For a little while now – I guess since the Enlightenment, but maybe for longer – we’ve overvalued the “what” of the world.
We think we can only really know something if we can cut it up and identify its pieces, and we have a tendency to treat the component parts of a thing as more fundamentally true than the thing itself. You can see this in the language we use: to break a concept down is to explain it. Clouds, for example, are really just water droplets. Character traits (such as kindness) are really just collections of behaviors (such as opening the door for someone). Science is observation, postulation, and experimentation. Theology is a collection of rules. God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
We get a smug knowingness by viewing truth this way.
But there are two problems with prioritizing the what of the world. The first is obvious: Often (and maybe always) things are actually better understood as unbroken wholes rather than as collections of disparate parts. Music, for example, can’t be broken up without becoming nonsense; one note can’t be a melody without the next note, and a downbeat doesn’t exist without an upbeat. Paintings, too, hit you all at once. Nobody goes to an art gallery and looks at art point by point through a cardboard tube.
When we break things down, we risk destroying them. It’s important to remember that we don’t break things down to reduce them to their ultimate reality; we break things down so that we can put them together.
The second problem is that the what is only one sort of knowledge, anyway, and it’s only arbitrarily that we take it as the most important. There is also knowing how something is and what something is for, and these sorts of knowledge are at least as helpful as knowing what something is made of.
Think of your best friend. Do you know them better if you can list their height, the color of their eyes, and the chemicals that make up their body? Or do you know them better if you know what being with them is like? Or take a chessboard. Do you know a chessboard better if you can say that it’s made of 40 square inches of maple wood and half an ounce of black paint? Or do you know it better if you can play chess?
The point isn’t that there’s a right or a wrong answer to these questions; it’s just that taking the material answer as obviously correct is to make an assumption.
Rather than assuming that what things are made of is the bottom-line version of what they really are, I think it’s better to think of truth as something like the view of a mountain: variant depending on the angle, but true all the same. From where I sit, looking out over the Denver suburbs, Mount Blue Sky is a small purplish smudge against the horizon. But from the base looking up, it’s a looming tower of dark stone, and from the summit looking down, it’s a beige pile of broken rocks and snow.
None of these views of the mountain corners the market on the truth; no view is more or less real than any of the others, and there is no view from nowhere by which you can see all of the views at once.
We see only sparkling slivers. And somehow, still, thank God, there really is a mountain.
