Chapter 2 - Three Questions

 Chapter 2 - Three Questions

 

“I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become”   Carl Jung

 

 Why *do* humans value philosophisers so?

 

The answer goes to the fundamental questions life poses: questions often too obvious to cognate, in the same sense the fish knows not the water in which it swims.

 

By my reckoning there are three such questions

 

1)   Who/what am I?

 

2)   What is going to happen?

 

3)   What will I do?

 

And little, if anything, in life does not come back to one or more of these three fundamental questions.

 

Yet across the vastness of history the artisan has had little or nothing to contribute to answering these questions.

 

No watchmaker can tell us what we are, unless to tell us we are …. late!

 

No farmer knows what is going to happen beyond that foretold in the almanacs. 

 

And no blacksmith can tell you what to do (though he might tell you *not* to put your hand in his fire).

 

It has been the soothsayer and the theologian who have told us who/what we are, and it is they, especially, who have comforted us with the idea that we are *something*: generally expressed as something “spiritual” or as having a “soul” (and I am not saying they were wrong).

So who/what am I?

Plato set the template for much Western philosophy by defining the human as essentially a soul that temporarily inhabits a body. In Phaedo he declares:

“The body is the source of endless trouble to us… it fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense… If we would have pure knowledge of anything, we must be quit of the body.”

For Plato, to be human is to be a soul engaged in a struggle to escape bodily distraction and return to the realm of eternal forms. Humanity is, at its core, rational and immortal.

Augustine, meanwhile, defined humanity in terms of its relation to God:

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” (Confessions, I.1)

For Augustine, humans are creatures defined by longing, fractured by sin, yet capable of grace. 

Then René Descartes redefined human essence in purely epistemic terms. In his Meditations he wrote the line that became a cornerstone of modern identity:

“Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am.”

For Descartes, the essence of humanity is the certainty of consciousness. 

Hobbes has us as machines of desire and fear: “For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body.”

while Jean-Jacques Rousseau countered Hobbes with a more romantic anthropology: “Nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes, and the fatal enlightenment of civil man.”

Kant defined humanity through reason, but not theoretical reason alone—moral reason: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe… the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

But for inspiration it is hard to top Shakespeare's humanity-sketch in Hamlet:

“What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.” (Shakespeare's irony, at this point the narrative, is acknowledged).

That all said, these tiny quotes do little justice to the volumes these and other philosophers have bequeathed us on the nature of humankind. The point rather is to illustrate, however briefly, the effort and erudition philosophic thinkers have applied to this most basic question of our existence, shared and solipsistic. 

People who ponder this question, at whatever level, consider it an important and fundamental, indeed crucial, topic to consider, so it is unsurprising that those who seem to have the answers would be held in high regard.

But what is going to happen? 

Every plausibly sentient creature manifests awarenesses of immediate dangers and immediate opportunities (and regarding other species, by and large, we have little way of knowing if understanding extends beyond that), but at a philosophic level?  

Plato again: "When the soul has been joined with the body, it is mortal; but when it has been released from the body, it is immortal and goes to the presence of the gods.”

and Marcus Aurelius: “All that you see will soon perish, and those who behold this perishing will perish soon after. The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.”

and why not the Bible? In Ecclesiastes: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

Whether predicting rainfall, crop yields, prospects of war, royal fertility, or the future afterlife, those canny enough to develop a reputation for prediction offered hope and comfort in uncertain times, and sense of control over the essentially uncontrollable.

What person would not want to know, at least in a practical and limited sense, what the future will bring?

Even today?

And what will I do?

Well, we can always ask Machiavelli:

“A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must inevitably come to grief among so many who are not good. Hence it is necessary for a prince, if he is to maintain himself, to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessity of the case.”

Offering wisdom on how to live well has been perhaps the principal goods-in-trade of the philosopher throughout. Stoics, Epicureans, Pythagoreans, Socratics. Christian, Buddhist, Hindu. 

And frankly the great majority of what has been taught, the great majority of the time, has found its uses, its adherents.

*Knowing what to do* assumes self-knowledge, and assumes a peace (or at least a detente) with the future.

 A willingness to take advice on what to do, how to live, and indeed how to die, assumes enormous (even absolute) trust in the integrity of the person who is the source of the advice, and the extent to which such advice from nominal philosophers, the de-facto philosophers of religion, and the philosophic professionals such as physicians, was acted upon in moments of uncertainty and risk, correlates with the esteem in which such sources of advice were held.

It is entirely understandable that talented and the studious youth of any such society would aspire to enter, after appropriate study and apprenticeship,  such positions of exalted understanding and accompanying social esteem. It is entirely understandable that at least some members of such an esteemed circle would favour acquiring the usual property accoutrements of such status, and it is entirely understandable that persons who have acquired such status would thereafter resist any force or fact or even suggestion that their status might be unmerited and/or its continuation threatened  

 

And over the aeons of the past the other 99% of us have believed, with varying degrees of certainty, trust and “faith”, the pronouncements of the wise 1%. 

 

We have found solace in our existential discomfiture, and certainty in their premonitions and strength in their encouragements.

 

Along with, of course, despair in their existential misapprehensions, disappointment in unfulfilled predictions and regret in their misdirections. 

 

Nonetheless, the inventive among the philosophers were always able to spin out a post-hoc justification, a bit of dialectics, to explain their wrong advice had been, in retrospect, not wrong (hence the falsifiability test of the pseudoscience, as propounded by Popper).

 

For no matter how many mis-directions, mis-assessments and mis-prophecies the philosophic betters delivered, the three essential questions posed above remained, and no one else could answer them.

 

What am I?

 

What is going to happen?

 

What should I do?

............

 

Of Tools and Truths: The Philosopher's Rule as the rest follow

 

In virtually every civilisation across time, those who speculate on the nature of being, the fate of mankind, and the conduct of life—the so-called thinkers—have enjoyed special honour. Why is this so?

 

The answer lies in the invisible fundament beneath all human striving. 

Life poses questions—and many of us live without directly articulating these questions, not because they do not matter, but because they seem too elemental to notice. Just as the fish knows not water until it is dragged into air, so too most of us swim mostly among unexamined assumptions, unarticulated queries.

Yet if one were to distil the ceaseless hum of human existence into discrete interrogatives, they might number only three:

1.  Who or what am I?

2.  What is going to happen?

3.  What should I do?

These three questions form the skeleton of all human meaning.

 

Every religious creed, every philosophical system, every ideological movement is, at bottom, an attempted answer these questions. And here is the rub: practical men, however indispensable, have historically had little to say on these fronts at the philosophic level.

The blacksmith may forge iron into useful tools, but he cannot tell you the purpose of your life. 

The stonemason may raise a cathedral, but it is the theologian who fills it with metaphysical significance. 

The midwife may bring forth life, but cannot say whence it comes nor whither it goes. 

Thus it is that the practical man, however necessary to the continuation of life, is often peripheral to its interpretation.

The medieval watchmaker, armed with gears, springs, and patience, could certainly keep time—but could not, by any stretch, address the mystery of why time should matter, or whether time is, as Augustine puzzled, a mere illusion of the mind. 

By contrast, it has always been the soothsayers, the prophets, the metaphysicians, the theologians, and then the moral philosophers who have had the temerity to claim answers to such fundamental questions.

These were the ones who dared to say not only what is, but what is beyond. 

Whether animists in ancient Africa, Brahmins in Vedic India, Greek metaphysicians, or medieval scholastics, all occupied a singular role: interpreters of the unknown. Their coin was meaning, their dominion the unprovable, their trade the intangible.

Consider the Delphic Oracle at the Temple of Apollo. She said little of practical use, but her cryptic pronouncements were sought by generals and kings. Croesus, king of Lydia, famously asked if he should wage war against Persia. The oracle replied: “If you cross the river, a great empire will fall.” 

He crossed it, and his own empire fell. 

The genius of the reply, of course, was its semantic ambiguity—a hallmark of the philosopher’s method. It meant, ultimately, whatever the outcome required it to mean.

Such slipperiness has been the bane and the glory of speculative authority. 

Karl Popper, in the 20th century, articulated this problem rigorously: that a true scientific theory must be falsifiable. He drew his line against Marx, Freud, and Adler, not because their systems lacked internal coherence, but because their systems could explain anything—and therefore, in his view, explained nothing. 

“Every conceivable case could be interpreted as a verification of their theories,” Popper wrote. “But in this way, they were rendered irrefutable—and so were not scientific.” 

Yet it is precisely this irrefutability, this fideistic insulation, that has lent metaphysical and prophetic systems their enduring appeal.

And the masses have continued to place their trust—sometimes wisely, sometimes not—in those who claimed access to the truth behind the veil.

So when we ask, What am I?, it is not the blacksmith or the banker who answers. It is the philosopher—be it Plato, who told us the soul is immortal and tripartite; or Descartes, who asserted cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. 

When we ask, What is going to happen?, it is not the engineer or the tailor who replies. It is the prophet, the astrologer, the eschatologist, who speaks of ages to come, of final reckonings and promised salvations. 

When we ask, What should I do?, it is not the chef or the carpenter, but the ethicist—the Confucius, the Kant, the Mill—who seeks to offer an answer.

This is why the pronouncements of philosophers have carried such weight, and why their errors—when revealed—are not quickly punished. For as long as the central questions remain unanswered, any attempt to answer them continues to be valuable. The market for certainty is never saturated, even if the goods are defective.

We see this in the history of religious prediction. The medieval millenarians, the 19th-century Millerites, the apocalyptic cults of every epoch—they were all wrong, often spectacularly so. 

But their adherents did not always abandon them. 

Instead, reinterpretation occurred. 

The failure of one prediction simply opened the door for a more refined eschatology, a better dialectic, a more sophisticated allegory. Wrongness was not a disqualification. It was an opportunity for hermeneutic ingenuity.

Indeed, one of the marks of the philosopher—as opposed to the mechanic—is the ability to retroactively justify. As Charles Sanders Peirce observed, “We are all more or less dupes of our own fallacies.” Yet the philosopher’s fallacy, once repackaged with eloquence, can still dazzle. So long as the fundamental human questions remain, so too does the possibility of being right—or at least, not provably wrong.

It is for this reason that the “wise 1%” have always held the ear of the remaining 99%. Not necessarily because they were correct, but because they ventured to speak on matters too vast, too vague, and too vital for silence. 

As Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensées, “Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.” The artisan may shape the world with his hands—but it is the thinker who shapes the world’s self-understanding.

Of course, the influence of the thinkers has not always been benign. 

The same philosophers who elevated ethics and metaphysics have, at times, legitimised tyranny, fatalism, or despair.

Nietzsche offered insight, but also the spectre of nihilism. 

Heidegger illuminated Being, but also dabbled with fascism.

Marx offered solidarity and critique, but also inspired regimes of terror. 

Philosophers have led us upward—and downward.

And yet: the questions remain. 

They are as old as Gilgamesh, as perennial as the stars. 

They cannot be answered by clockwork, nor quieted by machinery. 

Their gravity is such that even in an age of satellites and supercomputers, men still sit by fires or screens and ask:

What am I?

What is going to happen?

What should I do?

No hammer, no plough, no codebase can answer these. 

And that, perhaps, is why the philosopher—despite the artisan’s resentment—endures. 

For we cannot help but wonder. 

And as long as we wonder, we will need those willing to risk an answer.

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