How To Be An Agnostic: An A–Z
The darkest place is always underneath the lamp.
Chinese proverbHegel once remarked: ‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings
only with the falling of the dusk.’ Mary Midgley deploys the
image in her memoir: ‘The thought for which I want to use it
is that wisdom, and therefore philosophy, comes into its own
when things become dark and diffi cult rather than when they
are clear and straightforward. That – it seems to me – is why it is
so important.’
She laments what might be called the gnostic conception
of philosophy by telling the story of a man looking for a lost
key. Someone walked by and noticed that he was looking only
under the lamp-post. ‘Is that where it was mislaid?’, they ask.
‘No’, he replies. ‘But it is the easy place to look.’ The metaphor
and the story could stand for the difference we’ve been
teasing out.
A – is for the Agnostic Spirit
A practice of questioning This can be associated with Socrates,
the individual who said, ‘One thing I know, that I know I know
nothing’. He realised that the key to wisdom is not how much
you know, but is understanding the limits of what you know –
an understanding that he failed to fi nd in the politicians and
poets of his day. If Plato is right, he devised a method of ques-
tioning, now called the elenchus, that brought people to a posi-
tion where they realised the profundity of their not knowing.
For some this was too much, and they turned away. For others,
though, it revealed a deeper sense of what it is to be human, the
troubling puzzle and wonderful mystery of it.