Our idioms, like our daily lives, are full of questions big and small; good and bad; easy, hard and frequently asked. It’s the questions we ask, and those we fail to ask, that determine whether we gain the insight we need to do our jobs. But questions are about much more than developing or getting smarter.
It is a principle fundamental to the structure of democracy that citizens can question the decisions made by their elected officials. As individuals and communities we form our perceptions of what is right and wrong, doing so in no small part against the backdrop of question-based opinion polling, interviews and interrogation techniques.
Even so – or perhaps for this very reason – people rarely call questions into question.
DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY
The way we start conversations by asking “May I ask you something?” is a good example of how naturally asking comes to us. It’s not just the way we’re always asking. It’s the way we do so without noticing, and apparently without being able to stop. Asking questions is as natural as breathing.
At least that’s the immediate impression one gets from reading the books and articles written about questions. The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer is among the few who have analysed the essence of the question, and he holds that the structure of the question is presupposed in all experience. What he means is: Even when we’re not asking questions, we’re still relating to ourselves and our environment in a questioning manner.
Consider a preverbal child who crawls over to a ball, picks it up with her hands, licks it and turns it this way and that. Gadamer would say she is asking the question, “What’s this?” When the same child throws the ball down and follows it with her eyes, she is exploring the question, “What can a ball do?” In this way all human actions can be understood as acts of questioning, and humans can be regarded as ‘question animals’.
But if Homo sapiens is the questioning animal, how do humans differ from other animals? When a curious dog sniffs your handbag, is it not questioning, just like the little child? And what about the horse pressing against its owner to reach the carrot she holds in her hand? Is it not asking “Wasn’t that for me?”
Experts on questions would reply, “No.” Animals differ from human beings precisely by not asking questions. It’s humans who interpret such animal behaviour as questioning, and we do so precisely because the question is an essential part of our own being – not essential like breathing is to all living creatures, but essential as a way of being in the world. Asking is a way of Being: the human way of being, in philosophical terms. It’s not an action that can be performed more or less explicitly by more or less conscious beings.
Since none of these questions can be answered by anyone but ourselves, we must each ask them individually. We cannot stop. Thus, asking questions is not merely what distinguishes us from animals and gods. Questions also define us as human beings.
Questioning is a non-arbitrary condition of the human state of being, universally applicable to all people at all times. Questioning is that which cannot be otherwise, and which is therefore constant. Questioning, according to Heidegger, is the one thing we cannot call into question.
QUESTION — QUEST — TRUTH
Heidegger was by no means the first to give the question a central role in his understanding of what it means to be human. Nor was he the last. In Western thought and civilisation, it is an age-old assumption that
This is why questions are the staple ingredient in all teaching, coaching and therapy. It is also why scientists across disciplines agree that questions are the key to becoming smarter. Although only a handful of researchers speak and write about questions themselves, they will unanimously confirm – if you ask them directly – that it is impossible to develop new thoughts and ideas without asking questions. Questions are the stuff thinking and development are made of; and it’s thanks to questions that we have access to ‘the good life’ and to ‘true knowledge’.
That, at least, is the assumption philosophers have gone by ever since Plato laid the groundwork for Western thought in ancient Greece. Most of Plato’s works are constructed as dialogues between Socrates and various interlocutors. They are transcripts, of a sort, of conversations where Socrates uses leading questions and answers to guide his followers to insight.
According to Plato, the things we experience with our senses are phenomena, and he understands phenomena in the light of ideas. For Plato, a horse is not a horse because it has four legs and a tail – as so many animals have – but because it participates in the idea of the horse. Like all other ideas, the idea of the horse is part of the world of ideas, which differs from the world of phenomena by being inaccessible to sensory perception. Instead, we can come to cognitively know, realise and recognise the world of ideas, and we do so by means of questions. In the dialogue Phaedo, Plato has one of the characters recapitulate Socrates’ point as follows:
When people are questioned, if you put the questions well, they answer correctly of themselves about everything.
It is the idea of the human being to know the good, the beautiful and the true, yet no human being is pure idea. Like the horse, we are also phenomena that can be seen, tasted, smelled, heard and touched. We must accordingly rely on questions in order to recollect the world of ideas from which we, and all other phenomena, derive our reality.
In other words, Plato constructs all his dialogues around Socrates’ questions not because he is interested in questions as such, but because he is interested in the answers that may be obtained by asking in the right manner.
For Plato, it is the answer – understood as our ability to recollect the good, the beautiful and the true – that is essential. Although we cannot recollect without seeking, and although we cannot seek without questioning, questions are always merely a means to achieve an end. A means that dissipates as soon as the goal (here: knowledge or realisation) has been achieved. This has led some to think that Plato regards questions as the opposite of knowledge: as a human phenomenon that is to be transcended.
So we have Heidegger on one side, Plato on the other. Heidegger regards questioning as an essential characteristic of being human, one we cannot call into question because we are ‘always already’ questioning. Plato regards questions as a human phenomenon we ought