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Now that I am retired and have been consigned to the less productive part of society, it has occurred to me to ask why we find it so important to question things -even things we think we already understand; even things which might be better left alone; even the value of the questions themselves…

I suppose that the easiest answer is curiosity; but seeing things differently than might be expected is a leap that not all of us take; need to take; or want to take, for that matter. Imagination, though, is actually helpful if it persists from day to day I think. Like Philosophy, it explores the why of things; it explores the what-ifs, not requiring any particular answer but like a vacation, bathing in the journey as much as the destination. After all, it’s often the detours that lead to unexpected adventures more interesting than what we had intended.

Of course that’s not to say that each why has an answer, nor that whatever we discover is useful, but the thrilling thing about the process is that it may be exploring an aspect of reality that requires an effort to find. Beyond everyday life lies an unlit, darker region only visible at its edges; only knowable in the gloaming; less clearly, if at all, where it joins the blackness beyond.

And in the shadows is where much of our speculation lies. Answers there reflect not so much the daylight where we live, but often the penumbral kingdom of the whys that curiosity so earnestly seeks to explore.

I suppose it’s obvious from the way I’ve framed the often rambling journeys of conjecture, that not all of them -maybe not even most of them- arrive at useable answers, but it’s the unfamiliar land traversed that often holds the clues. Sometimes, much like Donald Rumsfeld, once the U.S. Secretary of Defense famously put it, there may be ‘unknown unknowns’ in that shadowed area that may offer unusual and unexpected answers where we had no previous suspicion they even required a question. Not to make too much of the idiom, I suspect that it’s where Philosophy likely enjoys itself the most.

Are we, though, the only creatures who ask why? One answer, of course, would be to ask how we could ever know. An unquestioning assumption might be that the search for sustenance and a mate would suffice for their existence, but how could we possible be sure of that? Just watch a dog playing, or its attraction to various scents, and it’s hard to think of it as anything other than curiosity: the Father of where, the Mother of why, and perhaps a distant cousin of so what?

Too panpsychic? Too… hylozoic (the Philosophical belief that all matter possesses some form of life)? Well, why is that so hard to imagine? Why is it sometimes difficult to imagine that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies when even Shakespeare could entertain the idea?

Why is why? It’s a question so fundamental to existence that even three year old children seem obsessed with it; and so are puppies, or the inquisitive young of most species as they explore the world around them. But I don’t want to push the analogy too far…

And yet, for humans at least, the rewards of merely wondering, of being able to ask why, is often as satisfying as quenching a thirst; the pleasure of answers, more than justifies their existence, don’t you think? And even if the answers are sometimes time-limited as more and more questions are asked, even the temporary satiety is refreshing. Truth is evanescent, and recedes like the horizon as you try to verify it with new questions. In fact, although answers are seldom final, it is sort of like groping your way through a moonless night with only a flashlight and its narrow beam to guide you. Beyond its light, other questions await… Thank goodness.

To exist bereft of questions is, well, to wander aimlessly through life without sufficient provisions: an empty backpack; a meaningless stroll with no expectation of a destination, no desire to aim the spotlight in any direction other than straight ahead, for fear of seeing something unusual, something not yet explained lurking in the darkness…

And yet, sometimes it is valuable to create doubt where, before, we were sated with assurance. Doubt is a spur to explore further, to ask more questions, to find more answers. Closure is not really the aim of Science, or Philosophy, any more than exploration ends at a discovery; there are always more things to explore, more questions to ask. Otherwise, what’s the use of either?

What is Progress, other than moving on from one question to another, and then realizing there are even more unexplored questions about the question… It’s a never ending journey -one that provides meaning to an otherwise signless road in a foreign city with no map, no streetlights to identify where we might like to go. Or why… Questions about answers whose worth we haven’t yet plumbed. Answers to questions we haven’t yet asked.

I can’t help but think of that famous, and timeless question of Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause—there’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry

And lose the name of action.

I read somewhere that each of us, when we philosophize, become the means by which the Universe, after billions of years awakes, momentarily contemplating itself in doubt and amazement.

I like that.