What Is Your Living Question?

I’ll be hosting a session called “The Living Question” during Limicon 2024 at The Stoa on its birthday, March 21st. This session will feature a truly aporia-inducing form of collective inquiry.¹

What is Limicon? It is a one-month experiment to further cohere (or wisely disperse) the social field formerly known as “The Liminal Web.” From the website:

Part we-space, part choose your own adventure, part field-nurturing experiment, Limicon 2024 is an online container open from March 6th - April 3rd. Experience a unique process designed to help you navigate these uncertain times and discover new ways of being.

You can purchase your ticket here.

A few philosophers recently wrote the second-shortest paper in the discipline, containing the following question:

Can a good philosophical contribution be made just by asking a question? 

The question was followed by a blank page. Clever. The answer, of course, is yes. If reasoning is the lifeblood of philosophy, a question is the heart that pumps it, enlivening an inquiry and deepening one’s sense of wonder.

Just like some questions are bad and some are good, some questions are meant to be answered with efficiency, and some are meant to be lived with. I am interested in the latter, as it is a neglected practice. A question need not be associated with an impulse to answer it, with neediness for clarity and a flexing of certainty. Just stay with the mystery for a while, or provide what

James Rutt

calls the “hero answer”—I don’t know. And one cannot say those words with faux humility; they really need to feel them and be in a state of unknowingness, or what philosophers call “aporia.”

True philosophizing necessitates such a state, a state that demands questions act as aporia bombs, compelling one to pause. This places the mind in a pretzel-like contortion and grounds one in their body, prompting them to feel all that is bubbling forth. A “living question” is a question one lives with without forcing an answer. One can stay with a question, enjoy its contours, taste its potential, and be rightfully afraid of all the rabbit holes it presents. While they might not always be articulable, there is a living question alive at the start of all good philosophical inquiries.

The sophists (or wordcels, to use current internet vernacular), always ready to jump at the chance to sound smart, will attempt to steamroll through living questions, forcing out an answer. However, if they are truly handling an aporia bomb, they will be quickly revealed because what comes out of their mouth is reasonable-sounding nothingness or “pseudo-profound bullshit”—assertions that appear deep at first glance but are, in reality, vacuous statements devoid of any true meaning or value.

The good news is the age of wordcel supremacy is coming to an end. With the semantic apocalypse on the horizon - where words are untethered from their meaning en masse - sophists will have no place to hide. New “languages,” where one only speaks with words sourced from a deeply attuned body, are being rediscovered. When speaking in this way, one connects with the unknown, seeing more mystery than any pretentious knowings ever can. When one asks a question from this place, and learns to live with it, no answer will be needed.

In truth, a living question will expose you, reveal you, and remind you how mysterious life is. The best questions are meant to be lived with, not answered.

What is your living question?

If you’d like to attend The Living Question session on March 21st at 12 pm eastern, you can become a member of this Substack to receive the link behind the paywall. Alternatively, purchasing a ticket to Limicon will provide you access to the session along with a suite of emergent sessions.

If you’d like to engage in aporia-inducing inquiry with me through my philosophical practice, please respond to this email with your living question.