Back to the Basics

 For quite a while I've had the feeling that BQ has evolved into more of a chat group than a discussion group.  Like we all, I live for the interactions we create as we consider the questions we come up with and that I post in this space.  We see each other in our Zoom meeting, and the check-in time is where we get caught up with each other's lives and activities.  I'm all for that, and it will continue, of course.

What is missing is what I consider to be the in-depth and insightful discussions that the Big Questions should be drawing out of all of us.  Philosophy is the act of asking questions with the innocence of a child and answering them with the rigor of a lawyer, or a philosopher.  Socratic dialectic wasn't a process of finding answers to the questions posed, but rather the progressive exposure of the many ways a question could be turned this way and that, wringing out perspectives that we might not have expected to exist.  Knowledge creeps in here and there, and we end up wiser than when we started.  THAT is the outcome I seek, and that is the outcome I count on all of you to help me, and everyone, to achieve.

I pulled out my copy of Socrates Cafe by Christopher Phillips for inspiration for this week's meeting.  The first page of that text was all I needed to get my philosophical juices flowing.  What is insanity?  That was the question being asked.  What do we do individually, as a family member, as small group members, as a community, as a country, as a society, that include elements of insanity?  How many could we identify?  The book's text lays it out in a clear way.  I'm sure that in a group setting it would take quite some time, and lots of interjections and comments to get to the point, but the seemingly endless questioning was invigorating.  I hope you feel the same.

We can use the same question as our starting point.  What is insanity.  And if you don't have a copy of Socrates Cafe, get one.  It is a great read, and you will be pleased you took the time to read it.

The Art of Powerful Questions

 I ran across a short booklet with this title, and I wondered how I might be able to bend the information it contains to our purposes at BQ.  Here is a link to the book.  It deals with how we think of the questions we ask and the answers we seek, and how, by reframing the questions, new outcomes emerge.  It is subtle and powerful stuff, and worthy of our consideration.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” —ALBERT EINSTEIN

This quote is pure Socrates, as well as Einstein.  Socrates spent a tremendous amount of time in working through the questions he asked the men of Athens, and how this probing and pushing put them on edge as their assumptions were questioned, and the thoroughness of their thinking was exposed.  They hated him for it, and eventually killed him because of it, but the root of his wisdom was in his use of dialectic dissection of language and argumentation.

Einstein was credited with discovering so many things not by working out the mathematics behind them, but in envisioning the products of that math in forms that could be understood physically or intellectually based on common sense analogies.  Light as both a particle and a wave, at the same time?  Preposterous on the face of it, but the proof was so simple, and so devastating.  Mass and energy are somehow equivalent?  It doesn't make sense on the surface of it (pun intended), but the reality of this fundamental principle lies behind almost everything we know, today.  And the list goes on.

The point of the book, and my hope for our discussion, is that we can take a question and reframe it in a way that the outcome is not what we regularly accept as an outcome, but rather something unique and new.  Philosophically, the classic, Is there a god? might not have a yes or no answer with examples supporting each possibility, but something more nuanced and graded.  Could god be both present and absent at the same time?  Both active in directing the ways of the universe and simultaneously impassive.  Might this be the Clockmaker's Concept of god?  Get things set up, turn them on and then let them run on their own?  Does that mean god existed, but no longer exists?

Or does St. Thomas Aquinas have the correct concept when he says, "God wills the smallest blade of grass to spring forth into being. It is the Eternal Will that regulates the passage of clouds before the sun."  

Things to think about...