I once had a contentious interview with Richard Dawkins who said there are no big “why” questions. There are only “how” questions such as “How did the universe begin or how did birds evolve wings to fly?” I pushed back, suggesting it’s worth asking existential questions like “Why are we here?” Even if they can’t be answered. How would you respond to Dawkins?
There’s a certain kind of thinking you can’t do by yourself because you have blind spots. You have a whole self-justifying, rationalizing edifice that supports all your mistakes. It’s often very easy for other people to see your mistakes but incredibly hard for you to see them.
Your kids give you a chance to learn about how the world looks from someone who hasn’t been fully shaped by it. That should be an exciting educational opportunity for parents. I see that as one reason to have kids.
You might say, “Let’s identify the fundamental point on which we disagree.” It’s very striking when you do that because you find it’s hard to identify.
The difficulty comes when people have a hard time believing their opponents can argue in good faith. It’s probably not going to help if there are a lot of people watching. People tend to be more performative when there are people watching.
“What’s the thing that could potentially perfect you in a way that would make sense?” And my answer is knowledge, to understand how things work.
There’s a reason why those conversations were so reliably venturing into philosophical territory. It’s because there’s something that your soul wants. Inquiry is a fundamentally dissatisfied activity.
But Socrates discovered we have an even deeper form of vulnerability—the fear about the core ideas that make us who we are. The person we are is a construct that could be shattered. In Socratic inquiry, you allow that to happen. It’s very intimate and lends itself to people feeling somewhat violated, upset, jealous. This is the moment when things, as I said, get interesting. But for the interlocutors who haven’t fully been trained in this practice, there are going to be a lot of casualties.
I once had a contentious interview with Richard Dawkins who said there are no big “why” questions. There are only “how” questions such as “How did the universe begin or how did birds evolve wings to fly?” I pushed back, suggesting it’s worth asking existential questions like “Why are we here?” Even if they can’t be answered. How would you respond to Dawkins?