How To Be An Agnostic
beyond the prioritisation of sexuality as a determining character-
istic of the individual – a ‘way out’ of sexuality, as he put it, and
into an, as yet, unknown way of being sexual.
Not so academic
Montaigne and Foucault stand out as two examples of modern
philosophers who explicitly engaged with Socrates in his agnos-
ticism and Plato in his emphasis on a way of life. One can point
to others.
Consider Descartes, the man who doubted everything until
he was left only with the thinking ‘I’. It might be thought that
nothing could be more removed from life than that, and indeed,
many of his Cartesian followers have practised such hyper-
speculation. And yet, he derived his famous ‘Je pense, donc je
suis’ in the context of a meditation. It leads the reader through
feelings as well as thoughts. The aim seems to be two-fold. First,
the meditations were not supposed to inculcate radical doubt
for its own sake but to reveal to the philosopher the limits of
human reason. Second, Descartes believed that someone needs
to be in the right position to receive truth, as well as having
the right arguments. Meditation could lead to the construction
of such an attitude. David Hume made not dissimilar sugges-
tions. He discussed a kind of passive cognition that happens to
us. One must make preparations to be open to the more prepa-
rations that would connect the philosophy to the life.
Or take a philosopher like Schopenhauer. He is famous for his
pessimism and explicitly said that philosophy cannot change
lives. He thought human beings were the tragic slaves of their
base wills. People may make great efforts to aspire to the higher
things that their ‘excess intellect’ glimpses above them; but will
‘will out’. Love, for example, is always brutalised by the animal
will for coitus. The result, some of his interpreters say, is suf-
fering and labour and radical unhappiness. This though is not
quite fair. Every day Schopenhauer read from the Upanishads.
They confi rmed for him a rather different ethic: if the world