Through a glass darkly

Originally published 17 September 2006

Pas­cal’s Pen­sées is a grab bag of plat­i­tudes, non­sense and sub­stance, a dis­or­ga­nized sketch of the book Pas­cal might have writ­ten had he lived long enough. (He died at age 39.) But it con­tains enough nuggets of wis­dom to have won a place among West­ern classics.

One entry I have always liked: “Sci­en­tif­ic learn­ing is com­posed of two oppo­sites which nonethe­less meet each oth­er. The first is the nat­ur­al igno­rance that is man’s lot at birth. The sec­ond is rep­re­sent­ed by those great minds that have inves­ti­gat­ed all knowl­edge accu­mu­lat­ed by man only to dis­cov­er at the end that in fact they know noth­ing. Thus they return to the same fun­da­men­tal igno­rance they had thought to leave. Yet this igno­rance they have now dis­cov­ered is an intel­lec­tu­al achieve­ment. It is those who have depart­ed from their orig­i­nal con­di­tion of igno­rance but have been inca­pable of com­plet­ing the full cycle of learn­ing who offer us a smat­ter­ing of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge and pass sweep­ing judg­ments. These are the mis­chief mak­ers, the false prophets.” (Pen­sées V:327)

The pas­sage would seem to sug­gest that the pur­pose of sci­ence — and indeed all edu­ca­tion — is to arrive at a state of igno­rance, but an igno­rance that is aware of itself. It took almost three cen­turies for Pas­cal’s insight to become the com­mon view of sci­en­tists. The philoso­pher Karl Pop­per wrote: “The more we learn about the world, and the deep­er our learn­ing, the more con­scious, spe­cif­ic, and artic­u­late will be our knowl­edge of what we do not know, our knowl­edge of our igno­rance. For this, indeed, is the main source of our igno­rance — the fact that our knowl­edge can be only finite, while our igno­rance must nec­es­sar­i­ly be infi­nite.” The physician/essayist Lewis Thomas went fur­ther: “The great­est of all the accom­plish­ments of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry sci­ence has been the dis­cov­ery of human ignorance.”

Sci­ence writer Tim­o­thy Fer­ris agrees: “Our igno­rance, of course, has always been with us, and always will be. What is new is our aware­ness of it, our awak­en­ing to its fath­om­less dimen­sions, and it is this, more than any­thing else, that marks our com­ing of age as a species.” It is an odd, unset­tling thought that the cul­mi­na­tion of the sci­en­tif­ic quest — the long slow gath­er­ing of reli­able knowl­edge — should be the con­fir­ma­tion of how lit­tle we under­stand about the uni­verse we live in.

This new aware­ness of our igno­rance should not be tak­en as per­mis­sion to indulge the super­sti­tions we are born into. Rather, it should cause us to to be mod­est and skep­ti­cal, par­si­mo­nious in our creeds, ever rich­er in reli­able knowl­edge but ever more demand­ing in the cal­iber of proof.

If the writ­ers I have quot­ed are cor­rect, the essence of wis­dom is the will­ing­ness to say “I don’t know.” Why is there some­thing rather than noth­ing? “I don’t know.” Why are the laws of nature what they are? “I don’t know.” Why does Bach’s St. Matthew Pas­sion reduce me to awed silence? “I don’t know.” Why does the sight of a Black Swal­low­tail in the mead­ow make me smile with delight? “I don’t know.” What is the mean­ing of it all? “I don’t know.”

On the oth­er hand, con­sid­er all the ques­tions for which we have answers. Why does the sun go dark at mid­day? Why does the comet appear in the sky? Why the plague? Why the drought? Why the infes­ta­tion of locusts? Why the moun­tains and the val­leys? Why the fos­sils on the moun­tain top? How did the uni­verse begin? And on and on.

As long as our answers to these ques­tions invoked the gods — as they did for thou­sands of years — no reli­able pub­lic knowl­edge was pos­si­ble. Only when a few curi­ous peo­ple said “I don’t know” did sci­ence begin. Admis­sion of igno­rance is a pre­req­ui­site of sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery, and by the same token, the more we learn, the more we are aware of what we do not know.

The 18th-cen­tu­ry Eng­lish sci­en­tist Joseph Priest­ley, the dis­cov­er­er of oxy­gen, wrote: “The greater is the cir­cle of light, the greater is the bound­ary of the dark­ness by which it is con­fined. But, notwith­stand­ing this, the more light we get, the more thank­ful we ought to be, for by this means we have the greater range for sat­is­fac­to­ry con­tem­pla­tion. In time, the bounds of light will be still fur­ther extend­ed; and from the infin­i­ty of the divine nature, and the divine works, we may promise our­selves an end­less progress in our inves­ti­ga­tion of them: a prospect tru­ly sub­lime and glorious.”

As Pas­cal sug­gest­ed, in our youth we are indoc­tri­nat­ed into tra­di­tion­al trib­al beliefs, as var­i­ous as the trib­al gods are var­i­ous. Many of us live out our lives in thrall to the tra­di­tions into which we are born. Oth­ers ques­tion their inher­i­tance and embark upon a life­time of learn­ing. The for­mer end up con­vinced they know every­thing. The lat­ter end as they began, in igno­rance — but a self-pro­fessed igno­rance that is sub­lime and glo­ri­ous in its ten­ta­tive­ly-held and ever-expand­ing wealth of knowledge.