Читать книгу Questions - Pia Lauritzen - Страница 6

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.

The question is the essential characteristic that distinguishes human beings from animals – and, for that matter, from gods. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger explains this point by saying that human beings are the only beings who call their own state of being into question. Humans consider the possibility that they could be different – or cease to be at all – and they do so precisely by asking. “Who am I?” “Why am I this particular something and not something else?” “What does it mean to be – and not to be?”

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.