Project Vision 21

In a recent interview, Spanish philosopher Juan Carlos Ruiz stated, “Nobody teaches us how to ask questions.” He then expanded on this idea, explaining that we lack a “pedagogy of the question” and, as a consequence, we also lack an ethics of dialogue—a key element for connecting with the emerging future.

As the eminent Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire noted last century, our educational systems have placed so much emphasis on answers that they’ve neglected the (perhaps even greater) importance of questions. While answers may demonstrate a degree of knowledge, questions generate new knowledge.
 

In our current era, as Ruiz points out, the situation has become even more serious. After so many decades of prioritizing answers, the rise of artificial intelligence has blurred the lines between “getting answers” and “gaining knowledge.” But this process often skips the personal transformation that comes from engaging with new knowledge.
 

This ease and speed of access to answers, Ruiz suggests, limits (and I would add, hinders) the expansion of our language. It leads to what he calls a “lexical poverty,” which in turn “often degenerates into cognitive poverty.”
This brings us to a timely quote from Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” (Tractatus, 5.6). For Wittgenstein, language is a mediator between us and reality (the world), whether in the context of formal logic (Tractatus, 1921) or within shared social practices (Philosophical Investigations, 1953).
 

When we stop asking questions, when we only seek answers, when vocabulary and understanding diminish, and when propositional knowledge (as John Vervaeke puts it) or what Ruiz calls the “declarative dynamic” is overemphasized, our world becomes narrower. Other ways of knowing—through processes, perspectives, and participation—are abandoned.
 

Vervaeke describes this condition as the “tyranny of propositions”—a mindset in which truth is reduced to the correct articulation of data (“Rome is the capital of Italy”), without questioning our ability to understand that data, its context and relevance, or our relationship to the community from which that data arises.
 

In short, we become disconnected from reality because we turn into spectators of our own lives, lacking the ability to rebalance our systems of knowledge. Without that rebalancing, we remain stuck in fragmentation—a state Vervaeke famously describes as “the meaning crisis.”
 

Freire advocated for an education rooted in curiosity, critical thinking, and above all, dialogue. None of this is new—Socrates was practicing it 2,400 years ago. But this isn’t about returning to the past or recreating it in the present; it’s about moving away from the shortcuts and superficialities that dominate today’s culture (think short social media videos).
 

If the future depends on our capacity to ask questions—and if no one is teaching us how to do that—then perhaps we need to return to the enduring questions of the past that are still relevant today. Starting, perhaps, with one of the most existentially iconic and paralyzing questions: “To be, or not to be: that is the question.” Let’s try it.