⁂ Concepts · Knowledge · No. 61
Ignorance

D'Anville's Africa: the elephants removed and the blanks left.

Ignorance

Not merely the absence of knowledge but, in several traditions, an active misapprehension that has to be removed.

Theme
Knowledge, truth and reason
Tradition
Cross-tradition
Term
अविद्या · avidyā
Term fixed
c. 450 BC

In plain terms

In English, being ignorant of something means not knowing it - a hole where information would go. That is the weak sense, and most of the interesting uses are not that.

The Indian traditions mean something stronger: not a blank but a misreading. Seeing a coiled rope and taking it for a snake is not lacking information about the rope; it is having the wrong thing actively present. Fear follows, and the fear is real. What removes it is not more looking but seeing correctly, at which point nothing about the rope has changed.

And there is a third sense, which is modern and political: ignorance that is produced. Not knowing can be arranged - by not collecting the data, not asking the question, or ensuring that what is known is not usable - and that kind is a construction rather than an absence.

As a philosopher would put it

The Greek treatment is largely privative: agnoia as the absence of knowledge, and Socratic ignorance as the recognition of that absence, which Plato treats as the beginning of enquiry.

The Indian traditions make it constitutive. Buddhist avidyā is the first link in dependent origination, the condition on which the whole chain of suffering depends; removing it is what liberation consists in. Advaita's version is adhyāsa, superimposition - taking the self to be what it is not - which is why liberation is described as the removal of an error rather than the acquisition of anything.

The modern development is agnotology, Proctor's term for the study of how ignorance is produced and maintained. Its subject is the deliberate manufacture of doubt and the structural absences - questions not funded, categories not counted, records not kept - that leave a domain unknown in a way that serves someone. Epistemologies of ignorance in feminist and critical race philosophy extend this to unknowing that is socially maintained and actively defended.

Where you meet it

Until the eighteenth century European maps of Africa filled the interior with mountains, kingdoms and river systems copied from Ptolemy and from traders' rumour. The blank spaces were not blank; they were furnished.

Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville stripped them. His maps from the 1740s onward removed everything that could not be sourced, leaving large areas empty. Contemporaries complained that his Africa was less informative than his predecessors'. It was, in the sense that it contained less; it was far more informative about what was known.

Jonathan Swift had mocked the older practice in 1733, noting that geographers filled gaps in their maps with elephants for want of towns. What d'Anville did was make ignorance visible and locatable, which turned it from a decorated absence into a specification of where to go and what to ask - and that is the difference between not knowing something and knowing that you do not.

What is actually disputed

Whether ignorance is an absence or a state.

The privative view treats it as a gap, which makes the remedy obvious: supply the information. The Indian traditions treat it as an active misapprehension, which means information alone does not touch it - you can be told the rope is a rope and still see a snake - and the remedy has to be transformative rather than informative. The dispute matters practically, because it predicts different things about whether correcting a false belief is a matter of evidence.

The agnotological claim is contested differently. That some ignorance is produced is well documented; whether the concept extends usefully to structural absences that nobody intended is disputed, since a category nobody thought to count is not obviously the same as a fact deliberately obscured, and treating them alike risks finding conspiracy in ordinary neglect.

Commonly confused with

  • not having been told Some ignorance is produced - by questions not asked and records not kept - and treating every case as accidental misses the ones that were arranged.

Defined against

  • Knowledge The pair looks trivial in English and is not, because the traditions disagree about whether the second is simply the absence of the first

Philosophers

  • Buddha Avidyā as the first link, and the root of the whole chain
  • Shankara Ignorance as superimposition, removed by knowledge rather than action
  • Socrates Knowing that one does not know, as the starting point
  • Nagarjuna Ignorance as the grasping of intrinsic nature
  • Ramanujacharya The objection that an ignorance with no locus is incoherent

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Knowledge c. 369 BC · Māyā c. 800 · Doubt 1641 · Truth c. 330 BC · Mokṣa c. 800

Avidyā heads the chain of dependent origination as the first link, which makes ignorance the root condition rather than a gap in information - a stronger claim than the Greek treatment of agnoia.