ULTIMATE QUESTIONS
Right now I'm slowly making my way through Hans Kung's Does God Exist?, an 800-page tome whose ultimate answer, with elaborate erudition, is simply "Yes."
Kung's title is the primum inter pares of ultimate questions. Also included in the brood of which Kung's title is patriarch are questions which have troubled people all through time: what is the nature and purpose of life? what is the nature and purpose of the individual human being? do we have a soul? is there life after death? These questions have propelled people to do incredible and monstrous things, to found monasteries and spark long personal quests, but also to mortify the flesh and justify the worst excesses of massacre and inquisition. We have then deduced from all the energy and concern expended on finding the answers to the questions that the questions themselves are important, are worthy of our attention and somehow evoke what is noble in our characters. That, however, may a mistaken assumption.
When I was a teenager I was taken over by these questions. As a serious Catholic, a Catholic boy seriously contemplating a career with the Trappists, these questions were the meat-and-potatoes of my religious existence, my reason for being. And when the religious impulse died under some very expert tutoring by a priest who was later defrocked, the intensity of the questions still persisted, fueled by the usual idealism of adolescence. I soon began to take on a casual Keatsian air, the young romantic unwilling to soil himself with questions of mundane reality, but who instead kept his sights on the celestial nature of things, who, in his own mind, was a noble character because he dared to ask and face the essentials questions of life.
I continued this innocent sentimentality on into my first years at college, where my airiness could be nourished by a 5-million volume library and hordes of intelligent and committed teachers. I searched among the various philosophies and religions for answers, I argued long hours with roommates over minor points of meaning, I wandered in existential angst up and down the banks of the river. In short, I indulged in the life of the knight errant in quest of the Grail, feeling sterling because tragic, justified because unsuccessful.
This may sound foolish but I assure you I was dead serious about all this. The problem, of course, was that I was getting nowhere. I continued to be racked by unappeased desires for certainty, and certainty, in the form of answers to those questions, was simply not available. As much to take my mind off these problems as to do my duty to society, I volunteered to do some tutoring and teaching in the community and at a nearby state prison. It was then I found the answers to what had been unanswerable before.
I realized much later that a good source of my existential problems then was how I had asked what it was I wanted to know. The form of the question is important because the form to some degree should help determine the shape of the answer. I had asked large amorphous questions that suggested large equally amorphous answers. Really, what possible answer is there to the question, What is the meaning of life? The word "meaning" in this interrogation implies a certain definitive restriction and hope: it is this and no other possibility. Given the multifarious nature of our existence, the crazy-quilt texture of our lives, the question is really meaningless because we're looking for an impossible uniformity, a "meaning," amidst what works best as a jumble, a confusion, a hoard of infinite possibilities. A good question is a request for information that is, or will be, available at some point in time. A good question is also a way of provoking reality to give up its secrets; it is a pry-bar on some unseen phenomenon.
Ultimate questions really don't work this way; they are questions that do not really look for answers. Instead, they encapsulate a certain romantic urge for definiteness and order. Having them continually asked provides the questioner with a sense of continuity over time, a continuity that would be destroyed by an iron-clad answer. Asking the question "What is the meaning of life?", then, is the answer to the question. Asking the question, not finding the answer, is the meaning of life to those interested in such questions.
But anyone can see the fruitless circles this would send someone in. What appears as nobility is in fact simple foolishness. Questions are only good if they keep leading one back to actual life, back to testing and verifying the surrounding world. Richard Feynman, the physicist, once suggested that we would all do better if we learned to live without the open-ended questions because physics, at least by what it shows now, indicates that they won't be answered. I agree fully. Far from being debilitating, this lack of certainty is vivifying. It provokes us into finding out how things work, but finding out in a way that is consistent, through the method of science, and attached to the material universe in which we reside, since this is the only home we can definitely say is ours.
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the giant computer Deep Thought has come up with the answer to the question posed to it earlier, namely, "What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?" The answer is 42. When his listeners exclaim disbelief, outraged after waiting seven-and-a-half million years for what they see as a frivolous answer, Deep Thought gives them some very good advice. It's not the answer that's at fault, but that they did not know how to ask the question. Now that they have the answer, they have to go back and find the question. Our universe is like 42; it is, in a sense, our answer. Our duty as human beings is to find questions that fit the answer. Ultimate questions don't do this; science does. Kung's "Yes" is not an answer at all, only an assertion. Let's get down to the computers and the microscopes.