Since Julian Jaynes' origin of conscious ness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, the first questions entertained by men -- even before the cave-dwellers of Western Asia, North America, and the European peninsula painted graffiti on their walls--were questions of an unanswerable nature, all beginning with the parentally-dreaded, aspiratory phoneme "Why?" Several millennia later, verb forms introduced the existential "Why is?" You can be sure that there was a class of linguistic innovators, probably burned at the stake, for slotting noun phrases in at the end of this predicate.
But it is only in the struggle for knowledge that history progresses. The sacrifice of those great social scientists to the all-consuming dialectic of increasing grammatical complexity paved the way for the next innovation: verb conjugation. Men now asked "Why am?" Increased leisure time among the slaveholding, multiply-married, alpha-males of the tropical zones gave us self-reflexive personal pronouns, and one in particular: the first-person personal pronoun, and thus, "Why am I?"
Via the expanding geographical horizons of the nomadic tribes of Europe and Asia, their travels necessitated by the regular fluctuations in temperature, and thus food supply, we finally arrived at the linguistic turning -- no, stopping -- point from which we have since not progressed: "Why am I here?"
The abyss opens up right here for us homo sapiens, but anthropological research has told us that even apes recognize themselves in the mirror. Why don't they ask why?
Notice, please, that there is no answer to any of these questions. Why? These questions are essentially unanswerable because even the simple single syllable presupposes the existence of the questioner, the very thing whose existence is being questioned (only persistence in asking questions actually puts the questioner's existence into question).
Notice again, please, that these questions are the questions which religion tries to address. If you will remember your European history, you will remember that, in the West, religious inquiry -- theology -- gave way to scientific inquiry about four centuries ago, with either Galileo or da Vinci, depending.
This should not go unnoticed. Nor should its meaning. This choice to pursue the scientific over the religious, despite claims to the contrary, and whether consciously or not, means that we have officially acknowledged that existence is irrational, and cannot be accounted for. Even a cosmological breakthrough, which discovered that the Big Bang took place precisely so many billions of years ago, and that the matter in the universe is, indeed, fully accounted for by a completely explainable inflationary transformation of the energy of such and such a true or false quantum vacuum, the question "Why?" would still exist to be asked. And you would, for better or worse, still exist to ask it.
If you must ask this fateful question, try to use the German, if you can. This German interrogative adverb is "warum," pronounced "varoom", like the sound your car makes when you start it up to drive to McDonald's or to Boston for a fun-filled weekend. Instead of the Existenzangst of the English adverb "Why?", this guttural utterance imparts a rather proud appreciation of humanity's numerous technological advances, symbolized, in this case, by the onomatopoeic sound of the internal combustion engine.
If you cannot remember all of the above, then remember, the next time you are tempted, either by your postmodern identity crisis or by the bewildering, tumbling, hall-of-mirrors irony of your American bourgeois existence, to cry out "Why?" in primordial anguish, to realize first that you would be acting like a caveman. Your ancestors already answered that question for you. Go rent a movie or something.
