The Sower of Question Marks ???

By Mark Eyskens

This book was born out of a long-standing frustration, due to the observation that a societal silence prevails on existential questions, which we dare not talk about even in our highly interconnected world. As if an embarrassment has seized our interlocutors, struck by a certain metaphysical prudishness as soon as conversation turned to talking about life and death, the meaning of our existence, or fundamental values and their divine or human origin. “Is there life after death?” and “Is there life before death?" are questions that I have never heard raised at the Parliament bar or in a waiting room of the university faculties.
This book is the result of a reaction to the deficit of essential questioning at a time when digital and other forms of media inundate society.
This writing is not a philosophical essay, nor is it a theological treatise, a sociological manual, a novel, a collection of poems. The truth is that it is all of these at the same time. Hence, the reader must browse the pages of this book with caution and prepare to encounter divergent intellectual landscapes planted with many question marks. Furthermore, since I will thoroughly discuss transcendence and what is hidden behind the visible and in the heart of the homo sapiens, I had to appeal to allegories, metaphors, images, and poetry.
Three allegories emerge most forcefully: that of the homo interrogans, the blind monk and that of the palimpsest, three symbolic stories that try to unravel some signals of the mystery of being. The first concerns the discovery made by an expedition of paleontologists in Africa of an anthropoid skeleton that, thanks to the arrangement of the bones, was buried in prehistoric times in the shape of a large question mark. The second allegory is about a blind monk, who knows the contents of all the books in the library and is apparently a visionary. The third one is the story of the discovery of an old parchment in Jerusalem, an enigmatic palimpsest the decoding of which could upset the understanding of our human condition. Moreover, a certain professor J.C Mortal appears who can be considered as the spiritual twin of the author.

"Life is a mystery to be lived and not a problem to be solved," the sage Mahatma Gandhi taught us. Yet in order to grasp the mystery, it is necessary to ask the right questions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jun 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665598279

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© 2022 Mark Eyskens. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/22/2022

ISBN: 978-1-6655-9828-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-9827-9 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Preface

Why Sow Question Marks?

What Is Truth?

Is It Possible to Reconcile Faith and Science?

Are There Limits to Scientific Knowledge?

Do We, Citizens, Know More or Less?

What Is a Human Being?

Is Man a Homo Interrogans?

Mother, Why Are We Living?

Who Am I?

Am I a Narcissus?

What Lies North of the North Pole?

Is History Guided by BINC?

Do I Need an Alter Ego?

How Impersonal and Abstract Is Democracy?

Can an Anonymous Letter Provide the Answers?

Why Monotheism?

What Is Good? What Is Evil?

Is the World Getting Better?

Can a Blind Monk See?

Can a Palimpsest Be Helpful?

Is There Still a God Question?

About The Author

Preface

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This book was born out of a long-standing frustration that I have carried around with me all my life. I have had the happiness and the privilege of being able to meet a lot of people in many circles in Belgium, in Europe, and in many latitudes and longitudes. Nevertheless, I have been forced to notice both an individual and societal silence on existential questions, which we dare not talk about even in our highly publicised and interconnected society. This heavy silence encumbers any discussion of what remains truly important after the realisation that you only live once.

The academic, political, cultural, multicultural, and international worlds have given me an abundance of human experience, ideas, and geniality, which obviously does not imply that the importance of the more intimate circles of family, friends, and dear colleagues should be minimised. Within these circles, we have talked about everything from the many serious societal problems and the challenges of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow to more trivial and ephemeral events. Still, it has only been on very exceptional occasions that the most important questions, namely existential problems, were broached. It was as if an embarrassment had seized my interlocutors, struck by a certain metaphysical prudishness as soon as conversation turned to talking about life and death, the meaning of our existence, or fundamental values and their divine or human origin. ‘Is there life after death?’ and ‘Is there life before death?’ are questions I have never heard raised at the Parliament refreshment bar or in a waiting room of the university faculties where professors rub shoulders. Even so, it is true that moral, theological, and eschatological questions are often commented on during the reading of the Holy Scriptures in religious services in our splendid churches and cathedrals.

However, it is also clear that the constraints of a fairly dogmatic traditional framework of thought have encouraged ecclesiastics to give apodictic answers without first raising the right or crucial questions, some of which, moreover, have been systematically avoided. It was and is a time in which the religious stifled spirituality and intelligence, and particularly when concerning the teaching of the younger generations, open-mindedness towards metaphysical problems is not particularly great.

This book, therefore, is the result of a procrastinated reaction to this deficit of essential questioning at a time when digital and other forms of media inundate us with challenging news, events, problems, declarations, and statements that are often nothing more than the foam of the groundswells of contemporary history. This is thus my main motivation.

The following pages lay bare an architecture that I should explain in order to warrant the understanding, and perhaps even the mercy, of the reader. This writing is not a philosophical essay, nor is it a theological treatise, a course in futurology, a sociological manual, a novel, a collection of poems, or an exercise in literary style. The truth is that it is all of these at the same time. Hence, the reader must run through and browse the pages of this book with caution and prepare to encounter divergent intellectual landscapes planted with question marks in valleys and on heights. Furthermore, since I will thoroughly discuss transcendence, metaphysics, and everything that is hidden behind the visible and in the heart of the Homo sapiens, I had to appeal to allegories, metaphors, images, and poetry.

Two allegories emerge most forcefully: that of the Homo interrogans and that of the palimpsest, two symbolic stories that try to unravel some signals of transcendence in order to be captured by humans. The first concerns the discovery made by an expedition of palaeontologists in Africa of an anthropoid skeleton that, thanks to the arrangement of the bones, was buried in prehistoric times in the shape of a large question mark. The second is the story of the discovery of an old parchment in Jerusalem, an enigmatic palimpsest the decoding of which could have upset the understanding of our human condition.

Another important passage in my writing is built around a lengthy dialogue with an elderly blind monk who is nevertheless a monastery librarian who searches the countless books he keeps for the keyword to the mystery of existence. Additionally, in this book I will appeal to a spiritual twin brother, a kind of doppelganger, a soul’s clone called ‘Professor Mortal’ with whom I exchange my views either orally or in writing. The advantage of his remarkable presence is that Mortal also functions as a scapegoat for the more questionable theses that are sometimes posited in this book.

‘Life is a mystery to be lived and not a problem to be solved,’ the sage Mahatma Gandhi taught us. Yet in order to grasp the mystery, it is necessary to ask the right questions.

Mark Eyskens

June 24, 2022

Why Sow Question Marks?

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All my life, I have sown question marks, and I have been afraid to plant exclamation marks. I have scattered them, my question marks, in the vegetable garden of my daily life, in the turmoil of the day, sometimes listening to the whispers of history in the landscapes that make up our society, in cities and towns, and in the wide oceans where essential questions float around as the horizon drifts imperceptibly away. It is especially important to ask real questions in politics, where exclamation marks are planted daily in fields full of false problems.

Most questions beg for answers but end up raising new questions instead. I studied problems in both academic and nonacademic literature, where I sought the questions that were not usually raised or were hidden between the lines. Those rare ‘life-determining books’ helped me the most and taught me that the paths to take in life are usually lined by question marks much more than by readable signposts.

Sometimes, I also discovered question marks in my fellow human beings, both in those we still too remotely call our neighbours and in those who are farther away from us, in chance encounters or on distant journeys.

Asking who, what, where, and why questions is the fate of the inhabitants of our blue planet. Even for those who do not read books or are not enchanted by modern information and communication media, looking at the horizon or the sky will suffice to overwhelm people with countless questions about things. These questions rise from mountains and valleys, from all directions, and above all, from the clouds, which in skies full of whimsical figures form the most beautiful, most sublime, and colourful cloudscapes, which can be explored while enduring the mundane traffic jams on the road. The sky, the clouds, the firmament, and the heavens are full of questions and question marks for those who not only look admiringly but also those who are driven by curiosity and long to truly see. For these, amazement breaks through the dogma of self-evidence and opens the way to wisdom, which may even lead to philosophy.

Sowing questions—growing them like exotic flowers, caring for them, watering them, pruning them, cutting them, and nurturing them—is a hobby that is not so easily reconciled with an active life that begins every day at dawn (not always such a poetic spectacle) and lasts until long after sunset. It is an experience that fills us with melancholy. Added to this is the knowledge that we sleep at least a third of the time allotted to us from birth till death, drifting off into dreamy semi-consciousness every night. For this reason, questioners must be and remain not only highly active but also proactive and postactive, and that is why I decided some time ago not to retire and to work until my death, a decision which could make a definitive contribution to the seemingly insolvable problem of financing pensions, all the more if everyone followed my example.

In short, I want to continue the careful cultivation of questions selfishly and contentedly in my personal vegetable garden while perhaps also serving the common good in the process. To achieve this, I simply take my time, even though it is a daily struggle. For I have little time; time has me. That is why I try to kill time expertly, to commit a perfect murder out of idealism. So far, though, I have not succeeded.

For a long time now, question marks have been waving at me, swaying on their lithe stalks. Exclamation marks, on the other hand, give me an internal nettle rash. They resemble spears that can stab, inflict pain, and cause harm. The so-called self-evident truths frighten me above all, making me feel intellectually allergic. If the statement ‘It goes without saying that …’ is proclaimed in a loud voice, it is without a doubt appropriate to sceptically raise one’s eyebrows. After all, scepticism and the ability to put things into perspective are more likely to move mountains than haughty assertions that are fired off and thrown around with zeal, especially when such incontrovertible propositions turn out to be based on the alternative facts that have become commonplace in the digital age.

The pursuit of truth, of course, remains a great virtue and necessity, especially in diverse and heterogeneous communities. Yet as soon as one’s search for truth leads to the rock-solid conviction that one possesses or has acquired the truth, it becomes dangerous. Then the lure of being right beckons, with the flattering certainty it automatically entails. Those who do not share the same truth are often immediately accused of being either too foolish or too evil to apprehend it. Intellectual terror, spiritual conflagration, and even actual conflicts then become possible.

This is not to say that dealing with the truth in a careful and considerate manner, after passionately seeking it, should be equated with falling into intellectual, ethical, or aesthetic relativism. On the contrary, self-relativisation is beneficial to the development of a socially useful personality, a socially employable ‘I-ness,’ a gentle ego. Perhaps the truth is that truth is inevitably multidimensional and comprises different aspects of greater or lesser value. It should be noted that many truths are gradual and time-bound, and thus may evolve over time, their truth value continuously increasing or decreasing. However, the relativisation of human values and dignity, and especially the closely related denial of them, leads to social cynicism and incivility. Every drowning person searches for a lifebuoy. It is the people with a sense of salvation, with the hope that people and things can be improved, who can afford to be compassionate and tolerant in a world where harshness heartlessly drives out cordiality.

The radicals and extremists are usually people who doubt, hesitate, and even distrust their own gnawing uncertainty. They try to suppress their own fear, creeping along the thick walls they have erected with their own hands to keep themselves safe. They fear the future, change, otherness, and the others, and are afraid of bridges, openness, and the so-called strangers on opposite shores. They fear that an open mind can only come about after encountering a cranial drill. In a world of mutual dependence, they allow themselves to be held hostage by the illusion of isolationism, the separatist identity cult, the ‘our own people first’ ideology, and all kinds of delusions about cultural and economic protectionism. These heralds of apartheid, the nostalgics who support the ‘blood and soil’ doctrine that is re-emerging in Europe, suffer from an oyster complex, closing their shells at any imagined hint of trouble. They behave like the cavemen of the Stone Age, climbing up their steep protective rock walls and hiding in their caves, all the while believing they are truly safe there. They are certainly not. We live in a world that is changing at such a rapid pace, like never before, and these changes have never been so profound.

Could it be that a new type of human being is emerging? Perhaps a better human being—or at least for better or for worse? Is it a coincidence that more than two hundred years ago, in 1818, Mary Shelley wrote the unparalleled bestseller Frankenstein?

During my quest for new questions and the potential discovery of signposts signalling answers, I came across Yuval Noah Harari’s two masterful publications, Sapiens and Homo Deus. The author is a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an institution where I coincidentally taught several guest lectures on European integration. Professor Harari initially wrote his works in Hebrew, but soon after the publication of their English translations, they conquered the planet as worldwide bestsellers.

His second book, Homo Deus: A Small History of the Future, published in 2015, particularly caught my attention. It describes the emergence of a new type of human who will live happily and immortally in a world freed from hunger, crime, and war, one in which humans will exist alongside and complementary to miraculous tools invented by means of and provided by revolutionary technologies. He draws us into this world of artificial intelligence and robotisation, which he suggests would eventually cause the Homo sapiens to mutate into what I call Robo sapiens. According to the author, in addition to all the overwhelming discoveries and inventions of modern science, the algorithm, a set of formulas and instructions that must lead to the solving of a problem and the achievement of a goal, plays a particularly essential role. Like a computer program, the human being—programmed by nature and increasingly assisted by scientific innovations—is, according to Harari, becoming a walking and thinking algorithm. This is a view that gravitates dangerously towards an overly mechanistic vision.

After all, even if the computer and artificial intelligence will be able to progressively distinguish right from left, they will not be able to evaluate what is just and unjust. The robotised computer is oblivious to values and, therefore, remains inhuman—or, rather, nonhuman—even though it is an extraordinary being that, when used correctly, can help humans be more efficient.

In addition to its practical usefulness, the development of artificial intelligence also has didactic and ethical consequence, for it clearly proves where the boundaries lie between machine and human, showing that humans have an additional value that transcends the material: the inherent transcendence of being human. To the contrary, the technologised high-tech human, christened ‘Homo deus’ by Professor Harari, may well degenerate into a Homo diabolus by using diabolical supremacy to destroy the world and its people with future weapons of mass destruction that outstrip every apocalyptic imagination.

Homo deus refers to an evolution and possible reality that I myself have formulated, called ‘the divinisation of man,’ and elaborated on in several of my books, yet within a scope and context entirely different from Harari’s. In my 1996 book The Journey to Dabar: A Philosophical Thriller, I introduced my idea of the ultimate divinisation of man as the culmination of what I termed a transcendental evolution. The following quote from that book illustrates my view:

The first fundamental event in the history of the earth, as far as man is concerned, is the ‘vitalisation’ of inorganic matter, the birth of life and of living primitive cells on earth, probably 3.5 billion years ago. The second fundamental event is the ‘hominisation’ of living beings, the incarnation of man, which arose from the evolution of the animal kingdom at least 300,000 years ago. The third phase is yet to come. It has to do with the following biblical message—Genesis 1:27—to be decoded: ‘that man was created by God in his own image, in the image of God.’ I call this third phase the ‘divinisation’ of man, provided one reads the Genesis sentence in the future tense as: ‘God will create man ….’ It sounds somewhat presumptuous, but for those who believe in the content of the message of the Old and New Testaments and that of other religions or philosophies, this is the core of the scriptures, of the sign that was received by Moses, among others, and later embodied by Christ. What we are commemorating here is the first step taken by humanity on the path of its divine vocation, of its divinisation in an evolutionary perspective, which of course reduces the Darwinian interpretation to the stammering first letter of a very complicated but hopeful alphabet.

In my book The Old Professor and the Sea: Dialogue about Meaning and Being (2005), I continued developing this thought, writing:

It is now my conviction that existence is a process of becoming which, according to Teilhard de Chardin, brings us to the ‘omega’ point, to a point where man is called to deification. I am in favor of a ‘transcendent’ theory of evolution: vitalisation, hominisation, and divinisation. So, I see God as a finality rather than a causality, and certainly not as a physical causality. Causality is a concept that cannot be applied to the unchangeable, to Being, and thus to God.

Yet the finality of God also has a causal effect through reversion; finality exerts an attraction effect, stimulates and directs, enticing the existence into which man is thrown. His incarnation is not complete. Evolution compels him to become more human, but this process is primarily a process of value accumulation. Man becomes more human through the practices of love, justice, truth, and compassion. I thought it only appropriate to call these virtues unnatural, and therefore supernatural, because they do not occur as such in nature and certainly not in animal communities.

Today, many years later, I hesitantly conclude that we do not find these so-called supernatural virtues in nature, which is dominated by the Darwinian laws of survival of the fittest and the law of entropy, of total dissolution, destruction, and chaos. These special virtues, which have goodness, the good (with merely one letter distinguishing it from God) as their common denominator, have to do with what we might limpidly call ‘a divine power.’ In addition, then, to the Homo deus described by Harari, which is a kind of technological übermensch, a trans-or perhaps post-human, we must dare to ask whether there is not also a Deus homo in the making, namely a good, loving human being who responds to an incarnation of the good by ‘becoming good’ (read: God) and who thereby remakes the world of men into a better world. Or at least could make.

Could it be that the abovementioned manifestations represent the closest approaches to what we call the transcendent, namely the consciousness that there is a reality, a form of being, a kind of force that surpasses us in dimensions that are not observable? Would we, having lost our way somewhat by wandering around in a huge forest of question marks, be able to find our way, thanks to a hazy glimmer, to the inexplicable brightness where the truth becomes tangible, where the history of mankind takes on its meaning?

The triad ‘vitalisation, hominisation, and divinisation’ sounds beautiful and corresponds to a kind of intellectual aesthetic which culminates in divinisation and the emergence of a new mankind, ways beyond the most sophisticated scientific and technological civilisations. Thus it seems crystal clear that as an inspiration, as a dream, as a force, this