The problem of willed ignorance
Against knowledge theories of suffering
Two logically distinct but simultaneous moments compose the event of understanding.
In the first moment, the knower apprehends the thing being known. However, this moment is immediately followed by a second in which the knower responds to the knowledge.
While these logical moments are distinct, we must see how this response to the known is integral to the knowing itself, for this is the subject’s own moment of recognition of their involvement with the knowing and the known.
Christianity and Platonism differ in this crucial respect: Platonism takes the moment of knowing the Good to necessarily result in doing the Good, for the Good’s charms are obvious and irresistible, whereas Christianity maintains these two moments as separate and independent.
In short, the Christian contends that knowing the Good is insufficient for doing the Good; one must also choose to not suppress this knowledge of the Good. Therefore, we do not so much embrace the truth as we resist the urge to suppress the truth.
This explains why Jesus put the command to "repent" at the heart of his message. The notion of repentance highlights this second moment of knowledge where one not only knows but also responds appropriately to what one knows.
Jesus offered forgiveness of past wrongs as he confronted the people of Israel with the message of the Kingdom of God, and he only condemned those who did not respond to his message with faith. Their primary issue was not ignorance of the truth, but the suppression of the truth which they could see plainly.
On this point, Platonism and Buddhism are more similar to each other than they are to Christianity in that they both (in different ways) locate the source of human suffering in ignorance (a lack of knowledge).
In Plato’s schema, the human soul has forgotten the Good with which it was acquainted in its pre-existence, thus humans now stumble through life making some better and some worse choices in a confused search for this Good of which they have become ignorant. Sometimes they get glimpses of the Good and move towards it, but other times they choose lesser goods which ultimately obscure the Good. They spend their time following shadows and illusions.
For the Platonist, the soul has forgotten the Good which it once knew. Thus, the human being suffers primarily from a foggy memory.
Buddhism teaches that the source of human suffering is attachment to the illusion of a self which relates itself to the equally illusory notion of a fixed external reality. All phenomena are a constant flux with nothing behind them or explaining them, and thus nothing is real in the sense of being substantial. Humans suffer because they are continual forming expectations and having them broken. The only constant is change, and thus grasping is the only surefire way to disappointment.
Following the Buddha’s teachings, one experiences enlightenment through attaining the realization that all is nothingness.
While Platonism maintains both the moment of apprehension and the response as distinct but intimately related, Buddhism collapses the two moments of understanding into each other in a single event of ecstatic realization. Enlightenment is a single punctual moment, utterly simple in its parts, and sui generis. In the moment of enlightenment, the practitioner directly is the One's realization of itself.
In contrast to both Platonism and Buddhism, which explain evil as fundamentally born from ignorance, Christianity articulates a novel theory of the entanglement of will and knowledge by introducing the notion of 'sin' as an explanation for why human life is full of suffering.
Christianity begins from the premise that ignorance is insufficient to explain human suffering, because ignorance-based theories of suffering like Platonism and Buddhism overlook the second moment of knowledge where the agent can choose to suppress what they know.
The problem to be tackled here is that of “willed ignorance” — that a knower can come to clearly see the truth and its implications, and yet still choose ignorance.
How does this choice to suppress emerge? Can ignorance really explain the existence of self-destructive behavior in human beings?
The Christian tradition has typically resorted to the notion of nothingness to describe the emergence of this possibility of "turning away" from the truth. This turning away is sin, and all spiritual and material effects of this refusal of the truth are called evil. From Augustine to Barth, Christian theologians have described evil as a parasitic nothingness which preys upon life, introducing fractures and distress into the community of God's creation.
While I think this notion is on the right track, it needs to be fleshed out more fully, more specifically how this nothingness emerges and how it functions. It's here that Psychoanalysis begins to point us in a fruitful direction by theorizing the nature of repression.
Psychoanalysis owes a debt to both Judaism and Christianity when its theories probe this insight of the two-fold moment of knowledge, and thus it stands within the Judaeo-Christian tradition of ethical reflection by articulating how the subject speaks the truth in the act of suppressing the truth.
Freud originally developed psychoanalysis as the practice of reading his patients' self-reporting (dreams, speech, actions, physical sensations, etc...) as coded symptoms which indicate a knowledge which has been displaced. The subject theorized in psychoanalysis displays an internal complexity which makes sublimated knowledge possible, and thus suggests interesting possibilities for a Christian theory of subjectivity.
This displaced knowledge we find in psychoanalysis is not ignorance in either the Platonic or Buddhist sense, but is rather a willed ignorance.
How shall we begin to describe the origin of the impulse to will ignorance?
I love this. I'm going to address this topic in my next Theological Epistemology lecture, and hopefully in an article. Emil Brunner puts it this way: "Not the nous but the heart, the will, is the agent of sin.” Aquinas says that the will is "the subject of sin," and the other faculties, including the mind, are affected via the will. And the authors of "Classical Apologetics" put it this way: “We suggest that classic Reformed orthodoxy saw the noetic influence of sin not as direct through a totally depraved mind, but as indirect through the totally depraved heart.”
How to understand the source of this will is a question. But the Christian perspective is not, and should not be, intellectualism about sin, but voluntarism. And yet, the act of the will is to will ignorance, including of the good. Thanks for setting up the problem, Matthew!