Transcendental Self-Questioning
Some Classical (unfinished) Old-School Philosophy
We cannot meaningfully ask: “What is a Being?” What does it mean ‘to be’? We have to be — in order to ask the question in the first place. Being is the necessary condition for posing the question of being. But you understand the question. That’s the problem. We simultaneously grasp the question together with its impossibility. Let’s call this: The Quasi-Meaningful statement. The quasi-meaningful statement is in fact a being’s self-questioning, which is also the existential human condition. Get it? You are a being. Existentially, the question “What is a Being?” is structurally identical to the more popular (and dreadfully worn-out) question: “Why am I here?”. If you care at all for philosophy, and it is my contention that we all do at one point or another (and mostly when its too late), then you are a quasi-being caught in an infinity. But the infinite loop of self-questioning is not endless, it has a very concrete termination (your death).
It is not a specific, historical or material self-questioning i.e. What is my name? How tall am I? What were the immediate circumstances of my birth? How do I provide food for my family? but a Transcendental variety of self-questioning. Yes, it has mystical undertones, and yes it is a privilege to pose it, but it’s not as exciting as it sounds, at least not philosophically. Philosophically, the very positing of, or we should say, the inevitability of the transcendent, as revealed through quasi-meaningful statements is sufficient reason for wonder.
Taking things further, if we draw the seemingly trivial distinction between two metaphysical (quasi-meaningful) statements:
a. What is a Being?
b. What is Being?
A fresh dose of wonder as we quadruple our troubles. The word ‘being’ is a placeholder for ‘anything whatsoever’ it denotes a form, a generality, but so does the absence of the indefinite article in terms of grammar. Both statements express an unusual level of generality and yet the sentence b. seems to be even more general than the first. As we make distinctions between metaphysical statements, it feels like we are dissecting infinity. Arranging impossible questions — a new definition of philosophy perhaps…
Unlike philosophy, science is not concerned with impossible questions, science (obviously) deals with particular problems. Science never questions being itself, it takes it for granted as it describes how being is, but never — what it is. Strangely enough, the most obvious questions remain well beyond the interests of scientists as scientists.
Unfortunately my thoughts have been interrupted. As is the tradition in “old-school classical philosophy”, the natural train of thought is now irreversibly broken and I cannot continue.
