Constituents of Matter / 4 / 4.3

4.3 EXPLAINING THE CONTEMPLATED WORLD: THE HOW AND THE WHY EXPLANATIONS

This contemplated world is populated with things taken as merely present-at-hand, things which are therefore no longer involved with, and in, anything. In such a world man is no longer guided by that prior pre-conceptual understanding which discloses to him its collective and purposeful structure. If, man was not explicitly aware that he had that understanding when he was using the world, now that he is merely contemplating the world, he becomes aware of it, and does so precisely because it is missing; the understanding of the purposeful connectedness of the world becomes conspicuous as that which is now missing, as that which man is looking for but cannot find. Therefore man feels compelled to seek a way of recovering it. This desire to provide the world of things which are present-at-hand with the missing community character present in the world of things which are ready-to-hand constitutes man’s drive to explain the contemplated world. The explanation which man thus provides to himself concerning the contemplated world transforms it into a world experienced because it reflects knowledge derived from a direct observation of objects.

There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience. For how should our faculty of knowledge be awakened into action did not objects affecting our senses partly by themselves produce representations, partly arouse the activity of our understanding to compare these representations, and, by combining or separating them, work up the raw material of the sensible impressions into that knowledge of objects which is entitled experience? In the order of time, therefore, we have no knowledge antecedent to experience, and with experience all our knowledge begins.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781)

Since the involvement of things was ultimately for the sake of him who got them involved with each other in the first place, the connectedness of man’s experience should itself always be both relational as well as purposeful. Explanation must therefore supply both an understanding of how things in our experience are related to each other as well as an understanding of why they are related in that way. Therefore, explanation must always contain a ‘how’ component as well as a ‘why’ component. However, as a product of the human mind, the explanation thus supplied must be conceptual rather than pre-conceptual, must be a reasoned discourse, must be what Aristotle called a λογοσ Man has therefore always told himself stories which served the purpose of explaining how and why the contemplated world appeared to him to be a community of purposefully connected things.

The explanation man provides himself is historical; what serves as an explanation has changed with time as man’s historical being has changed. Thus, although always driven by the same need to find in the contemplated world the hidden understanding which had guided his use of ready-to-hand things, the explanation man gave himself in mythical times is quite different from that which he gives himself today. Along that historic path, the relative importance of the how and of the why explanations changed as well, with the why explanation becoming less and less central.