How To Be An Agnostic
to, you are in part not saying ‘no’ to it. So a negative dialectic,
paradoxically, has the capacity to lead us to new worlds, towards
that which is beyond our comprehension, to the transcendent.
It’s like the sculptor who works by removing material from the
block of wood or stone, saying ‘no’ to this chip; and who leaves
some material, not saying ‘no’ to that. The result is a revealing
of the form.
Or remember Socrates and his daemon, the inner voice that
only ever said ‘no’ to him, telling him not to do this or that,
and thereby leaving him open to new experience and the
wisdom to be found with an awareness of the limits of your
knowledge. Or you could relate it to the falsifi cation thesis of
Popper, that nothing can be proven to be true, only proven to
be untrue. That which remains, that which we cannot say ‘no’
to, is the best approximation.
Illus. 4.2: Buddha as depicted at Kamakura, Japan