Yes, Asking Big Questions Is Still Helpful.

We like to divide things into eithers and ors, don’t we? No great revelation there. Among these binaries is the notion that there are thinkers and doers, and perhaps not enough between. For obvious reasons, philosophers get plunked into the “thinker” category, and all kinds of assumptions are made about our willingness/ability to do anything other than think. The judgements don’t end there. Thinking, as it would seem, is perceived as something of a luxury, and between thinking and doing, it is the less desirable. It must be nice, after all, to have the time and space to just sit with an idea, removed from the hullabaloo of the “real world”, the demands of everyday existence.

I get where all of this comes from. It is the very definition of privilege to repose in uninterrupted contemplation, to have nothing better to do in the midst of all the chaos with which the world presents us. It smacks of fiddling while Rome burns, doesn’t it? Who the **** cares about asking abstract, far-fetched, ponderous questions at a time like this? What good is musing over something that doesn’t have immediate, concrete, and helpful answers?

Except it doesn’t work that way, for a bunch of different reasons. Technically speaking, thinking is still an act, and choosing to think as your verbe du jour is still a choice. Okay, that’s exactly the kind of pedantic stuff that gets people peeved at philosophers, I know. But when we’re waxing philosophical, are thinkers not doing anything?

What if we take a step back and another look? As the esteemed Maya Angelou once said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” The “do your best” part is pretty evident in our current daily lives. In our own way, most of us are just trying to put one foot in front of the other and live through what are utterly nonsensical times. We’d love to get to the “do better” stuff, but that’s an awfully big hump to get over. “Do better” sometimes seems like a tiny speck in the distance.

I’d like to suggest that the questions we bounce around in philosophy are part of the “know better” part of this process. It’s the (wobbly) set of stepping stones between doing our best and then doing better. The questions we ask in philosophy aren’t, as many would insist, frivolous or overly abstract. They sit just beneath the surface of “doing our best”, but they’re also necessary in order to get to “do better”.

Let’s try a few, shall we?

· How do I know that the chair I’m sitting on is real? If I can’t know this, then can I know if anything is real? What if I’m not real?

· Are humans minds and bodies, or just minds, or just bodies, or something else entirely? What about other animals, or even plants?

· What makes something beautiful, instead of ugly?

“Who cares?” some will say. “I don’t have the time or the mental real estate to be playing around with airy crap like this. I have stuff to do, and places to go.”

Fair enough.

Except that wondering how we know if our chairs/our selves/the whole universe is real is amazing training for wondering if the information that pours out of the internet like an unscrewed fire hydrant is real. It leads us to question what’s true. It’s the good bits from which the scientific method is built, and ideally, it is the safety net we try to build into politics. Thinking about the existence of a chair is just a few degrees of separation from thinking about reality and truth.

Wondering about minds and bodies and the way they work/don’t work together actually helps us to understand who and what we are, how we relate to nature, how our minds work, and how much free will we might have. It colours the way we set up laws, the way we build relationships, and the way we respond to climate change.

Thinking about beauty forces us to take a good hard look at ourselves as beings. It helps us to resist latching onto harmful body image issues and take care of ourselves. Chatter about beauty leads to chatter about art, which in turn helps us to learn to express all kinds of thoughts and emotions through means other than our fists.

Every question here, every single one of them, helps us train our brains to think, instead of just passively absorb whatever floats by. These questions are the sandbox in which we learn to create, innovate, evaluate and collaborate.

Philosophy isn’t just about asking questions for the sake of asking questions or for the sake of killing time (note: philosophers don’t really have any more spare time than anyone else). When we think philosophically, we realize that in just about every aspect of our lives, we operate with an underpinning of answers to questions that most of us don’t bother to ask. The way we dress, the way we work, the way we talk to our dogs, all of it presupposes an answer to some bigger question that someone else answered on our behalf. We tacitly agree to truths and values without giving them a second thought. We sign away the “do better” part before we’ve given ourselves a chance to “know better” first.

A philosopher is just someone who takes a moment here and there to check in. Is there a reason we identify a certain way personally or politically, or do we just kind of shrug and let it happen? Could we see ourselves, others, and the world around us in a different light that might be less dismissive or destructive? What’s underneath all the overwhelming awfulness we’re feeling right now, and how do we fix it? Although there are a handful of thinkers who’d have us believe this happens in a sparkly little bubble of isolation, it’s not true. In most cases, if you’re going to question any of this, you have to be someone who leaves the house and engages with the “real world” long enough to notice that it’s happening.

And are the big questions that philosophy asks easy to answer? That one’s rhetorical, isn’t it? Do they have one clear, reliable, accessible answer? Nope. Do they require constant re-asking, an open mind, and a willingness to discuss with others? Yup. Are they complicated, frustrating, and do they leave us feeling vulnerable? Yes, yes, and yes. Are they sufficient to solving problems, without the “do better part” to follow them up? No. Are they still a necessary precursor to the “do better” part? A thousand times yes. Without the “know better”, we’re swinging in the dark, randomly spitballing, and in times like these, we don’t have time to be making assumptions or going along with whatever answers are thrown at us.

Big questions are not, by any means, “just questions”.