As books are to literature, so questions are to philosophy.  They’re the stock in trade of each.  Seems obvious now, though it took me a while to get it when I first started studying philosophy.  I couldn’t work out what I was actually dealing with.  It wasn’t until I took a clue from one of my undergrad majors, English Literature, that the penny finally dropped.

Philosophy was the canon of great questions.  How do we know things?  Why is there something rather than nothing?  What does it mean to be?  The three questions of Kant’s metaphysica specialis: what do I know?  What can I hope?  What ought I to do?  And many more.

On the one hand, it’s not surprising I didn’t recognise philosophy at first.  We don’t often deal with questions in contemporary discourse.  If they’re raised, they’re not dwelt in.  Instead, we rush straight through to answers, or increasingly, we skip the questions altogether and deal only in answers.

On the other hand, my not seeing philosophy as the canon of questions was unexpected.  Because I’ve always had what you might call a feeling for question.  I’d much rather ask questions than make statements, and I’ve got a nose for the good question versus the less good question.

Have you had a good life?

I came across a case in point the other week.  A woman was speaking on the radio about a book she is writing based on interviews with people aged 50 and over.  In the interview she asks a single question: have you had a good life?

Now this is not a good question.  For starters, how must the interviewee feel on being asked it?  Surely they’d be thinking, “Geez, I knew I shouldn’t have worn this colour.”  Even if I were 103 I would be dispirited by this question.  Because life is always now.  We’re always in the midst of it, we always think there’s more to come. To answer therefore is, by definition, presumptuous.

Secondly, those either dead enough or foolish enough to respond gave disappointingly uniform answers.  All those who answered, “yes, I’ve had a good life” (which is to say everyone who answered, surely) attributed its goodness to the fact they had survived some crisis or tragedy.  Boring.  That human beings make meaning of suffering may be touching, but it’s not news.  And what’s the use of asking a question that produces only (a) what is already known, and (b) the same answer?

The truth is, this question — have you lived a good life? — was the author’s own question.  It’s the question she has of her own life, and the answer she gives to herself (if she gives one) is really the only answer that matters.

Our own unique question

The idea of each of us having our own unique question is raised in The Blue Flower, the novel I’m reading based on the life of the German Romantic poet and philosopher known as Novalis (1772-1801).

The young man who will become Novalis, Friedrich von Hardenberg, or Fritz, falls in love with 12 year old Sophie von Kühn, a match that mystifies everyone given Sophie’s relentless straightforwardness and Fritz’s flamboyant intelligence.  Fritz himself is intrigued.  He can’t quite make Sophie out.  So he commissions a painter to paint her portrait in the hope it will help him see.

Alas, it does not go well.  The painter, Hoffmann, comes and stays in the von Kühn household but spends most of his time refusing to come out of his room.  Eventually, after some weeks, he leaves the house without telling anyone, and stopping for a beer in a roadside inn, has the misfortune to run into Fritz, his effective employer, much sooner than he had planned.  Before he has had a chance to cook up a milder story he finds himself responding truthfully to Fritz’s question about why he has left:

“Hardenberg, in every created thing, whether it is alive or whether it is what we usually call inanimate, there is an attempt to communicate, even among the totally silent.  There is a question being asked, a different question for each entity, which for the most part will never be put into words, even by those who can speak.  It is asked incessantly, most of the time however hardly noticeably, even faintly, like a church bell heard across meadows and enclosures … You must have listened for it, Hardenberg, for Fräulein Sophie’s question, you must have strained to make it out …”

“I am trying to understand you,” said Fritz.

Hoffmann had put his hand to his ear, a very curious gesture for a young man.

“I could not hear her question, and so I could not paint.”

Interesting, isn’t it?  The idea that each of us has our own unique question that we ask incessantly, though mostly unconsciously.  It got me thinking, of course, what my question is.  I certainly know the feeling that there is a question.

Somewhere in this blog I’ve talked about my disenchantment with the “why” question.  For “why” is really the least interesting of questions.  Also, the easiest to ask, and that certainly counts against it.  It yields answers of a sort – the only kind of answers – all too readily.  It’s also the question we’re all besotted with, asking it over and over again in all situations, and never satisfying our insatiable desire for what it might yield.

No, my question will not be a why question.  I think my question is the same as Virginia Woolf’s, namely, how to live? I’m not a little discouraged that she was probably asking it as she headed for the Thames with her pockets full of stones.  But it is a worthy question.

And what about you?  What’s your question?

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Image: Mykl Roventine from Flickr