Chapter 8: What is a question and how did the capacity to ask a question emerge?

For years I was travelling upriver into jungles in Borneo while writing a book about orangutans which I named The Intimate Ape. I liked the jungle because it was so unknown to me. The boat was safe and quickly became my temporary sanctuary. The jungle flowed past in blurred images that gradually become clearer to me. Then the whole jungle felt like an unknown sanctuary. In the jungle, the wild orangutans kept distant because they don’t want contact with human beings. Orangutans who have been kept captive by human beings and then released into the jungle again will sometimes approach human beings. Young orangutans kept in orangutan orphanages are the most comfortable around human beings. I stayed in one orangutan orphanage in Kalimantan, Borneo for a month and saw the curiosity in the eyes of some of these creatures. They all have distinct personalities. They can be affectionate, playful and devious at times. I know people who are the same. I named my book The Intimate Ape because orangutans don’t form social and political groups like chimpanzees and gorillas. They are more solitary and seem to be good observers, because they are not distracted by the political and social dynamics of other primates, human being included. From this solitary nature of the individual orangutan without the distancing of political and social activities, I though they might find more intimacy. But I don’t know.

For years I have been asking myself what a question is. The question occurred to me when I was writing about orangutans and wondered how orangutans could learn if they couldn’t ask questions. Orangutans have a rudimentary culture and create innovations, which they teach and share with other orangutans. For example, an orangutan may discover that there is fruit inside a shell of what appears to be a stone. Then the orangutan may discover that a rock can be used as a tool to crack the shell to get the fruit. But, how did that happen? How did the first orangutan discover this and teach it to others? In the same way, how did the first human being discover that fire could be made and that animals can be eaten and that they could be barbecue to change the taste? That may sound obvious in retrospect, but who will be the first to discover something similar which we don’t know now? What is it that we don’t know that we don’t know?

So, how did homo sapiens progress to an ability to ask questions? Does the ability or faculty for inquiry have to exist first as a potential in all human beings or does it emerge accidentally and arbitrarily and the similarity is only coincidence? What human being invented the first question? How did that happen? How would other human beings even know they were being asked a question if they didn’t know what a question is? I don’t have an answer. If you keep reading this article, don’t expect an answer. You will be disappointed. The question then will be, why are you disappointed? Did school only teach you that you cease to exist if your questions can’t be answered? If that’s how you live your life, then there’s no place in the jungle for you.

To ask a question, would an individual need to be aware of lacking information that was desired and have a way of communicating that to someone else? Or does curiosity function some other way? Does curiosity require consciousness and, if so, what kind of consciousness?

And consider this: people also have the capacity to ask themselves questions, to debate with themselves, to dream the dreams that are created by an agency in ourselves that we don’t know and don’t control. Isn’t that remarkable? The theory is that this comes out of a capacity for self-reflection, which apes, elephants and dolphins also have. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that we live in the tyranny of our own minds. The ability to ask ourselves questions, to formulate questions, is a strange, self-reflective ability that comes with our consciousness. Was this capacity always there in human beings or did it develop in some way? I ask myself, Wouldn’t there likely need to be some motivation to ask a question, especially if there was not an immediate biological need for an answer? Or is curiosity a kind of motivation and then, what is curiosity?

For orangutans, I reasoned that curiosity would be a good motivator and I speculated that in order for knowledge to progress beyond immediate needs, that curiosity would be a motivation that natural selection would favour. Those who were curious would develop knowledge further than those who were not curious. Those who were curious would be favoured by natural selection. Don’t ask me what curiosity is. I can only give the kind of superficial answer that seems to satisfy people too easily and then they will leave me alone. But, do orangutans share in their species the potential and faculty for inquiry? Do all primates, including human beings, share the same potential and faculty for inquiry, to different degrees?

Consider this: orangutans don’t have spoken language or sign language to articulate curiosity, but they can read the behaviour and body language of other orangutans – and human beings too, a little too well and more than we think. If an orangutan wants to know something, the orangutan gets close and observes intensely, which then might have the effect of asking a question, to trigger a response in the other orangutan. If something does not keep the orangutan intent, then it won’t happen. I know that situation when I am teaching a class of human primates. Human primates aren’t always intent on lectures. They have an escape hatch called a smart phone to whisk them out of something they don’t want to hear. One time I created a unique university course on interviewing and formulating questions, but the students never asked me intriguing questions. They had already been indoctrinated by the education system to be passive absorbers of dogma and be satisfied with that. It seemed that the students didn’t even know how to be genuinely curious. Warren Berger recounts research in his book A Better Question about a progressive decline in asking question through the process of an education. That’s how you engineer passive citizens, just give them an education. What is even more clever, is to get people to pay tuition to buy this kind of passivity. You don’t need to pay people to be passive minds. They will willingly pay for it themselves. Frankly, I enjoy more the intense curiosity of orangutans. Their eyes speak for them.

What else can be hypothesized about questions? The type of question might be defined by its purpose or function. The purpose might be to acquire information and to learn. Beyond that standard function there can be a range of functions: to get someone to reveal secrets unwillingly; to get some to confess and perhaps repent; to get someone to reveal secrets that even the person doesn’t know that he or she knows; to make a discovery or innovation; to help someone find the path to improvement or solve a personal problem; to heal a person in therapy. The different functions of questions may share the same strategy for a different result or have unique strategy matched to the function. For example, as will be discussed at another time, the strategy of asking about a contradiction could be used to reveal a misconception or a lie, or it could be used to find a higher truth that doesn’t fit the rational rule of no contradiction, such as Zen Buddhist questions.

What else? A question can be a statement disguised as a question or what is called a rhetorical question. Or, a question can be formulated by someone who lacks information and wants an answer. One problem debated about Socrates is whether he sincerely asks questions when he doesn’t know the answer or whether he is being ironical and is enticing someone to reveal a foolish mind. I am proposing that the purest Socrates asks questions when he sincerely doesn’t have an answer himself and that, as he says, this process is good for the soul. The value of understanding this Socrates is to learn the same behaviour in ourselves, despite the resistance of the ego to admit it has limits to its knowledge, particularly for experts whose careers depend on knowledge. Socrates challenged these experts centuries ago in ancient Athens with his questions. The result would be humiliating for the ego of an expert. And we know what happened to Socrates. And, do you think that expertise is more expert now?

Human beings are experts at avoiding answering questions, so it can take considerable skill to formulate a question in a way that provokes a true answer, particularly if the person being questioned is resisting an answer without knowing it. That situation describes the problem of psychotherapy. A therapist has to ask questions to a patient whose consciousness is resisting giving the right answer and the patient may not even know that. It also describes the practice of Zen Buddhism and journalism. How can a question break through the resistance to answering a question?

An even deeper problem is how to formulate a question when you don’t know that the question even exists. If that sounds paradoxical, it is. Typically, people ask a genuine question because they are conscious of the limit their knowledge, which, in itself, is quite a feat. How does a person become conscious of the limitations of what the person knows and another person doesn’t? Sometimes people don’t know that their knowledge is limited. For example, a person who didn’t know that invisible biological organisms like viruses exist wouldn’t be able to ask about viruses. A person might ask, Why do people get sick? But the person would have to know first that sickness is an odd situation. If you are sick all the time and everybody around you is sick all the time, maybe you would not perceive the existence of sickness. But maybe that is not a good example. Remember that, as French philosopher Michel Foucault reminds us, what we now think of mental illness was in other times a sign of divinity or devilry, depending on the point of view. I have had autistic students in my classes and they seemed to have admirable mental skills. For my orangutan book, I interviewed an autistic scientist who I witnessed apparently being able to connect and converse with orangutans. I know several zookeepers who are able to enter the cage of an orangutan unharmed. The orangutan understands something about the person that generates trust. I witnessed in one zoo a person punishing an orangutan by hosing him down in a cage. How co-operative do you think the orangutan after that? There’s the amazing story of the autistic primatologist Dawn Prince-Hughes who was able to understand gorillas in a way that others can’t. Her story can be found in her remarkable book Songs of the Gorilla Nation. The point is that the concept of mental illness was created and may be replaced in the future by a different concept. What that might be, I have no idea.

A better question might be to formulate a question about what we don’t know that we don’t know. I haven’t been able to do that myself. I ask myself and myself says I don’t know. But I should keep trying. The aspiration behind the pure Zen koan is to ask the unanswerable question, but even with that it is irresistible to try and answer the unanswerable question and so create new dogma and a passive mind. There are hundreds of years of Zen literature about the paradox and bewilderment of the Zen koan. There will be more.

Otherwise, have you read Kafka’s novel The Trial? For me, Kafka would be the only writer who could capture the sense of teaching in a university behind the veil of rationality and altruism. Where rationality is concentrated, is it balanced by equally strong irrationality? If you want to enter a dreamlike reality where there is no way to grasp what is happening to you, a kind of existence in the confusion and bewilderment of questions that aren’t answered, read Kafka’s The Trial. Then project that experience onto your own reality. When you get tired reading The Trial, you can take a break, put the book down and re-enter the dream world of passivity, certainty and dogma. Or, do you imagine that you alone have escaped?

Email: socraticzen88@gmail.com