“Why Are We Here?”

Opening Convocation address by Dean of the College Walter Wright

“Why are we here?”  At Clark, we are told that “learning through inquiry” is one of three signatures that characterize a Clark education.  And “inquiry,” whatever else it may be, is certainly about asking questions.  So it is appropriate to begin a talk like this one with an inquiry and a question.  “Why are we here?”

But not every utterance that has the form of a question will give rise to inquiry.  For genuine inquiry to occur the question that is asked must be real.  It is not so easy to say precisely what makes a question a “real question.”  As a way of getting started, though, let me suggest three qualities that characterize “real questions.” 

First, real questions are about things that matter.  If the question is not about something important to the person asking, something that they need know, then it is idle or trivial.  You should know that asking good questions is not easy.  In fact to succeed in asking one is already an achievement. Such questions are alive, and when you ask one, you are on the trail of something living.

Second, real questions are about something that the asker doesn’t already know.  If a questioner believes that she knows the answer already, then her asking is strategic rather than real, and the question is rhetorical, or empty.  In such a case, she raises the question not so much to learn as to have some secondary effect on the person with whom she is speaking—but the questioner is not really inquiring.  Many of the questions one encounters are of this kind—they are rhetorical or strategic and their answer is anticipated by the asker.  Real questions, on the other hand, take us into the unknown.   

Third, when someone asks a real question, he will follow the asking with attentive listening.   If a question is real, the asker does not know the answer and it is important to him to learn it.  So he will wait for responses that will help him disclose what he is seeking.  On the other hand, when a question is followed by a lot of talk, you can know that what is happening is not real inquiry.  Questions which elicit genuine inquiry—“real questions”—matter, they take us into new territory, and they call for attentive listening.

So, once again, “Why are we here?”  When people giving talks like this one ask questions, their questions are usually rhetorical rather than real, and so they answer them immediately.  If I were doing the usual, I would now offer you a list of reasons why “we”—the people who have gathered as the Clark University community (students, faculty, and staff) in these late summer days—are “here”—in this university at this moment.  I would attempt to identify the common connecting threads that weave the diverse set of people who make up Clark University into one “we.”  Thus, I might affirm the values of independent thinking and autonomous learning that are manifest in serious inquiry, openness to cultural diversity, and commitment to making a difference that we have identified as the signatures of our university.  I might seek to inspire your passion for learning.   I might offer you a list of the qualities that should characterize educated people at the beginning of this new century, except that my colleague Patrick Derr is going to give you his own excellent list in a few minutes.  But I am not going to do those things.

Instead, I want to invite you to stay with the question “Why are we here?” and to hold it for yourself as a real question.  We have each found our way to Clark University for our own disparate reasons and from various points of origin.  Circumstances and our individual choices have combined to bring us to this moment.  What has brought me here?  This is one approach to our question.  And if we take it, each of us will find our own answers to the question “Why am I here?”  Asked like this, it is a good and important question—one deserving of thought.  And it is also a very old question.  Nearly 2500 years ago Socrates asserted that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”  One thing he meant was that each of us needs to ask the question of ourselves—“Why are we here?”  And, Socrates thought, we each need to ask it as a real question, not asking as if we already knew the answer, but surrendering what we imagine the answers to be and listening to what arises that we had not known before.  Paraphrasing what our Logan Fellow Patty Ewick has recently written, asking this question in the first way “entails a deliberate and sustained scrutiny of our assumptions, blind spots, values, and biases.”  It will sometimes be uncomfortable.  I invite you to hold that question and to ask it for yourself.

If you make the effort necessary to ask the question this first way, I suspect that you will sooner or later find that a second, more complex level of this matter will open: “Why are we here?”  This second form of the question arises because the question belongs not only to each of us as individual people, it is also about this “we”—because we are here together, and we are interconnected.  There is a natural tendency to conceive of thinking as something that happens privately—between our ears— but this assumption should be questioned.  In his essay on “Dialogue” Martin Buber claims that thinking and inquiry are necessarily dialogues.  In Buber’s account, “thinking” does not occur inside the mind of the solitary person, it arises between “I” and the “other” whose difference itself arouses the energy of thought.  Inquiry, insight, and discovery happen in the spaces between us, in a community of thinking.  And Buber is not alone in this view.  He reminds us also that all across our tradition, thinkers like Plato, Humboldt, Hegel, and Feuerbach have repeatedly arrived at this basic insight.  As Feuerbach wrote “True dialectic is not a monologue of the solitary thinker with himself, it is a dialogue between I and You.”  The pronoun with which Feuerbach ends his sentence is the intimate form “du” that is spoken between parents and children, lovers and good friends.  It is a word that conveys connection and intimacy.  Thinking is a social activity. 

This second way of asking our question (“Why are we here?”) leads us to engage the people around us, our teachers in and out of the classroom, our fellow students in late night discussions and in the fullness of shared lives.  The great Greek thinker Aristotle made this point this way.  He wrote, “Everyone by nature desires to know.”  In his understanding, to be a human person is to be curious—to move beyond the limits of what is known through dialogue with other persons.  Once again, if we ask “Why are we here?” as a real question, if we take it as a guide for genuine inquiry, we will be moved into areas that at present are unknown to us, and we will be changed.

And this, in turn, can lead us to a third way to ask our question: “Why are we here?”  What is it about universities and about Clark that brings us, as inquiring persons, into this orbit of inquiry and learning?  Universities are complicated social networks.  They offer opportunities for many kinds of connection and relationship.  They are scenes of laboratory research, professional preparation, and clubs; social exploration, personal growth, and art events; athletic involvement, good parties, and community engagement; and, oh yes, study.  As you work through the many possibilities that Clark offers, ask this question too as a real question for yourself.  Why are we, why are you, here? 

This question too has many possible answers.  A little more than 200 years ago, a controversial new Professor of Philosophy began his academic career at an important European university with a series of lectures asking a similar question.  Johann Gottlieb Fichte was known as a defender of the French Revolution and an advocate of the new critical philosophy.  Curious students at Jena crowded in to hear him speak about “the scholar’s vocation.”  By “scholar” (Gelehrte), Fichte did not just mean people held doctor’s degrees, had read books or had written refereed articles.  He did not mean people who worked in a university as teachers or students.  To be a “scholar” in Fichte’s sense meant engaging the human condition and the world in the broadest terms.  It meant seeking the endless development of human possibility in oneself and assisting the development of others, or, as he put it, it meant committing oneself to “the ethical improvement of humanity as a whole.” 

Of course we should not simply accept Fichte’s answer.  As we ask ourselves “Why are we here?” we need to find our own answers, not adopt someone else’s.  But Fichte’s answer invites us to think large and to dream.  Are you willing to take up the invitation?

So as this year begins, I hope you will remember to ask questions—your own questions, real questions.  I hope you will ask them of one another and of yourselves, of the books you read and of the surrounding world.  And when you ask, be willing not to know the answer; be willing to wait in the place of uncertainty and discomfort.  Be willing to stay with your questions as long as it takes.  I invite you, when you hear opinions that challenge your own, to take them in and see where they lead.  Instead of holding to your own certainties and meeting what is other with rejection and argument, try opening yourself to listening and to dialogue.  See what is “other,” see the new, as a possibility that invites.  Attend to the new and unfamiliar meanings that approach you out of the unknown.  Be willing to learn.