Holding Gauguin’s questions

Just like that, I’m plunged into our last modular week at the TEP, and it is turning out to be an amazing if intense one on such topics as questioning, inquiry and dialogue. As we learned to expect from our last module with this facilitator, we are given several questions each day to think and maybe write about.

One of the questions posed was concerned with those asked in the title of the following painting by Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

The questions are in fact inscribed (in French naturally) in the upper right hand corner of the painting, which is a large–massive actually at 55 × 148 inches–canvas depicting the different stages of human life (specifically of women) in Tahiti, where he lived out the last several years of his life. Shailesh did not ask us to attempt to answer these questions, but rather asked us what we felt about them and their significance.

I am not going to  attempt to answer his questions just yet, but rather borrowing from a statement that struck a particularly resonant chord, am going to “hold” the question/s with me for a while. This is not to say that I am not going to engage with them –I am going to try–but the idea is to explore myself through them, not arrive at the answer. Shailesh said (or at least implied, since I am only paraphrasing him here, not quoting) that the ability to answer questions too quickly renders them somewhat trivial. It was a good thought-provoking insight, but it raised another question for me, what I’ll put out here. How long can one hold on to a question and exploring it or even just letting it lie in the back burner, and still keep it meaningful?  Will not holding it too long also have the same effect as as rushing to answer it?

As a quick aside, I know that some of my research projects have benefited from ideas braising (or should I say marinating?), nearly forgotten, for many, upto even 12, years. Come to think of it, my current book is the outcome of the marination (maturity) of an idea relegated to the realms of a footnote in my dissertation.. but it wasn’t really a question that formed the seed there; it was an observation that benefited  from later experience and well, knowledge accumulation. While this gives me hope that questions too will improve with age, I know of a flip side too. The footnote was one idea that survived to flower into a full-blown book, but I know of other ideas that died from the neglect–they might have proved fruitful once but got lost or buried beyond redemption. Or perhaps their fate is indicative that they too were trivial like the questions that get answered too easily.

Returning to Gauguin’s questions, what is their significance? The article Shailesh gave us to accompany the image treats them as examples of the most profound questions we humans can ask ourselves: questions that are at the core of what it means to be human, in fact. It followed up with additional questions about them: “Can you think of three more important questions that any soul can ask?” &  “Have you ever considered them yourself?” I’ll leave the second one aside for the moment since it’s a different way of asking the same question Shailesh posed. But the first brings to mind another set of questions, namely the difference between “good” and “bad” or “right” and “wrong” questions. The think the former is a rhetorical question, not a serious one. For what does it matter whether there are more (or less) important questions out there? In this matter as in education, comparison serves no good purpose.

It is true, however, that questions of the sort Gauguin posed invite the same sort of self-exploration and inquiry as the “Who am I?” question raised a couple of weeks ago by Gopalan. And I would venture to say that considering these questions even at a biological level (rather than at a philosophical one) has led to profound and earth-shaking discoveries about the world around us. The questions, at least the first two–D’ Ou’ venons-nous? (where do we come from) & Que sommes-nous? (What are we)–were in fact the starting point for both Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel, arguably the two most influential figures in nineteenth century biology.

Both men began with the same questions, but based on their raw materials and experience came up with very different sorts of answers. Darwin who journeyed around the world and saw all manner of living creatures in diverse environments and held the questions his observations raised for twenty years before detailing his understanding of natural selection as a mechanism for evolution. His questions about where we come from and what we are did not consider just humans or indeed any one organism or species but life in all its diversity. Mendel on the other hand had just his garden of peas. So he took the question in another direction–he answered the first question quickly enough; we (like the peas he studied) come from our parents. His findings were more revelatory about the second and even the third–Where are we going? about which Darwin had not specific predictions just the fact that life changes or evolves. He (Mendel) detected the patterns for traits were passed down the generations from parents to children. Eventually, decades later, there was of course, the grand synthesis, which brought these different strands together into one coherent picture. Knit together by DNA, which at James Watson in one of his brilliant moments–and those must be acknowledged just as his low points are–said, proved Darwin more right than Darwin himself could have dreamed!

At a philosophical level, I think I may veer toward the nihilistic if I stew about in these questions too much. But then I think of the Dawkins’ final comments in his God Delusion documentary and find myself in sympathy with what he said… that one can derive meaning in life from the very act of questing and asking questions about the meaning. Holding on then, to what JK and Yeats have to say the, about observers becoming the observed and dancers the dance,  I’ll sign off for now. But these questions will stay with me for a long time to come. Thank you both, Gauguin & Shailesh.