What is a question? I must use on even to ask. Perhaps it is impossible to define something so basic to thought. A question is unique. Yet my life from childhood to maturity has been filled with questions. Wisdom, I have heard, is as much a matter of knowing the important questions as of having their answers. Questions focus my attention and my efforts. They are a summons to learning. Long ago the great teachers found that people learn best when they are asked instead of simply told. A question is a challenge, the beginning of a quest.
There is an old tradition that views man as the being who asks the questions. In the words of Aristotle, “All men by nature desire to know.” From this point of view man is distinguished by his power to discover. The mark of man is a question. The history of the ages is the record of man’s questions. When an old question is answered or even just abandoned and a new one replaces it, then a new age begins. All the knowledge that creates civilization emerges in answer to human questions. The history of religion follows this same pattern, as it tells of man’s quest for God. In all things man’s progress is the progress of man’s questions. They lead to knowledge, and knowledge is power.
There is another tradition even older that makes a different claim. It asserts that man is born into the world with a question and that he lives his life with a question, but it is not man’s question. In this view man is not primarily a being who questions, but a being who is questioned. The question addressed to man persists, harder than stone, softer than snow, more insistent than the warmth of the sun. “Where art thou?” (Genesis 3:9.) Man is distinguished not by his power to ask but by his power to hear. The question with which he lives is not his own, but God’s.
