Idea Framing

Because my last post was about being a picture framer I thought I would revisit a related post I did last year. It's related because it's also about framing, not about picture framing but idea framing. As a result, I think of myself not only as a framer of pictures but also as a framer of ideas:

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

Does that mean that adults who ask 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 reflectively 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 is 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 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 I have 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 has helped develop lucidity in my thinking and an ease of thought that never existed before. I've often said that if there were no contradiction in the world we wouldn't need philosophy to help figure things out.

One of my big childish questions 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 it is often with children, that statement is usually followed by “But why?”

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