The Most Important Question

[autumn08]

What is the most important question someone can ask themselves?

[Megan.]

'Can I love myself'. My personal answer is that I'm working on it...

[Deborah]

Who am I?  Sometimes the answer really isn't so simple.  Even if you can honestly say I am trans that isn't an answer to this question.  That answers the question "What am I?"

So, Who am I?  Who are you?


Sapere Aude

[autumn08]

Thank you for responding, Megan and Deborah! 

[stephaniec]

my question for the last couple of years has been what is my purpose for being alive.

[autumn08]

From the beginning of Albert Camus's essay, "An Absurd Reasoning;"

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards."

[Tessa James]

Lawyers are trained to not ask the questions they don't know the answer to.

I trust the most important question and answer as provided by Mr Camus does not suggest we find out by committing or considering suicide?

A tough and triggering topic in this club but worthy of our attention.

[autumn08]

Lawyers are trained to not ask the questions they don't know the answer to.

I trust the most important question and answer as provided by Mr Camus does not suggest we find out by committing or considering suicide?

A tough and triggering topic in this club but worthy of our attention.

Camus advises us to accept our absurd condition of seeking meaning, in a meaningless world, and enjoy life anyway.

[Dayta]

How may I be of service?

[Kylo]

"Why am I still here?"

Personally I think the question that eternally haunts human beings is what the hell we're living for.

Because breathing, eating, sleeping, and so on and merely existing... just isn't enough for a human. We need more. So we invent reasons to keep breathing.

[DiamondBladee]

The ultimate way to proceed in life is to find out who you are.  But that's infinite, and therefore impossible to explore totally 100%.  So why is it like this?  Is this how the world is set up for a reason?

There's a lot of things like this.  You start at 0%, and you can get to 99.99% if you really try, but never 100%.  Such as knowing who you are.  Or such as love.  Or such as having power.

[Kylo]

2nd important question:

"where did I put my keys"

[Just Me Here]

What is right to me

[V]

Why?

[Deborah]

The most important question is whatever I learn at the moment.

[SeptagonScars]

For me the most important question is probably "How can I make things better?" I mean with what I have right now or what I can reasonably easily obtain. It's keeping it realistic yet positive and moving forward. Asking myself that helps keeping me on track in life and to not be too held back by past mistakes and what gets me down.

And also: "What truly matters?" to focus on what's actually important. Especially for making decisions of any kind.

[warlockmaker]

A contemplative meditational question akin to a Koan. "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

[Chloe]

"How can I make things better?"

  And best way to do that? Candide would say by "tending to one's own garden"!

         The enlightened playwright and social critic Voltaire (1694-1778) concluded his satirical tale Candide (1759) with the observation that the violence and plunder of kings could not compare with the productive and peaceful life of those who minded their own business, "cultivated their own garden," and traded the surpluses with their neighbors

          As far as the bigger "how" and "why" questions go science has proved to be just as limiting as "religious" explanations  . . . poised as we are directly in between the infinitely Large and infinitely small? Think Francis Bacon said it best almost 500 years before Einstein:

"It's all relative" to the observer's point of view. Our "human condition" renders us inadequate!

           For man's sense is falsely asserted" (by Progagoras' "Man is the measure of all things") "to be the standard of things: on the contrary, all the perceptions, both of the senses and the mind, bear reference to man and not to the universe; and the human mind resembles those uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects . . . and distort and disfigure them" ^{Novum Organum,i,41.} . . . "the human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and regularity in things than it really finds . . . Hence the fiction" ^Ibid,i,45
        . . . the human understanding, when any proposition has been once laid down (either from general admission and belief, or from the pleasure it affords), forces everything else to add fresh support and confirmation: and although most congent and abundant instances may exist to the contrary, yet either does not observe, or despises them, or it gets rid of and rejects them by some distinction, with violent and injurious prejudice, rather than sacrifice the authority of its first conclusion.

"Having first determined the question according to his will, man then resorts to experience; and bending her into conformity with his placets, leads her about like a captive in a procession." ^Ibid,i.63

^{Valerius Terminus}