I don’t know why I’m drawn to philosophy. I’m honestly not very good at it. I tried to write a syllogism this morning, and my eyes glazed over.

It seems to me that most people are only ever drawn to what they’re already kinda good at, or intend to become good at, or even used to be good at. Maybe if I can’t manage to write out one simple syllogism, I should probably take the hint, get over myself, put away the straight lines and sharp angles of logic, and resign to work with the curves and filigrees of “poetry” instead.

Uugggh… Poetry. (Cue eye rolls)

That stuff, much to my chagrin, I’ve always been somewhat okay at. But “Poet” has never had that ring of prestigious solidity as “Thinker” does to my mind. One sort of person seems to want solutions to the problems of life. Another sort just wants to “dance about it”. I want what the first group wants, but I wasn’t given a mind for problem solving. Seems, instead, I was given a pair of tap shoes.

Whatever, so I can’t do syllogisms! Does my penchant for overthinking justify my interest in philosophy? I mean, I think a lot, but I can’t think in a straight line. It’s more like a waffling, associative “this or maybe that or maybe this” idea collage, and when I try to express any of it, it comes out as word salads. (Kinda like Jordan Peterson, except I can’t hide my own philosophical incompetence behind a doctorate or the fickle prestige of culture-war punditry).

It might be that the only bit of “philosophy” I’ve ever really excelled at, likely to the point of compulsion, is asking “Why?” . Over and over again, like a three-year-old, except I’m thirty-two with cellulite and utility bills.

Funnily enough, it wasn’t until I entered my thirties when it first really occurred to me that, “Well shit – maybe no one actually knows (for certain anyway) the answer to any “Why” question, do they?” There are a lot of answers to be found for what’s, when’s, who’s, where’s, how’s: seems to mainly be what school and church and YouTube are for (or at least, what they’re most preoccupied with). Modern (or “post-modern”) Americans are especially preoccupied with the “How’s” of life; the more self-focused the better. Maybe that’s the reason why self-help and pop-psych/pop-sci books are far-and-away more popular than epistemology books. Well, one of the reasons… Also, maybe it’s ’cause people just don’t wanna be boring dorks?

My modest life experience has shown me that very few people are willing to give you an answer to a “Why”, even if they’re smart. “Why” tends to catch people off guard, throw them off-balance, even invite a weird kind of suspicion or hostility I’ve still yet to understand… It’s like they don’t think I’m really asking to know.

Some get past that initial shock and give it a good college try. I find it is the smartest people who, when they try, do so reluctantly, and with many caveats; whereas those who don’t offer caveats – the ones who are clearly quite keen to enlighten you – aren’t usually the most qualified for the job of Answer Haver. Still, most people don’t try to answer the “Why’s” of life or allow their thoughts to drift too close to those questions (unless there’s been a death in the family, or they suddenly become sick, or they experience a decent string of suspiciously bespoke bad luck, or – alternatively – they’re so well-off and comfy that the boredom itself threatens to kill them until they pick it apart).

No, it seems to me that most people, most of the time, become apathetic or funny, morbid or evasive, practical or wry when faced with a “Why”. Kinda like Calvin’s dad:

I tend to identify pretty heavily with Calvin, but I did not have a sarcastic father to bat my endless stream of “Why” questions out of the way of his TV screen or newspaper. Instead, I had a very earnest, anxious, passionate, desperately-seeking father who did his utmost to find me answers the minute I began exhaling questions. His quest to find me answers (which was something of a proxy for his own quest for answers) led him into the church. The church led him into ministry. Ministry led him to bear a standard as something of a professional Answer Haver for a good many people. Dutifully, thoroughly, with great toil, many tears, and complete sincerity of heart, my Dad did his damnedest serving as an Answer Haver for me, and for countless others, for a long time.

I admired my Dad. Still do.

As a child, I learned to emulate him and other Answer Havers as well. I spent a long time – most of my life, in fact – believing that to be an Answer Haver was the summum bonum (what smarter-than-me-people say when they mean “the whole fucking point”) – of life. That to be an Answer Haver was pretty much the only reason I existed. And it made a certain kind of sense: “I’m good at asking Questions, right? Why would I have all these Questions if I wasn’t meant to have their corresponding Answers?”

But the problem was this: I wasn’t very good at it.

It doesn’t take a clinical psychiatrist to guess that a person who lives a life believing, deep down in their heart, that they kinda suck at the one thing they exist to do is stressful AF. For themselves, and everyone around them. Needless to say, it was not a sustainable way to live. It was utterly exhausting. The bubble burst eventually, at which point the relief of realizing I couldn’t ever possibly HAVE the Answers felt like actually Mercy. Through various humiliations and heartbreaks, disillusionments and disappointments, a much needed increase in empathy, an unnecessary (but then again, who knows?) foray into temporary insanity, an injury, a wandering, the gentleness and prayers and encouragements of some very patient friends … maybe even a miracle, I was cajoled into giving up on the summum bonum of “Answer-Having.” (That all sounds very dramatic and intriguing, by the way, but I promise that my story isn’t as interesting to hear as it was to live through. Maybe someday I’ll make up a more interesting story to sheath my own in? Maybe I’ll just “dance about it”…)

That’s all to say that a Life Lived, not just a Life Thunk, stopped me from believing that I must have Answers to “be okay.” In fact, the relief of this realization felt so great, and my brain and heart were so damn tired of living like that, that I went into an almost opposite direction for a bit. In a kind of selfish fit of misery-disguised-as-humility, I fired myself from any and all positions or ambitions of not only Answer Having, but Answer Pursuing. I even gave up on Answers, en toto (that’s “smarter-than-me” for “Dorothy’s Dog”), for a while and just started to regard Questions, the “Whys” of life, as an end unto themselves. A lot of gurus, mystics, and pseudo-intellectuals do this, don’t they? But it was an approach doomed to internal combustion. My “Questions Only” strategy for life continued to erode until I was only able to regard my particularly Question-y nature as a sort of mental/emotional vestigial tail – a deformity of sorts: the broken and obsolete leftovers of a primordial monkey brain long past its usefulness and beginning to putrefy.

In the span of a couple years, I had gone from the pursuit of Absolute Knowledge, to a life-changing Epistemological Doubt, into Epistemological Dismay, a brief “high” after putting the burden of my own epistemological weight down completely, light enough to run free (and smug) through life’s ambiguities – as if I’d transcended some kind of immature, base, worldly vice. I was probably somewhat insufferable.

Then the fear came. Then I collapsed. The “spiritual highs” of being untethered to any Answer came crashing down to practical ol’ earth again. Life, especially in the midst of its many sufferings, didn’t make sense anymore. In the end, it seemed to me that to continue asking unAnswerable “Whys” was, at best a masturbatory and conceited game: at worst, a living Sisyphisian hell.

The Existentialist Soren Kierkegaard once formulated a wonderfully concise syllogism when considering the nature of suffering and despair. “If life is suffering, and suffering is meaningless, than all that’s left is despair.” I’m fond of Kierkegaard, but he was kind of a bummer: a pale, dainty Danish kid with chronic depression who might’ve never got laid and was kind of a boring dork.

In stark contrast to Kierkegaard, you have the much cooler, funnier, sexier Absurdist Albert Camus: a charming Frenchman who smoked cigarettes and probably got laid a lot. He wasn’t overly fond of nerds like Kierkegaard and all their hang-ups concerning “meaning”. He saw despair as a waste of time. He also saw “meaning” as a waste of time. Personally, I figure he might be right about one of those, but not both.

To his credit, it was Camus who tried to cheer me up in my darker moments by saying, “Hey man, it’s all bullshit, but maybe bullshit can still make you happy? You’ll at least look cooler doing Absurdity than…whatever this dorky ‘pursuit of truth and meanning’ thing you’ve been doing.” I’m sure he meant well, and I wanted to believe him, but it didn’t work. I still had Questions, and it hurt to have them. It did not make me laugh, or make me feel cool. In fact, the hurt only became all the more tortuous when the “Whys” themselves threatened to be utterly meaningless. I could tell myself, “It’s all bullshit”, but I still wondered “Why” about the bullshit. I had no choice. I considered what the use was in continuing to live in the meaninglessness of unAnswerable Whys, to push the “Why” rock uphill over and over again while Albert cheered me on: “Smile, mon cheri, smile!”

For a while, life did not seem worth living. But, like a starving animal, the hunger pangs took over again, and my instinct to find food overpowered my instinct to escape pain.

I say that as if it were certain, or as if it was a self-generated change. But when I think back on it, I wonder: was there something more powerful than the shadows of animal instinct, disguised as “the human will”, keeping “the gun out of my mouth” after all? However it was, something kept me alive long enough to propose, to myself, one more thought experiment.

I decided to pretend *against* the Absurdity, and see where it might lead. A thought arose with a bleak dawn-break wearily snapping at the heels of a long bout of insomnia: “If nothing matters, then it doesn’t matter that I pretend that it matters, right?” So, at least for the time being, I allowed my broken monkey brain to remain drawn to, if only as an entertaining diversion, or as something to keep my eyes out of the depths of some Nietzschian Abyss, “Philosophy”.

And what did I mean by that? The eminent and fellow failed Answer-Haver, Philomena Cunk, calls Philosophy: “Thinking about thinking”…

I’m not sure she’s wrong. It is very hard, and maybe a bit silly, and again – I’m not good at it, nor am I even educated in it. But still, I wondered:

“Why am I inclined to ask Why?”

Eventually I remembered a very bastardized and borrowed line of reasoning from someone I love and admire who was gifted in syllogisms (and poetry, too), a man I call Grandpa Jack. I’m going to butcher it, but it went something like this:

“Does it make sense to be a creature that feels hunger but exists in a universe with no food? Or, to be a creature that might die of thirst in a waterless world? Of course, we know that food does exist, and our world has water. These instinctive needs do not seem silly or futile to us, because we have seen that there are means to satisfy such needs; therefore, we know that these needs/instincts/compulsions are not meaningless. They are not nonsense. Hunger and thirst serve a vital purpose.

So, does it not follow then, that other needs would exist in us? Needs of a higher nature, since we are some of the highest creatures on the animal spectrum? And yet, we often insist that these “spiritual” needs exist without a means to be satisfied. That they are illusory, useless, without actual purpose, because they concern things not of nature – like food and water – but of super-nature. Justice, Kindness, Mercy, Meaning, Love: these are matters we find far above and beyond the natural, the material. But if nature and our material needs are our only clue to the “whole point” of Humanity (and it may not be our only clue), even still: does it make sense to be a creature who asks “Why” questions, as if her life depended on it, only to exist in an abysmal, empty, meaningless Nothing? Of course that doesn’t make sense! Even a child with no talent for syllogisms knows that. It would be Absurd. “

And look: I know just enough about philosophy to know that the Absurdists were real big deal for a while – that they looked cool smoking their cigarettes and sounded cool speaking their French and wrote hilarious witticisms and carried sharp insights in their pockets like switchblades, and were generally very intriguing. I imagine that if their movement had really kicked off in the 21st century, they’d probably be riding motorcycles and listening to Lana Del Rey or something, claiming to understand all the layers of irony in her songs or whatever. And sure, they seemed clever as they spent their allegedly meaningless lives winking in black-and-white photographs, bent over their written pages of witty prose or painting apples on their faces or walking their pet lobsters. I’m actually quite fond of the Absurdists (I’m even named after one of them).

But for all their snarky charm, all their chic mystique, all their futile whimsy, the Absurdists have not succeeded in answering my first ever question, a mere child’s question – and bizarrely, they thought themselves rather clever for their failure to do so, as if they out-reasoned reason itself.

“Why??”

I will still poke my nose into the philosopher’s books, even the Absurdists, because… well, I can’t help it (and because I actually don’t begrudge the Camus’s of the world as much as this rant may lead you to believe).

But I also can’t help what I’m apparently good at either. It may even be the only thing I’m truly good at: asking “Why”, without irony or rhetorical trickery or pretense. It may be the only thing left of me that isn’t tainted by pretense.

I will keep asking “Why”. I can’t help it. The Absurdists had their shot to shut me up and push me out of the way of their TV screens and newspapers, but they couldn’t – even when I wanted them to. And while I keep asking “Why”, I might as well begrudgingly put on my tap shoes and “dance about it”, like a broken monkey or a “poet” might.

Or, better yet, like a child might.