Dr. Adler and Max,

"Bet on the Tortoise

"Men of '53, have you any philosophy in you? I have suggested, in these hurried words, that discoveries and inventions do not, as such, accomplish human welfare. But they do bring it more fully within our reach."

I wanted to comment on this wise assessment of things from Alexander Meiklejohn in GIO #71. From what I can tell, the pace of life and invention is accelerating exponentially. Many people simply do not know how to handle it, they have no sense of their own center, or Self. So, weird disturbances are occurring. This week in San Jose at our airport, a man grabbed a woman's tiny white dog from her lap as she sat in her car. He threw the dog under the wheels of oncoming traffic where it perished. Then he sped off and disappeared. The poor woman's offense? She accidentally tapped the bumper of his SUV after he cut her off in traffic. The police called this "road rage."

Whatever else it may be, life is going fast and people are frantically trying to do more and go faster and they rarely pause to ask "Why?, or What for?, or Where is this getting me?" Some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs sleep 1 to 3 hours per night, under their desks, so they can talk to customers and associates in other time zones. Fortunes can be earned under such circumstances, marriages and partnerships forged, the body made to perform. But, as Meiklejohn hints, is "human welfare" getting accomplished? I think not.

Living and loving in an unbalanced life usually means that sooner or later the health is lost, the fortune, and the marriage too. The next great advance in our evolution has to be in the area of wisdom and philosophy, people will be forced to ask "Why?," and make important decisions about how to spend their time wisely. I agree with Meiklejohn, bet on the Tortoise every time...

Regards,

Rob Ryan

Dear Max,

Just a quick note to say that California has still not fallen off into the Pacific, and neither have I. At the moment I seem to be a representative of what may be the majority of the members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas -- those who deeply appreciate and enjoy thoroughly the weekly missives you put together but who rarely say so. So before I neglect doing so another moment, thank you very much for your excellent work.

When we spoke on the phone once last year you mentioned that Dr. Adler might hold a seminar out here sometime this coming spring. Is that still in the works? If so, I would most definitely like to participate, or even be of assistance in some small way.

Thanks again, Max, and always Do Good!

Lewis Greer
http://dogoodmusic.com

How to Answer Questions
by Mortimer Adler

Children ask magnificent questions. "Why are people? What makes the cat tick? What's the world's first name?" Out of the mouths of babes comes, if not wisdom, at least the search for it. Philosophy, according to Aristotle, begins with wonder. It certainly begins in childhood, even if for most of us it also stops there.

The child is a natural question-box. It is not the number of questions he asks, but their character, that distinguishes him from the adult. The grown-ups do not lose the curiosity which seems to be a native human trait; but it certainly deteriorates in quality. Judging from the question-and-answer games that adults play with their radios, they are interested in simple matters of fact. They want to know whether something is so, not why. But children's questions are not limited to the sort that can be answered by an encyclopedia. An inquiring infant could stump the whole board of experts on "Information, Please" -- or any other quiz program, His quiz program would have to be called "Understanding, Please."

What happens between the nursery and college to turn the flow of questions off, or, rather, into the duller channels of adult curiosity about matters of fact? I have been teaching philosophy for some years. I have tried to get college students to ask themselves questions -- the philosophical questions children seem to ask naturally. A mind not agitated by good questions cannot possibly appreciate the significance of even the best answers. It is easy enough to teach the answers parrotwise. But to develop actively inquisitive minds alive with real questions, profound questions -- that is another story.

But why should we even have to try to develop such minds, when children are born with them? Somewhere along the line adults must fail somehow to sustain the infant's curiosity at its original depth. School itself, perhaps, dulls the mind -- by the dead weight of rote learning, much of which may be necessary. The failure is probably even more the parents' fault.

We so often tell the child there is no answer, when one is available, or command him not to ask so many questions. We thinly conceal our irritation when baffled by the apparently unanswerable query. All this discourages the child. He may even get the impression that it is impolite to be too inquisitive. Human inquisitiveness is never killed; but it is soon debased to the sort of questions asked by college students, who, like the adults they are to become, ask only for information, please.

Recently I have become a parent. I have a little boy. And I am beginning to appreciate the difficulty of trying to be a father and a philosopher at the same time. But I still naively suppose that something can be done, at home or in school, to keep infantile wonder alive -- to prevent the hard questions children ask giving way to the easy ones on which adults test their prowess.

I have no sure-fire recipe for solving this problem. I am not so brash as to think I can tell you how to answer the profound questions your children put. But I do have a halfway measure to propose. Parents would do a better job if they understood the meaning of their children's questions, even when they could not answer them. They should be able to distinguish real from unreal questions. Some questions deserve to be answered; others not. They should be able to tell a hard question from a silly one, and not treat everything that perplexes them as foolish.

If parents distinguished among the different kinds of question, and responded accordingly, they might suffer less discomfort and their children might be less discouraged. Aristotle was an expert on this business of classifying questions. I am proposing an Aristotle in every home -- a parent who knows what he is being asked.

To begin with, questions are either real or unreal -- I would almost say true or false. A false question is one we ask without any desire to know, as, for example, the perfunctory, "How do you do?" Now children frequently ask such questions, partly for want of something better to do, partly because they impishly realize their nuisance value. Their first or second "Why?" may be genuine inquiry; but when every answer immediately evokes another "Why?" they are just plaguing us, not thinking. At some point we must draw the line between real questions and false ones. The false "Why?" should be answered by "Because!" for that, as an answer, is appropriately just as empty as the question

There is also the difference between the "Why?" that questions a statement and the "Why?" that resists a command. We may have reasons for both statement and command, but we need not be equally inclined to explain in both cases. I am in favor of trying to answer every real question that expresses a desire to know; but I am far from sure that it is good policy -- progressive educators to the contrary -- to explain my reasons every time I give an order. The child who asks "Why?" before obeying may, of course, be inquiring about the goal toward which his action is being directed. When we detect inquiry rather than insubordination, we should explain.

Among real questions, some are easy and some hard, and our greatest difficulty is in telling the hard questions from the silly ones. The worst mistake a parent can make is to regard as good only those queries he can answer easily and to treat all others as vexatious and silly. There is another difficulty. Children can ask questions beyond their own depth. They ask about God or what happens after death -- before they can understand the answers to such questions. When we know that the answer to a good question, a hard question, would be beyond them, we can do one of three things: (1) oversimplify the answer, without falsification; (2) promise, and convince them, that they will learn the answer later; or (3) divert their attention to something else. The first solution is, of course, best.

The easiest type of question is about matters of fact, even when the facts are recondite or complicated. The encyclopedia or the almanac is always handy to help the parent satisfy a child's desire for information. And the sooner children can be trained to use such reference books themselves, the better. Let us call this the "is" question. "Is this so? Is that so? When did it happen? Who did it?"

Next in order of difficulty is the "what" question. "What is it? To what kind does it belong? What are its qualities or attributes?" These "what" questions need seldom stump us, because, though they appear to be the sort of inquiry scientists make, the child is usually after something more obvious. He wants to know the names of things, the conventional labels, which record the classifications of every-day usage. Occasionally, a child does pursue his inquiry beyond the classifying name. Then he is really asking a "why" question -- the reason for the classification.

It is the "why" question that most frequently perplexes parents. Some "why" questions are silly. Children make a game of asking such foolish questions as "Why is a mouse when it spins?" But some "why" questions are good -- the best questions, though hardest, because most profound. Here Aristotle can be helpful to the parent-turned-philosopher. He distinguished four meanings of "Why?" When anyone asks the reasons for a thing, he wants to know: (1) what purpose it serves; (2) how it came about; (3) out of what materials it is composed; and (4) what sort of thing it is.

We should be able to tell when children are asking one of these real "whys." Even though children ask profound questions, I suspect that they often do not know the difference between a wise and foolish one. Our first task is to make this discrimination, and we should be able to make it even if we cannot answer the question.

When children persist in asking good "whys," they push us beyond our depth. But a question we cannot answer may not be unanswerable, or silly. If we cannot answer a good question, we should at least convey to the child our respect for the question, so that he is encouraged to go on asking questions of that sort. We should make every effort to educate ourselves up to such questions. Children's questions can be taken as an occasion for our own enlightenment. We might even propose to look into the matter together with them, and we ought not to postpone doing so in the hope that they will forget about it. When we confess our limitations, we should be sure that our "humility" is not merely covering up our indolence.

Since I am only recently a philosopher-turned-parent, I cannot speak from much experience when I suggest that understanding children's questions is halfway toward answering them. I am going to try this way of suffering little children to ask questions without killing their curiosity or losing my own sanity. I am not hoping for too much success, for if the task were that easy, there would really be an Aristotle in every home, and every mother's son would become a philosopher.

Good Housekeeping Magazine October 1940

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