Interrogations

By Kassandra

An eclectic, literary challenge to everyday thinking.

Number Three: Homo quaerens

Democritus said 'We know nothing truly, for truth is in the depths.'

We call ourselves Homo sapiens, ludens, fabricans, ridens, necans. We should be Homo quaerens. We are a searching, seeking, digging, exploring, investigating, questing species. We have no choice, since nearly everything is hidden from us. Matters that are vital to survival, that are necessary for happiness and flourishing, or that we are just plain nosy parker curious about. All kinds of things are hidden: large things and small, important and trivial, concrete and abstract. We spend our lives hunting for them...our keys, the DNA molecule, the far side of the cosmos, the good life.

It is not surprising of course. When we see ants pouring out of a crack in the sidewalk, we don't suppose they know much about the city the pavement is in, let alone the planets and stars, so why should we? The universe is one thing--a species of bipedal primate with opposable thumbs on planet earth is quite another. There is nothing inherent in either that requires they should understand one another.

Things are hidden because they are too far away, or because they are too small, or because they are in the future, or in the past, or deceptive, or vague, or doubtful, or imagined, or elusive, or behind something. The surface of Venus is hidden by clouds. The far side of the moon is hidden by position. What Shakespeare was doing from 1585 to 1592 is hidden by lack of evidence. What any of us will be doing tomorrow is hidden by time. Reality is hidden by appearance. The answers to many difficult questions are hidden by the crudity of our equipment--what it is like to be other people, what it is like to be a bat, who or what is in the Chinese room, how our minds work, what our real motives are, how to be good.

We know nothing of the future, very little of the past, and not a lot even of the present. We don't know what's going on next door or across the street, let alone across town or across the country, let still more alone in every village in Nigeria or China. We think we know more or less, we make educated guesses, we extrapolate from what we do know--but of course all that is quite different from really knowing. It may seem adequate for an approximate understanding of the world we live in, but the understanding is only approximate.

So, we dig great trenches and peel back the surface of the earth. We invent scuba gear and submarines and we explore the deep ocean so inimical to our terrene mammal bodies. We build rockets, we measure trajectories to the millimeter, we design telescopes and probes and cameras, and we gather bits of information about the solar-orbiting lumps of rock beyond our own.

We haunt archives, study documents, examine potsherds. We spend months or years doing 'fieldwork' among people with customs different from our own, in Papua New Guinea or the Amazon rain forest or the Shetland Islands or South Side Chicago. Goodall and Fossey and Galdikas seek our nearest relations hidden deep inside their leafy thickety tropical habitat. We design experiments, we ask each other questions, we introspect, we ponder dreams, habits, motivations, beliefs.

Our favourite stories have always been full of mysteries and revelations, from Oedipus and Hamlet to Holmes and Dalgliesh. We make heroes of seekers and questers, and we read their accounts: Herodotus and Marco Polo and Columbus, Parsifal and Arthur's knights and Don Quixote.

The most thoroughly, fiendishly, diabolically hidden entity of all is perhaps the one humans want most--some sort of better world. What believers think of as heaven and the rest of us call Utopia, Tir Nan Og, Shangri La. Very hidden indeed, because it is No Place. It is doubly, triply, multiply hidden: by its nonexistence in the present and the past, its extreme unlikelihood in the future, its invented, imagined, fantastic, make-believe nature. It inhabits the same realm as thought experiments and counter-factuals, dreams and hopes, wish and fantasy, memory and nostalgia, longing and yearning: the odd and paradoxical region of human mental life which contains the unreal, the unseen, the hidden, the lost--what Yeats called The Land of Heart's Desire. Without it, without its twisting, concealing paths and byways, the stark foursquare obvious realities of the visible world might be too revealed for comfort.

Kassandra is the pen name of Ophelia Benson.

She can be emailed here.

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Interrogations will next be updated early August 2002

Previous Interrogations

1. Self and Internet
2. Perfection Isn't

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