A friendly listener, Alicia S., submitted this note to us:
I was asked this question and had no idea how to respond to it... This is the question: "Would you rather never be able to answer a question or never be able to ask a question"?
The point of the question is to tease out whether philosophy (or rather, what you see as valuable in doing philosophy) is a matter of the answers you get or the search for those answers. A more scientific conception of philosophy dictates the latter: we want to learn truth. A more artistic conception emphasizes the value of the journey, that introspection and playing with ideas are good in themselves.
So, if one chooses to accept this question, you can answer it by clarifying your views on this. Personally, I like both angles, and embracing just one of them wholeheartedly is a mistake. Which is dominant in a given inquiry depends in part on what you're inquiring about and why; it's less important to come to agreement about how to criticize literature or even the existence of God than it is to come up with workable political arrangements or criteria for admitting scientific theories (which will have practical applications) as legitimate. Even within a given discipline, like ethics, whether you need anything like final answers will depend on how immediate a practical application your verdicts are supposed to have: are they supposed to guide your judges and so determine who gets executed, or determine what lines of scientific inquiry get funded?
However, I don't accept the question, because it's extremely vague and silly. The notion of a question doesn't actually make sense without an answer. That doesn't mean that by definition, there are no unanswerable questions, but it does mean that "never being able to answer a question" is incoherent. If there are no answers, there are no questions. Or is it just me that would be unable to answer a question? So I can ask where my lunch is but can never know the answer? OK, presumably it means that I would never be able to answer a philosophically interesting question. But I could ask such a question, of ask someone else, who would presumably at least some time be able to answer, so then I would know the answer. But if someone then asked me the same question, still I couldn't even repeat what I'd heard? Maybe because I could hear the answer but never understand it, so I would just be repeating it by rote, not actually answering it in the sense of imparting my own knowledge. It's all very puzzling how to take this.
The alternative, that I can never ask a question, would have to mean that either I already knew all the answers (say, if I'm God), or that I was an animal, unable to reflect enough to question. Which interpretation you choose would certainly affect the answer. The second option raises Voltaire's dilemma in his "Story of a Good Brahmin:"
What does it really matter if you are intelligent or stupid? And what's more, those who are stupidly content with their being are quite sure of being content; those who philosophize and scrutizine and ponder and reason are never so sure of reasoning well.
“Clearly,” I said, “we should choose not to have good sense, if that good sense contributes to our misery.”
Everyone agreed with me, and yet I found no one who wanted to accept the bargain of becoming ignorant in order to become content. From this I concluded that though we greatly value happiness, we place even greater value on reason.
But yet, upon reflection, it seems that to prefer reason to happiness is to be quite insane. How can this contradiction be explained? Like all the others...it is matter for much talk.
According to Voltaire (and I agree), we will always choose to be questioning beings over animals, even if there's something about that which doesn't really make sense.
In conclusion, the correct response when someone asks you such a question, Alicia, is a raspberry.
-Mark Linsenmayer
(Image note: the cat comes from here and looks to be by artist Anastasiya Malakhova.)
First I want to say finding the question “vague” and “silly” is fine but I disagree mostly because you’re being too literal in addressing it. Being able to ask a question is far more important than only being able to answer questions. The reason for this is that there are no answers. Yet it rests with the questioner whether to accept the answer. The questioner is far more powerful. When I say there are no answers that is because they are always wrong. Or they may be right. In science when certain criteria are met which are accepted by the questioner and responder as valid, then the answer is accepted as correct. There is an answer in that situation. In religion I would much rather be able to question: Does God exist? than to only be able to answer that question. In law (and life) being able to formulate a cogent, specific and strategic question is far more critical than answering it (and whatever answer there is, it’s usually determined by a third party–a judge).
Answers don’t exist. Only questions.
Additionally, to Voltaire–he clearly posits wthat we human beings naturally are seekers, questioners. Yet those human beings who are ignorant are more content because of their ignorance–they don’t seek out the solution–they aren’t shackled by endless gnawing, groping, mind-bending questions.
Ah, to be such an animal. At least for one day…
Surely you don’t completely believe that Laura. If you thought answers don’t exist, then why did you bother giving one to question?
I think the question of, quoting mark, “whether philosophy . . . is a matter of the answers you get or the search for those answers” is interesting. I think “philosphy” means, essentially, “love of knowlege”, which might be taken as suggesting that it is all about answers.
On the other hand, one of philospophy’s fathers, Socrates (and I think I am getting this from podcast epsisode 1 so it isn’t name droping), said; first, that all he knows is that he knows nothing; and, second, that the unexamined life is not worth living. This sounds like philosophy, maybe even the good life, is a matter of persevering in the search for answers – examination and asking questions – despite certain ignorance.
Not sure what to make of that but I think am sympathetic to the Laura / Socrates view (sorry Laura if you didn’t want to be conflated with Socrates like that). I think in epsode 1 the cosensus was that Socrates was selfish in allowing himself to be executed and abandoning his family. From another angle, though, his commitment to philosophy despite certain ignorance (knowing he knows nothing) could be seen as heroic.
Having Hegel on the brain from this morning, I refer to the Sense-Certainy section at 105-107. He forumlates the process to the absoulte or unversal “Now” or “This” as (1) pointing out Now is (2) asserting that the same Now is superceded (it was “now”- hence that now no longer is “now” and (3) in the act of negating and instance of “now,” we affirm the truth of a universal now. So we have a dialectic of thesis and antithesis, and synthesis. No one part of the process is more primary – the process are moments of truth; no one moment is more primary.
So I tend to agree that a question and answer are so intertwined in the process of philosophy that there it is foolish to seperate the answer part and be dismissive of it. Any answer is going to have a truth value in the moment it exists, and its coming to be is the predicate of the next question. Knowlege is thus and upward spiral; and the questions and answers but points on the arc
Nice. I’ve always found the process of identifying what I do not yet know as the most interesting part of learning.
I’m much much less philosophically savvy, so forgive my idiocy.
But I think in order to “solve” this problem, we need to play along with that silly question.
Assuming this is an accepted form of a question:
“Isn’t the answer to 2+2 = 4?”
Since, answers could be embedded in questions, then:
“Isn’t it obvious that I would rather always be able to ask a question?”