Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feeling IgnorantA Phenomenology of Ignorance1Emily McRaeWhat does it feel like to be confused? What does it feel like to ignore something? These questions, although not prioritized in Western epistemologies, nevertheless matter in our lives. We often use our feelings as feedback on our epistemic states. Feeling ignorant is a reason to think we are ignorant and can motivate us to do something about it. Such feelings are fallible, of course—we can feel like we know something we do not in fact know—but they provide rough, practical guidance to tracking our own epistemic states and motivations. In fact, feelings of ignorance may be central to the activity of learning. It is doubtful that we could learn effectively without them.But the affective profile and phenomenology of ignorance are rarely theorized in Western accounts, in large part, I suspect, because of the pervasive dichotomy of "thinking and feeling" that historically has dominated Western philosophical approaches to the mind. This dichotomy encourages us to sort phenomena according to their boundaries, and, if we must choose, ignorance seems to be more of an epistemic event than an affective one. Luckily, though, we do not have to choose. Buddhist psychological taxonomies, as I will show, are drawn along different lines. This positions Buddhist moral psychology to be a productive framework to investigate ignorance, since it allows us to attend to its epistemic, affective, and somatic contours.This paper focuses on the affective component of ignorance: what ignorance feels like, when and why these feelings arise (and when and why [End Page 26] they do not), and what feeling ignorant, particularly in moral contexts, can do for us. Drawing on the fourth-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu, I examine the phenomenology of ignorance and argue that how ignorance feels depends on our epistemic access to our ignorance (whether and to what extent we know that we are ignorant) and the object of ignorance (what our ignorance is about). I argue that ignorance has a complex affective profile: it can feel a lot of different ways, ranging from unpleasant fogginess to clueless confidence. This complex affective profile makes ignorance difficult to spot, especially in ourselves, and marks a difference between ignorance and other problematic mental states, such as hatred or resentment, that have a more straightforward phenomenology. Understanding the connection between the object of ignorance, the epistemology of ignorance, and its affective phenomenology allows us to take on the project, essential in the Buddhist philosophical traditions, of locating and addressing our ignorance. Without careful attention to these three components, it is possible, and likely, to simply ignore our ignorance. I conclude with the suggestion that the ability to attend to our ignorance requires the cultivation of equanimity.This investigation into the affective side of ignorance requires the introduction of a core Buddhist philosophical and psychological category: the dysfunctional states (kleśa; nyon mongs). This is not only because the category of kleśa is a productive framework for understanding the phenomenology and epistemology of ignorance, as I will argue in the next section, but also because traditional Western categories of reason and emotion, or thinking and feeling, are not up to the task of investigating the affective aspects of ignorance. This dichotomy makes a division exactly at the place where my inquiry in this paper begins, for ignorance—as an affective, epistemic, and somatic experience—straddles the divide between thinking and feeling. The category of kleśa includes ignorance, along with other states that Western taxonomies would classify as emotions, such as hatred or envy. This allows for an investigation into features that ignorance may share with emotions without the commitment to the cumbersome claim that ignorance is (or is not) an emotion in the Western sense.The KleśasThe kleśas are dysfunctional states that cause wrong actions and suffering. They are typically divided into primary and secondary kleśas, where the primary kleśas are the root dysfunctional states and the secondary kleśas arise from the primary ones. Different texts and traditions include different kleśas as primary and secondary, but all agree that ignorance, desire, and hatred are among the primary kleśas...