by Eva Brann
Odysseus with the Sirens
My title is a question: “Do you know what an odyssey is?” I am asking each of you to ask yourself: “Do I know what an odyssey is?”
In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while. So let me call for a time out before the game has properly begun, and let me backtrack before ever having started on the road.
I asked you a question. Before having got to know a single one of you I asked you all a question. The question stared out at you from posters around the campus. Forget for a moment what the question was asking—you probably pay minimal attention anyway to this and to most posted intrusions on your consciousness—and concentrate on the mere question. Ask yourselves: What is a question? Some of you, those interested enough to turn that question over in your mind, might sense that there is something weird about it: It seems like a self-defeating, paradoxical, Catch-22 question. How can someone who doesn’t know what a question is ask what anything is, including a question? How can we be sure we are actually doing whatever one does when asking a question before we know what we are supposed to do? Yet we do it all the time—we just ask away.
Now when things are going on in life that seem impossible in thought—that is the moment at which something flashes out, for some people and I hope for many among you, that has the name “wonder.” Wonder is that sense of fascinated estrangement from yourself and your world that makes you think. Both of the two great ancient philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, think that wonder is the origin of that peculiarly searching kind of thought called philosophy. Plato has Socrates say: “This is indeed the special feeling the philosopher has—wondering” (Theatetus 155D). Aristotle says: “It was because of wondering that people first began to philosophize” (Metaphysics 982 b12). Wonder is the sense, which comes in a flash but won’t go away, that things are not as straightforward as they seem, that the ordinary way, or explanation and argument leaves you with unbearable contradictions and impossibilities. And philosophy kicks in when you start to take your puzzlement seriously and think it out articulately. Everyone who is aroused to inquiring thought by a contradiction is willy-nilly a philosopher; Let us therefore philosophize together by pursuing the apparent paradox of asking about questions.
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