The Curse of Knowledge
Truth is not a door to an open field where freedom awaits us but 'possibly' a narrowing corridor to a prison where self-destruction lies in store
I said in my heart, “I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.”
And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind.
For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
We live in a world of information overload. Every day, we are bombarded by an endless stream of articles, videos, tweets and posts vying for our attention. Amidst this cacophony of content, a growing chorus warns that this "intellectual obesity crisis" is slowly killing us.
Social media platforms, they say, is the main culprit - driving us to mindlessly consume more and more low-quality information.
The antidote, we are told, is to disconnect from the digital deluge and instead seek wisdom and enlightenment in the pages of good books. Spend your time absorbed in the works of great minds, and you will find the answers you seek. Devour their ideas and you will end up happy and satisfied.
But what if this conventional wisdom is also not what it is cracked up to be. Or at least has its own pitfalls that we need to be aware of.
What if I told you that your noble quest for truth, knowledge, wisdom and enlightenment might ‘likely’ leave you feeling emptier, unhappier, unsatisfied and more confused.
It seems like a counterintuitive, even blasphemous idea. The truth is meant to liberate us. How can it then enslave us?
But that is precisely the message that rings out across the ages, from some of history's greatest philosophers, writers and poets. The very same philosophers, writers and poets you are being asked to read instead of lying awake and watching cat videos!
So what is going on here?
Knowledge leaves us ‘feeling’ Empty
Let us begin our exploration with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the quintessential Renaissance polymath of the 18th century. Poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic, and amateur artist - Goethe embodied the archetype of the knowledge-seeker that counted other Enlightenment luminaries such as da Vinci, Galileo, Newton, Voltaire and Rousseau among its ranks.
It was through this lifelong, frustrating quest for knowledge and understanding that Goethe came to intimately understand the ultimate futility and emptiness that accompanies such an endeavor.
He would go on to brilliantly explore this theme in his magnum opus "Faust", bequeathing to his titular character the same unquenchable thirst for knowledge that drove and tormented Goethe himself.
The first lines of Goethe’s Faust literally spell Faust’s complaint against all the knowledge he has accumulated:
"NIGHT
(A lofty-arched, narrow, Gothic chamber. FAUST, in a chair at his desk, restless.)
FAUST
I've studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,—
And even, alas! Theology,—
From end to end, with labor keen;
And here, poor fool! with all my lore
I stand, no wiser than before:
Faust continues to rail against the sterility of his vast erudition, deeming it fruitless ("nothing can be known!"), agonizing in its futility ("Knowledge cuts me to the bone"), and beyond what any rational being should bear ("No dog would endure such a cursed existence!").
Disheartened by the emptiness he feels despite all his reading, all his truth-seeking, all his knowledge, and assured that nothing would ever satisfy his restlessness, Faust proceeds to make a pact with Mephistopheles, the devil.
As part of the pact, Mephistopheles agrees to provide Faust with any knowledge and pleasure that he desires with the caveat that if ever Faust was satisfied by the experience then his soul would belong to Mephistopheles.
Faust, in essence, in his pact with Mephistopheles, bets on his restlessness, his anxiety, and his dissatisfaction never ceasing. Having spent a lifetime pursuing knowledge and coming out feeling empty, Faust bets that he will likely not find anything new that will satisfy him as well.
Faust’s insight in the human condition which seals the Faustian bargain is a powerful statement by Goethe about the curse of knowledge.
The great nineteenth century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, an unceasing seeker of knowledge like Goethe, the writer of arguably two of the greatest novels of all time, and a thinker with unparalleled insight into the human condition, expresses similar Faustian sentiments in his Confessions:
“In my search for answers to life's questions I experienced just what is felt by a man lost in a forest.
He reaches a glade, climbs a tree, and clearly sees the limitless distance, but sees that his home is not and cannot be there; then he goes into the dark wood and sees the darkness, but there also his home is not.
So I wandered in that wood of human knowledge, amid the gleams of mathematical and experimental science which showed me clear horizons but in a direction where there could be no home, and also amid the darkness of the abstract sciences where I was immersed in deeper gloom the further I went, and where I finally convinced myself that there was, and could be, no exit.”
Tolstoy, like Faust, had read everything there was to read and had ended up feeling emptier, unhappier, more confused, less focused and less fulfilled.
Thousands of years before either Goethe or Faust, the writer of the Ecclesiastes, purported to be King Solomon, also expressed similar despondency with his accumulation of knowledge
I could fill pages upon pages with quotes from brilliant minds throughout history from Dante to Milton, from Shakespeare to Blake and from Pascal to Kierkegaard — Intellectual giants who dedicated their lives to understanding the world and the human condition — expressing similar frustrations with their search for the truth. But, in the interest of time, let us move on!
Knowledge leaves us ‘feeling’ Scared
So why does knowledge leave us feeling like this? One reason is simply the realization that no matter how much knowledge we acquire, the darkness never disappears.
The universe is a boundless, limitless and immeasurable place. Both time and space stretch behind and beyond us into endless infinity.
And on the edges of infinity lurks the darkness in the shadows. It scares us! As Pascal says in his Pensées:
"The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me."
And so we seek to banish the shadows through a never-ending cycle of exploration, examination, investigation and analysis. We dissect and categorize, arrange and organize, all in a desperate attempt to flood the darkness with the light of understanding.
But no matter how much we try, the horizon never recedes. The darkness persists. Each new discovery, each new question answered, each mystery resolved, each superstition banished, each myth debunked, each theory proved or disproved merely reveals new questions, new problems and new mysteries to be resolved.
As Aldous Huxley says in his “Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist":
"The more we know, the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness."
Knowledge therefore leaves us feeling scared, frightened, vulnerable and exposed by confronting us with the despairing possibility that no matter how much we know, the unknown will continue to persist.
Knowledge leaves us ‘feeling’ Stupid
The other thing we realize very early in our journey is the vastness of knowledge. And the complete assurance of our utter failure in hoping to grasp and make sense of even a tiny portion of it within our lifetime.
Carl Sagan drives home this brutal truth in this video where he visually shows how hopeless our predicament really is.
The pursuit of knowledge very quickly, then, starts to resemble a Sisyphean task, our hard-won understanding forever dwarfed by the mountain of mystery that looms before us.
The more we learn the more we realize how much more there is to learn; and the more we realize how much there is to learn, the more we ‘feel’ that we do not know anything at all.
This realization is perhaps so universal and so fundamental that it was first articulated not by a modern philosopher but one that lived over two millennia ago. Socrates, the father of Western philosophy, is famously quoted as saying:
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."
Knowledge therefore leaves us feeling not wiser but more stupid.
Knowledge leaves us ‘feeling’ Confused
The world is a complex place and making sense of it all is not easy. Certainly not within one lifetime. The more we know, the more we realize how difficult it is to unite all our knowledge into a cohesive whole.
And the level of intelligence is not the problem here. In fact, the best minds have failed at this more spectacularly than anyone else. Emerson, in his essay on Plato, criticizes Plato for exactly this failing. Of getting himself tied in knots, of losing his way:
“In the second place, he has not a system. The dearest defenders and disciples are at fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory is not complete or self-evident. One man thinks he means this, and another that; he has said one thing in one place, and the reverse of it in another place. He is charged with having failed to make the transition from ideas to matter […]
He argues on this side and on that. The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never tell what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides of every great question from him.”
T.S. Eliot muses on this problem of knowledge failing to illuminate us in his poem "The Rock" when he says:
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
This fragmentation of knowledge, despite all our exertions, therefore leaves us feeling profoundly disoriented, lost, confused and hopeless.
Knowledge leaves us ‘feeling’ Lonely
Society around us basically functions on the basis of shared myths, beliefs, and assumptions. These myths, beliefs, and assumptions, many of them permeating our language, our social interactions, our laws, our institutions and even our very thought patterns, are what bind us together into a cohesive whole.
But knowledge, by its very nature, seeks to question these myths, beliefs, and assumptions. It seeks to break them down, to analyze them, to test them against reality and arrive at the truth.
The more we learn the more we start to see through the myths, beliefs, and assumptions, the illusions, that hold society together, and the more difficult it becomes for us to relate to those who still believe in them.
As the nineteenth century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer writes in his “Wisdom of Life”:
“The more a man has in himself, the less he will want from other people, — the less, indeed, other people can be to him. This is why a high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial. True, if quality of intellect could be made up for by quantity, it might be worth while to live even in the great world; but unfortunately, a hundred fools together will not make one wise man.”
The nineteenth century American transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau, who spent two years alone in the woods exploring nature and meditating, expresses this feeling in “Walden”:
“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
Jung explains why this happens. Why the more we learn the more lonely we feel:
“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
Nothing, it seems, has the power to make us feel more alone, more isolated, more disconnected and more alienated from those around us than true knowledge.
Can there be a worse punishment? Having sacrificed everything on our quest for the truth — having dealt with the struggle, the travails, the despair, and the anguish — to find out that you cannot speak of it with anyone else, nothing can possibly be worse than that.
Knowledge leaves us open to Persecution
Perhaps not having friends is not such a bad thing when you realize that the same friends might come after you with their pitchforks, torches, knives and shovels if perchance you were to start sharing your truth with others.
Since time immemorial, philosophers, prophets and poets who threatened to speak the truth and disrupt the smooth functioning of society have been seen as outsiders, misfits and troublemakers who needed to be straightened out, persecuted, exiled or put to death.
This is why the prophets of the Old Testament were persecuted, why Socrates was put on trial, why Jesus was put on the cross, why Hypatia was brutally murdered by a Christian mob, why Prophet Mohammed was banished by the Quraysh, why Galileo was condemned by the Church, why Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam, why Denis Diderot was imprisoned, why Rousseau was exiled, why Voltaire was forced to flee France, why Nietzsche was ostracized, and why Alexander Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned in a Soviet gulag.
This is but a small selection from an extremely long roster.
This is precisely why Rumi advises the philosopher not to risk persecution by revealing his true beliefs in a chapter titled “An explanation of why one must keep one's own mystical state and intoxication hidden from the ignorant” in his “Masnavi”. He writes:
Listen to what Hakim Sana'i said:
'Rest where you drank the wine your drunken head!'
For from the tavern if a drunk should stray
He'll seem a clown with whom the children play:
He'll tumble into puddles everywhere
And all the wretches will laugh, point, and stare;
They'll follow him because he's strange and new
Although of drunkenness they have no clue.
Rumi, perhaps, knew this because he witnessed first hand the persecution and potential murder of his spiritual master Shams Tabrizi — responsible for transforming Rumi from a learned, bookish scholar, lost in his own head into a Sufi poet — at the hands of Rumi’s own followers and disciples
Elsewhere he repeats again:
Keep your lips sealed, don't mention, as a rule,
Your path, your wealth, and your religious school,
For these three can attract so many foes,
Each one will wait to catch you once he knows—
Don't even tell a few, have you not read:
'All secrets shared by more than two are spread'?
And even gives the example of the Prophet to follow:
With metaphors to fool all those around.
The Prophet gave exclusive teachings too,
Answering his men though they then had no clue;
To cloak his words he'd use a parable
So foes could not grasp what was valuable,
And he extracted answers from each foe
While from his questions none of them would know!
Accessing pure insight into the truth is then the surest way not only to become a social outcast but to risk persecution and gamble with your life.
Knowledge can paralyze Us
If not loneliness and persecution at the hands of one's friends, then complete, total and utter paralysis awaits the truth seeker who dares to venture too far down the path of knowledge.
Nietzsche in “The Birth of Tragedy" explains the brutal effects of knowledge when he says:
“Understanding kills action, action depends on a veil of illusion.”
However, why this happens requires a bit more explanation as Nietzsche goes on to elaborate:
“This is what Hamlet teaches us, not the stock interpretation of Hamlet as a John-a-dreams who, from too much reflection, from an excess of possibilities, so to speak, fails to act. Not reflection, not that! - True understanding, insight into the terrible truth, outweighs every motive for action, for Hamlet and Dionysiac man alike.”
Let that sink in for a moment for it is perhaps slightly counter-intuitive. Nietzsche is not saying that knowledge paralyzes us through a surplus of options, the usual modern narrative given the abundance of the world around us, but rather because it reveals the futility of our action in the first place.
That is the meaning of Hamlet’s soliloquy in Act 3, Scene 1 of the play:
“To be, or not to be, that is the question— Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them.”
Nietzsche explains further in his “Will to Power" why being skeptical about our beliefs, putting them under scrutiny and questioning them until they give way is a dangerous proposition:
“The untenability of one interpretation of the world, upon which a tremendous amount of energy has been lavished, awakens the suspicion that all interpretations of the world are false.”
As Nietzsche explains the impact of this realization in “Human All-Too-Human”:
“He who thinks most deeply knows that he is always in the wrong, however he may act and decide.”
Perhaps inspired by Nietzsche, Osho, the controversial Indian mystic, expresses a similar belief in his book "The Book of Secrets" for those looking to borrow the best from the various religions of the world:
“In this age systems have become very heavy and confused. For many reasons the whole point has been lost. Before, each system lived in its own world: a Jaina was born Jaina, lived Jaina, died Jaina. He did not study Hindu scriptures, it was prohibited. He did not go to the mosque or the church, that was a sin. He lived in the walls of his system. Nothing alien ever penetrated his mind, so no confusion was there.
But all that has been destroyed and everyone is acquainted with everything else. Hindus are reading the Koran and Mohammedans are reading the Gita. Christians are moving to the East and the East is moving to the West. Everything is confused. The confidence that used to come from a system is no longer there. Everything has penetrated your mind and things are jumbled up. Jesus is not alone there, Krishna has penetrated and Mohammed has also penetrated. And they have contradicted each other within you. Now nothing is certain.”
The more we learn, the more our convictions crumble. Each new piece of knowledge reveals our beliefs as just one possibility among countless others. Where we once stood on firm ground, we now find ourselves adrift in a sea of uncertainty. Is anything true? Can anything be known? The very foundations of our worldview erode with each new discovery.
Skepticism becomes our constant companion, an unshakable shadow darkening even the brightest epiphanies.
Knowledge can destroy Us
According to Dostoevsky, profound insight followed by utter inaction can only lead to one outcome: self-hatred, self-contempt and self-disgust resulting in self-destruction.
Through the tortured intellectual souls that populate his novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky shows us the dark trajectory our fates can take when knowledge immobilizes us.
Ivan Karamazov, in The Brothers Karamazov, loses his mind as a result of his inability to take the actions demanded by his philosophical conclusions.
But perhaps it is Dostoevsky’s Underground Man who forms his strongest critique of the paralysis that results from immense knowledge.
The Underground Man possesses some of the most profound insights into the human psyche but lacks the courage to take advantage of them. Spiteful of his own cowardice, he retreats into a metaphorical underground existence, ties himself into philosophical knots and builds the foundation for his resentment which he then directs, with full force, towards himself and towards those around him.
So contemptible is Dostoevsky’s Underground Man that the novel's opening paragraph stands in the history of literatureas likely the single greatest articulation of self-loathing ever penned. The first paragraph of the novel reads:
“I am a sick man…I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts. However, I don’t know a fig about my sickness, and am not sure what it is that hurts me. I am not being treated and never have been, though I respect medicine and doctors. What's more, I am also superstitious in the extreme; well, at least enough to respect medicine. (I'm sufficiently educated not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, sir, I refuse to be treated out of spite. Now, you will certainly not be so good as to understand this. Well, sir, but I understand it. I will not, of course, be able to explain to you precisely who is going to suffer in this case from my spite; I know perfectly well that I will in no way "muck things up" for the doctors by not taking their treatment; I know better than anyone that by all this I am harming only myself and no one else. But still, if I don't get treated, it is out of spite. My liver hurts; well, then let it hurt even worse!”
The Underground Man’s self-hatred drips from every word of the paragraph above. And the novel does not become any easier from there on. Dostoevsky does not hold back.
While Dostoevsky was the first modern novelist who clearly laid out for the modern reader how the weight of unbearable knowledge can crush us psychologically, the insight itself, the caution that knowledge can lead to our destruction is contained within our sacred books and ancient mythologies
In the biblical story of Genesis, Adam and Eve's fall from grace is triggered by them eating the forbidden fruit of knowledge. In Greek mythology, Prometheus is punished by Zeus for giving humans the gift of fire, which symbolizes knowledge and technology.
Truth, then, is not a door to an open field where freedom awaits us but possibly a narrowing corridor to a prison where self-destruction lies in store.
Concluding thoughts
So knowledge can leave us feeling empty, scared, stupid, confused, lonely, persecuted, paralyzed and possibly mad.
Which begs the question: why are things setup this way?
Why are we given this incessant thirst for knowledge that can potentially lead to our downfall?
Why do we seek the very source of our own destruction?
Iqbal, the great poet of the East, who took inspiration from Rumi and Goethe, in his poem Man, blames nature for its cruel joke on man:
Nature has played a strange and wanton joke—
Making man a seeker of secrets,
But hiding the secrets from his view!
The urge for knowledge gives him no rest,
But the secret of life remains undiscovered.
Wonder is at the beginning and the end—
What else is there in this house of mirrors?
He ends his poem with the haunting:
All things delight in their very existence,
They are drunk with the wine of being.
But there is no one to drive away his sorrow—
How bitter are the days of man!
Perhaps, then, we are just born this way. Born to seek in a hall of mirrors, fated to find nothing, destined to suffer, and doomed to destroy ourselves in the process.
Perhaps life is just a tragedy after all.
Further Explorations
So where does this leave us? Is Ignorance indeed bliss?
Are we better off doom scrolling on our social media feeds than spending time with books?
Probably not.
The bad news is that all of the above stands true. Seeking knowledge, truth, understanding, insight, wisdom and enlightenment is indeed a dangerous game to play. It destroys the illusions which comfort us and leaves us feeling alone, isolated, persecuted and possibly mad.
As Nietzsche writes in “Beyond Good and Evil” how someone who embarks on the quest for knowledge, truth and wisdom:
“…proves that he is probably not only strong, but brave to the point of madness. He enters a labyrinth, he multiplies by a thousand the dangers already inherent in the very act of living, not the least of which is the fact that no one with eyes will see how and where he gets lost and lonely and is torn limb from limb by some cave-Minotaur of conscience.”
The good news, however, is that if we take this opportunity to clear the ground up, to let go of our limiting assumptions, our egoic attachments then we can possibly start making progress towards finding our true selves and building a more authentic relationship with the world.
The Dark night of the soul is an inevitable milestone and a terrible curse of knowledge in our quest for the truth.
But there is a way out. The very philosopher, prophets, poets, novelists and writers who tell us about the despairing curse of knowledge show us the way forward in their writing.
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Rumi, Iqbal, Goethe, Dante, Milton, amongst countless others, all share what we can do to break free from the prison we build ourselves. The same prison they found themselves in after their long journey. I hope to explore this topic more in my upcoming editions.
In the meantime, I would love to hear what you think about the topics discussed here. What would you want me to write next?
Thanks for the interesting reflection! I'd be interested in hearing more of what you think is on the other side once we 'break out of the prison' we've created for ourselves? Is there a specific thinker that you like, who offers the way out? Also, have you read much Kierkegaard? Thought of him as I read your essay. Saw some cool parallels in his thinking and what you were engaging with here.
Thanks for reading and the generous comment Raymond!
I am thinking through a post that answers the question from a particular thinker’s perspective. Might provoke some thoughts on your side.
I’ve read Kierkegaard, some primary and a lot secondary, but need to go deeper. If you see anything in my posts that resonates with his philosophy, I would love to hear that.