Chapter 2: What could a question do better than produce an answer?

The Mumonkan collection of Zen Buddhist koans, maybe composed in the Chinese Sung dynasty (960-127)[i], records that the Zen master Nansen Osho was asked what truth had not been taught in Buddhism. Nansen was living on Mount Nansen in China in 795.He answered that it is not mind, not Buddha, not things.[iii] The answer lists three things that truth is not, which can easily be assumed answers of where to find truth and are now eliminated, although maybe it’s not certain that they are eliminated. Someone could also argue otherwise. So, the answer begets another question and the uncertainty of the question remains.

The Hekiganroku collection of koans records that Joshu was asked by a teenage student of Nansen who would eventually succeed the Zen master if he follows Nasen closely. He answers, “Chinshu produces a big radish.” Chinshu was a town in the vicinity where big radishes were grown. Knowing that context may or may not help. Knowing the full koan of this incident makes the narrative more interesting, but doesn’t explain what big radishes have to do with anything except that they might to hot to the taste and that isn’t necessary a clue to an answer. Interpreters of the koan might expand it into a series of implied questions that may be related or not and that might beget debates that can branch into new questions. So, it can’t be certain if the path becomes a diversity of unanswered questions. Again, the uncertainty of the question dominates.

The Hekiganroku collection of koans records that Enkan asked for his rhinoceros fan and was told that it was broken. So, Enkan asked that the rhinoceros be brought to him instead. The fan had a picture of a rhino under a moon. Commentators speculate that the statement that the fan was broken might be a symbolic answer, that the usefulness of what was being communicated had vanished. Or maybe not. That leads others to continue the koan between the participants as a kind of further debate and an agon – the ancient Greek term for a contest, which could be a context for the elenchus of Socrates.

The koan is an instructive narrative that sets a scene, usually with two people, with questions and answers. It is not didactic or discursive in a western sense. There is no ostensible dogma, no predictable answer in terms of western science or philosophy. There is usually a puzzling question or implied question to contemplate for however long it takes, often for ages. This may have more than a little similarity to the Socratic aporia in the early dialogues of Socrates where the aporia is a state of confusion and bewilderment. When western rationalists try to explain Socratic aporia they usually don’t see the same value in confusion and bewilderment that Zen Buddhism does. The rationalists try to squeeze some rationality out of the apparent irrationality of the Socratic aporia. They have a sense of certainty that Buddhism often doesn’t.

A typical Zen question is asked when there is no obvious answer. That’s a crucial distinction because the question is not based on the premise of dogma or an expected answer. There is an element of mystery and bewilderment that is created to strive for an answer and to have the active experience of striving for an answer.

Now compare the koan to the elenchus of Socrates, in the bios or life of Socrates. Like a koan, the narrative of Socratic encounters that Plato produces have a clear setting and clear characters in a story, in the early dialogues at least, that result in an inconclusive end. The canon of koans comes down without that fuller sense of bios in Socrates.

Is the inconclusive aporia of the Socratic dialogues a failure to finish the discussion in a rational way or is the inconclusiveness and bewilderment also the goal of the lesson, as in Zen Buddhism?

The Zen encounter leaves the disciple to finish the puzzle in the disciple’s own individual way, without an instructor to determine the result or to declare that a definite answer has been reached. It may only be in the western dream of rationality that there are definitive ends. Zen Buddhism has its own context for certainty.

So, is the same true of the early dialogues of Socrates? Is the intention that the person leaves Socrates baffled and frustrated, or did Socrates intend that the experience was a lesson that the person could continue in that person’s own individual way?

Philosophers debate this issue in excruciating detail, because it bothers them so much, and their answers may conform more with western rationality and not so much with a fuller Socrates in the context of Athens of the time. Plato himself would be aware of the inclusiveness of these dialogues and that may have left Plato unsatisfied, which would explain why the Socrates of the later dialogues becomes more didactic, more certain of the goal of certain answers that need to be established.

The early dialogues capture the process of asking reasonable questions in a dynamic between two or more people with different temperaments that affect them, in their particular bios, in a context of radical doubt. It is not a rational summary of the conclusions, which, of course, aren’t found in the early dialogues anyway. It is worth reading Socrates and the Irrational by James Hans to get a sense that more than only rational factors are in play play in a Socratic dialogue. Personality, character and bios are factors that Plato thought important for the dialogues, which seems peripheral to rationalists, but is part of the context that Plato gives us to consider and to make use of in our own elenchus. The context of the radical doubt in this Socrates in not found in Xenophon’s account of Socrates. As time progresses, Plato changes the degree of certainty in the dialogues, reduces doubt, and the character of Socrates then has answers and elaborate theories. If that is true, it may because the early dialogues reflect more strongly the historical Socrates, or at least Plato’s recollection and interpretation of Socrates, and the later dialogues more the thinking of Plato.

Does Plato’s later elaboration of the mind of Socrates complete Socrates or distort essential elements of the mind of Socrates? If the later dialogues distort essential elements of the thinking of Socrates, what are those essential elements and how might they be important?

What about the element of doubt in the early dialogues? The Jungian psychoanalyst Marie-Louise von Franz assumes that the doubt, uncertainty and perplexity in the earliest dialogues of Socrates are flaws in the psyche of Socrates. Doubt for the self-assured, rational von Franz seems to be simply the absence of certainty and apparently without purpose. There is no argument in her analysis of the dreams of Socrates that doubt may have value in resisting and in examining mistaken beliefs, including ones from ego consciousness, that can trap human beings. Von Franz frequently uses the phrase “no doubt” when she is doing the analysis. For her, doubt, uncertainty and perplexity are apparently symptoms of the evasion of the tasks that the psyche of Socrates is giving him. In the Phaedo dream, von Franz characterizes doubt as an evasion. Since Socrates did not understand the message of the dream according to von Franz’s interpretation of the dream, which may be a valid observation, she says that he was “plagued by doubt” and that he interpreted the dream “literally.” So, the literalness of Socrates is then caused by doubt and doubt apparently does not have a rational value like it does in Zen Buddhism. For von Franz, Socrates asking questions and not providing answers demonstrates his “passivity” and “lack of determination to risk himself in a creative act.” She sees in Socrates evasions to life, evasions to his unconscious, a failure to act and psychic resistance or blockage.

But, as von Franz’s teacher and mentor Carl Jung knew, it is always wise to be careful in rationalizing the apparent irrationality of parts of the human psyche. Jung was interested in mysticism, Gnosticism and the eastern mind and wrote an introduction to the 17th-century Chinese mystical book The Secret of the Golden Flower - also promoted the value of doubt in analyzing dreams and the psyche, as von Franz knew. Jung found value in what it is difficult for the rational mind to understand and accept.

Jung wrote a whole study of Job in the Old Testament, plagued as Job is by doubt about the deity. Job is an archetypal questioner who poses dangerous questions to the deity as a vulnerable human being confronting a much more powerful divine force. For Jung, the deity cannot tolerate doubt in his creatures. Instead, doubt is projected onto Satan, who is given the apparently paradoxical divine mission to test the loyalty of the faithful Job by persecuting him unjustly. Satan is tricked into this kind of defeat, just as Job is tricked into displaying his loyalty and faith to the deity.

Job survives the test in a way that his friends, with only a blind, superficial, and dogmatic faith, fail. In the end, Job and the deity distinguish between human understanding and divine wisdom, which is akin to the distinction that Socrates makes and the limits that Buddhism puts on human knowledge. In comparison, rationality can be arrogant and blind, particularly when rationality is seized by the ego to do the unknown biddings of the ego. Rationality can thus become a mask for the ego. Jung was personally preoccupied with the figure of Job as the doubter and questioner that Jung himself was too. Von Franz cites Jung as saying that doubt in interpreting dreams is a “precious gift” that “does not violate the virginity of things beyond our ken.” Jung, aware of how easy it is for ego consciousness to have an arrogant over-confidence and to misinterpret psychic phenomena, is satisfied to linger at length with doubt.

Is Jung’s stance of doubt towards dream interpretation similar or different to the Socrates who creates doubt in examining others in his style of elenchus and aporia, and is Socrates satisfied with concluding with doubt? Could the doubt of Socrates be “a creative act” through which he finds clarity? Does the life of Socrates really show him to be passive and adverse to risks? Is Socrates’s defiance of the public life required of a male citizen of Athens an act in itself or a failure to act? Is the aggressiveness of the attitude of Socrates towards the jury in his defence of himself in the Apology really the behaviour of a passive and timid individual or a boldness that he won’t relinquish no matter what?

Consider for a moment this thought: what if the inquiry of the early dialogues could be based on a Socrates who believes in the limitations of the knowledge of human beings and in the existence of a world beyond that knowledge and beyond human consciousness, which he knew through his sense of doubt and spirituality?

If the idea is plausible, that would require the ability to live with doubt and a need for an art of inquiry that was rigorous in exposing the limitations of human knowledge in a disciplined way. This is what Socrates claimed in the early dialogues, writings which may be more faithful to the character of Socrates than the later dialogues. The later dialogues may have lost the sense of the historical Socrates because of the strength of a rationality in Plato who couldn’t live with those limitations. And that later path that Plato set would be followed and developed over the centuries in a more focused secular western rationality as a kind limited perception of existence.

The idea of the Socrates who believes in the limitations of human knowledge and of a world beyond it might be, in part, one definition of a whole human being, the bios. Similar concepts are found in psychoanalysis and in Zen Buddhism. In this thinking, the whole human being transcends the limitations of the rationality of ego consciousness. That, of course, complicates the way that the whole human being is encouraged and developed. In terms of the art of inquiry of Socrates, that might also affect the process of inquiry, which Socrates insisted was not a mere intellectual game or kind of sophistry, but a way to heal the soul or psyche of the human being guided by a Hermes figure. But heal from what? This Socrates doesn’t always have answers, but may be guided by tuition or a speculative sense of what is beyond human consciousness without being able to clearly formulate it, groping in the dark while Plato, instead, unlike Socrates, seeks release from the dark shadowy world where Socrates lives with other human beings. In the Republic, is Plato’s allegory of the cave a psychic eruption in Plato of a doubt he had in the Socrates that he revered? When a later Socrates delivers Plato’s allegory of the cave, Socrates asks whether those in the darkness put to death someone who returned to liberate them from their darkness in the cave. The answer is yes, which sounds like the dramatic irony of Socrates predicting his own death for trying to liberate the minds of others. That obvious connection puts the drama of the cave intentionally into the context of the life of Socrates in a way that Plato’s audience would understand. Is Plato’s allegory of the cave then an answer to Socrates, an aspiration in Plato beyond the Socrates that he revered but whose doubt he could not tolerate in the end?

Suppose for a moment that the early dialogues have essential elements of Socrates that are lost in the later dialogues. The essential elements of the early dialogues are doubt and uncertainty in the mind of Socrates, which Socrates then confers to others to make them uncertain, with the aporetic conclusion of a discussion that does not answer conclusively the questions that Socrates poses, which apparently is sufficient for Socrates. “That is enough discussion for today, Crito. Let us follow the course and let God lead the way. I feel drowsy now and want to close my eyes. Maybe death is like a little sleep and in that little sleep I will be strolling in the underworld having discussions with Homer and Orpheus.”

Maybe Socrates is satisfied with doubt. Maybe it is in doubt that Socrates finds clarity of mind and from doubt that he can formulate questions more freely and openly. If that make sense, it would pose a different kind of inquiry from what is now familiar in western secular rationality where catechism, answers and dogma dominate the process. Finding irony in the statements of Socrates might in itself be an evasion created by a rational ego consciousness that can’t accept doubt. What if a question – or a deep, genuine, essential question – is a form of speculation in the sphere of doubt, possibly about an unknown future event, possibly about a past event which can never be determined fully? Otherwise, a question asks for what is known or can be known, as a kind of catechism. In that case, the answer already exists and the answer exists in a realm of empirical fact or in the conventional dogma. But the question that is a form of speculation in a sphere of doubt may be valuable for seeing alternatives or for clarifying the initial point of view. The speculative question also reveals the thinking and character of the person being asked the question. It also sets a benchmark against which the person giving the answer can be measured in the future when the answer is verified in the realm of history and empirical reality.

How could the role of doubt and questions based on genuine doubt be justified? There is a possible model for this other kind of process of inquiry in Zen Buddhism, expressed aptly by Stephen Batchelor, a former monk in Tibetan Buddhism and Zen Buddhism who calls himself an atheist Buddhist. In his book The Faith to Doubt: Glimpses of Buddhist Uncertainty, Batchelor says:

“The way of the Buddha is a living response to a living question. Yet whenever it has become institutionalized its vital response has become a well-formulated answer. The seemingly important task of preserving a particular set of answers often causes the very questions which gave rise to those answers to be forgotten… … [O]ur very existence declares itself to us as a question. Birth, sickness, aging, and death are the mute, imperative voices of this question that beckons us along a path. To be vital, this path can never stray from the ground of its question, it can never rest content with any answer. The path leads not to a coherent answer but to a series of responses as inarticulate as the question. Once we find something we believe in, it is easy to forget the original question. But instead of acquiescing to the security of belief, we can intensify the sense of doubt. Belief, whether in a teacher, a doctrine, or even one’s own experience, retreats from the questions behind a shield of protective views and concepts. But the person who questions lies open and exposed, prepared for the unpredictability of the moment… Each cultural and historical occasion is a unique question that provokes a unique response.”

How would von Franz analyze what Batchelor says about the doubt at the centre of Buddhism that even Buddhists have trouble accepting?

Zen Buddhism uses the art of inquiry to guide individual students to find their own answers themselves. Zen masters try to empty the student of false knowledge and the limitations of rationality typically by posing paradoxical questions or giving paradoxical answers. This can become a lifelong process for the students to find their different individual answers. The growth comes from the process of seeking an answer, not from being given an answer to memorize and follow. The process of dealing with paradoxical questions in a life full of irrational contradictions is the experience that helps the student. Growing is a lifelong process in a bios, not an immediate conclusive end.

As an example, one Buddhist teacher, Dzogchen Ponlop, develops the idea of the cultivation of the inner Buddha in a person into a “rebel Buddha,” perhaps an inner voice akin to the function of the contrary daimon of Socrates. What is important, says Ponlop in his book The Rebel Buddha, is being able to ask questions. “In the beginning, we may think of asking questions is a sign of ignorance. The more questions we have, the more we don’t know… However, knowing clearly what you don’t know is already a form of wisdom. Real ignorance is not knowing what you don’t know (21).” That is what Socrates says. He makes the distinction between himself and others in the Apology: “I do not think that I know what I do not know” (21d). Wisdom is knowing what you don’t know, the same claim that Socrates makes from his interpretation of the Delphic oracle about himself, although Western rationality is tempted to interpret that as irony and insincerity, as does someone like Thrasymachus in the Republic. But, “having a clear question,” says the Buddhist Ponlop, “means you know clearly what it is that you don’t know… Real wisdom is when you find a true question. When you find it, you should not rush to answer it. Stay with it for a while. Make friends with it.” (23) Note how different this is from Western rationality, which typically asserts the primacy of the answer over the question, the primacy of the teacher over the student, the primacy of the therapist over the patient. In this thinking, answers matter most, not questions. But the primacy of the answer over the question is a rational assumption that seems unassailable from the perspective of Western rationality. Ask thyself, Why shouldn’t this be questioned?

What are the questions that haven’t been asked about Socrates? What is it that we don’t know about Socrates when we think we understand him? What don’t we know that we don’t know about Socrates?

email: socraticzen88@gmail.com

A revisualization by Shawn Thompson of koan # 91 from the Hekiganroku collection of koans