In Chapter 2, Albert Knox states that
"It seems as if in the process of growing up we lose the ability to wonder about the world."
What does he mean? Do you agree with him? Explain why or why not, using examples from this first section of the novel (pp. 1-120) and your own life experiences.
I disagree. We never lose the ability to wonder. Even as we grow older, we never stop wondering. Although we don’t wonder about the same things, we still continue to wonder.
Even now, I would often wonder about a wide range of things. When my family and I first came to Hong Kong in 1997, we only planned to stay for three years. Staying in Hong Kong gave me an opportunity to learn Chinese and see different things. After the three years, we decided to stay another three years because of my fathers work. I sometimes wonder, how would my life have been different if we had gone back to the US after the three years here?
As a child, it is unlikely that any of us will actually wonder how the world, as we know it, came to be. How and why the universe was created? We do not wonder about these things because we did not know that the universe existed. Instead, we would wonder about comparatively little things, like why we have to go to school.
We only start to wonder about "Life, the Universe, and everything" when we are taught of the existence of these things. We often stop wondering when the question is answered. But there are always new questions to be answered. That is why we never stop wondering.
Philosophy is a mixture of ethics, metaphysics, epistemology and logic. Philosophers are people who pursue answers to questions of this four field, they wonder about them. Even as a child, we often wonder whether what we are doing is right. As an adult, we always try to find the most logical solution to a problem. Therefore, if we interpret the statement as the ability to wonder, then in a sense, we are all philosophers in some way.
2 comments:
Hi Patrick
Some really interesting insights here - I often wonder what would have happened if...... you can trace nearly every aspect of your life back to a particular moment when someone or yourslf made a decision which has had a knock on effect on you. What if your parents had not met? What if you had not been in a certain place at a certain time. I was watching the History Channel (yes I am sad!) on Sunday which was showing a programme about 911 survivors and their stories of how they got out of the buildings in New York - nearly all of them could trace thier survival back to a key moment or split second decision... which makes you think; what about those who made a split second decision and ended up being killed! Is it fate? Is it coincidence or is it all out of control? Maybe this is a seperate topic!
I agree with everything you said. There are different choices for everything, this means that there can be many possible outcomes. Wondering about the result of different outcomes is quite a common thing.
For what Ms Woollett said, I think that some people ended up killed is sort of due to fate. At such tragic and unexpected accidents, there is bound to be someone killed. There are opposites for everything, so some survive and some die. Maybe we can say that those people were just unlucky.
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