the phrase ‘Dare to Know’ as the motto of the Enlightenment, he was reacting against the biblical recommendation, ‘Do not wish to know higher things, but fear them’, paraphrased by the poet Alexander Pope.
But regardless of how we define or think about ignorance, it’s essential to recognize that it’s part of the human condition. As the American humorist Mark Twain remarked in one of his numerous epigrams, “We are all ignorant, just about different things.” To better understand ignorance, we must acknowledge several types of ignorance.
