The desire to know
Dr. Maureen Hunter | TLT President's Report April 2015
Is it time we scientists focused less on the ‘how’ of things and more on the ‘why?’
Aristotle said the desire to understand is part of the inherent nature of humans. But have we scientists lost track of the purpose of knowledge?
LIKE MOST KIDS DO, my children went through that early stage of educational development where every question was why. “Why do birds have wings?” they’d ask. “To fly,” I’d answer. “Why do people have eyebrows?” “To help protect our eyes.” “Why do acorns fall to the ground?” “To grow into oak trees!” “Why? Why? Why?”
Anybody who’s been around small children knows that these simple questions can be endless. But what seemed like their naïve inquisitiveness out of control called to mind for me the opening line of Aristotle’s book titled Metaphysics: “All human beings by nature desire to know.” So I would patiently try to answer them one question at a time. As these budding scientists progressed through their school years, I began to notice that their questions switched from the “why” to the “how.” It made me start to think about the types of questions we scientists ask.
Today in science we don’t ask why. We ask how. Technological developments have provided so many wonderful tools and gadgets that we spend all of our time measuring things and collecting data. We want to know how things work instead of why things work. It’s as though things in nature don’t have a real purpose—they just exist. We’re asked to accept that all of nature somehow just happens by random processes.
For people of Aristotle’s time, understanding the why is what spawned scientific exploration. What we now call science was known as natural philosophy until the 19th Century. Maybe we moderns don’t ask why because we don’t know what to do with life.
What do I mean by that? Well, we look at physics as the fundamental science to explain how things happen. We have the Laws of Physics. We don’t use life systems to help explain non-living matter. For us, life is something that needs to be explained in terms of non-life. We start with the non-living building blocks and try to explain living systems as built up out of non-life. But our explanation is somehow incomplete, so life becomes a problem for us. This wasn’t a problem for Aristotle and other ancients. They took life as the starting point and used it to explain the non-living systems in the world around them.
So–should we ask why? Well, the more I thought about Aristotle’s line, the more I focused on the words “by nature.” Aristotle believed that all things in nature had a purpose or a “final cause.” I find myself thinking:
It’s in a bird’s nature to fly. That’s the purpose of its wings. An acorn naturally grows into an oak tree. That’s why acorns fall to the ground.
It’s the goal of nature to be all it can be. Life naturally strives to reach the ultimate actualization of its potential. The final cause of an acorn is to grow into an oak tree. But final causes are rejected by modern science. They don’t fit into modern world views. Natural things don’t have a purpose—they just are. It’s hard for us to imagine how the end state of something can affect the beginning state. It’s a sequence of time problem. But I ask, would the seed exist if it was not to mature into the tree? Is the end prior to the means?
And that brings me back to Aristotle’s line: “All human beings by nature desire to know.” Is Man’s final cause to know? To know not just the how but also the why? I think it’s a conscious choice but not a self-evident one. I think both of these two dimensions should not be separated or placed in opposition to one another. The study of natural philosophy should still hold an important place. Science and technology are two sides of the same coin. They are the two forces that lead us to knowledge.
To unceasingly pursue all the answers to how without asking why is simply shortsighted. Both young minds and deep thinkers ask why. They ask the simple but probing questions without constraint. Why? Because
all human beings by nature desire to know.
Maureen Hunter is the technical service manager for King Industries, Inc., in Norwalk, Conn. You can reach her at mhunter@kingindustries.com.