Everything we do, everything we act upon, every institution
we conceive and every object we create, be it physical or mental,
is a response to a problem… how do we keep food and edibles cold
so they don’t spoil… the fridge… how do we travel to the moon… spaceships
how do we explore the world… science… how do we teach what is and what isn’t… schools…
and how do we pass alone important information about what values we hold… schools…
every thing we see is an answer to a problem…
but and this is important to note… we don’t have to answer every problem…
the history of philosophy is littered with problems that vexed the minds of men…
but we don’t… or I should more correctly state, I don’t consider them to be OUR
problem of our time… for example, the problem of our knowledge in the external world…
that problem vexed philosophers for centuries and Descartes and Spinoza and Leibniz
and Hobbes and Locke all worked on this solution…the mind/body problem left to
us by Descartes also was worked on and is still a problem this day…
and yet, personally I don’t consider them “MY PROBLEMS”…
I am working on other issues and so we don’t have to work on other people’s
problem… we can pick and choose what issue of modern life we choose to
work on… one of the questions I do work on is this… what is the relationship
between the individual and the society… the individual and government…
another problem I work on is what does it mean to be an individual…
and what are our possibilities as individual human beings… what is possible
for human beings to understand or to comprehend or to become…
what does it mean to be human? another question of mine is one of perception and
perspective… we humans have different perceptions and perspectives of time, space,
each other, reality, thought…how does our perspective of reality and the relationship
of things, change who we are and what we want to become…this idea of being and
becoming is important… who we are and who do we want to become…
but the important thing to note is this, my questions aren’t necessarily your questions…
my search for what is important to me is part and parcel of who I am… my questions
tell you who I am as surely as if I told you my life story…
I am on the outside looking in as I have been my entire life… outside looking in…
and that reveals my viewpoint of my questions… I stand here and ask these questions…
whereas you might stand there and by standing there, you get different questions and
different answers…our viewpoint decides which questions we ask…
because I am liberal means I ask different questions then a conservative because
my viewpoint is different… where I ask the question determines what questions get
asked…I am male and that changes what questions I ask… I am white and that
changes what questions I ask… I am 5’8 and that changes the questions I ask…
I have a severe hearing loss and that changes the questions I ask…
it is like using radar to spot objects… we use questions to understand locations…
if we use radar in every direction, we can then understand what is our current location…
asking questions does the same thing…we can tell our location for our questions…
so what questions are you asking?
Kropotkin