the why of things

man on wire is about phillippe petit, famous funambulist, and his wire-walking stunt across the twin towers in 1974. (it's a brilliant movie about an unbelievable caper, and i highly recommend you go and see it if you have not.) once he was back on terra firma, reporters naturally besieged him, and the big question they had for him was: why did you do it? petit angrily points out to us the absurdity of the question -- there is no why! -- and his point is very well taken. there are two reasons, i suppose, why the "why" is absurd: first, there is no possible cost-benefit analysis to a stunt so far beyond imagination, and second, we don't even have the proper language to deconstruct the deed. just as deconstructing aesthetics largely ruins beauty, so does any attempt to understand petit's act diminish it to something less than what it truly was. there was no "why". there was just the act.

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now, in training to give therapy, one of the lessons we learn is not to ask "why" questions. whys encourage speculation, fabulation, post-hoc rationalizing, and chase away, sometimes forever, the actual truth. human beings are very bad at whys, we're biased, we find illusory correlations between things. we need rules of cause and effect to make sense of the world, but our rules are general and overextended. add to that the dreadful fallibility of memory and the inevitable schematizing, and what you find is that whys are about as useful as invisible money. we're different from the psychodynamic therapists that way -- we're told that we don't need reasons to fix problems, just a clear picture of thoughts, and actions, and you know, i think i believe in that.

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while science is about finding whys, psychology isn't really a science, and i save myself from some nasty sprains over the philosophy of causality by just not caring about it. i've seen philosophy of science majors argue till they're blue in the face and hurl kant and hume and popper at each other like nuclear warheads, and i'm awfully glad i get to stay out of it. i'll tell my little research stories and do my therapy uncaring of reasons and chickens and eggs. this is why i've always liked the humanities -- they let the whys be, and in that small corner of the discourse, at least, there is peace.