The Anatomy of a Question | Ken Woodward #87

"The question was not broken. It was unfinished." - Ken Woodward Buried in the introduction of the twentieth century's most famously unread book is the most precise dissection of a question ever written. In this solo episode, we open Martin Heidegger's Being and Time and recover his anatomy of inquiry: every question has a subject, a source, and an intent, and most questions fail not from bad wording but from missing parts. We test the anatomy against the streets of Washington, D.C., including a backyard in Marshall Heights where a five-hour-and-forty-five-minute conversation revealed what sixty-one years of an unasked question feels like. Then the reckoning. The man who drew the map of questioning joined the Nazi Party, deleted his Jewish teacher's name from his own dedication page, and spent forty-three years refusing the one question that came addressed to him. Knowing the anatomy is not the asking. This episode is about the difference, and the drive home. This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com. Be sure to subscribe to the weekly Curated Questions Dispatch newsletter for more fun with questions and curiosity! (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions) Keep questioning! Resources Mentioned Martin Heidegger Being and Time by Martin Heidegger Soul Boom Podcast Amanda Ripley Arthur C. Brooks Edmund Husserl Producer Ben Ford Beauty Pill