”f I can think of it, it isn’t what I want ”
—Randall Jarrell
The traditional pursuits of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful,” A. J. Ayer begins his infamous Language, Truth and Logic of 1936. The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of a philosophical inquiry. Something has to be put beyond question so the real questions can start. And Ayer is perspicacious enough to know that to do this, to put an end to this superstitious metaphysical tradition, he has to know what a real question is. For Ayer, logic is a form of hyperbole that can show us the starkest of truths: a question is something that can be answered. If there is no way of answering, then it is not a question that has been asked. “We enquire in every case,” he writes,
what observations would lead us to answer the question, one way or the other; and, if none can be discovered, we must conclude that the sentence under consideration does not, as far as we are concerned, express a genuine question, however strongly its grammatical appearance may suggest that it does.
Ayer is offering us a new way to spot a genuine question. For this “we” that Ayer gathers round him in his sentence, the point is not to do with question marks, or with wanting to know something. It is about what we can actually do to get answers—what observations can be made—so there can be no hallowing of curiosity. You will only know if what you had was a question afterwards; the answer won’t merely answer the question, it will tell you whether it was a question.
It is, of course, traditional for philosophers to make a fuss about questions and about the traditional pursuits of philosophers. Ayer implies that questions hypnotize us to look for answers when answers may not be possible. Only our answers reveal our questions to us (when it may be too late). “Does God exist?” is not a question, in Ayer’s view, because we only have observances and not observations to deal with it. If we took Ayer’s method as a prescription for conversation rather than philosophical inquiry, the conversation would be halting at best. And at its worst it would be like someone trying to drive someone else mad. The Ayer-person would too often be saying: you can’t ask for that because that’s asking for nothing, you can’t want that because it doesn’t exist. If questions are ways of wanting they are bound to be—as Ayer intimates, though this would not be his language, truth, or logic—wishful. Ayers’ word for wishful would be metaphysical, or nonsense.
One way of describing so-called growing up would be to say that it involves a transition from the imperative to the interrogative; from Food!—through I want—to Can I have? Questions are, among other things, the grammatical form we give to our desire. Once our wanting has become a question, we have acknowledged—started thinking about—the ways in which wanting in itself doesn’t seem to guarantee satisfaction. There is something between us and what we want, and our wishes are leaps. If Ayer’s concern about “genuine questions” is redescribed as a preoccupation about, as it were, genuine wants, it might lead us to ask: do we find out about wanting by seeing if what we want is actually there? And if it isn’t actually, observably there, what do we do? There is a logical sense in which you might decide a question is not a question, but there is no comparable way of making wants disappear. Who we are is what we can’t be talked out of. In the world of wanting, the knowledge that my question has no answer can make it more of a question. My frustration may not be a satisfying answer to the question of my desire, but it doesn’t—fortunately and unfortunately—abolish my desire.
If questioning is a way of desiring, answering must be akin to satisfying: a meeting of desire. Because we are often able to persuade children that “I want” can be translated into “Can I have?” there is something resembling socialization. To learn to question, and to learn not to, are the basic building blocks of development. To know just what can be questioned, and what must not be—and to learn, as Ayer wants us to learn, what constitutes a question—is what education educates us for. And questions about questions are worth asking because so many of the practices we value—so many of the practices we depend upon for our descriptions—depend upon them. How could we teach, litigate, cure, marry, or talk at parties without asking? Without questions we wouldn’t know how to torture people, or do consumer research. But if we believe that asking questions is the way, the route to the things that matter most to us—the truth, the facts, the answers, and so on—what kind of picture does this suggest we have of ourselves? If we are askers and answerers—or, indeed, as psychoanalysts are supposed to be, resisters of these rituals—what are we then like? Clearly we imagine that much of what we have inside us—much that is essential—can only be got at through a question. And yet language is the only medium for this double act of questions and answers (there are no questions in music, say). To conceive of a form of social relations in which there is no such thing as questions and answers seems virtually akin to imagining a world without language. So mesmerized are we by the question-and-answer format that it might seem silly to consider—even as a thought experiment—trying to discard it. What would we be able to do together—what would we be able to say—if interrogation were banned?
One of the notoriously annoying things about going to see a psychoanalyst, as it is euphemistically called, is that psychoanalysts often don’t answer questions. Questions are encouraged, but answers are not. And psychoanalysts, of course, have reasons for mostly not answering questions which they consider to be in the best interests of the so-called patient. It would seem simply human to at least try and answer a question if someone seems in need of an answer. So there would have to be good reasons for a group of people bent on doing some kind of good to quite candidly refuse to play the game —indeed, to make it integral to their specific therapeutic technique, essential to their notion of cure, to mostly not answer (of course, if they never answered there would be no meeting in the first place, and no telephone). It is as though psychoanalysts were people who had discovered something about answering that had both made them suspicious and enlightened them.
It is in its skepticism about answers—or rather about answering—that psychoanalysis comes into its own. But first the analyst has to persuade the patient of the value of the new game; because it requires the patient’s co-operation, it has to show him the benefit that might accrue from going on asking and being barely answered. The analyst wants the patient to ask without expecting an answer—without, in fact, expecting that there will be answers at all. There might be something else, but not an answer. Psychoanalysis, at least in some of its versions, says: it is human to ask questions, but it is misleading—somehow baffling, or distracting—to be interested in answers. The patient, that is to say, must learn to enjoy desiring without needing satisfaction. He must travel hopefully with no hope of arrival. “You know what charm is,” the narrator of Camus’s The Fall says, “a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear questions.” Psychoanalysis is a way of getting the answer no while being encouraged to clarify one’s questions.
This not answering questions as one of the things a psychoanalyst does is a way of defining the situations that call for a psychoanalyst (rather than for a doctor, or a policeman, or a florist). Psychoanalysis is best thought of as a temptation—among many other competing temptations—to see and describe one’s life in a certain way. And this certain way is an inquiry, among other things into the part questions and answers play in one’s life: the part they have been forced to play, the part one allows them to play, and the part one wants them to play. When people want to know what the questions are that their lives seem to be answering; when people want to find out which questions about themselves can be an-swered, and which predicaments cannot usefully be formulated as questions; when people need a new question to ask of themselves; then it may be worth their while to go and see a psychoanalyst. If they are more interested in answers than in the trouble with answers, their time and money will probably be better spent elsewhere.
For Ayer, genuine questions have answers; for the psychoanalyst I describe, the problem with the question is its need for an answer. The philosopher and the psychoanalyst seek different satisfactions. The psychoanalyst wants to persuade us that there is a satisfaction in asking, and going on asking; the philosopher wants to get his asking right. The philosopher and the psychoanalyst agree that people ask, and ask for, what cannot be asked. For the psychoanalyst this is the point, for the philosopher this is the problem. What is not in question is the value of questions, and the value of asking questions about questions. The traditional pursuit of philosophers that Ayer was so dismissive of has been a quest of (and for) questions. What Freud did was to redescribe questions as part of the rhetoric of demand. To ask a question is simply a way of acknowledging to ourselves and other people that we are lacking something.
When the Logical Positivist meets the Psychoanalyst, perhaps the only thing they will have in common is an interest in asking. The psychoanalyst is likely to think that we are our ways of asking, or that our sense of who we are comes from knowing what we are asking for. For the philosopher the question of who we are is nonsense—or rather, not a question—because there are no observations we could make that could possibly provide an answer. And yet their shared appetite for questions is itself complicit with a picture of ourselves as wanting something (truth, facts, satisfaction, and so on). The notion of people as the animals that question themselves—that doubt and judge and punish—has been one of our most spellbinding images and projects. As though questions signified the transition from nature to culture; as though culture turned appetite into a question. As though bringing up children is getting them to put some question marks in.
“Supposing no one asked a question. What would the answer be,” Gertrude Stein wrote in Near East Or Chicago, tartly omitting the question mark. Much of what goes on between people goes on behind the scenes of this question-and-answer routine, this compulsive gift-giving and gift-withholding ritual. But the supposing that Stein proposes seems somehow beyond us. As though, if we went along with her, we’d be giving up something without quite knowing what it was. Is questioning the best way of wanting, and is wanting the best thing we can think of ourselves as doing? These are the pragmatic questions—as uncongenial to the Analyst as to the Positivist—that Stein pushes in our direction. Though it is not, of course, questions she is pushing. If the Old World was full of questions, she intimates, perhaps there is a New World that is full of something else.
Adams Phillips, a child psychotherapist in London, is the author of On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, On Flirtation, Darwin’s Worms, and other books. He is also the editor of the new Penguin Freud.
