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On the Fence - Iconoclasts
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On the Fence
In writing this study of agnosticism, I don’t aim to change the minds of believers or non-believers. Instead, I aim to show doubters that there’s nothing wrong in doubting. Agnostic doubt isn’t just an indecisive sitting on the fence, with religion on one side and science on the other. If we want to see agnosticism through that metaphor, it’s more like walking on a fence, or like spinning like a dervish on a fence. It’s also like running along the fence onto other fences, which have other things on either side: other fields, gardens, back alleys, mountain ranges.
Agnostics really dislike confining metaphors, especially those that create false dichotomies, as if the physical world studied in the sciences didn’t give rise to the mind that ponders Heaven and Hell. Agnostics are liable to cry, “To heck with fences!” or “Don’t fence me in!” They’re liable to leap down from the fence, drive like maniacs on the autostrada, and make pilgrimages up dirt paths into the unknown.
And then suddenly they may hop back up on the fence, and continue their journey across city and farm. Looking for hours on both sides, they may notice that the fence gets lost on the horizon. It’s difficult to say what’s on this side and what’s on that. They look below them and the divider is gone. The wooden line is now a pier sticking into the Caribbean, now a footpath over the Ganges.
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Iconoclasts
Agnosticism is neither a stasis of indecision nor a philosophy that lacks historical depth. On the contrary, it has deep roots, strong reasons, and an endless number of applications. Few knew this better than Byron, whose meandering epic Don Juan (1824) champions doubt in many of its form. Upending the structure of the epic, he says he’ll write 12 books (like Homer), yet continues past 16; he says he’ll tell the secrets of the afterlife (like Homer and Dante), yet does no such thing. In Canto 9, stanza 17, he argues that because our understanding of reality is so uncertain, the thing that most closely corresponds to our experience is doubt. In this sense, doubt is more certain than doctrine, proof, or certainty.
There's no such thing as certainty, that's plain
As any of Mortality's conditions;
So little do we know what we're about in
This world, I doubt if doubt itself be doubting.
Like epicureans — and Byron — agnostics strive to live in the moment, even to relax into it. They want to savour the fluid truth of living naturally, spontaneously, and authentically. They refuse to live in fear of cracking the golden frame of an icon someone nailed to their wall.
The National Gallery, London. Photo by RYC.
Yet agnostics differ from atheists in their iconoclasm — that is, in their breaking of icons. This is because they question both revelation and reason. They’re not afraid to break the doctrines of either, figuring that if these doctrines are truly solid they can’t be broken. In sounding the depths of reason and revelation, they go as deeply as possible into both. They refuse to worry about being called unreasonably emotional or coldly rational. They aim to leave that name-calling behind, and instead follow the moment’s slippery truth, whether that be glimpsed in the academy of the scientist, the temple of the priest, or the imagination of the poet.
Agnostics also question their own philosophy. At times, they even accuse themselves of setting up an impossible ideal of infinite exploration, much as theists set up an unchanging and invisible Truth, and atheists set up repeatable verification according to the scientific method.
The agnostic notion that we can simply go on thinking and feeling without deciding on a particular truth is impractical to many, perhaps undesirable to most. Yet this is what agnostics believe: we can keep stretching our emotional and intellectual horizons, as if we were walking towards the horizon on a planet that grows larger every day.
Sunset over Urbino (photo by RYC)