Gladys asked:

Why did we come to the world?

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When we ask a question like this we should not be expecting a simple or quick answer. These kinds
of questions are more an invitation to conduct a thought experiment or investigation, even if or
especially if the question stands alone from any context or it is generated as part of a complex
situation.

As a guide for conducting such an experiment, we can learn from the way we teach children how to
conduct scientific investigations. Here we can begin with a very general and superficially simple
question like," Why do candles go out" or "Why do elephants throw water over themselves"? The
ensuing discussion should lead to the generation of ideas suggesting causes that can be tested
through simple experiments.

An implicit technique we can transfer from scientific investigations to practical philosophical
investigations is that of 'gardening', which may not on the face of it seem to have much to do with
either, but by which I mean the process of growing a tree that pictures the meanings and
interconnections we have 'grown' from investigative dialogue or monologue. From such trees we can
recognise interconnections, coherences, compatabilities, comfort or discomfort amongst the idea we
have hanging from the branches.

So, if the question, "Why did we come to the world" which probably intends to take us on an
expedition into the confusing jungles of metaphysics, is the root of the tree, what questions will
encourage its growth? There is some experimental value in initially taking the question literally rather
than metaphorically with the intention of seeing what characteristics of the metaphorical interpretation
of the original question can be generated. If we can answer well enough on a literal interpretation we
may be content to say there is no need to embark on a metaphorical or metaphysical interpretation.
We could then understand the question to be asking about a journey in much the way that we could
ask of a holiday companion; "why did we come to this beach?" Within this supposition we already
have some concrete and ordinary ideas hidden in the shadow of the attention grabbing metaphor. In
particular we can identify the following:

I. a travelling companion: why we came

II. a questioner expressing doubt or uncertainty about the reason for the journey: what did we expect
from the journey?

III. a questioner expressing doubt or uncertainty about the particular destination of the journey: why
here and not elsewhere?

IV. a questioner expressing doubt or uncertainty about the specific membership of the travelling party:
why us and not them? Or why you and not them?

There is also a presupposition that the agents involved had some choice in their destination: we came
and were not sent, there may be no sender.

All of these questions are answerable in concrete terms, the answers to which may be interesting in
themselves but if we were asked the original question in the context of a philosophical counseling
dialogue would we be doing justice to the originator of the question if we now advised that the original
question was simply a metaphorical chimera, a non-question that had no more substance than a
mirage? Probably not, mainly because we have not yet examined what critical step turns very
ordinary questions into metaphorical ones. Part of the answer resides in the replacement of a very
specific destination like 'the beach' with an abstract one like 'world'. This term seems to take us on a
giddy high-speed ride into the stratosphere and beyond before we have had a chance to consider the
possibility that it may not be so abstract and general as it seems to want to be. We can bring the
dialogue focus and entailed tree generation back down to ground by identifying the scope questioner
explicitly or implicitly attributed to the term 'world'. What worlds does the questioner inhabit? Where
by worlds we can include, families, culture, education, job and so on.

If it turns out that the level of generality was intended to transcend all particular worlds then we can
close this phase of the investigation and open up a new one by referring back to the generalisations
constructed from the concrete questions and asking:

V. In what sense are we travelling?

VI. Do we travel alone?

VII. Is there a purpose to our journey?

VIII. What should we expect from our journey?

IX. Is there a sender?

X. Where were we before we were sent?

XI.Is there an endpoint to our journey?

I began by suggesting that philosophical investigations can borrow some techniques from the way we
teach children to conduct scientific investigations. We can further borrow the idea that such
investigations are part of a learning process not simply of specific facts and results but of technique.
This particular investigation offers the participants a model for the non-destructive analysis of
metaphorical ideas in terms of their concrete 'earth-twins' so that should the philosophical traveler
want to close the investigation at that point they can, but should they want to continue the game they
can do that as well by generating a new set of abstractions synthesised from the assertions implicit in
and drawn out from the original question. And so they may continue moving between the two
approaches until they decide they want to rest, take another direction or give up travelling.

Neil Buckland