In a world that seems devoid of absolute certainties, how can we make declarative statements? Don’t we all risk one day asking, as Colonel Brandon does in the Jane Austen novel Sense and Sensibility, “Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?”?
How do we know anything for certain? Aren’t even our beliefs, our opinions, subject to change and, as Marcel Proust put it, aren’t they “as eternally fluid as the sea itself”? Is it true, as Proust wrote, that “all our resolutions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last”? Or am I completely wrong about this? Now isn’t that a question we often forget to ask?
Aren’t we only on solid ground when asking questions? And yet, don’t all of us make more statements than questions? Is this why we have not been able to find certainties?
Could this be what the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes was getting at in his Discourse on Method when he questioned his existence? If we can’t know anything for certain, how do we even know that we exist? Wasn’t his conclusion—cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am—an attempt to answer this question? And wasn’t this answer an assertion that the act of asking is proof enough of your existence? Then, doesn’t it follow that people who don’t ask questions have no proof of their existence? Of course couldn’t you exist anyway, even if you couldn’t prove it? But aren’t we better off asking the question just to have the proof? On the other hand, isn’t it likely that the kind of people who don’t ask questions are not likely to worry about whether or not they exist?