Questions

The art of questioning is often taken for granted as easy and natural and common.  However, within a society saturated in marketing, questions are often cover for assertions, power-plays and attempts at manipulation. From this perspective, honest questions are somewhat of an endangered species. Indeed, it is so rare to hear a sincere, earnest question.  There are questions to look good.  Questions to prompt the answer we want. Questions to make a point.  But to have someone genuinely pose something they are curious about or wondering - whether about the world around or about the person in front of them....is profound indeed.  

The English philosopher Charles Taylor wrote of these as "pseudo-questions." By contrast, he defined a legitimate question as something to which we are open to an answer that surprises us. From a deliberative perspective, to see one individual ask another individual a sincerely held question in openness is a beautiful and rare event.