There’s a big why in the world. Aristotle remarked that we never can know a thing until we know why it’s there. We can know its form, its composure, its construction, but until we know its function we cannot understand the thing. “Why,” it seems, is tantamount to our finding meaning and purpose in the world we live.
Why is a hard question to ask. Why makes you think forward; Why makes you consider the past. What, How, Who and Where seem trite and simple words next to Why’s impeccable weight.
Why cannot even be considered abstractly. Why implies a thing, a consequence, a context of action, not just bare fact. Science, inasmuch as it is an observation of the world, is not an explanation of it. Unfortunately, science itself is often muddled between the realm of “why” and the realm of “what” and ”where,” confusing correlation with causality, probability with knowledge.
Rather, to know Why, one must have a modified understanding of what it is to know in the first place. Primarily, knowledge is not a perception of the world as abstracted or removed from us. Knowledge of this sort cannot be what we mean by knowing. Consider the camera and a photograph: a picture can be said to be the purest kind of observation of the outside world, yet on the photograph do we see knowledge? Do we see understanding in the photograph itself? No. If we are to know anything by the photograph, it is we who do the knowing, not the pure observation of object.
On the other hand, we cannot know without an object; we could not know the world in many intimate ways if we could not photograph it. So knowledge must be some kind of interactive thing, something that happens through inquiry, un-removed from either the knower or the known.
Why (as in, why is this here?’) has to be determined in this context of knowing. Why cannot be a mere “because it is so” observation of the universe, as if things had non-physical essential purposes we are to divine through observation. Rather, we must ditch this conception of essential purposes in the sense of being apart from the process of knowing as interaction and inquiry. You were not destined to be through your genetics, your heritage or even your environment, but those have interacted with you and largely have shaped who you are, how you act and what you will become.
But sadly this information does not provide us with a Why at face value; if anything, we at least understand the rest of the whats, wheres, whos and hows. Why is yet elusive, forcing us to ask more.
I think the critical distinction with understanding Why is the context of Why in its relation to the future and, in particular, future consequences. Obviously, we have yet a means of reliably predicting the future (just look at the weather forecast, ye of high faith in science and statistics), yet we shape our lives around it. We’d like to think that we are here at Gustavus not simply to be here now, but to be something in the future, to learn something or in barest form to get something from here that will be applicable to our lives later on.
Why is then a reflection of our beliefs on what we think the future will be as a mixture of what we hope it to be, what we expect it to be and what we cannot know to predict it will become. Hence the confusion among those of us who ponder, “Why should I do this?” If our hopes are not strong enough, if our uncertainty in the world is too great or if what we expect is lifeless looming, how can we find an answer to our question?
Why cannot be answered if we simply do not want it to be. Similarly, Why cannot be answered if we don’t believe we can answer it; nor if we don’t think answering it is possible. Conversely, if we have an abundance of hope, certainty or idealism, our Why may be answered, but not with respect to the other two factors. I may hope beyond hope that I will win the lottery and plan my life around that, but no matter the degree to which that answers Why for me, will what actually happens reflect my expectations.