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What Is it That Matters?

August 30, 2006 1:15 AM

hen I was an undergrad working towards my philosophy degree, I would occasionally tell my friends that I wasn't able to do something with them because I was working on a paper for a philosophy class. One of my friends, Chris, would constantly tease me by saying that I should just turn in a paper with "Why?" printed in huge font. Honestly, I thought it was funny, but it made a good point.

Some people might think that philosophers have - or, more appropriately, think they have - all the answers. But what studying philosophy teaches you, or at least what it taught me, is how to ask questions. While I believe that there are right and wrong answers, that there is Truth in the world, I also realize that those Answers are hard to come by. But the important thing to keep in mind, I think, is that, given the elusive nature of real, ultimate Truth, the answers we ask on the way to the Answers are just as important, if not moreso, than the answers we find.

There was a time in the dark days of history when we were asking the question: How do we explain retrograde motion, given that the Earth is the center of the universe? That question resulted in unbelievably complex models of the universe. See, e.g., Ptolemaic spheres (explaining retrograde motion through the use of several interlocking spheres). But such contrivances, useful as they were, were incorrect, objectively speaking. The cause of this incorrectness was the questions people were asking. Later, as the geocentric model became more and more improbable, given empiracal evidence, the heliocentric model became accepted, and the question "how can we explain retrograde motion?" became moot: retrograde motion was a consequence of heliocentrism, not a problem to be explained away. Retrograde motion supported the heliocentric model, rather than serving as an insoluble problem within the geocentric framework. Put another way, because we asked a different question, we saw that the questions we were asking before were, frankly, stupid.

So, given this background, I must admit that I have no answer to the question posed in the title of this post. And, enlightened by the work of Ptolemy, I wonder if it's even a question that's worth asking. Is it family that matters? Love and sex and children and grandchildren? Is it money? Success? Defined how? Is it freedom from want? Freedom from need? Happiness? What the fuck is happiness? Is it time alone with a good book, or time with someone you love? Is it sleeping in, or waking up and "living life to the fullest"? Is it keeping your feet firmly on the ground or jumping out of perfectly functional airplanes? Is it saving children's lives or making sure there aren't too many children to begin with? Is it driving a hybrid so that you reduce your impact on our environment, or is it working towards a way to make sure the human race is not wiped out when our sun goes nova and our little green planet is swallowed up by the resulting explosion? What is it that matters?

I wake up some days and I run around and I do all this shit. But, in the end, there are still people without enough food to eat, there are people with AIDS, there are children crying in streets somewhere. Does it matter that I feel like I've accomplished something this Tuesday?

I do what I do, I guess. And maybe I should be thankful that I even have the luxury of sitting here thinking about this.


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