Asking Big Questions | How to Contemplate Perennial Questions
How powerful are questions? Powerful enough to get Socrates charged with “corrupting the youth” and ultimately put to death. When people think of philosophy today, most think of contemplating seemingly abstract questions. Although early philosophers often asked practical questions like — How to live a good life? The French writer Voltaire suggested, “judge people by their questions rather than their answers.”
Asking Questions
In my interview with the authors (Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko) of The Good Life Method, we discussed the importance of asking big questions.
Blaschko explained,
One of the things that we do towards the beginning of the God and The Good Life course stresses the importance of dialogue. Specifically, the importance of becoming disposed to ask questions in the right sort of way. We distinguish with our students two different kinds of questions.
First are prosecutorial questions or the prosecutor question. You’re asking a question because you want to be correct.
Next, there are questions that we call dinner party questions, questions that you are genuinely curious about the answer.
The goal is to provide tools to ask questions about a range of topics within the scope of the good life.
Big Questions
The big questions we wrestle with today are often the same questions contemplated since the beginning of human history. For example, here are a few of the typical perennial questions:
How does one live a good life?
Why is their suffering (or evil) in the world?
What does it mean to be wise?
Thankfully, we don’t have to start with a clean slate tackling these questions. For example, Soren Kierkegaard wrestles with faith in Fear and Trembling.
According to Sullivan,
Kierkegaard gets angry, confused, and weirded out by the questions. The one essential thing, at least if you are somebody for whom Christian faith or other religious traditions, is to show in practice how you are dealing with those problems, even in an incomplete way. I share with students one thing that was helpful for me and trying to think philosophically about the Bible. I started buying translations of Genesis, and when I read it, like a book and let myself dog year pages of it and write questions in the margins the same way I would with a philosophy book.
Contemplating Questions
To the question, what is contemplation? Blaschko responded, “One of the big goals we have in this class is to understand what philosophers mean by contemplation. I spend eight weeks building up to reading one paragraph of Aristotle at the very end of the Nicomachean Ethics.”
According to Blaschko,
Today we often think of contemplation in ways that can be valuable and important. But really aren’t the way that the ancients often would think about contemplation. Aristotle thinks contemplation is the highest thing in us. In almost mystical terms by this point, in the Nicomachean Ethics.
When Marcus Aurelius is Roman Emperor on the front lines leading Rome through challenging situations, he doesn’t use contemplation as a momentary relaxation to be more effective, suggests Blaschko. He uses contemplation to retreat to think about what makes life worth living and valuable.
Image: The Song of Love by Giorgio de Chirico (1914)
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