Defenders of the Lost 'Why'

I wonder why

I wonder why I wonder

I wonder why I wonder why I wonder...

Is 'wondering' of this nature valuable in any sense? Or to use more fashionable terms, is it 'relevant' in some way? What is its USP?

Here are four commonly-heard arguments against such 'wondering'.

(A) The Practical argument : Nothing good ever came out of such wondering. While people who wonder lock themselves up in dusty attics and sit down in one dark corner wondering away, the whole world passes these Wonder-van-Winkles by. Consequently, such wonderers may have plumbed all the secrets of the heavens, but they forget how to 'eat, sleep, and live like a man'.

A possible reply : This argument bristles with unexamined assumptions. Is there a universal consensus among all human beings on the issue of what 'good' is or, more strongly, should be? If not, a wonderer may be permitted to define the term 'good' to suit her own tastes geared towards the habit of wondering. Moreover, it is hardly the case that all wonderers have shut themselves up in dingy rooms : many scientific discoveries (such as those associated with the stars and the planets in radio astronomy) were, in fact, made by those who had wondered about the vastness of space and time within which 'man', that fragile thinking reed, has been cast into. Again, sticking to the case of science, much scientific development has been forwarded by those who have wondered about the foundations of pure mathematics (Euler, Gauss, Riemann, Lobatchevsky, Minowski, Poincare et al.), perhaps the most abstract field of human speculation. To be sure, such mathematicians may have forgotten how to 'eat, sleep, and live like men' but this only goes to show what I have long suspected : the 'sanity' of science is based on the 'insanity' of its foundational figures.

(B) The Patriarchal argument : Yes, agreed, many people like to wonder about the mysteries of human existence, but this habit has to stop at a certain point. People have to get mature sooner or later, and stop dabbling in empty speculations. They have to get married, settle down in life, and start a family.

A possible reply : This assumes all too easily that the 'wondering' habit is an optional extra for people who are possessed by it, as if the underlying metaphysical issues can be (re-)solved by a change in one's sociological status. This is not, of course, to imply that the state of being married and the condition of being possessed by this habit belong to two mutually exclusive domains; many married people continue to be obsessed by the distant call of the 'why'. Again, many other such people were unmarried, starting from Plato to Plotinus to Hegel to Aquinas to Kant to Nietzsche to Wittgenstein. There is again the curious case of people like Gotama the Buddha in whom this habit is rekindled only after being in the married state for a while.

(C) The Postmodern argument : People who persist in asking questions of this nature are suffering from the disease of metaphysics. They seek to construct 'grand narratives' to make sense of their lives, and are unable to bear the overwhelming sense of dizzying vertigo that comes with the realisation that we have been thrown into a world where there is no 'meaning'. All such 'meaning' must be 'invented' by us.

A possible reply : Postmodernism is, in a manner of speaking, a multi-faceted 'entity'. Along with its denunciation of the 'search for meaning', another aspect of postmodernism is its slogan that a thousand flowers be allowed to flourish, that no voice be allowed to go unheard. If that is indeed the case, a 'wonderer' could reply that her habit of wondering is precisely one such flower in the garden of postmodernism, one such voice in its chorus. In other words, instead of worrying that this habit has been driven out by the onslaught of postmodernism, the latter should rather be welcomed as a liberating force that has made this habit truly valuable. Neither is it the case that every person who 'wonders' ends up constructing meta-narratives; such a person could understand her sense of wonder simply in terms of her belief that there is at the heart of our existence a mystery that cannot be penetrated by human 'reason'. This would be a postmodern episodic or piece-meal form of 'wonder'.

(D) The Politic argument : It is grossly immoral that while one section of humanity, incidentally the minority, leads a comfortable life with the spineless excuse that its comfort is justified by its possession of a sense of wonder, the other section, the majority, sinks deeper every night into a faceless morass of poverty, misery, and agony. Would it not be better to live in a world where all resources were so re-distributed that everyone had the same basic 'minimum standards' of existence, even if this re-allocation requires that all 'seats of learning' be dismantled so that nobody can take shelter behind the smoke-screen created by a 'sense of wonder'?

A possible reply : This is an issue where sociologists, anthropologists, historians, economists, 'developmental workers', and the like must all join the conversation. One of the most important questions here is centred around the nature of this 'sense of wonder' : is it an epiphenomenon of socio-economic structures? Some would argue that this is indeed the case, and that by changing these structures one can eradicate this 'sense', while others would argue that it is precisely the opposite : it is our sense of wonder that leads us onward to invent the various forms of socio-economic orders that we have learned to make our peace with.

Of all the above four arguments, the last one is the most crucial and the most deserving of our urgent attention. If we are persuaded that the 'wonder' that many people have claimed to suffer from is, after all, but an illusory hallucination that can be cast away with a dose of life-giving medicine, the Politic argument is justified in its claims. All the available resources in this world must then be redistributed so that everyone begins to enjoy the same minimum standards of living, even if this redistribution leads to the uprooting of the habit of wondering. The fundamental issue, however, is the following. The Politic argument was actually applied, historically speaking, in large swathes of Eastern Europe and Russia. In retrospect, we can perhaps say that what ultimately led to the downfall of the body politic in those regions was the simmering sense of wonder that, in spite of being driven underground, continued to torment (some) people to ask what 'it was all about'. Therefore, it is one thing to abolish the existence of one class that entrenches itself by continuing to feed on the fat of the land with the excuse that it is keeping alive the reactionary, not to mention pointless, habit of 'wondering why'. It may be quite another thing, however, to suppose that with its abolition this habit too has, at the same time, been eradicated from every human heart.

I wonder

I wonder why I wonder

I wonder why I wonder why I wonder...

These lines actually come from an American Noble-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman. One of the greatest popularisers of physics in the last century, he was far from being an 'impracticable' person (contra the Practical argument). Married three times (contra the Patriarchal argument), he was hardly a person seeking 'grand narratives' : he experimented with LSD, and was also a painter and a drummer (contra the Postmodern argument). What remains now is the Politic argument : should American Federal resources have been directed away from Cornell University (where Feynman had taught) and the economic structures of the country dismantled so as to cure Feynman of his 'sense of wonder'? This is a difficult question that remains to be answered.