the importance of not knowing

It’s human nature to be inquisitive. There are always things we don’t know, and it feels good to know the answer.

In Ancient Greece, if you had a question you needed answering, you would make a pilgrimage to Delphi, wait several months, sacrifice a goat, bathe in a sacred spring, and hike up the side of a mountain to reach Apollo’s temple. Then the oracle would give you some vague riddle that you would spend the next few years interpreting.

Today, if you have a question, you ask ChatGPT, and it instantly tells you what you wanted to hear. Unlike the oracle at Delphi, the answer is clear and immediate. You can close out the chatbot, confident that you have the right answer without having to grapple with an ambiguous prophecy.

And yet something important is lost with efficiency. Truly knowing an answer requires struggling with uncertainty. All the greatest scholars labor for years, deeply investigating their topic, before they feel able to present their work—and even so, they’ll usually admit they have an incomplete understanding.

Of course, not everybody can sacrifice that kind of time to a single question. That’s why we have reference books, which compile the intellectual labor of others into an easily accessible format. For the sake of authority and conciseness, they lose the ambiguity, presenting information like it’s more concrete than it actually is.

With each additional abstraction from uncertainty, the easier it is to find answers, and the more confident those answers sound. It’s too much work to look in a reference book, so you can just search on Google or Wikipedia—but these draw on reference books, condensing several to assert something even more confidently. Then ChatGPT again makes things easier by drawing from Google and Wikipedia. With each progression, we offload our epistemic struggle to others, trusting them to have arrived at the right answer.

Now we can confidently proclaim that we “know” more things than people in the past—but this is a facile knowledge. We can never answer a question like the person who poured their life into thinking about it.

If anything, the lost ritual of asking has collapsed the meaning of the question in the first place. You really only had one shot with the oracle at Delphi. You had to be damn sure that you were definitely asking the right thing. Same with deciding a dissertation topic. Figuring out which question to ask is more important than the answer itself.

Modernity sidesteps this immense burden. We are drowning in a sea of answers, forgetting how to ask the right questions. How can we tell which ones matter? All information looks the same when packaged as chatbot responses.

On a whim, I asked Claude AI to recommend me a paper on the phenomenology of asking questions, and it suggested this 1992 article by the University of Tokyo professor Akihiro Yoshida. After reading the paper, I looked more into the professor.

This man has spent his entire career asking the question of what it means to ask a question. After devoting his youth to getting a PhD in educational psychology, Yoshida became interested in phenomenology in the 1970s and spent over a decade working with Japanese master teachers. Only then did he write this paper, and he continued to research questions well into his retirement: here’s a more recent paper on ambiguous expressions, and here’s one on how teachers use questions in their practice.

In his website biography, Yoshida lists all these details about his life, and then ends with “well, you cannot tell everything in a brief semi-introduction.”

At this point, I started crying. How dare I think I was worthy of asking the question of what it means to ask a question? I could never understand it to the depth that Yoshida clearly did, and even he admitted there is only so much that can be revealed in an answer.

I actually think the crying was a good thing. I could have just asked Claude to summarize the paper, but I chose to follow a more effortful path, and it led to a deeply cathartic emotional experience. Perhaps, by feeling a fragment of the weight of an ancient prophecy-seeker, I was one step closer to actually asking the right question.

If you liked this essay, please consider getting my book Algospeak, on how social media is changing our language.

Thanks for reading <3

Adam