“The Fundamental Question”
Arthur Witherall
Clearly, in the evolution of matter into mind, there are biological imperatives built into our genetic self. And, among them, there appears to be a universal capacity to feel awe. Just as there appears to be nary a community among our species [historically and culturally] that did not concoct one or another narrative that revolved around and embodied both morality and religion.
Instead, it’s the part revolving around memes, and the parts embedded existentially in individual experiences that come to encompass whatever particular awe some one particular individual might feel about “the fundamental question”.
Approach it along these lines and, in my view, the debate regarding whether one ought to feel awe about something instead of nothing more or less disappears.
In other words, for all practical purposes, no one is obligated to think about it at all. Not when faced with all that goes into the clear obligation to subsist from day to day.
And any number of us have opted out of even that obligation — they commit suicide.
Exactly. The question is there. And it is there because, unlike all other species of life on the planet, our minds are able to pose it. Coupled with the fact that feeling awe is part of the tool kit that nature provides us with merely in the fact of being born.
It only becomes a “philosophical question” to those who come [existentially] to ponder the question “metaphysically”.
Wittgenstein himself grappled with the tangled complexities embedded in exploring the relationship between words and worlds. Of words in worlds.
Here we encounter things like logic and epistemology. But what are the limitations of both in groping to answer questions like this?