by Philippe Huneman
You’re a railway worker, a teacher, an intern. You’re at a dinner somewhere and someone asks: “Why are you on strike? You reply that this project the government wants to impose on us is unfair, and another person replies: “But why isn’t it fair? Why shouldn’t we have an equal system for all, as they say?” And then we talk about hardship, life expectancy, fairness, etc.
This little word, “why“ punctuates our discussions – how many times a day do we use it? Far from being restricted to politics, it cuts across all fields, from the everyday talk – “why is the baker closed today?” – to the most obviously metaphysical – “Why is there something rather than nothing?” asked Leibniz – to the most intimate – “Why didn’t she come?” It is the question of the scientist – “why does the straight stick plunged into the water appear bent to me?” – as well as the private investigator’s phrase – “Why did the butler put on his gloves on a Sunday?“
Few questions are so common that they characterize at the same time insignificant everyday discussions, technically worded scientific questions and deep philosophical interrogations. This mere constatation should direct us to question the very possibility of asking why, the meaning it can have for so many distinct populations in various contexts, and its connection to general features of human cultures. Here, many philosophers of the past have shown the way, by raising in their own manner similar issues. I propose to directly address the meaning of ‘asking why’, by introducing a set of concepts likely to frame this questioning.
“Why?” and the reason(s).
Among all the questions that enable us to orient ourselves in the world and in our common lives – who? what? how many? where? when? – this one, “why?“ seems necessary for a certain meaning to emerge, whatever the sense we give to the word. In fact, unlike the other W-questions, it has the virtue of linking what exists to something else: opinions to their justifications, actions to their motives, events to their effects. Let’s imagine for a moment what a world or existence would be like without the possibility of asking “why?”, without a conceivable or available answer to that question: a heap of motley facts, incomprehensible actions, random opinions to believe or not to believe. Our expert in sticks or optics would be out of a job; everyday life would suffer just as much: by knowing or imagining why our friends or colleagues do such and such things, we can indeed predict their behavior, and without a minimum of predictability, no social contract would hold.
The fact is that we can indeed ask why. Far from being conventional, localized or cultural, this fact is properly and essentially human. To ask why is, in effect, to ask for a reason – a reason why we support a particular opinion, a reason why we do a particular thing. One of the traditional definitions of the human being is that he or she is a “rational animal”, and philosophers since Aristotle have discussed this statement at length, emphasizing the links between “reason” (ratio) and “proportion”, or between “reason” – in Greek logos – and discourse. If humans are indeed rational animals, they are clearly those who can, or must, ask for reasons and give reasons. Above all, “why?” seems to be the question of rationality, and in this respect, the fact that we constantly ask why is neither an accident of life in society nor a conventional linguistic fact, but a key endeavor of rational beings.
But this is less an anthropological matter than a philosophical conundrum: what makes us able to ask this question, what gives us the right to expect answers, how do we discriminate a good why-answer from a bad one, can we ask why at every turn, or does it sometimes become irrational?
Leibniz, again, called the statement “everything has a sufficient reason” a “principle of sufficient reason”; but is it true, and if so, why exactly ? In contrast, other philosophers like to quote the line by the Rhenish mystic poet Angelus Silesius, “the rose is without a why[1]“, which we intuitively feel is correct, without knowing exactly what he meant and how this would be compatible with a world where everything has a reason.
Grammar
It is sometimes said that having a concept means not so much knowing what it means as knowing how to use it. We know what “why” means, apparently: to ask for reasons; but what does “reason” mean, in turn? At any rate, through our childhood we’ve learned to use it. Three- and four-year-olds are notorious for asking “why this?” or “why that?”. Sometimes it’s touching, sometimes it’s annoying, and sometimes you’d be hard-pressed to find an answer. Certainly, they discover things about the world in this way; but at a deeper level, they also learn how the question “why? – in other words, when it’s relevant, and when it’s absurd to ask why.
“Why is the gentleman living on the street? – because he has no home, no job.” The answers are manifold, at the discretion of the parent (and his or her political and ethical sensibilities), but they do exist. However, to “why is green green?”, a question asked by the child, these same parents won’t find an answer, because the demand here doesn’t make sense. As children get older, they stop asking such questions: they’ve more or less mastered the “why”.
Ludwig Wittgenstein spoke of “grammar” to mean something broader than the grammar of grammar school- a set of constraints on language, less absolute than those of logic, more flexible than the latter but less arbitrary or conventional than the highway code. Without subscribing to the whole of Wittgenstein’s thinking, we could call the “grammar of why” such an instruction manual for the question by which we ask for reasons.
A grammar distinguishes between cases. Here, an initial distinction between three types of the word “why” is essential. I was talking earlier about the reason for a belief or opinion, and the reason for an action – like going on strike. These are two different things, even if an opinion about the world is always part of the reason for an action. From these two “because” I must distinguish the answer to a “why?” that would be addressed to a thing or an event, like the questions children ask about animals, plants, diseases, landscapes, passers-by, day and night. This third “why” generally seeks causes: why does night fall? Because the Earth rotates on itself, so that for part of the time we’re not facing the sun.
The three types of “why” are different, and learning grammar here already means learning to use the appropriate “why”. For example, you wouldn’t tell a child that it’s getting dark because the sun is tired and wants to sleep: only humans have goals and desires that motivate their actions, not physical objects.
Scientists are not only debating the causes of things, the explanations of phenomena, but also, more profoundly, what constitutes a good explanation, and on this front the breakthroughs are revolutionizing scientific thinking, notonly the content of science. For Greek scientists like Aristotle, attributing tendencies to nature was a way of explaining phenomena: the stone tends to move downwards, that’s its nature. With what is often referred to as the “scientific revolution”[2], which emerged in the 17th century, this kind of explanation was outlawed – Galileo spoke of the “principle of inertia” to say that bodies have no tendency of their own. A good explanation, then – for him and still for us – is to point to the forces responsible for a phenomenon, a trajectory, a change, which is attested by its departing from inertia.
A major philosophical question then arises for those who question the grammar of why: are these three types of answer – these three “reasons” – actually linked, or are they ‘homonyms’, as Aristotle would call them, namely, three different things that the French language and a few others group together under the same word “why”, just as – to take a classic example from Spinoza – we happen to call both a constellation and a barking animal “dog”?
The rationalist philosophers of the 17th century, whether Cartesian or post-Cartesian, sometimes thought that the causes and reasons for beliefs were the same thing: “The order and connection of ideas are the same as the order and connection of things” goes a famous thesis from Spinoza’s Ethics. But can we be so optimistic? On the face of it, the cause of today’s fires in Canada is not why I believe there are fires in Canada: I know it because I read it in a reliable newspaper. Yet I believe, as do others, that up to a certain point, this meeting of the three “reasons” under the same concept is not arbitrary, that this grammar is conceptually right, founded in the nature of language as in that of the world, but it would still have to be shown.
However, as with ordinary grammar, speakers here often make mistakes. The most common is to confuse “why” with “for what”, in other words, cause and purpose – two heterogeneous types of reason. If Silesius’s rose is really without a why, I should understand that it is without a goal, it serves no purpose, even if its existence does indeed derive from a cause – the seed, the gardener, and so on. Here, regarding these conflations of the purpose and the cause, child psychologists speak after Jean Piaget of an animistic phase in children – for whom the sun or the river are animals, just as some religions endow them with a soul. But many adults subscribe to “natural theology”, a venerable tradition proper to Western thought and devoted to proving the existence of God through a consideration of nature. A natural theologian sees the world and its complexity as proof of God’s design. This theoretical trope, vastly popular in the 17th and 18th centuries and fueled by the progressive knowledge of the complexities of nature, living and inert – zoology of the invertebrates, botany, astronomy – even survived David Hume’s immensely sophisticated skeptical examination in his Dialogues about natural religion (1779), as well as Kant’s sympathetic but radical critique in his Critique of Judgement (1791). Some famous British scientists of the late 19th century later committed to this exercise in a series of influential lectures published as the Bridgewater treatises (1833-1836) : physiologist Charles Bell, geologist William Buckland, or historian and philosopher of science William Whewell for example. Only Darwinism, while not putting a halt to this sub-discipline of theology, reduced it and forced it to become a fringe science under the name of Creationism and now Intelligent Design. Hence this purpose/cause confusion is strongly entrenched in our culture and cognition. After all, seeing an intention, a purpose behind seemingly accidental events is also a mainspring of what are somewhat hastily dubbed “conspiracy theories”, as many psychology studies emphasized it[3].
Nevertheless, such confusion is not so easy to rule out. After all, we attribute intentions to dogs and dolphins; and even if it’s consensual to believe that we’ve moved beyond Descartes’ dualism, for whom animals were like machines while only humans wanted and thought – cell biologists will still talk about the purpose of such and such a process as the Krebs cycle, or the tendencies of certain bacteria to seek out oxygen or light. Is this legitimate? Should we reform the language of biologists in the name of the principle of inertia? Or are there subtleties in the grammar of why that would prohibit certain fusions and authorize others – subtleties that would then have to be made explicit?
Metaphysics and its idols
One interpretation of Leibniz’s abovementioned principle of reason would be that everything has a cause. But – and this is an abysmal question – what causes everything to have a cause? For Leibniz, it’s God insofar as he is supremely reasonable and free, and therefore does nothing without reason – the same God whose ultimate creative decision explains, in Leibniz’s view, why there is something rather than nothing. Thus, it is easy to see that a very thin layer of language separates the little word “why?” from the most abysmal metaphysics.
The same vertigo grips us as soon as we notice another children’s game, the regression of why. Because this question, unlike “when” or “how many”, accepts or even calls for iteration: “Why night? Because the Earth turns; yes, but why does the Earth turn on itself?”, and so on. Our child will delight in such a string of “why?”, to the despair of his or her soon- to-be-tired parent, especially when it comes to explaining why gravity, why centrifugal force, etc. – things that even theoretical physics hasn’t come up with a unanimously accepted explanation for.
When it comes to the iteration of reasons for action – “why do this or that?” – the dizzying questions of ethics arise. Every goal requires means, but also appears as a means to another end. Is there, then, an ultimate end? Aristotle called “Happiness” that end of ends, to which all the circumstantial ends of an individual are ordered.
However, to show how quickly metaphysics emerges underneath the “whys”, let’s return to our starting point: “You are on strike in order to protest against an unfair reform. But why then are equal pensions unfair? Because life expectancies differ. But why do they differ? Because different professions mean that people live more or less long. But, really, why are there life expectancies? And why do we have to die one day?” This chain of questions mixes our three types of why: reason for an action (the strike); reason for an opinion (the injustice of retirement reforms according to the government ); reason for facts (ultimately, death). This is an argument for saying that the three kinds of reason are indeed three species of the same thing – otherwise, no intelligible mix would be possible – and for rejecting the thesis of the homonymy of the whys.
But above all this iteration reveals that the chain of whys will always fail on questions without accessible answers in practice or in principle, such as “why do we die?”. Here, the realm of explanations seems to end, and mythic discourse sometimes takes over. Whether we’re talking about Genesis, Pandora’s Box or the Amerindian myths that have been brilliantly dissected over the last century by ethnologists, many myths explain why humans must die – or why there are men and women, or why there is evil in the world.
Like many medieval philosophers, Thomas Aquinas, an Aristotelian philosopher, saw in the infinite regress of causes a proof of God as the cause of the world: classical metaphysics of the 17th century debated at length this idea of an ultimate cause that is without cause, and therefore “cause of itself”. Aristotle initiated such a proof; for him, it is as an object of “desire” that the “first mover” moves the world (even if, unlike Christian thought, this world is uncreated, eternal, and requires no cause to explain its advent), for if he moved to move the world, this movement would require an antecedent cause. The existence of God can only be reached by such reasoning, never by experience, and this is why Enlightenment philosophers, following Locke, Hume or Kant who admitted that knowledge starts with experience, moved away from this type of inference.
But Aristotle’s first engine, or Thomas’s God, functions like the myths I mentioned earlier. It’s a question of inventing a satisfactory answer to the question “Why?”, even though, in accordance with the grammar of the why, no adequate answer would be possible for us. For it is often frustrating to confine ourselves to causes, to series of causes that sometimes accidentally converge towards a happy or tragic event – Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the discovery of the Lascaux cave. A series of coincidences does not seem a “sufficient” reason for such important events – not to mention the Grail of theologians of all stripes: the appearance of life on Earth…
There’s a part of us that wishes Napoleon had to lose at Waterloo, that Queen Elizabeth or the CIA had done away with Lady Di, that Achilles had to die from an arrow shot through his heel by his best enemy Hector, in the same way Frédéric Moreau in Flaubert’s Éducation sentimentale felt he had to meet Madame Arnoux one day. To speak of the “destiny” of heroes, or the “soul mate” of romantics, is thus to substitute the uninspiring and boring “why” given by a chain of independent causes with a “because” commensurate with our aspirations – just as the Eternal Being, necessary and perfect, is a better answer to “why is there something than nothing?” than a long argument showing that this question makes no sense because the grammar of the why proscribes it.
I call “metaphysical idols” those ideas or fictions that fill such a role of substitute, supplement, compensation or gratification. They are born in the interstices, the voids or simply the dullest corners of our grammar of why; they inhabit not only religion and myth, but also romantic thought, literature, tragedy, romantic comedies, and possibly psychoanalysis or geopolitics. From Democritus to Wittgenstein, via Kant, Darwin and Nietzsche, and despite their differences, thinkers have long been criticizing them, but they never cease to remind us of their inexistent reality. Like movie idols, they are landmarks, beacons or guides, even if, like their celluloid analogues, they are never “in real life” what we see in them.
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Philippe Huneman
Philosopher. Director of Research, Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS / Université Paris I Sorbonne)
Author of Why? The philosophy behind the question (Stanford University Press).
[1] Cherubinischer Wandersmann, Sämtliche Poetische Werke (1949), Vol. I
[2] This notion of a ‘scientific revolution’ as a sudden disruption of the course of knowledge is a major simplification of a slow and complex process. As an introduction to a more realist view of this revolution as told by real historians see Setven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2018
[3] See for instance Brotherton, R. and French, C. 2015, “Intention Seekers: Conspiracist Ideation and Biased Attributions of Intentionality”, PLoS ONE, 10 (5): e0124125. D