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on my smartphone. I carry it with me; I shouldn’t
need to search for it at all. But here I am, searching.my favorite bit by the comedian Louis
C.K. is about how children are always asking
questions. He starts by admitting that before he
became a father he used to judge parents for their
reticence to answer their children’s questions. He
recalls watching a parent shut a kid down in a
McDonald’s, telling him to just keep quiet and eat
his damn french fries. But why not answer questions,
C.K. asks his audience sarcastically, and expose your
children to many wonders of the world?
“You can’t answer a kid’s question!” C.K. ex-
plodes. “They don’t accept any answer! A kid never
goes, ‘Oh, thanks, I get it.’ They just keep coming,
more questions: why why why, until you don’t even
know who the fuck you are anymore at the end of
the conversation. It’s an insane deconstruction!”
A conversation that begins with his daughter
asking why she can’t go outside because it’s
raining spirals out of control into analyzing why
we’re here and C.K.’s admission that we’re alone
in the universe.
He says, “At the end it’s like:
Why?
Well, because some things are and some things are not.
Why?
Well, because things that are not can’t be!
Why?
Because then nothing wouldn’t be! You can’t have
fucking nothing isn’t—everything is!!”
It’s possible that I never outgrew this phase of
life. I’ve always loved asking questions, especially
why questions. I was raised in a largely secular
family: my father a Reform Jew—the most liberal
branch of Judaism that embraces the idea of a
personal god—and my mother a lapsed Christian.
In the abstract, at least, both my parents saw the
value of religion, of engaging with something
higher than yourself to find meaning and purpose.
But both were also humanists and education
researchers. Being a researcher, who lives and dies
by the scientific method, comes with a built-in
agnosticism and a low tolerance for woo-woo
explanations. I’ve heard my father say that if
something can’t be measured, it could just as easily
not exist. Research was my parents’ chosen vehicle
for making sense of the world, and they devotedtheir careers to answering difficult questions using
it: Which students do better in school and why?
Why did this or that social program not work?
How do we judge the value of an education?
But science (and my parents) also acknowledge
there are no definitive magic answers for us
humans. Knowledge is gained only through deep
thought and putting in hard work to arrive at the
most plausible conclusion—and a plausible conclu-
sion is as good as it gets. This is also a recurring
religious lesson: aspire to godly knowledge at your
own peril. Prometheus was sentenced to suffer
for eternity; Adam and Eve were expelled from
the garden, made mortal. Job only compounded
his own misfortune by seeking divine answers.
Scientific research is humble in its own way. It’s
keenly aware of its human limits. My father’s email
signature still reads, “In God we Trust, all others
bring data.”
It’s possible this left me wanting. I believed in
data of course, but they weren’t enough. When
I was young, my parents got wise and gave me a
tape recorder to talk into, to keep me entertained
and eventually exhaust myself. Somewhere in their
closets there are cassette tapes full of me rambling
and counting, then asking what numbers are and
how high they can go, then asking about infinity,
and at some point, probably asking about God.
“You were also really into spreadsheets,” my dad
tells me.
I guess no one was surprised when I decided
to study philosophy in college. I thought: this is
the place where all my questions will finally be
answered. It’s an ancient discipline, after all. But
searching for answers through philosophy turned
out to have the same pitfalls as a six-year-old’s
argument with Louie C.K. You could swap
recordings of my class discussions on the meta-
physics of Parmenides for C.K.’s whole routine,
and you’d end up in the same place.
When—a little more than halfway through my
degree—I first asked Google if I should be studying
philosophy, the top results were pretty much what
you’d expect. They remain unchanged today,
in fact, and are all from university philosophy
departments. You can tell they’ve tailored responses
to all of their anticipated readers. For the college
student with my pretensions: To study philosophy is to
grapple with questions that have occupied humankind forSEARCH HISTORY | RACHEL WILKINSON