Quote of the Day: Chesterton on Settled Questions

"When a thing of the intellect is settled it is not dead: rather, it is immortal. The multiplication table is immortal, and so is the fame of Shakespeare. But the fame of Zola is not dead or not immortal; it is at is crisis, it is in the balance, and may be found wanting. The French, therefore, are quite right in considering it a living question, because it is not yet solved. But Shakespeare is not a living question: he is a living answer." (From All Things Considered)

The point of asking a question should be to get the answer--or to help elucidate the answer for someone else. Indeed, the very nature of a question assumes that there is an answer, even if the person asking the question doesn't care to wait and listen to it. An answer, in turn, is ultimately a conclusion, a settlement, a point to contemplate.

The conclusion is thus not the place where the intellect gives up and stops working, but rather is the thing which the mind is trying to find when it formulates its question. It can then be used as a new starting point from which to answer other questions--whether scientific, philosophical, motive, etc. We need not reinvent the wheel, as the saying goes, but rather we might apply the wheel to build a more complicated machine: a car or wheelbarrow or what have you. The multiplication table is settled, to use Chesterton's example: but far from being dead, it becomes a part of the foundation for more exciting things, whether more advanced math or whether for physics.

On the other hand, to constantly return to it and call it into question is not so much to give it new life as to beat a dead horse. Alas, this is done frequently by the would be rationalizers who want their own first-hand evidence for everything. Progress for such a mindset is ultimately impossible, whether that progress is social, political,  scientific, philosophical, or theological. Without the foundation of settled questions, progress becomes mere change, which itself becomes a vacuous flitting from one fashion to another, without purpose or end: sometimes comedic in a tragic way, often tragic in a comedic way, and detrimental to a society if its breadth is allowed to displace cultural depth.