How To Be An Agnostic
one’s ignorance. The direction that any one individual chooses
to take after that will vary. For Nietzsche, having undergone
a therapy of writing in his so-called middle-period books, the
next step was to develop the will to live in spite of what he had
concluded about the nature of existence. He created the heroic
character of Zarathustra to explore what that might mean. For
the Christian, as John Cottingham explains in The Spiritual
Dimension: ‘Dependency, vulnerability, the insistence that
strength is made perfect in weakness, are the hallmarks of the
Judaeo-Christian spiritual tradition (and perhaps the key Islamic
notion of submission says something not too dissimilar).’
Jonathan Lear believes that Freud can be read as providing an
answer to the Socratic question of how one should live and the
intuition that it begins with knowing oneself. The problem, as
Socrates himself knew, is that people readily deceive themselves.
Like prisoners in a cave confusing shadows with reality, they
would prefer to think that they know the meaning of things and
that they understand their own nature. Admitting ignorance,
they suppose, would be to condemn humankind to its self-
delusion, lost like the blind leading the blind. Freud’s way out
of this fi x was to devise a way of talking that borrowed from the
early Christian tradition of radical uncertainty about oneself.
Socrates founded his philosophy on a practice that is recognisably
similar. He developed the habit of persistently asking questions
of himself and others that revolved around a central conviction:
‘I am very conscious that I am not wise at all.’
U – is for the Unorthodox
Some of the greatest religious spirits have been heretics – not
least, the founders of the great religions.
W – is for Why?
Meaning is nothing if not subjective. This is the fundamental
reason that the scientifi c worldview, for all it unpicks, does not