Answers?

"Any answers? Any questions? Any rags, any bones, any bottles today?" - Groucho Marx as Professor Wagstaff in Horse Feathers


From Plato's academy to Wagstaff's Huxley College, man has pondered the answers to life's great mysteries. But as Douglass Adam's wrote when ultimate answer (42) was solved, we then have to figure out the question.

In ancient Greece, wandering scholars, known as sophoi, provided education for money. Plato abhorred what he saw as specious scholastics. He preferred philosophers, literally "lovers of wisdom," who gave freely of their knowledge. A related debate wages today, but both sides doth reek more of power than prudence.

Metaphysics deals with the first principles of things. It looks ontologically at the existence of being and epistemologically at how we know being.  Can universals exist in reality, or merely as concepts? Empiricism versus skepticism versus existentialism - as Jefferson Airplane sang, "The human name doesn't mean shit to a tree."

Philosophical debates tangle in the rhizome of man's ego. The Buddha illustrated this in his Flower Sermon offering a blossom rather than expressing a rational creed.


Western thought focuses more on control than knowledge. Ken Kesey addressed this concept in the screenplay, Over the Border, encapsulated in his collection, Garage Sale. In it, he ponders the great question, "How does this thing run?" Which inevitably leads to the next question, "How do I drive it?" Finally comes the ultimate interrogatory, "How the hell do I get off it?"

Man still embraces the hubris of Icarus...as ever - BB

"The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer." - Ken Kesey