“Just asking questions”

The point of Philosophy, I think, is to ask questions. Answers are boring. Conversation ending. Questions that can be answered are better suited to a field that deals with answers, like Science. In fact, if a question ever can be fully answered, it immediately falls out of the cannon of Philosophy all together.

When we look back on earlier works, we see people who jumped freely from Math to Poetry to Science to Theology. This is a better way to live I think, and allowed greats such as Newton, Descartes, and Pythagoras to enrich their thinking with diverse problems and methods of solving them. But this isn’t the point I want to get to here. The point is that is was all just up for grabs back then, and the lines we’ve so neatly cut would not have been apparent to these thinkers.

Since then, the line between Science and Theology has been drawn: referencing the Bible is no longer passable Science. And what was lost to Theology was made up for with gains from Philosophy. “Physics” the field of study we know today takes little from Aristotle’s work which gave its name. As our capacity to answer questions grew, the domain of Philosophy shrank.

Not to worry though! It appears there are actually endless questions to ask, and the answerable ones are in the minority. The more typical route taken is to only sprout more questions in your quest to answer one.

This is where the value is in Philosophy. Good Philosophy doesn’t fully answer the question, but shows us why it was the wrong question to ask in the first place. Good Philosophy leads us to better questions. Graham Harmon recounts the origin of the name “philosophia” as the love (philo) of wisdom (sophia), not wisdom itself. It is the joy of chasing questions not the claim to somehow catch them.

You probably encountered this yourself the first time you thought over some of the classic “Big Questions”. What does it mean to be a good person? Well, what do we mean by “good”? Is there even a meaning, let alone a single meaning? If the meaning can change over time, how do we know which meaning is right today? Should we insist on our meaning of “good” and put that onto others? If we let everyone have their own meaning, who could we even say is “bad”? And so on.

Turns out that under one hard problem is actual five or six other hard problems you have to answer too. Sometimes a philosopher will take a good stab at figuring something out, and that lets us push down to deeper questions. Eventually we get so deep-down into the weeds of something that we’ve lost all sight of the ground above. The tangle we’ve gotten into down here only makes sense to the few who’ve also followed down this way and can’t be made out with any understanding back up where we started. “Don’t come down this way!” we shout up to those still standing at the surface. But they can’t hear us up there and so they begin following the same path, doing it all over again, rediscovering and retangling.

Sometimes I wonder if we’re all more or less on the same page. Just trying to find the right words --- our words --- for this thing that can never quite be articulated. When I think that Plato had it wrong, and really it is the real objects of Earth that come first, and the “forms” just some lossy compressed version of all those objects expereinced, that he would say: “yeah man, that’s what I meant”.

It’s so easy to take an idea too literally, or to mis-apply our sensibilities of today. When one idea becomes common, saying “actually, it’s sometimes not like this!” feels rebellious and important. But when that exception becomes more ingrained than the original idea, returning to the first point becomes the rebellion.

There is a side of this that is very pleasant: we all actually agree --- thank god! And there is a side that is much more dreadful: nothing can ever be properly understood outside of the context it was specifically addressing, and that context changes with every address. This doesn’t even account for the migration of meaning within words themselves (and words are what Philosophy is made of, with the exception of a hopefully brief episode called “analytical” philosophy).

When certain issues become “touchy subjects”, I think Philosophy is part of the problem. Many of these topics, even the seemingly fact-based ones, can be rooted out to some philosophical question. As we know, this will never be answerable, and so the arguments could continue indefinitely. But as they continue, we learn what the better questions to ask are. We might find a passable answer, but only at the expense of large fish we now need to fry.

I have this issue myself all the time. I have an opinion on how I think the world should work that I’ve got narrowed into a pretty strong system (in my opinion). I think if I were to argue it to you I could at least convince you on some of the points. Anecdotally, I’ve been successful doing so. But there are deep, secluded issues that I know lie within it. I’ll try and conceal them --- I don’t think they are disqualifying to my ideas, but they certainly wouldn’t make them persuasive --- and I know that I have to solve them at some point. They’re my bigger fish.

People are often dismissive of the opposing side when arguing these touchy topics, or enraged by their arguments. To them, these people are completely naïve to the real questions we should be asking.

I would love if someone engaged with those deep issues I’ve found. I would be happy to argue and hopefully make some progress on them. I’d listen openly; I want to figure them out. But I could only do so with someone whose made it all the way down there too. Who I know isn’t there to take advantage of this vulnerable, tender spot in my worldview. It can be hard to broach even with people you mostly agree with. The paranoia that perhaps some difference in opinion earlier in the stack went overlooked is often proven true.