Adults asking childish questions

Isaiah Berlin said that philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.

So does that mean that adults who asks childish questions are  philosophers? Not necessarily. For one to be a philosopher childish questions should be followed by reflection and possible explanations. For example, Albert Einstein is considered a philosopher because he answered his own childish questions. One of the biggest childish questions he asked was, “Did God have any choice in how he created the world?” All his life Einstein developed thought experiments and theories that showed reasonably well that God did not have a choice if the world was to be the way it is.

I’ve asked childish questions. In my attempt to answer them I haven’t necessarily become a philosopher but I did turn to philosophy to answer them. What philosophy offers to an inquisitive person like myself is a toolkit of ideas and methods for understanding and explaining. One thing I know is that many of the childish questions asked don’t have simple answers. Sometimes they have contradictory answers. Philosophy helps put the contradictions into perspective and sort out the confusion that can arise from them. In the process philosophy helps develop a lucidity in one’s thinking and an ease of thought that never existed before. I have often said, if there was no contradiction in the world there would be no need for philosophy to help figure it out.

One of my big childish question was, “Why is the world the way it is?” I didn’t ask it in the wonderment of its physical nature as Einstein did, but in the wonderment of its social evolution. I was thinking about its political and economic development. I wanted to know why humankind organizes and governs itself the way it does. I saw a singular, standard system of human organization and governance emerging. I wanted to know why.

I say my question was a childish one because in a sense it was like asking why the sky is blue. The standard answer to that question usually is, “Because! that’s the way it is.” However, with me, as is often the case with children, that was followed by, “But why?”

I can’t think of a childish question Berlin may have asked. I know that he was deeply against the idea of determinism, the philosophy that believes that there is a particular social determining force in the world. He saw that historically this philosophy often led to human subjugation. For instance, both Hitler and Stalin believed in social determinism which they formulated into totalitarianism and the subjugation of their people. The people who didn’t fit into their deterministic schemes were often imprisoned or completely eliminated. Perhaps the childish question Berlin might have asked is, Why has humankind been so brutal and insensitive to itself?