The problems and questions of house keys, surgeries, etc.
At the very end of my recent writing on infinite access to media, I referenced a short quote from Rainer Rilke. In that full passage, he spoke beautifully of questions:
I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
It's clear that, without even speaking of problems, he understood some differentiation that has eluded me in specifics but plagued me from the shadows for some time. This differentiation was only made explicit to me recently as a friend shared with me a passage from Agnes Callard's Open Socrates (which I admittedly have not read) in which I latched onto the model as a way to explore a related set of issues that have interested (or troubled) me over the past few years. I will use her examples only to set the stage for an investigation of these differences, as I hope to expand upon her framework in a way that allows us to draw closer to my core issues of interest. In her book, Callard uses the example of the streetlight effect to help illustrate the nature of questions as opposed to the nature of problems. For those not familiar with the original parable, I will offer this retelling:
One night, on my way home from the park, I found a person searching around on the street. I asked if they had lost something and they said yes, they'd lost their house key. I offered to help look, so they told me it was a single silver key upon a single key ring. I began searching around for this until, after a few minutes with no luck, I paused and said okay, where exactly do you think you lost it? They told me that they thought they'd lost it back up the road, in the park. I tried to contain my surprise (and a bit of annoyance) as I asked why, then, we were searching here. They gestured up above us and said that streetlight makes it much easier to look for them here; no good lighting in the park, they told me.
The general interpretations of this story often have to do with reminding/admonishing searchers of some kind to remember that one is in danger of accidentally following what is easy rather than staying with what is more difficult but correct. This has been used in multiple contexts, notably (to my knowledge) in spiritual pursuits, but also in pursuit of science, as Callard cites from Chomsky. In science, Chomsky says, we have no choice but to look where the light is, meaning through what tools and methods exist for us to perceive and measure whatever phenomenon is of interest; in other contexts, however, we may be missing the mark by searching only where is apparent.
The named effect, in short, is that it is convincing to look where things generally are easier to see (or find) regardless of whether the thing we want can be found there.
What is a question?
The question of the keyless may be "Where are my keys?" and, of questions, Callard says:
If the keys themselves are what you want, you must search wherever you need to search, in the light and in the dark, even if you have no idea in advance how that search will proceed.
This is true of any of the great and fundamental questions of philosophy, and connects (as Callard's other discussion in this section would indicate to someone who actually read the book) to Meno's paradox, in which we consider how we could search for anything we do not already know, and how we should recognize that thing if we did encounter it. Should we pursue the answer of a question for which we have no existing answer, and for which no perfect rubric or referent exists against which to judge the potential answers we may find, that search may lead us along paths altogether foreign and disorienting; we may not (and may not be able to) know our destination, even upon our arrival.
So what is a problem?
Of problems, Callard says:
Problems tend to come packaged with an accepted methodology for approaching them, which is to say, a system that has been developed for solving problems of that kind. [...] When there is a problem, there tends to also be (at least) the makings of a road that one ought to travel in order to arrive at the solution. Problems are characteristically tractable.
In this light, and with Callard's note that we may problematize a question as an alternative to abandoning the search for an answer when that search becomes too difficult, the problem of the keyless may come from a wider range depending on their goals. They may choose to solve the problem of getting in the house if there is something they need there, or the problem of having somewhere to stay that night so that they can resume the search in the daylight. Even the problem of having a working key is, by nature, different from the question of where the old key is now; new keys could be made for the existing locks rendering the search for the old keys redundant, lest one care about those particular keys.
Appropriate Implementation (or Avoiding Premature Problematization)
A properly scoped problem with a suitable solution can be beautiful, and can serve both the immediate need (resolving the problem for its originator) and also as an opportunity to learn new things about the field in which the problem exists. Still, even the most perfectly crafted problem with its most perfect solution would likely offer fewer opportunities for new knowledge generation than the continued exploration of a question. In Callard's example, the issue at hand is surgery, and she says that the question of "What makes a good surgeon?" is likely more salient to those intending to become surgeons whereas the areas into which you could problematize that question regarding levels of training or expertise, particular types of surgery, complication rates, etc. are likely far more salient to those selecting a surgeon for their own surgery, or that of a loved one.
For the surgeon-to-be, their question may have no logical end goal, as being a surgeon (even or especially a good one) likely has no single, culminating event through which the answer to the question is suddenly made entirely clear. For anyone who has pursued such a question, it continues to develop and exists only as a pursuit; that pursuit may end, but it is likely not because the question has been sufficiently answered. Rather, the pursuit may end because the person has given up the pursuit, redirected their efforts, or because they have, in the face of a question requiring to difficult a search, they have chosen problematize the question and solved the problem instead.
For those in need of a surgeon, the corresponding event is clear: a successful surgery. This finite pursuit comes, as Callard suggested, with at least the possibility of developing an effective rubric, if it does not come with one pre-made. I will not speak for everyone, but I personally did not find myself inspired to continue seeking out better and better surgeons after one "good" surgeon had already successfully saved my life with a complication-free laparoscopic procedure. To put this roughly but simply, it seems that a problem is that through which we seek to get, have, or do something new related to our area of focus, while questions are that through which we engage in the process of understanding or becoming something new.
Problems have been at the forefront of most of my professional life, and they are themselves an art. I spend much of my time encouraging those I work with to take time constructing the proper problem to solve, drawing upon their own knowledge of their field, and drawing out information from those they are looking to help with their solution. It's no surprise that, in the business of providing a useful system as a product or service, your customers have problems that need solving. But these problems, it seems, are not enough. Interplay with the questions that naturally underlie our experience as Problem Solvers seems necessary; without those, we have no means to reflect upon our experiences as such. To follow the lead of the would-be surgeon above, how can we be good Problem Solvers? In the course of investigating this ostensibly valid question, more will inevitably arise: How can one prioritize the potentially infinite number of problems to be solved? And how can one ensure that a problem statement is both accurate and relevant to reality? With even a cursory investigation of our (dare I say primary) responsibility of Problem Solving in our role, the ongoing pursuit of these questions quickly becomes either something we take on as an obvious requirement for our own continued development, or something we turn away from and ignore as unintelligible, burdensome, or a distraction from our responsibility as Problem Solvers, not Question Pursuers. If we're feeling particularly clever, we may try to problematize even these questions: being a good Problem Solver becomes achieving a particular number on our dashboard of Problem Solver Performance Indicators, and we do away with its pursuit as a question. The danger of this premature problematization is that our solving of the problem ends where our pursuit of the question may have continued to enrich us, and would have thereby delivered more value (or more sustainable value) in the long run. If there was something special about that key, no replacement will do.
But Not I
I would like to take a moment to relay the sentiments of at least a small portion of readers who I know, having read that last paragraph, feel strongly:
"Glabnob, you fool! You've sold out to your masters at the Problem Factory, and you sacrifice your precious energy at the shrine of Problem Solver productivity! Don't you feel the least bit ashamed, peddling subtle hustlegrind content under the guise of philosophy? This is not for me! I am not a Problem Solver! I am a human being!"
I hear your cries. I, too, awake to find a human on this side of the screen as you do on yours. Let us do away with the problems of the Problem Solver, and let us address our shared occupation as Human Being. Let the question be that of how we can be good Human Beings. It gets no easier and, though you we may loathe to admit it, we have long felt particularly clever, so we have instinctively problematized our own existence. Our collective and individual dashboards of Human Being Performance Indicators blink and wobble unceasingly, all spiking graphs and endless tables, conditionally formatted with soothing greens and alarming reds, and lest one actively resist the problematization of those most pressing questions to their own continued pursuit of excellence in the field of Human Being, we neglect these questions for the exact same reasons as those mentioned for the clever Problem Solver.
You may feel, as I do, that I am not verifiably qualified to preach to you about the pursuit of excellence in the field of Human Being; I have no string of letters and abbreviations to place after my name to attest to such qualifications, as one might in the workplace. You may otherwise feel that I should have skipped all this diversion about Problem Solvers and spoke to you directly of these things for which we share concern, that we cannot escape as we cling to the lives that bear them. I will admit that I feel much more like a human being when I am allowed the opportunity to discuss those things I observe regularly, there in the space allotted me at the Problem Factory to play with ideas and practices, where the consequences are more easily excused as issues of my labor than issues of my very soul. In reflection, I don't believe these to be truly separate and I cannot draw that distinction between the self I am here now and the self I become on that factory floor, but (for better or worse) when I fully immerse myself in the role of Problem Solver, I manage to hold that reflection for later. Pursuit of the questions, however, happens in that very reflection, where excellence looks the same. The problems I solve stay at work, as the problem of my surgery stayed at the hospital, but the questions I pursue follow me everywhere. I imagine that the living "along some distant day into the future" that Rilke described is a sort of integral of living, the area under the Pursuit-Over-Time curve, and by maximizing my Question Pursuit Cycles now I may be able to reduce my Answer Time-To-Market, but my next Pursuit Retrospective isn't for another week... we may have to tighten that feedback loop to keep everyone on track.