Dr. Sean Collins: Why Do We Need Questions?

At Thomas Aquinas College we spend a lot of time asking questions. But perhaps some of you will want to correct me: you will say it’s we, the tutors, who spend a lot of time asking questions, while you students spend most of your time searching for answers. I’ll admit that sometimes I have thought that this job I have of being a tutor is the best job in the world, because I get to read the best books ever written, and then if there are things I don’t understand, I just come to class and ask about them. After you students answer my questions, I get to go home and get paid, while you, the ones who answered the questions, get to pay tuition. That might seem a little unfair.

But of course I’m speaking mostly in jest. It really isn’t just the tutors who have to ask questions. In fact, I am going to argue in this lecture that asking questions is an essential part of what we do; and by “we” I mean not only the tutors, but also you students. To see why it’s essential, we are going to have to ask some questions about questions themselves.

Before we get going with that, I should mention that broadly speaking this discussion pertains to logic, or in other words the investigation of our natural, human methods of discourse. And so the aim of my lecture is theoretical but also practical. As befits an opening lecture for the school year, I am hoping that this lecture will help us understand better what we do here at TAC, and thereby help us do it better. My goal is to discuss things which are important not only for success in the classroom, but in our whole approach to contemplative life. There is much here to discuss, and I want to avoid the mistake of trying to say too much. But I do want to tell you up front that there’s lots more to think about. Perhaps that can give us hope for a fruitful and lively discussion period afterwards.

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So to begin: why are questions important? There are all sorts of questions, with all sorts of occasions that prompt them. For example, you could ask someone, “What’s going to be on the exam?”, or “Will you dance with me tonight?”, or “Is that really dancing?”, or “How long is this lecture going to be?”, or “Should we go bowling afterwards?”, or “What is virtue?” But despite the diversity of questions, it deserves noticing first that even the most diverse sorts of questions do all seem to have something in common. They all seem to convey some sort of desire on the part of the speaker, either to know something or perhaps to decide or prove something. But of course the questions that will interest us most in this discussion are of a more restricted variety; they are mostly what we could broadly call “philosophical” questions, such as my last one above, “What is virtue?”

One way to describe this last sort of question is to say that it is an expression of what we call wonder. We have all heard the maxim which says that “philosophy begins in wonder.” But what exactly does this mean? I know that I myself have acquired a reputation for being a tutor who incites a fair amount of wonder. Or so at least students often say. I confess that there have been moments when I have wondered if this was a kind of backhanded compliment. “That Mr. Collins, I’m not sure if he knows anything, but he sure is good at wondering about stuff.” To be fair, I don’t really think that that’s what has been meant most of the time. But we could, in any case, still wonder why wonder matters that much, or even if it really does matter. Is the proverb that philosophy begins in wonder perhaps just a pious platitude, or is it more than that? Does it just mean that we really do have an innate desire to know? Is it theoretically possible that we could dispense with this piety about wonder, and just get on with the business of finding out whatever it is that we’re supposed to learn?

I am going to argue that this last idea would be a serious mistake. If it is true that philosophy or knowledge begins in wonder, and if it is true that the normal expression of wonder is questions, then we could translate the maxim into the statement that “knowledge begins with questions.” And we could then further recall that at the very dawn of philosophy, the first great teacher and model of philosophical pursuit was Socrates. What seems to especially characterize Socrates is a disposition to ask many questions, even sometimes to the point of annoyance of those with whom he converses. Socrates also claims that he doesn’t know much. But he does relentlessly ask questions. We may wonder if Socrates is a little too self-deprecating when he says he doesn’t know much. Are his questions a disguise, a cloak of humility, placed over knowledge that he really has? After all, how could he have become a great teacher if all he does is wonder about things, rather than assert something? What interior state of soul is this, exactly, that inclines Socrates to think of himself and act this way?

In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates’ inclination to ask questions is situated between two other things – perhaps we could call them “cultural phenomena,” in order to sound sophisticated. The first cultural phenomenon is the rise of the sophists, who do not show much interest in asking questions, but in just telling us things. The second phenomenon is less common, but still interesting: namely the appearance of certain individuals such as Ion, who make their life of the mind depend neither on questions nor on any kind of worked out reasoning, but on something called “inspiration.” But perhaps this inspiration is also connected with wonder. It looks like the sort of thing we might call “wonderful.”

Socrates finds both the sophists and the inspired ones intensely interesting and even puzzling. Both of them seem attractive in some ways, but also problematic. Should we see Socrates’s own way, the way of asking questions, as a third and intermediate alternative, perhaps one that avoids excess while holding on to what is valuable in each of the extremes? Notice that the way of the sophists appears to be entirely active, and no way receptive, whereas that of Ion appears to be somehow entirely receptive instead of active.

In any case, in the first Platonic dialogue that you freshman have just begun to read, the Meno, we do see that it’s really hard to go forward in any philosophical inquiry unless one has a genuine desire to learn and ask questions. Meno asks Socrates whether virtue can be taught, but when it comes to thinking seriously about it Meno doesn’t seem to have much stamina for the pursuit. A little further into the dialogue, Socrates urges Meno to probe the depth of the original question about whether virtue is teachable by recognizing it as founded upon a deeper question, namely the question “What is virtue?” Meno himself then seems to realize that these questions are like a well that keeps getting deeper. If taken seriously, they make demands upon our minds, upon our intellectual capacity for reading reality, that Meno didn’t seem to anticipate at first. Even by the end it is less than clear that Meno really has much inclination towards it. And something similar to this can be seen now and then in other dialogues as well. In the Republic, for example, Thrasymachus becomes rather annoyed when Socrates probes a little too deeply about the real nature of justice. Thrasymachus seems to perceive a threat being posed to his own easy, prepackaged answers to life’s puzzles.

There are a couple of other things, however, that emerge in our reading of the Meno, which may cause us to wonder more deeply about just what the role of questions is in the life of the mind. One is what happens with the slave boy. As you will recall, Socrates invites a slave boy to answer questions about how to make the double of a given square. And then by doing nothing but asking questions, Socrates leads the slave boy to discover for himself how to double a square, by a route quite different from what he had first anticipated. Using this as an illustration, Socrates suggests that what we learn is somewhere in us even before we we learn it, and all it seems to take to bring it out is the right questions. That may suggest that there is something in questions that is more than just a bare desire for something. The question “Will you dance with me?” sounds like the expression of a desire, but is there something else involved in questions that enables us not only to wish for something, but also to reason? Could questions even have in their interior character something which is already akin to knowing?

Should we have said, in fact, that “Will you dance with me tonight?” is really not a question, but something else, namely a request? By comparison, if I ask, “What is virtue?” should we not say that there is in this case no request, no act of the will being proposed, but something that simply has to do with knowing versus not knowing?

I myself encountered an interesting intimation of this thought some years ago when I first became a tutor. I was then at St. John’s College, from which we have inherited many of our intellectual customs here at TAC. But there was one interesting custom at St. John’s which we don’t tend to share as much here. Some people there, although I imagine not all, held that the goal of education is to discover and explore what were called “the great questions.” Those who said this were thinking of questions such as “Is there a God,” or “What is causality,” or “Why are we here,” or “Why does evil exist,” and so on. The idea seemed to be that it is the questions that we are really after in our education, and not so much the answers to them. When I first encountered this opinion, I naturally found it a little bit problematic. On occasion I think I argued with my colleagues about it. It didn’t seem very hard to argue against it. After all, if a question expresses a desire for an answer, who in the world would want to have just the questions and not the answers?

But on the other hand, if a question is more than the expression of a desire, and in some way an expression of the mind, then perhaps the opinion of my former colleagues could make some sense. In one of the inspiring talks that our founding president Ron McArthur was famous for giving, in which he would explain why we do what we do here at TAC, he quoted another great educator, Mortimer Adler. As I’m sure some of you know, Adler was an inspiring and influential mentor for both St. John’s College and for Thomas Aquinas College. I don’t remember the exact words of what Dr. McArthur quoted from Adler, but the gist of it was that much of what passes for education nowadays is just answers looking for questions. That assertion was not meant as a compliment towards educators. The point was to say that if teachers just offer answers without any questions preceding them, it is likely that the answers won’t really amount to anything either, because no one is likely to know what the answers accomplish or even mean. That too might suggest to us that there is something in questions that is akin to knowing.

So now you see that I’ve already asked a lot of questions, and I’ve not given too many definitive answers. But from thinking about these questions I will propose an immediate practical conclusion. Questions do matter for learning. Experience shows that it really does matter that we have questions before we try to get answers, lest the answers should fail to be recognized as really fulfilling something in our minds. And so I would urge you students to make good use of questions. Answers without questions are a lot like artificial intelligence; they are apt to be simply a repetition of what someone said, but lacking any real intelligence beneath them to be fulfilled or satisfied. So if you encounter something in class that doesn’t make sense to you, ask a question about it. And if you find yourself in the position of having to ask a lot of questions instead of answering them, you should not think that you are burdened with a dishonorable role in discussion. Answers without understood questions fail to do the primary thing that we hope to accomplish in all of our studies, which is to develop not just a habit of accepting something we are told, but of becoming a good judge. We cannot become good judges until we become habituated to discovering real things that beckon to our mind’s natural desire and power to understand them. That process begins with questions, which give direction to our thought.

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All that being said, however, I propose now that we take a deeper dive. We should really follow the example of Socrates a little more closely. To Meno’s question, “Is virtue teachable?”, Socrates responds by pointing out that there is a deeper question upon which the first question depends, namely “What is virtue?” So likewise here, if we really want to understand more deeply the value of questions, what we should do is ask the more fundamental question, namely “What is a question?”

So: what is a question? We said before that it seems to signify some kind of desire or wish. But to look into that more deeply, I’m going to suggest a brief detour into something that you juniors will remember fondly from last year. What we must observe is that understanding the meaning of speech involves more than just identifying some indifferent object of signifying; we must also see how the things we signify stand in relation to our own minds as we speak. This gives rise to what we call “modes of signifying.” You freshmen and rising sophomores haven’t yet had the pleasure of discussing this in the language tutorial, but you will soon enough. For now, we don’t need to discuss much about it. The one thing we need to note is that there are two general kinds of relations that the things we signify can have to our own minds. They can either be objects of thinking or objects of willing, since those are the two most universal powers of the rational soul. This is why, for example, what is called the imperative mood of a verb differs from the indicative mood. If I say “You are coming tomorrow,” I am using the indicative mood. If I say “Come tomorrow,” I am using what we call the imperative mood. The object of signification in the indicative mode is what stands to our minds as known, while what is signified in the imperative stands to our minds, or more precisely our wills, as what we will or desire.

This distinction explains why it is only the indicative mode of speaking that is either true or false, whereas the imperative mode is neither. For an act of willing, unlike an act of knowing, is neither true nor false just as such. There are some further striking and important things to note about this. First, notice that the person who utters a command expresses his will, but does not strictly speak about his will. He could speak about his will, if he chose too, by using a kind of circumlocution. Instead of saying “Come tomorrow,” he could say, “I want you to come tomorrow.” Now we have no longer a command, but an indicative statement, produced by the speaker talking about his own state of soul. The one spoken to can easily enough understand what he is to do from that, and so this way of speaking can and sometimes does take the place of a command. But in the real imperative statement, the speaker does not speak about himself, but about what is to be done, and what is spoken is not spoken as something observed or known, but as the expression as well as instrument of an act of will.

Since a command is thus an instrument of authority, it is strictly speaking only someone who has authority who can effectively speak a command. We do, however, use what grammarians call the imperative mood for other things as well, such as prayers, requests, and wishes. We understand the differences between these, at least in English, less by the sensible form of the verb and more by context and intonation. So when we say “hallowed be thy name” in the Our Father, we still use the grammatical imperative mood, even though we recognize that this is not a command. What it retains in common with a command, however, is that it still expresses an act of will and not an act of knowing. Likewise, whether what we utter is a command, a request, a prayer, or a wish, it can be spoken in English with what grammarians call the imperative mood. All of these are expressions of acts of the will, though of various different kinds.

So this is enough to see that a primary and most general division of kinds of sentences, with roughly corresponding moods or forms of verbs, is according to whether they express acts of the will or the mind. Then, as a further more specific division, we can see that they may signify either of these in various more subdivided ways.

So now we are almost ready to return to what a question is. Once we see that sentences naturally divide into expressions of the will and expressions of the mind, we should expect questions to be one or the other. So which one are they? One peculiar thing to note with questions is that there doesn’t seem to be, in English at least, a distinct form for the verb used in a question. We use the same form of the verb as we use for the indicative, either with an inversion of the noun and verb, or else just with a distinct intonation that suggests that we are anticipating an answer.

But why do we use the indicative? For that matter, it is also interesting that in English we often signify a request with exactly the same form that we use for questions, still with the indicative, and with the verb and subject inverted. So in the beginning of our lecture I gave “Will you dance with me tonight?” as an example of a question, but perhaps we should wonder if this is really a question. Ordinarily, the person who says “Will dance with me tonight?” is not looking for information, as one ordinarily does with questions, but for actual dancing. If the person who utters the request really wanted information, they might say instead, “Will you be dancing with me tonight?”

All of this should make us wonder what a question is exactly, and more particularly whether it is the expression of an act of our will willing, or an act of the mind knowing. And further, is a question the same thing as a request? We have already observed, right from the outset, that questions are not true or false, and thus do not seem to express something as known, but indicate rather a desire for something. This is also true of requests. Well then, do questions fall on the side of expressions of the will? Is that why questions and requests look alike?

These problems impressed themselves on my mind one day years ago when I was a young graduate student. I had come across a perplexing text. It was in a commentary by one of the commentators on Aristotle’s work On Interpretation. While preparing this lecture, I went back and looked for the passage that had perplexed me, but since I couldn’t find it I will just have to tell you about it from memory. The text I came across was discussing what we have just now been discussing, namely the kinds of sentences and the verbs that they use. It laid them out more or less as we have, by dividing between the kinds that express an act of will, such as commands, requests, and so on, and those that express an act of the mind. And just as we did, the text set all of the various kinds of expressions of the will in opposition to the indicative, which expresses not an act of will but an act of the mind observing or apprehending something. But what surprised me is that when it came to questions, the author put them on the general side of sentences which expresses the mind, like the indicative, and not on the side of those forms which express the will.

I was surprised by this, since as we have already said a few times, questions always seem to express a desire — namely a desire to know something. Should it not then be placed on the side of the sentences that express the will, rather than the intellect? My first thought was that this commentary must be wrong. But I didn’t dismiss the passage out of hand, and in fact the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that the author was right and that I had been wrong. He had to be right, because in the opinion I had entertained before, a question would really be the same as a request, and I began to realize that this was not true. Questions place no obligation upon the listener to fulfill a wish or desire in the way that requests do. They do nothing but offer an opening to be filled up with knowledge, should the one who hears the question wish to fill it.

This may seem strange at first, but some further examples will confirm it. It turns out that questions don’t even require, as a condition for asking them, that the one asking be seeking knowledge. A parent teaching a child might say, “What is 4 x 9?”, or with a younger child, “What color is this?” At first we might think that there is just a kind of false pretending going on in examples like these. Is the questioner merely pretending to be ignorant? But on reflection, this doesn’t seem to be quite correct. Instead, the parent or teacher chooses to think at the level of the child or student, so that the two can understand each other. Likewise our Lord says to his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” He isn’t pretending to be ignorant. In all of these examples, what we can see finally is that the question is merely expressing the mind’s receptivity to the truth. That receptivity exists in some sense even when it is already fulfilled.

And so the answer to the question “What is a question?” is that it is simply an expression of the receptivity of the mind. By consequence, it also expresses the natural desire that our mind has to receive what is true. After I encountered the problem I’ve been describing, I gradually came to recognize, and I think you will too, is that there is in fact a kind of desire or intention that our minds have towards the truth, even before that intention engages our wills explicitly. In this connection, St. Thomas observes that every power of the soul has a kind of natural desire towards its object. This natural desire is not the same as an act of willing. In the case of the mind, we can say that the act of knowing is what the mind just naturally seeks for no other reason than because it is the fulfillment of the mind itself. Questions are thus the natural expression of this receptivity and desire of the mind, even before the will comes into play. And answers are then the fulfillment of this receptivity.

There is one further important qualification to add to this account of what questions are. It is that questions express not only receptivity, but what I will call articulated receptiveness. A newborn child has a receptive mind, though the child cannot yet ask any questions. We, on the other hand, have a more formed receptivity, one which we articulate with words. This can be compared with the materials out of which something is made, such as a house. Ordinarily we do not make houses out of bare clay or wood. Rather we form the material into bricks and so forth, so that it becomes more adequately and immediately receptive of a more perfect form, a form which bare clay cannot immediately hold. In the same way, questions express not just the bare receptivity of the mind, but a more perfected kind of receptivity that is the result of already knowing things.

Thus we can see that although questions do usually imply ignorance, what they require more essentially is a receptivity that derives from some prior knowledge, in the form of awareness that there are things to be known, perhaps new things one was not aware of before. This is not only knowledge of a practical sort, the sort that says “I should do this or that,” but of a contemplative sort. In the Meno, when the slave boy first begins to talk with Socrates, he doesn’t ask immediately if there is some other way to double a square besides doubling its side. That isn’t a question for him until later. He can’t will it into being a question, because what he thinks is the right answer to the question about how to double a square would, if it were true, exclude any question about an alternative. And so it is really after he has seen that what he assumed would work turns out not to work that the new question comes into existence, not just as an act of will but of understanding. This is why what we observed before is true, namely that we don’t really learn in any strict sense if all we ever get is answers looking for questions.

Interestingly, Aristotle claims in the Posterior Analytics that all knowledge comes from some kind of pre-existing knowledge. This seems like a peculiar thing to say on the face of it, but now, at least, we can see that the derivation of knowledge from prior knowledge is a much more universal thing than we are perhaps at first inclined to suspect, because even questions turn out to involve prior knowledge. This is why there is a natural order among questions. A child cannot ask why the sky is blue before knowing that the sky is blue, and a scientist cannot ask what light is unless he knows that light exists. The knowledge of the that enters into the question as to why, and the knowledge of something’s existence enters into the question as to what it is.

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There is a particular kind of question in which the role of pre-existent knowledge contained in the question is especially manifest, namely with what Aristotle calls an aporia. Aporia literally means an impasse, though it is nowadays most often just referred to as a difficulty or problem. Sometimes it is called a “knot.” What the slave boy encounters is a knot of sorts; he becomes baffled by the fact that what seems like the obvious way to double a square doesn’t work. When I described how puzzled I was when thinking at first about what a question is, that too was an aporia. We face a problem of this sort when we not only see an opening for new knowledge, but also something that seems to stand in the way. This, however, is unlike a practical problem, where we all we encounter is an impediment that we should be happy have taken away. An intellectual problem is different it is something we can welcome, because it is an occasion for discovery. We know that the truth itself comprehends difficulties, rather than being stymied by them. And so we should welcome such problems as stepping stones towards more complete understanding.

I will offer you one concrete, striking historical example of this, one which some of you are no doubt familiar with already. This example played a significant role Aristotle’s own discoveries even about the very foundations of mathematics and natural philosophy. The example I have in mind is the problem of the tortoise and the hare, which is one of Zeno’s famous paradoxes. I first encountered this problem as a high school student, because I happened to have an excellent teacher who knew how to think philosophically, and how to rouse the minds of his students. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the paradox, but for those who aren’t, I’ll briefly describe it. Zeno wishes to prove that motion is impossible, and he does it by arguing that if it were possible, a faster moving object could never overtake a slower one as long as the slower one gets a head start. Suppose a rabbit and a turtle have a race, but the turtle gets a head start. Then once they’ve begun, it will take some time for the rabbit to catch up to where the turtle began. By that time the turtle will have gone some distance. So it will take some more time for the rabbit to catch up to where the turtle is now. By then the turtle will have gone some still further distance. And so on. This process can evidently go on infinitely, and therefore it apparently follows that the rabbit can never overtake the turtle.

So now we’re talking about rabbits and turtles. Maybe that doesn’t sound so dignified. In fact, when I heard this paradox for the first time as a high school student, there happened to be a young lady who was a good friend of mine. When I told her about the paradox, she had a terse response. She said, “That’s ridiculous. Of course the rabbit will win.” She even said it more than once, in case I was deaf. Remarkably, my dear friend never achieved the state of questioning. I probably don’t need to tell you that the friendship between myself and that young lady never blossomed into a full-blown romance.

Aristotle, on the other hand, took this paradox so seriously that he proposed a solution for it not once, but twice. After giving his first solution, he says it is inadequate, and he looks for and finds a deeper one. This even became, for Aristotle, one element of the experience that led into a deeply articulated and profound philosophy of nature. It is interesting to note that to this day, there are many professional mathematicians who know about the paradox but don’t look into it far enough; they only get as far as the first solution, and think that they are done. There are also some philosophers, especially the followers of Hegel and Marx, who know about the paradox but choose to answer it in absurd ways … but I won’t go into that more here. Suffice it to say that this seemingly small problem has extraordinary ramifications.

We should also notice that the Zeno paradox is an argument. It is one which we must understand in order for our minds to be spurred on to look for a solution to the problem it poses. When this happens, the argument which began as an objection takes a new turn, and now becomes an argument for a distinction or correction, and thence also a source of understanding. This is what happens for Aristotle himself, who sees that the understanding of the Zeno paradox really centers around the meaning of both the infinite and the continuous. This leads him to a deeper understanding of the necessity of a distinction between potentiality and mere negation. As I said, there are many today, even among scholars, who never recognize these questions, and consequently never come to the understanding I am speaking of. Some of them have written books on how Aristotle didn't really know what he was talking about, but just made up things like the distinction between the potential and the actual, as if that were simply one of his pet projects.

So now I hope you see better, dear students, why you should welcome questions and problems in your daily life as a student, and even see them as essential for our mind’s activity, and vehicles for real learning. I will also add add here a note about the practical implication of my claim that questions are not expressions of the will. While that may seem like an abstract, unhelpful fact, it has consequences. Suppose questions really were just expressions of someone’s will. What would arguably follow if we took that to its logical conclusion is that answers would likewise have to be nothing but some kind of fulfillment of the will. There are a few philosophers, both ancient and modern, who have entertained that idea. I confess that there have been moments when I have wondered if this particular misconception arises now and then implicitly even in our intellectual pursuits here at the college. Day after day, you students hear tutors persistently asking questions. Maybe you are tempted on occasion to quietly wonder: where did the tutor come up with all these questions? Do they matter? Are the questions anything other than some kind of imposition of the tutor’s will, which I find myself reluctantly obliged to submit to? It can become easy to grow weary. We can see that Socrates faced the same kind of doubt sometimes in those with whom he spoke. In a college setting, when the going gets difficult in this way, we can think that the remedy is the same as the remedy for every other challenge: just try harder. There are times when we need to expend more effort, but often what we need most is to recognize that it not just our wills that need to be engaged. Our minds must be engaged, by real questions. We can’t just will the questions; there is a real sense in which we need to see them through a habit of contemplative openness.

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While cultivating a habit of asking questions, we should also cultivate the habit of asking them well, as well as about the right things. What do I mean by the right things? If it is true that questions express most fundamentally the receptivity of the mind, there can nevertheless be questions about all sorts of things, as we noted at the beginning of the talk. The receptivity of the mind is not equally fulfilled by answers to every kind of question. The answer to the question “Is that really dancing?” may be fulfilling to someone’s mind in some way, but not as much as the answer to the question “What is dancing?”, or “What is justice?” Philosophy is born in the pursuit of answers to those questions which really express the mind’s receptivity most fully.

In this connection I must mention the many false things that are suggested in connection with what is supposed to pass for liberal education. We hear it said, for example, that “critical thinking” is what liberal education is really for. In a similar vein, there is also the exercise theory of learning, which suggests that we study to exercise the mind, just as we would exercise the body. Some say that the goal of our kind of education is not to learn, but to learn how to learn. Another idea is that there are some general things that are most useful for living, before we specialize too much. In particular, there is the view, either articulated or implied, that what we need is knowledge that will teach us how to lead better lives, perhaps especially by being more loving or more holy.

Some of these suggestions, especially the last one, are a good deal closer to the truth than others. But they all may share at least a potential misunderstanding, consisting in the surmise that what is worthy of our educational pursuit is really not any actual knowledge about reality or life just for its own sake, because knowledge itself is essentially just a tool. This view demotes the human mind itself from being the highest part of our nature to the level of a mere tool, and it sees the mind’s receptivity in those terms.

The very existence of philosophical and contemplative life finally depends upon the possibility that not only the will but also the mind itself can be fulfilled and thus be our perfection. There is indeed a fulfillment of the will too, and it is no small thing. Still, the idea of a will without a mind, or a resolve to be intentional without an acknowledgment of the beauty of the eternal logos, while it has tempted even some great philosophers, is ultimately empty and false. That is why our greatest and most immediate purpose as learners must be to discover the true for its own sake.

But here, speaking of difficulties, is where we encounter a difficulty with great ramifications. It is such an important difficulty that I will only be able to offer a faint glimpse into its importance and its solution. The difficulty begins with the observation already made that plainly not all true things perfect the mind. The answer to the question “Why don’t you like to dance?” may be important to someone, but it isn’t likely to perfect the mind very much. And there are a great many things of that sort that necessarily preoccupy us; so many, in fact, that one might well begin to wonder whether this idea that knowledge can perfect us is really true.

In a beautiful passage in his Almagest, Ptolemy asserts that the knowledge of the heavenly bodies is what perfects our minds the most, since these bodies are at the same time eternal and relatively accessible to us. So it isn’t just because we can say true things about the heavenly bodies that they are worthy of our contemplative examination, but because the truth that they have in themselves is of a most inherently noble and intelligible kind. Ptolemy takes the stars in their courses to be eternal realities which, being known by us, must elevate our minds.

Ironically, though, it turns out that Ptolemy was wrong. While the knowledge of the heavenly bodies has become even more accessible to us through the tools and methods of modern science, the eternity of them has been discovered to be an illusion.

I know this may sound blunt. But to be all to brief about it, I will say that Ptolemy was certainly not wrong to say that there are eternal things, nor to suggest that eternal things are what especially perfect the mind. He wasn’t even wrong to point to the heavenly bodies as a bridge towards that perfection. If he was wrong about anything, it was about how they are a bridge. There is simply too much for me to discuss adequately here, but what we can say briefly and for certain is that while fewer things in our immediate experience are simply eternal than was once thought, there are correspondingly more things that are signs of the eternal, and signs in more wonderful ways, than was once recognized.

Perhaps the greatest mark of these signs is their beauty. While the possibility of a knowledge that perfects the mind’s receptivity is not apparent to all, what is more immediately apparent is that the world around us is full of beauty, down to the finest nook and cranny. That beauty often appears, if I may put it metaphorically, in the form of a resonance between our minds and the eternal truth which makes its mark even upon the lowliest of material things. We shall never go astray about finding what is worthy of knowing for its own sake if we make ourselves habitually alert and sensitive to this beauty. It is about this beauty that we should especially aim to ask questions. We should also bear in mind that this beauty is not only in sensible things, but also and even more in the intelligible.

I suggested above that we must not only try to ask the right questions, but also to ask them well. By “well,” I have in mind something that will further help us to discern what the most important questions are. If the most important questions are those that most fulfill the receptivity of the mind, then asking questions in the right way means asking with an expectation of answers, but not perfect ones in this life. That is because the most important and fulfilling questions are inherently about mysteries. Asking questions well means asking about them with the expectation of finding mysteries contained within the answer.

But there is often misunderstanding about what a mystery is, in the truest sense of the word. The false idea that the human mind is just a tool for getting whatever we want or need would foreclose the very possibility of mystery in this truest sense. In this truest sense, mystery refers not to what lacks intelligibility in itself, but to that which is most intelligible, that in light of which other things therefore also become intelligible. But this most intelligible reality happens to be often difficult for us to see, because it exceeds our mind’s capacity. It is like the sun, as Plato suggests, in the light of which we see everything, but which we are unable to gaze at and see directly otherwise than by a glimpse. Still, even while mysteries exceed our mind’s capacity, they draw us upwards. They are thus the very opposite of what lacks intelligibility.

The most important philosophical questions are questions about these mysteries. Yet there is a way in which all philosophical questions are about these mysteries, insofar as they all point in the direction of the highest truths. So we should not be surprised to discover that, when we ask questions in the right way, even about lowly things, we are often led to answers that both satisfy and yet create more yearning. That, indeed, is a sign that we have asked questions in the right way. The opposite of this is what Cardinal Ratzinger describes in his writing as fundamentalism, which is the habit of only asking questions in a way that tends to close one off from the ultimate truths, rather than opening us up towards them.

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My wife and I are friends with a young highly respected and intelligent scholar who is not a TAC graduate, but who devotes much of his life to learning. Some years ago this friend of ours visited some classes at TAC. He told me that he was amazed at what happens in the classroom at TAC. He noted how rare it is to find a place where one can have calm, extended, rational, non- ulteriorly motivated conversations about the meaning of things, and do so not just once in a while but on a regular basis. My own experience certainly confirms what he said. In most places outside of TAC, attempts to have conversations of this sort don’t succeed very well. Many people in other places think that there are only two alternatives: either one can be told what is true by someone who claims the authority to do so, and then decide privately either for against that authority, or one can have a conversation in which everyone is given a chance to do something referred to as “expressing an opinion,” but with the understanding that these opinions are essentially a private matter, finally dependent for being accepted or rejected on nothing but the private whim of the one presented with the opinion.

After this friend of ours recounted to us his experience of visiting TAC, we began to muse upon what it is that makes these excellent class conversations possible. He surmised at first that what makes them possible is the presence of some source of authority that everyone recognizes, or at least accepts, as reliable. I agreed with him about the great importance of this, but then added that I had reason to doubt that this was really the most immediately necessary thing. My reason for doubt was that there is another place where these kinds of conversations take place, namely St. John’s College. St. John’s College was founded in the late 1930’s, as a counter-proposal to the trend that had just begun among Ivy-league centers of learning such as Harvard, towards dispensing with liberal education as it had been understood before, and replacing it with the now almost universal system of electives and smorgasbord curricula. St. John’s decided to do the opposite. They thought that if one wanted to have a genuine liberal education, it should not vary according to personal or practical whims, but should focus on what have been recognized as the greatest and most intellectually formative works of western thought. And it should not be just an imposition of authority upon students, but should offer them the opportunity to do what Socrates always invites his interlocutors to do, namely reason upon things according to their own capacity and dispositions, motivated by the natural instinct everyone has to look intuitively into the nature of reality itself. And so books, those recognized as the greatest and most influential in our tradition, would become the teachers. Yet even those books were not to be seen as the goal in themselves; the goal was to ask about and discuss what is simply real.

But a most remarkable thing about St. John’s College is that it is a secular college; its name notwithstanding, it has no tradition of religious faith or authority on which it relies. Yet even despite that handicap, it has excellent and deep conversations similar to those we have, like those that so impressed our friend when he visited.

And so what I told this friend is that I suspected that there was something which is more fundamental if one wants to have the kind of thoughtful rational discussion that is customary among us. That something is the ability to ask questions. Nowhere does that foundation seem to be more lucidly manifested than it is in the person of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues. Socrates allows questions to be freely asked at both the beginning and the end of conversations. They are at the beginning because they express the receptivity of the mind to what is, in a manner which excludes the vanity to which the sophists were prone. Questions remain at the end in a seemingly different way, though it turns out to be really the same. The truth about genuine intellectual life is that it continues to be open and receptive even after one has begun to discover answers to questions. It is not open in the sense that it prefers questions to answers, but in the sense that it recognizes, and delights in the fact that what we see in this life is a steppingstone towards a much greater beauty and perfection than we see now. This openness is our greatest defense against every kind of vanity and deception.