Answering the Why

By Abram Van Engen

My two-year-old son, Hendrik, has just recently reached the Age of Why. Any statement, at any time, can get the same response: “But why, Daddy?” Finish your dinner. Why? Put the blocks away. Why? Time for bed. Why? And every answer, of course, gets a why in response. You need to nourish your body; we need to clean the floor; you need your sleep—why, why, why? It is adorable and annoying all at once. 

Recently, these whys bent toward my line of work. As I headed to my study one day, he wanted to know where I was going, and of course why. Why do you need to read? Why do you need to write? Why do you need to teach? Pushing for answers, a further why and a further why.

Maybe it was an insistent two-year-old in ancient Greece that finally got Plato to articulate his own answers to these never-ending whys. In the end, Plato said, it all comes down to one of three possibilities: the True, the Good, or the Beautiful. Whatever our inquiry, whatever our pursuit, whatever we hanker after or hope to have, it will be our understanding of truth, beauty, and goodness that drives us. Once you arrive at one of these answers (because it is true, or because it is beautiful, or because it is good), then there is nothing left to say—no why left to ask.

Unlike two-year-olds, professors far more often ask each other what. “What do you do?” we like to say, by which we mean, “What do you study? What do you research and write about? What is your specialty?” Depending on who is asking and in what context, we all answer with differing levels of specificity. In a broad meeting of professors from across the university, I might say English. Among English professors, I might say religion and literature, or American literature, or early American literature, or, more specifically, the Puritans.

Whatever answers we tend to give, two errors tend to plague them. First, what most of us do is far more than research or write. We teach. We train students. We treat patients. We do far more than study and publish.

But second, our answers draw us, by instinct, toward our differences. You study anatomy; I study literature. You study twentieth-century lit, I study seventeenth-century lit. You study one thing, I study another. We draw our boundaries, mark our territories, and stake ourselves on what makes us distinct.

It makes sense that we do this. We often need to know how our specializations distinguish us from one another. But such answers can also occlude what we share in common. The fundamental whys that drive us are not always so fundamentally distinct. 

In Philippians 4:8, Paul rounds out his counsel by reminding his readers to concentrate on the things that matter most. “Finally,” he writes, “whatever is true, whatever is just, what is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” 

Paul’s advice does not mean turning a blind eye to whatever is unjust, impure, or unlovely. Paul himself never looked away from sin and brokenness. But his counsel does urge us to consider how we know what is unjust, untrue, or unlovely in the first place. Searching for what is right will reveal a great deal that is wrong. The Greek word for truth, aletheia, literally means “nonconcealment”—to bring out from hiding. The light remains the point. We correct what is wrong by our knowledge of truth. We call out injustice by what we know to be just. We consider the unlovely through the lens of what we love. All of this requires us to think about the true, the just, and the lovely. 

The trouble is in remembering them.

Let me illustrate. My wife and colleague Kristin studies speech perception, and specifically what goes wrong when we fail to understand another’s voice. Her earliest research involved noisy backgrounds and the interference of other talkers. Suppose you go to a restaurant on a date. You are there to listen. You want to pay attention. But the restaurant is too busy, too full, and in the end, it’s just too hard to hear. This is energetic masking. The problem is that you cannot hear the signal for the noise.

Sometimes I think that can be the case in our own lives more generally. We came into our studies and our teaching for all the reasons articulated in Philippians 4:8. We fell in love with linguistics, or literature, or law because God had called us to wonder at him and his world in these subjects through the lens of justice or purity or love. But life got busy. Duties called. Meetings mounted. Moving from task to task and need to need, we can forget why we were ever drawn to this subject in the first place.

But there is also another more insidious and all too common form of interference. Suppose the restaurant is not full. Suppose, instead, that the conversation at the next table over keeps drawing us away. We came here wanting to set aside time and listen to someone we love, but we still end up distracted by another. This is called informational masking. Our attention is lured away.

Informational masking also afflicts those of us who research and teach. We start with a love of a subject—pursuing in it whatever is true or lovely or just—but we come to love most of all our own ability to master the subject. We pay more attention to our own recognition. A hope for higher honors becomes the answer to the question why.

In either scenario, we do well to remember why we started down this road in the first place. Why, in the end, do we study glaciers, or finance, or infectious diseases, or linguistics, or law, or history, or art, or poetry, or any number of other subjects? At our best—which is not always—I believe we are guided by the same ideas that Paul lays out in Philippians 4:8, trying to think about whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, anything excellent and worthy of praise—these deeper things that drive our search and draw us together.

In the coming weeks, different members of the Carver Project will be offering short reflections that pick out one word from Paul’s list in Philippians 4:8 and consider how it shapes the work they do and the way they go about it. How do they connect with this concept? Fundamental concerns cut across disciplines and drive our endeavors, answering in common ways the questions of why that lie behind our labors. Each week, over the next four months, we are going to play the two-year-old and ask ourselves, incessantly, why?

We offer this series in the hopes that whatever answers we come to will also be of some service to you in whatever line of work you pursue.

Abram Van Engen is Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and a Carver Project Faculty Fellow.