What Is Questioning? — On the Search for Possibility, Again

We often say that the core of philosophy is “questions,” and that philosophy’s mission is “to ask,” and so on, but what sort of activity is philosophical questioning, exactly? A question like “What’s for dinner tonight?” does not seem to be philosophy’s concern, so what, precisely, is philosophical questioning?

I have touched on related topics in earlier essays. This article may not offer much that is new; perhaps it is just a review or a summary.

First, people often talk about so-called “problem consciousness.” This term is used far too loosely, but what does it actually mean? In some places it is simply used as if it were identical with “the problem” itself; for example, “the problem consciousness of this book is…” means “the core problem of this book is….” Some people may think that being constantly guided by, and revolving around, a clear question in one’s thinking and writing is what it means to have “problem consciousness.” In fact, none of these understandings really get to the point. If a “problem” expresses a particular “concern,” then “problem consciousness” is concern about the “problem” itself. At that point, the “problem” is not yet a ready-made certainty, but something still waiting to be posed. “Problem consciousness” is not a desire to find answers; it is, first of all, a desire to find the problem. In other words, thinking that unfolds around a ready-made and determinate problem is precisely what lacks problem consciousness.

The philosophical way of thinking does not seek answers on the basis of ready-made problems. That kind of approach is not very different from ordinary daily or utilitarian thinking. What is distinctive about philosophical thinking is this: it does not start from a problem and then look for an answer; it looks for the problem—often, in fact, by starting from the “answer” and working backward.

In truth, our minds often already contain far too many ready-made “answers,” yet we do not know what questions they are answers to. And often, the more definite and uncompromising these “answers” are, the more hidden the “problem” behind them becomes. For instance, “We must cultivate problem consciousness” is a statement, but what problem is it responding to? Or take “I should care about others,” “We must be honest and keep our word,” and so on: these are all “answers,” but what are they answers to? You cannot lazily say that “We must cultivate problem consciousness” is an answer to a question like “Should we cultivate problem consciousness?”—a question like that has been artificially fabricated by you; it is not a real problem. For example, I ask, “What’s for dinner tonight?” Then after walking around the supermarket for a while, I arrive at the answer: “Let’s have fried noodles.” You cannot then say that “I’m going to eat fried noodles tonight” is an answer to the question “Should I eat fried noodles tonight?” because that was not a question you were actually considering. Perhaps the moment the word “fried noodles” suddenly surfaced in your mind, you had already found the answer to the question “What’s for dinner tonight?”

Of course, some factual or empirical judgments do not necessarily have a “problem” preceding them. For example, the conclusion “That’s a plate of fried noodles” may already have been confirmed the moment you first saw it, and may involve no confusion at all, nor any need to pose a question deliberately. But can it really be that important assertions such as “We must cultivate problem consciousness,” “We should care about others,” “We must be honest and keep our word,” and so on can all be confirmed so directly and intuitively? What philosophers must investigate is the “source” of these conclusions. This does not merely mean asking for the reasons supporting them; more importantly, it means seeking the real problems for which they can serve as answers. If they are not responses to some inner confusion of one’s own, then they will never truly belong to oneself; they will only be externally imposed dogmas. And if some seemingly arcane assertion cannot be traced back to any prior confusion at all, then it is either merely a banal judgment like “That’s a plate of fried noodles,” or else it is a rigid dogma, or a deceiving word game.

The reason some so-called philosophy is utterly uninteresting is precisely that it arbitrarily fabricates false problems. Take, for example, the so-called philosophy in high school textbooks. It claims that “the world is material,” and this conclusion is said to answer the question “Is the world material or spiritual?” Yet we can see that this question is a典型的 false problem; within it one cannot find even a trace of genuine confusion. This is not a question that a free person, out of curiosity and a desire to know, could ever pose. It is a fabricated question created to suit the answer.

Philosophy is an activity of inquiry, which means that what philosophers pursue is not ready-made, determinate knowledge. Rather, on the contrary, they are not satisfied with this ready-made and determinate world. They are not satisfied with living in a world filled with “answers”; they do not want their world to be crowded with lifeless facts like “That’s a plate of fried noodles, beyond all doubt, it is indeed a plate of fried noodles.” They hope this world can appear more richly varied; they hope to have more “problems,” or at least the possibility of asking questions. For example, I hope I can often have the chance to think about “What’s for dinner tonight?” Although the things one can eat for dinner every day are always very limited, if I always have a variety of options and can independently plan my life, then my life will become more interesting, won’t it? If I never have the opportunity to consider a question like “What should I eat tonight?” and can only passively accept other people’s arrangements—whether I am so poor that I can only gnaw on bark every day, or so rich that food merely comes to my lips—wouldn’t such a life be very dull? Don’t you want to move toward a richer, freer way of living?

To pose a question means to gain “room for choice,” and to have “room for choice” means, first, that your world is not already given in advance; for you, the world contains diverse possibilities, and only this makes choice possible. Second, your will is free; you possess the capacity to choose. These are what give us the feeling of “being human.” The greatest difference between human beings and machines is that human beings are never fully determined in advance; they can make choices and plan their own lives. One might say that “asking” is the way of living that enables human beings to “live like human beings.”

Human beings are born free; the capacity to ask and the capacity to choose are inborn, akin to the capacity to eat, to feel, to have sexual capacity, and so on, and in a certain sense cannot be shaken off. However, aging and unhealthy ways of living can make the capacity to eat and the capacity to feel sluggish and weak, whereas a proper way of life may preserve and cultivate these capacities. And when people are able to use these capacities with ease, their lives become richer, more splendid, and more interesting. Freedom is similar. It is also something inborn. But it is not always the same; if it is excessively indulged or left unused, it will lose its vitality. And the point of a philosophical way of life lies precisely here: one must use freedom properly and preserve and cultivate human freedom as much as possible.

The key to preserving freedom is to choose, as far as possible, paths that can open up greater possibilities for oneself; and the way to cultivate freedom is “asking.”

Of course, after “asking,” one cannot simply stop there. Since the question is based on a real confusion, one must naturally go further and seek resolution. Yet after all, the process of seeking resolution is a kind of “dissolving” of the problem. Does that not mean making the world determinate again? Does it not mean reducing the richness of the world? In particular, many philosophers also build their own systems of thought, gradually determining a distinctive conceptual framework and gradually restricting their own ways of asking questions and arguing. Are these not all destructions of richness? In a sense, yes. But at the same time, the key point is this: if one completely refrains from these self-limitations, if one simply relies on feeling to search for problems without any method and also makes no effort to seek answers, then in the end those problems cannot be preserved either. For if, when faced with a confusion, one never pursues it and analyzes it further, but merely lets the emotion of confusion rise and fade on its own, then sooner or later it will be replaced by a feeling called “being used to it, finding nothing strange anymore.” Regardless of whether one has understood something, “wonder” is often strongest only at the moment one first “discovers” it; what truly erodes people’s curiosity is not “understanding” but “habit.” And the effort to question and seek answers is precisely the effort to resist “habit.” Only by continually asking—answering—asking again can one maintain the world’s freshness.

As for philosophers’ efforts to build systems and frameworks, they can be compared to formulating the rules of a game, or to a computer’s “operating system.” An operating system establishes definite norms and constraints for the various programs developed on top of it. In a certain sense, it restricts the room for writing software, but on the other hand, without any stable, reliable, clear, and public operating system, we would simply be unable to create such rich and varied application software. Limits on possibility are necessary for the further unfolding of rich possibilities. If one accepts no constraints at all, that kind of world would merely be chaos, and diversity would be out of the question. Diversity also presupposes order; it is just that these orders should never be rigid and dead, just as computer operating systems must also keep developing and improving, only with relatively different levels of stability. Therefore, the philosophical pursuit of certainty can in a certain sense also be described as a pursuit of possibility; the two are not necessarily contradictory.

In a certain sense, I want to say that what philosophy pursues is not knowledge but confusion; or rather, not the “known” but the “unknown,” not “certainty” but “possibility.” It sounds as if philosophers are a species entirely different from ordinary people, but in fact philosophers’ desires are also ordinary people’s desires; there is no essential difference. In fact, “possibility” is one of the most fundamental pursuits of ordinary people too, if not the only one. No matter what you seem to be pursuing on the surface. For example, “money”—what, exactly, is the person pursuing money really pursuing? Is not the value of money precisely that it embodies “possibility”? That is to say, it can provide you with the possibility of buying all kinds of things—things you may not need at the moment, perhaps even things you know nothing about yet. But once you have money, you may obtain them at any time. Isn’t this the reason people pursue money? Thus, “the search for possibility” is not some profound and mysterious desire; it is a principle that can already be discovered in the lowest and most vulgar desires.

In this world disenchanted by modern science, stripped of mystery and novelty, are books proclaiming “unsolved mysteries” not flourishing wildly? This shows that, after all, people are still willing to have a world that astonishes and confounds them, rather than this world full of the known and the fully determinate. But compared with borrowing the tricks of those “unsolved mysteries” to fool people, what philosophy displays is the real magic.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Xindao

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