WHY

  
This is a point the phenomenologists make consistently, namely, that to know fully what we are doing, to feel it, to experience it all through our being, is much more important than to know why. For, they hold, if we fully know the what, the why will come along by itself. One sees this demonstrated very frequently in psychotherapy: the patient may have only a vague and intellectual idea of the "cause" of this or that pattern in his behavior, but as he explores and experiences more and more the different aspects and phases of this pattern, the cause may suddenly become real to him not as an abstracted formulation but as one real, integral aspect of the total understanding of what he is doing. This approach also has an important cultural significance: is not the why asked so much in our culture precisely as a way of detaching ourselves, a way of avoiding the more disturbing and anxiety-creating alternative of sticking to the end with the what? That is to say, the excessive preoccupation with causality and function that characterizes modern Western society may well serve, much more widely than realized, the need to abstract ourselves from power over the phenomenon, in like with Bacon's dictum, "knowledge is power" and specifically, knowledge of nature is power over nature. Asking the question of what, on the other hand, is a way of participating in the phenomenon.

-- Rollo May