What does it mean that so many of the really great questioners came from ancient civilizations? Are we losing the ability to ask good questions? Or have we lost the understanding that knowledge begins with a question? Is it surprising that the Chinese, who claim to have invented almost everything first, asked good questions? Did they invent the question? Who can say? Why don’t they claim it anyway?
Does the craft of questioning predate The Analects of Confucius, which were written over a more than thirty-year period in the sixth and fifth centuries BC? Wouldn’t it be significant that even Confucius predates the Analects, since they were written down later by his followers? Isn’t it possible that Confucius was an even better questioner than they remembered? And was it Confucius or was it his followers who originated the style of Chinese thought that was centered on formulating great questions? Was this style used in the debates of wise men sponsored by the government because these debates always had followers of Confucius on one side? When the teenage Han emperor Zhaodi, who sponsored one such debate of sixty wise men in 81 BC, asked the Confucians how the state should raise profits, why did the Confucians answer, “Why must your majesty use the word ‘profit?’”? When asked how the state should finance its military, why did they answer, “Why do we need military spending?”? Was it the use of questions that made this debate, ostensibly about the wisdom of state monopolies on salt and iron, become such a far-reaching discussion of good government that it is still studied today? Is it the way questions were answered with more questions that has kept this debate alive? After all, wouldn’t answering with answers tend to end a debate?
How influential has this been in Chinese thinking, this mental habit of couching ideas in questions? A millennium later, didn’t Kuo Hsi begin his famous essay on painting landscapes, “Shan shui Hsün,” with the question: “Why does a virtuous man take delight in landscapes?”? Isn’t the rest of the essay an answer to this?
Couldn’t even what Jesus called the golden rule be traced back to an ancient Chinese question? When was this golden rule best stated? Was it when Jesus presented it as a rule stating, according to the Book of Matthew, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”? Or when Rabbi Hillel, the famous scholar of the day, who was Jesus’s source, presented it as a riddle about explaining the entire Torah while standing on one foot? Or was it best presented in the fourth century BC by the Chinese anti-Confucianist philosopher Mozi, who posed it as a question, asking, “For if every man were to regard the persons of others as his own, who would inflict pain and injury on others?”? And doesn’t this progression from question to riddle to rule show a historic shift away from questions to more rigid assertions? Doesn’t this move us away from a rational choice based on free will to an obedient response to a moral command? Which is the stronger society, the one where people act well because it makes sense, or the one where people act well because they are supposed to?
Do newer religions ask questions? Where are the questions in Protestantism, one of the newest and least ritualistic of religions? Doesn’t the cantata, the choral piece before a Protestant sermon, start the sermon, Jewish-style, with a question? And aren’t Bach’s stunningly beautiful cantatas, with lyrics from the German Lutheran writer Erdmann Neumeister, full of very large questions? Doesn’t one of the largest questions appear in the opening line of Bach’s Cantata no. 8—“Liebster Gott, wann werd ich sterben?” Dearest God, when shall I die?