Big Questions

Let us imagine that you are taking care of a six year old girl with an insatiable curiosity. You need to do a series of chores until such time that her parents return, and yet she refuses to be left alone. Instead, she prefers to follow you around as you perform each chore. You start by putting clothes in the washing machine. When you put soap in afterwards, she asks why you did. You explain that the soap is what allows the clothes to get clean.

"Why is that?" she asks in response. You explain that soap is a base, which corrodes certain materials more than others, and so will remove the ugly stains that are currently on the dirty clothes.

"And how does the base do that?" she asks. You get into excruciating detail, trying to remember the organic chemistry you took in college; you even take out the molecular kit you still have lying around and try to get her to play with that. To no avail.

"Why does the hydrogen get given to the stain? Why does that make the stain fall off the clothes? Why don't the clothes fall apart?"

You cannot answer any more of these questions off the top of your head. You go online and do some research until you find answers that satisfy you-- answers which actually relate to the molecular orbitals formed, and the electrons that form each bond. When you relate these answers to her, she only has more questions. You throw up your hands in despair and give up-- an answer may have been discovered, but you are fairly certain that whatever the answer is, it is beyond your immediate ability to comprehend. This little girl has already probed the boundaries of knowledge, and she has only asked five series of whys.

This little girl has the same spirit as the most profound philosophers; the only difference being she has not acquired the vocabulary to fully express herself. Rather, she is in the process of acquiring this vocabulary by asking this recurring question, "why?"

A lesson to take from this scenario is that there will always be more questions. The philosopher may take a question that normally we would not even bother to answer, such as "Why do I want to live?" or "Why do I think I have free will?" These are very difficult questions to answer, questions which shake us to our very foundations if properly investigated. The beautiful thing about such questions, however, is that the answer will satisfy if investigated for a sufficient length of time.

The little girl was not satisfied-- this is what made her profound. A philosopher might investigate one of the above questions-- on the subject of life and free will-- and find a suitable explanation. The problem is, that every time an answer is attained, the answer will inevitably lead to more questions. This is the lesson to be learned from the scenario. This is the lesson to be taught to all would-be philosophers, who have a desire to be profound.