The Terms of Investigation

 The more that I spend time thinking about it, the more I recognize that a lot of questions a person frames are presuming certain structures of thinking. Even when a question seems to be genuine and real, it's already based on constructed assumptions regarding what should or shouldn't be questioned at all. It's almost as if questions are only ways of filling the spaces where one has structured a pre-existing view of reality.
   When I ask a question, maybe one of the things I need to ask myself is: what does the question say about who I am and what I am most passionate about? I may have this question, but am I even so confident that others around me would even frame such a question, given that they also have their own conditioned way of framing their lives and experiences? I am trying to theorize about the act of questioning in a way that goes beyond conventionally seeing questions as 'revealing' an underlying reality. Instead, questions are ways of exposing what we already believe we know and what we believe needs to be filled in.
  Is there such a thing as a 'bad' question? Well, based on what I just mentioned, perhaps questions are neither good nor bad. They are always based on a situation where certain factors in a person's awareness or thinking come to the foreground which require elaboration or verification. But since our questions are determined by our ways of cutting up the world, questions are also 'constructions'. In other words, a question doesn't just happen because I have certain amounts of information and require a missing piece. Rather, they seem to arise from a creative act of wanting to extend my chosen vision of the world to something potentially unexplored.
  This might entail that the amount of questioning a person is capable of may be determined by how much they've been socialized to investigate the world in certain terms. If I haven't gotten used to the idea of thinking that there are 'insides' to something, for example, I may never get to question what something is made out of, much less have the curiosity to want to know. I am sure that deeper spiritual questions might also arise from the same shared meanings across different communities. For example, I never really thought of the question "is there life after death?" until I encountered people whose religion was pointing to this question in the form of stories or parables. Had I not run into them, I would perhaps have never framed this question, because it would never have occurred to me to think in this way.