True Questions

“...Finally there are the questions induced by wonder: What is goodness? Does knowing what goodness is have an assignable relation to being good? What does it mean to be or not to be and is being better than not-being—a question you have all heard Hamlet utter, but not perhaps taken as seriously as one should, considering that while we’re alive the ability to be or not to be is our ultimate power. Thinking about such questions necessarily drives you into asking others: Is death the end of life? What comes afterwards? Is a divinity watching?

Let me call these questions true questions, because they do not go away. Some would say that they do not go away because unlike well-formulated problems they neither dictate a clear common method of inquiry nor have a universally acceptable answer. Their pesky perennialism is therefore purely the effect of their unanswerability. I don’t think so. First you have to know a lot, in fact you have to know everything, to know that such questions are in principle unanswerable. I happen to know that students find answers they can live with every day. I think such questions do not go away because, unlike problems that get solved and cease to be an issue, questions of this sort become the more engaging the closer they come to the answer. That is because those who truly ask long for the answer not because they want to be finished with the problem, but because they really want the answer to be with them; they want to live by its light. Let me give a hypothetical example of what I mean. Suppose after a life given to the quest for God you found yourself suddenly standing before His Throne. You would not rub your hands and say, ‘Well,—that’s that’ and lose interest. It would be a beginning, not an end.”
~Eva Brann