Agnosticism as a Worldview, After Max Müller

Thanks to Herbert Spencer, whose writings enjoy great popularity even among certain classes of the Russian educated public who consider it a point of honor to follow every movement of Western European thought, a peculiar worldview has spread in the West, which has received the characteristic name of agnosticism. Agnosticism (from the Greek word ἀγνοῖα—ignorance) is a teaching that proceeds from the assumption that man, by reason of his limitations, cannot know the essence of things, and that all his so-called knowledge is confined to the external side of things, insofar as they are given to our senses as phenomena. In view of such limitation, man must renounce all attempts—as utterly futile and beyond his powers—to apprehend the essence of things and of the entire surrounding world; and since it is precisely in the sphere of the essence of things that the ideas of God, the soul, and all the facts of the spiritual world in general reside, the conclusions to which such a worldview arrives are readily understood. According to it, all these subjects, lying beyond the possibility of human cognition, must therefore be entirely abandoned, and to occupy oneself with them means to engage in an undertaking even more fruitless than bailing out a boundless ocean with a spoon. The worldview is evidently cheerless, though understandable as a certain phase in the intellectual movement of contemporary humanity. Agnosticism in this case represents a transitional stage from materialism. The latter, in its extreme conclusions, was not willing to acknowledge any essence of things whatsoever. For it, the world was precisely as it appears to our senses, and beyond this world of phenomena it wished to know nothing, attributing everything else to the realm of fictions and the idealistic ravings it so despised. But precisely this extreme materialism contained within itself its own refutation, and its principle could stand only so long as it was not subjected to serious philosophical criticism. Yet a single touch of such criticism sufficed to at once expose the crude bankruptcy of materialism as a system—a system which in reality was merely the expression of an elementary, utterly childish, wholly unphilosophical worldview, since it did not even understand the distinction between the essence of things and their manifestation. And so, when this pitiful side of materialism was laid bare in all its nakedness, its adherents—unable any longer to maintain their footing on the ground of their cherished system, and at the same time unwilling to sacrifice their principles in favor of the opposing system, namely idealism—contrived a kind of intermediate worldview which, though theoretically no longer denying the existence of a supersensible world, yet practically denies it, proclaiming that this supersensible world, as containing the essence of things, is inaccessible to us and is an unknowable world. This intermediate worldview is agnosticism; and since in its time materialism had been widely diffused throughout Europe, it is natural that its successor—agnosticism, as its direct heir—has also spread widely, claiming all those who, having rejected the crude principles of materialism, do not yet have the courage to bow openly and frankly before the true worldview, hallowed by Christianity.

Agnosticism, as a philosophical worldview, is especially widely diffused in England—that homeland of deism, with which it has certain points of contact—and where it has found its most prominent philosophical spokesman in the person of Spencer[1]. There is even published a special organ of agnosticism[2], around which all the best representatives of this tendency are grouped and in which various philosophical questions find their resolution from the standpoint of this worldview. But it is evident that this worldview can satisfy only those who are sufficiently indifferent to the higher questions of existence to, so to speak, wave them aside. But there are people of another sort—and these are precisely the most serious—who pursue the resolution of these “accursed” questions with agonizing longing, and such persons, of course, can never become agnostics. In this sense the celebrated English orientalist Max Müller recently expressed himself. Having been invited to take part in the composition of a collective reply to the question “Why do I lead a moral life,” intended for publication in an agnostic journal, he declined the invitation, since he does not regard himself as a follower of agnosticism. In justification of this he then published a short article under the title “Why I am not an Agnostic,” and this article, for all its brevity, is so remarkable in content—containing, so to speak, the philosophical confession of the celebrated learned orientalist—that it attracted universal attention among philosophically cultivated and reflective people, both abroad and among us; and since the author’s conclusions are of very considerable interest even from a theological point of view, we consider it not superfluous to reproduce this article in its essential content in the pages of our journal[3]. Having pointed out that agnosticism, as a philosophical system, still requires more precise definition, Max Müller says that if agnosticism contains no more than the negation of Gnosticism, and if by Gnosticism is understood the teaching of such philosophers as Cerinthus, Valentinus, or Marcion, then he of course does not adhere to the views of these philosophizing heretics. But this purely negative definition of agnosticism would hardly be satisfactory to the eminent agnostics of our time[4]. Although agnosticism excludes Alexandrian Gnosticism, it may nevertheless contain a great variety of views of the universe that are mutually inconsistent in many respects, even while agreeing in their general rejection of Gnosticism. But agnosticism, as it is now understood, appears to signify something altogether different. It is understood in the sense that ‘a man should not say that he knows or believes what he has no scientific grounds for knowing or believing.’ This is perhaps a proposition which few would refuse to subscribe to, though it leaves an open door for many disputes as to what is meant by scientific grounds. Some astronomers thought that the earth was the center of the universe; others denied this; both parties, as they thought, expressed their opinion on scientific grounds. The opponents of Galileo adduced in favor of their view what they considered scientific grounds; Galileo likewise adduced scientific grounds in support of his conviction; and it would hardly be desirable that the representatives of both camps should have confined themselves to simple agnosticism—an acknowledgment of ignorance—regarding the true position of the earth or the sun in our planetary system, and, shrugging their shoulders, said: who can know this?

We enter a new domain of thought if, as agnostics, we are asked to “confess that we know nothing of what may lie beyond phenomena.” But this also, if properly interpreted, is a proposition which few would refuse to accept among those capable of penetrating the meaning of words; and persons versed in philosophical terminology might perhaps regard such a proposition as almost tautological. What may be, or even what lies, beyond phenomena is precisely what we call the transcendent—that is, what surpasses or lies beyond the horizon of our knowledge and therefore leaves us in ignorance, or makes us agnostics. The phenomenal, or that which belongs to the domain of phenomena, denotes what appears to differ from what is; and if knowledge were confined to what simply is, then all that merely appears could have no claim to producing genuine knowledge.

But if all these preliminary propositions are so evident as to render all dispute almost impossible, it may seem strange that agnosticism—not only as a name but as a doctrine—has recently been presented as a distinctive peculiarity of the nineteenth century. The entire history of philosophy forms but one continuous commentary on the fact that there are things which we can know and things which we cannot know; more than that: the chief aim of all critical philosophy consists in drawing a sharp line between these two classes of things. If we begin the history of systematic philosophy with Socrates, as it has been set forth by his disciples, we know that Socrates, though he had been declared the wisest of men by the Delphic oracle, declared that he knew only one thing, and that one thing was that he knew nothing. Some have thought this was merely a simple expression of extreme modesty on Socrates’ part, like what he says in the Hippias Minor: “My limitation is proved to me by the fact that when I meet one of you, so celebrated for wisdom and of whose wisdom all the Hellenes bear witness, I find myself knowing nothing.” But in his acknowledgment of his ignorance there is a far deeper meaning, for he regarded this consciousness of his ignorance as proof of his wisdom. He could therefore only have meant that, in his conviction, all human knowledge is confined to phenomena alone, and that he himself knew nothing of what lies beyond phenomena.

This question had to await its final answer until Kant wrote his Critique of Pure Reason and furnished a scientific demonstration of the limitedness inherent in human knowledge. Meanwhile, the acknowledgment of our ignorance—this truly philosophical agnosticism—found expression again and again on the lips of all the most celebrated philosophers. They did not call it agnosticism, because that very word, as apparently excluding only Gnosticism, would have conveyed too narrow and therefore false a concept. The Greek philosophers called it by the technical name ἀγνοῖα[5], or, if they wished to express the soul’s own relation to transcendent questions, they called it ἐποκῆ—that is, suspension of definitive judgment. During the Middle Ages, that same concept which now goes by the name of agnosticism was known under the name of docta ignorantia, that is, ignorance grounded in knowledge of our ignorance or of our inability to apprehend anything lying beyond phenomena.

In both of these senses, therefore—that is, in the sense that I am not a follower of the Alexandrian Gnostics, and that I admit that all objects of our knowledge are ipso facto phenomenal—I would not hesitate to call myself an agnostic. And yet I cannot do so, for two reasons: first, because I am strongly sympathetic to the aims which were originally envisaged by Alexandrian Gnosticism and Neoplatonism; and second, because I hold the view that the human spirit in its highest functions is not confined to knowledge of phenomena alone.

Let us begin with the second point. I need hardly say that the very name phenomenon or appearance carries within it the thought that there is something which appears, something of which we can say that it appears, something which seems to stand in a certain relation to us, and precisely to that extent can be known by us. That which appears to us remains, before it appears, unknown to us; but it becomes known to us only from that side from which it can be known—that is, from the side of its visibility, from the side of its phenomenal manifestability, insofar as it becomes the object of human knowledge. It is known to us as something without which the phenomenal would be impossible and even inconceivable. That without which the phenomenal would be inconceivable is sometimes called the noumenal, the real, the absolute; and if we call its absence inconceivable, we thereby posit that there exist certain forms of our thought from which our phenomenal knowledge cannot free itself—certain Kantian forms of intuition and understanding. These forms, as Kant has shown, cannot be a mere result of phenomenal experience, because they possess the character of necessity, which no phenomenal experience can confer. Let us take a very simple case. It is well known that we always see only one side of the moon; and yet, by virtue of both our sensory intuition (Anschauungsformen) and the categories of our reason, we know with complete certainty—a certainty that experience, however many thousands of times repeated, could never give us—that there must exist another side of the moon, which we shall never see from our earth, but which for our consciousness is just as real as the side we do see. These forms of sensory intuition admit of no exceptions. The rule that every material body must have more than one side is absolute. In precisely the same way, if we think at all, we must submit to the law of causality—a peculiar category of our reason, without which even the simplest phenomenal knowledge would be impossible. We never see a horse: we know only of certain states of our own consciousness, produced through the medium of our senses. But that these impressions presuppose a cause—or, as we call it, an object outside us—depends on that law of causality within us to which we must submit unconditionally, whether we will or not.

If we must acknowledge in every individual object of our phenomenal knowledge something, or a force, which manifests itself therein and which we know and can know only through its phenomenal manifestation, then we must also acknowledge a particular force which manifests itself throughout the entire universe. We may perhaps call this force unknowable or incomprehensible; but we may also call it the most known of all, since all our knowledge derives from the investigation of its phenomenal manifestations. That it exists—this we know; what it is in itself, that is, apart from its relation to us or apart from our knowledge of it, we of course cannot know; but we know with certainty that without it even the world of phenomena, or the phenomenal universe, would be impossible.

This is the first step which leads you beyond agnosticism and which at once deprives me of the right to call myself an agnostic. But there is yet another, and an even more decisive step, which completely deprives me of any right to that name. I cannot but observe in the universe an all-pervading causality or ground for every thing, because even when in my phenomenal ignorance I do not yet know the cause of this or that, I am already compelled to assume that such a cause exists in any case; I feel obliged to assume this because, for a mind such as ours, nothing can exist without sufficient reason. But how do I know this? It is precisely here that the point lies at which I cease to be an agnostic. I do not know it from experience, and yet I know it with far greater certainty than experience could afford. Nor is this a new discovery. The first step toward this discovery was taken very early by the Greek philosophers when, turning from the observation of external nature to the higher domains of thought, they recognized the operation of reason, or νοῦς, in nature—a reason that penetrates the universe. Anaxagoras, who was the first to recognize the necessity of the existence of reason in nature, attributed to it no more than the first impulse to the interaction of its indifferent elements. But even his νοῦς, as was soon observed, represented more than a mere primum mobile; more than a κινοῦν ἀκινητόν (the unmoved mover). We ourselves, after a thousand years of physical and metaphysical investigation, can say no more than that there exists a νοῦς, that spirit and reason exist in nature. Sa majesté le hasard (His Majesty Chance) has long since been dethroned in all scientific investigation, and neither natural selection, nor the struggle for existence, nor the influence of environment, nor any other factors of that kind are capable of explaining the Logos—that reason which looks at us through a thousand eyes through the transparent veil of nature and demands rational acknowledgment from the inner logos within us. If some philosopher can persuade himself that the true and well-ordered genera of nature are the result of mechanical causes, by whatever name he may give them, then he moves in a world altogether different from mine. He belongs to a period of thought antecedent to Anaxagoras. For Plato these genera were ideas; for the Peripatetics they were words or logoi; for both they were manifestations of thought. Had these thoughts not existed prior to their manifestation or their individualization in the phenomenal world, human reason could never have discovered them there and named them. Hence we, as Christians, may say with full warrant the words of the Apostle John: “In the beginning was the Logos.” If we call this Logos the Son, and if we speak of the Father whom no one knows save the Son—the so-called Deus ante intellectum—we are using human language; but if we know that all human language is metaphorical, we must never attempt to confine these words within the narrow limits of their literal sense. That which lies behind the veil of these words is in reality the legitimate domain of ἀγνοῖας, or agnosticism. But all that lies on this side of the veil is our possession—the possession of language and of subsequent science, which in the chaos of phenomena has discovered and with every new generation of Aristotles and Bacons strives ever more fully to discover the hidden cosmos, or the reflection of that Logos without which nature would be illogical, irrational, chaotic, and would exist only by the force of chance and not by the will of a rational Power. Call this Power the Father, or call it a Person, and you will neither lose nor gain anything, for these words are likewise figurative; and that which constitutes the personal element in man or in any other living being is just as unknown to us as that which constitutes the personal element in the author, the thinker, the orator, or the creator of logoi. All that I affirm is this: that if we ever speak of the Logos and of logoi, and clearly understand what we mean by these words, we can no longer say that in the beginning was protoplasm, and that the whole world evolved from it by purely mechanical or external forces. Once we have acknowledged in all the genera, or kinds, of the natural world not merely the unknowable, or substance and incomprehensible force, but also thoughts and the will of spirit, then this Spirit is not only not incomprehensible, but is the constant subject of investigation in its infinite manifestations by human science. In reality this is the sole object of all our knowledge, from the first attempts at crude grouping and naming to the final efforts of scientific inquiry striving to classify, investigate, and comprehend that object. All our knowledge of nature thus becomes an acknowledgment of the logoi of nature on the part of our own logos. Every genus becomes a logos, an eternal thought or an eternal word; more than this—it appears to follow from this that in nature there is no room for anything other than genera; no room for species, or εἴδη, in the proper sense of those terms. Here we see how the science of language becomes the science of thought. If what constitutes a genus is unity of origin, then true science knows individuals representing the genus, but not species—though for practical purposes the human mind may assign that name to varieties in their more or less hereditary and stable form, such varieties being in reality no more than the necessary consequence of individualization and diversity. If every individual differs and must differ in something from all other individuals of the same kind, then the accumulation of these differences naturally leads to the formation of what is called a species. We may thus speak, for example, of differences, varieties, or even species of horses, including the three-toed hipparion. But in reality there exists only one ἱππότης—if only we have eyes to see it, as Plato used to say.

I hardly dare say whether I know all this, or whether I only believe it. I cannot but see order, law, reason, or logos in the world, and I cannot explain this to myself simply by subsequent events—call them what you will: survival of the fittest, natural selection, or anything else. In any case, this knowledge is for me irresistible, and I therefore dare not enter the camp of the agnostics under a false flag. I am not certain that in my path to this knowledge I have not made use of something beyond the facts of our direct consciousness and the conclusions that can be logically drawn from them. Without these two authorities I do not consider myself obligated to accept any other testimony whatsoever. History alone can tell you how these ideas arose and how they developed from century to century. All that I have attempted to do—and of course in a very imperfect manner—is to discover the reasons which in the history of the world have led men to acknowledge what, according to the teaching of certain philosophers, is founded neither on the testimony of their senses nor on the logical conclusions of their reason. These reasons and their historical progress I have recently attempted to trace in my Gifford Lectures, and especially in the last volume, entitled Theosophy or Psychological Religion[6]. In one sense I have been and hope I am an agnostic—that is, in the sense that I rely only on historical facts and follow reason insofar as it is capable of guiding us in intellectual matters, and never lay claim to certainty for conclusions that are not proved or cannot be proved. This direction of mind has always been recognized as a conditio sine qua non of all philosophy. If in future it is to be called agnosticism, then I am a true agnostic; but if agnosticism excludes the acknowledgment of an eternal Reason pervading the natural and moral world, if to assume a rational cause for a rational universe is to belong to Gnosticism, then I am a Gnostic and a humble follower of the greatest thinkers of humanity, from Plato and the author of the fourth Gospel to Kant and Hegel.

We need hardly add anything to these philosophical reflections and conclusions of the celebrated orientalist. It is sufficient to say that his conclusions deal a decisive blow to so fashionable yet logically untenable a view as agnosticism, and coincide with those eternal truths which, as revealed in the Word of God, constitute the possession of every rationally believing Christian.