SCIENTISTS often assume that everyone has an inbuilt drive to seek knowledge. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had a word for it: Wissenstrieb. No, the French intellectual Jacques Lacan responded. The spontaneous human reaction to a puzzle, he claimed, is “I don’t want to know about it.” Science, by offering so many possibilities for knowledge, offers non-scientists opportunities to confront this fundamental question—to know, or not to know? Perhaps it compels them to confront it.
I want to consider one poignant example and suggest that it proves the limits of our desire to know. If anyone in your family has Huntington’s disease, you may want to look away now.
Genetics allows each of us to learn not only whether we will suffer Huntington’s, but also when we will get it. The disease is caused by a genetic copying mistake—the stuttering repetition of the “word” CAG in the middle of the gene. And the number of repeats predicts rather well the age at which the illness will appear. If there are 40 repetitions, you will get the first symptoms in late middle age, and if there are 60, before you’re 20.
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Good living, fitness, the best healthcare available, the right food, family love and support make no difference if I’ve got the gene: it is pure fate, undiluted by environmental variability. Once the first symptoms appear I will slide into mental and physical paralysis, and death.
If there’s a history of this disease in my family, should I take the test? Probably I cannot bear the prospect of knowing when I will die. Consider a theoretical ideal solution: I authorise another person or an absolutely trusted institution to test me and not tell me the result, but to kill me unexpectedly and painlessly in my sleep just before the onslaught of the fatal illness. The problem with this is that I know that the Other knows, and this ruins everything, exposing me to horrifying gnawing suspicion.
Lacan drew attention to the paradoxical status of this knowledge about the Other’s knowledge. Recall Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence in which the husband who for long years harboured an illicit, passionate love for Countess Olenska, learns that his young wife all the time knew about his secret passion.
Therein resides the enigma of knowledge: the whole psychic economy of a situation radically changes not when the hero directly learns something, but when he gets to know that the Other (whom he mistook for ignorant) also knew it all the time and just pretended not to know to keep up appearance.
Might the ideal solution to the Huntington’s conundrum then be total ignorance? If I suspect that my children may have the disease, suppose I test them without their knowing it and then kill them painlessly just before the onslaught? Or consider an anonymous state institution doing this for all of us without our knowledge. But, again, the question pops up: do we know about the fact that the Other knows, or not? The way to a perfect totalitarian society is open…
It seems that in this case the drive not to know is strong, and futile. We have to consider that the underlying premise—that the ultimate ethical duty is that of protecting the Other from pain, of keeping them in protective ignorance—may be wrong.