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 not to spend our time asking about, inasmuch as, like all other phenomena, it draws attention from what truly matters: the idea of the good human being.
Heidegger and Plato thus agree that what is essential to the question is something other than the question itself. It is, instead, the human being – understood as a mode of being or an idea, respectively. Despite their very different approaches to questions, and use of them, Plato and Heidegger agree that the question of the question must be understood in the light of what it means to be human.
THE PARADOX OF THE QUESTION
Plato and Heidegger represent two different currents in understanding and using questions within Western philosophy and the history of ideas. Without asking themselves the actual question, philosophers have provided two main answers to why anyone rarely calls questions into question. First, it is because we cannot do so: It’s ‘always already’ too late to avoid asking. Second, it is because we should not do so: There’s ‘always already’ something else more important to ask about.
Both of these answers presuppose, however, that the question of the question dissolves within the question of the human being’s essential way of being and developing. It is precisely the dissipation of this questioning the question, and the fact that it’s the question that dissolves itself, that set the scene for the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
Unlike Plato, Heidegger, Gadamer and others who dealt with questions more or less directly, Derrida actually asks why we do not call questions into question. He also provides an answer – indeed, one that differs from Plato’s and Heidegger’s by being grounded not in history, but in the question itself.
According to Derrida, the reason neither philosophers nor scientists nor anyone else calls questions into question is that even though it sets something out in the open, a question always keeps something else hidden.
Now this is where things get technical. Not in the sense ‘difficult to understand’, but in the sense ‘technological’. You see, there is a technology associated with asking questions.
Whereas, in the first case, the horse reveals itself as something-in-itself – that is, as an absolute entity – in the second case, it is related to something else and thus reveals itself as a relative entity. In other words, the horse appears not only differently, but essentially differently, depending on how we ask about it. Put differently: The questions we ask, and don’t ask, define our understanding of and relationships with our surroundings.
So what is concealed when we ask a question, and hence not called into question? The question’s presuppositions. When we ask as we do, we are not aware that ‘something’ will reveal itself in a certain manner, so we are equally unaware that we could be asking differently – and that ‘something’ could thereby reveal itself differently. In short, we are not aware of what the question does.
Posing a question means positioning oneself in a certain way in relation to the object of the query. One poses; posits; takes a position. With this positioning, one is always in the process of answering. This is why I was able to deduce earlier – in the case of the question, “May I ask you something?” – that it forecloses the issue at hand before managing to raise it.
This is the paradox of the question: Even as it opens up new ways of seeing and understanding the world, it simultaneously establishes a framework for, and thereby a limit to, understanding. If different people and cultures turn out to have different ways of relating to and using questions, then the line between what is comprehensible and what is incomprehensible will necessarily be drawn in different places, and the seeds of misunderstanding will have been sown.
Questions are just as revealing as dreams, or even more so, the German-American phenomenologist Erwin W. Straus once remarked. But if, in asking, we are always answering, then what we are revealing is always ourselves. Does this mean we cannot, should not, or must not call questions into question?
No, it means
There are many ways to ask questions, and thereby to think and be. The question is: What does it reveal about Western thought and civilisation that we relate to and use questions as we do? What does it mean for our relationship with ourselves and our surroundings that we have historically understood the question of the question in the light of the question of Man? And what opportunities do we have for investigating whether there are other options?
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