¡Que tristeza!
Las Doñas lloran,
en sus vestidas negras
the mists of morning
swirl in the air.
¡Tan joven!
They shriek, and pull their hair
the dark-haired lad lays
pale on the cobblestone
red blood on the barrel
of his father's rifle.
Los irregulares file
iron through the streets.
And the seed of liberty,
planted new,
is crushed 'neath
the heel of combat boots.
Hope had they,
that perhaps,
with the dawning
of the day
the chains of centuries,
long rusted
would clatter free
but such dreams
are just that,
dreams;
and melt away
with the dawning
of the day.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Who Questions the Questioner?
In My Education, William Burroughs says cryptically that “the answer to any question will come when you stop asking questions and wipe from your mind the concept of question”. Upon reading this however, in quite the opposite reaction from the Grand Old Zombie of the Counterculture intention, my mind was flooded with questions. Chiefly among those was “What is the concept of question?” or more succinctly, “What is a question?”.
Quite the puzzling abstraction really. Namely, it is difficult to say what a question is without resorting to tautologous synonyms. Is a question the act of questioning? An inquest into something? An inquest is just the formalized act of putting something to the question, and the act of questioning, while surely what a question is in the most literal of senses, doesn’t really get us anywhere. A performative then surely, in Austin’s sense; the grammatical request for more information. But again, how can one request something without asking a question? Command surely, but not request.
Admittedly, the level of abstraction at which we’re working is a heavy duty one indeed. It begs all sorts of questions on its own, such as- can general metaphysical types even be said to exist outside the mind? But that’s off-topic for the time being. But self-reference is a major problem in sorting a thing like this out. How can one question questioning without asking a question? Perhaps you can’t, and questions are some inexplicable epiphenomenon that’s arisen Gödelian from the murk of human cognition. But that I refuse to believe. The thought that my faculties are simply not up to the challenge is much more comforting. Almost needless to say, the desire to check Wikipedia mounts with each passing frustration.
Sadly, even Wikipedia is stymied by such murk, defining a question as “linguistic expression used to make a request for information, or else the request itself made by such an expression”. To which the dictionary replies “no such luck shit-head, try thinking for yourself”. Not in so many words however, as dictionaries are commonly more polite than that. The 2009 Random House Dictionary, courtesy of dictionary.com, defines a request as “the act of asking for something to be given or done, esp. as a favor or courtesy; solicitation or petition”.
So, according to the internet, that endless font of knowledge and distraction, a question is a linguistic expression used to make the act of asking for information. And in order to ask, you have to use a question. Self-reference again! What’s to be done? Again! Gah, this is getting frustrating.
When queried, my brother responded that perhaps a question is a desire for knowledge. That is true, but it seems more satisfactory as an answer for “Why do we ask questions?”, or “What are questions for?”. So he was no help really, and my sister just quirked her eyebrow at me uncomprehendingly. So much for asking teenagers for help with metaphysical problems.
None of this gets me any closer to understanding what the concept of a question is. The problem with the concept of question is that there is no “question”, no platonic form that all questions adhere to. Drawing upon the Wittgensteinan idea of Family Resemblances, in which categories are not strict but rather fuzzy and bleed into one another, perhaps the concept of question depends upon the question being asked. This self-referential modulation would fit with the flood tide of self-reference that this whole project has been struggling to tread water in.
This still leaves me without any sort of clear picture of what I’m looking for or looking at. Which is particularly troublesome because the point of this whole exercise was to find out what a concept of questioning is so that I could push it aside and allow my answers to come more naturally.
Perhaps the process of questioning is the unfolding of the lotus of knowledge, petal by petal; the question the rough fingers by which the petals are spread; and the concept is the hope that when you get done, you’ll have made it look the way it should have looked if you waited for it to open on its own.
But when you stop all this, and clear away the concept of questioning, in a very Zen sort of way, you realize that the lotus doesn’t need to be unfolded, because it already is, you just have to look at it.
Quite the puzzling abstraction really. Namely, it is difficult to say what a question is without resorting to tautologous synonyms. Is a question the act of questioning? An inquest into something? An inquest is just the formalized act of putting something to the question, and the act of questioning, while surely what a question is in the most literal of senses, doesn’t really get us anywhere. A performative then surely, in Austin’s sense; the grammatical request for more information. But again, how can one request something without asking a question? Command surely, but not request.
Admittedly, the level of abstraction at which we’re working is a heavy duty one indeed. It begs all sorts of questions on its own, such as- can general metaphysical types even be said to exist outside the mind? But that’s off-topic for the time being. But self-reference is a major problem in sorting a thing like this out. How can one question questioning without asking a question? Perhaps you can’t, and questions are some inexplicable epiphenomenon that’s arisen Gödelian from the murk of human cognition. But that I refuse to believe. The thought that my faculties are simply not up to the challenge is much more comforting. Almost needless to say, the desire to check Wikipedia mounts with each passing frustration.
Sadly, even Wikipedia is stymied by such murk, defining a question as “linguistic expression used to make a request for information, or else the request itself made by such an expression”. To which the dictionary replies “no such luck shit-head, try thinking for yourself”. Not in so many words however, as dictionaries are commonly more polite than that. The 2009 Random House Dictionary, courtesy of dictionary.com, defines a request as “the act of asking for something to be given or done, esp. as a favor or courtesy; solicitation or petition”.
So, according to the internet, that endless font of knowledge and distraction, a question is a linguistic expression used to make the act of asking for information. And in order to ask, you have to use a question. Self-reference again! What’s to be done? Again! Gah, this is getting frustrating.
When queried, my brother responded that perhaps a question is a desire for knowledge. That is true, but it seems more satisfactory as an answer for “Why do we ask questions?”, or “What are questions for?”. So he was no help really, and my sister just quirked her eyebrow at me uncomprehendingly. So much for asking teenagers for help with metaphysical problems.
None of this gets me any closer to understanding what the concept of a question is. The problem with the concept of question is that there is no “question”, no platonic form that all questions adhere to. Drawing upon the Wittgensteinan idea of Family Resemblances, in which categories are not strict but rather fuzzy and bleed into one another, perhaps the concept of question depends upon the question being asked. This self-referential modulation would fit with the flood tide of self-reference that this whole project has been struggling to tread water in.
This still leaves me without any sort of clear picture of what I’m looking for or looking at. Which is particularly troublesome because the point of this whole exercise was to find out what a concept of questioning is so that I could push it aside and allow my answers to come more naturally.
Perhaps the process of questioning is the unfolding of the lotus of knowledge, petal by petal; the question the rough fingers by which the petals are spread; and the concept is the hope that when you get done, you’ll have made it look the way it should have looked if you waited for it to open on its own.
But when you stop all this, and clear away the concept of questioning, in a very Zen sort of way, you realize that the lotus doesn’t need to be unfolded, because it already is, you just have to look at it.
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