How To Be An Agnostic
can be found in glossy magazines, survive for us to inspect.
One papyrus found in the ash-covered town of Herculaneum,
neighbour to Pompeii, records a ‘four-part cure’ from anxiety:
(1) Don’t fear god; (2) Don’t worry about death; (3) What is
good is easy to get; (4) What is terrible is easy to endure. This
is a summary of Epicureanism, one of the ancient philosophies
to develop a genuinely popular following. But notice how the
four-part cure begs a question: ‘how should one live?’ will never
be fully answered unless the prior question of ‘who am I?’ is.
Socrates suspected that it was not only glossy magazines, as
it were, that could fail to address the real question. He thought
that any form of written philosophy risked doing so too. That
is presumably why he did not write anything in his own hand.
Wisdom cannot be read off the page, or, as Plato put it, it is
not like water that can be poured from one vessel into another.
The point is that reading philosophy can be as much of a
distraction as following four-part cures and the like: it can pose
as philosophy without touching on the crucial matter of self-
understanding.
I have no time for such things; and the reason, my friend, is
this. I am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to
know myself; and it really seems to me to be ridiculous to
look into other things before I have understood that. This
is why I do not concern myself with them. I accept what is
generally believed, and, as I was just saying, I look not into
them but into my own self.Am I a beast, Socrates continues in this section of the Phaedrus,
or do I have a divine nature? – again recalling the in-between
status of what it is to be human. This, then, is how Socrates
tries to ask the question. Knowing oneself becomes a matter of
developing the right attitude to oneself and the world around
one. This care for oneself too becomes part of his philosophy.
All in all, Socrates’ agnostic enquiry became a committed
way of life. What had started as a puzzle from the oracle was