Explaining and understanding

I think the distinction that is made between explaining and understanding in these long quotes from "that Bortoft book" are interesting and illustrative.

Goethe's aim was to stay within experience (he was empirical), but without stopping at the sense experience of particulars (he was not an empiricist). He aimed to see the intrinsic necessity in the phenomenon by a further encounter with the phenomenon beyond sense experience, but which is reached by going more intensively into the sensory instead of away from it, as in mathematical physics—or any speculative explanation. Goethe's phenomenology of nature seeks to make the intrinsic intelligibility of the phenomena visible, not to explain it.

Far from being onlookers, detached from the phenomenon, or at most manipulating it externally, Goethean scientists are engaged with it in a way which entails their own development. Here we have the notion of Bildung, which was so important to Goethe and his contemporaries. Weinsheimer describes this as a genuine development leading to the acquisition of a potency, instead of the expression of a latency. In the language of the parable, it is an “augmenting of the talent” not simply the activation of a talent one has already. The organ of exact sensorial imagination is not sitting there waiting to be activated. It has to be developed, and this is done by practicing exact sensorial imagination: “... in the present day we must be active ourselves in the development of new faculties.” Thus, in Goethean science the scientist himself or herself has to become the instrument, and he or she has to participate actively in his or her own development in order to become this instrument. This is quite a different matter from just using instruments externally, e.g., microscopes and telescopes, to augment the senses.

[T]hings are not only objects which can be taken in isolation from one another. In fact they are not primarily such “objects” at all. They only seem to be so when their context is forgotten. What this habit of selectivity overlooks is the way in which things already belong together. Because it overlooks this, the analytical mind tries to make things belong together in a way which overlooks their belongingness. It tries to put together what already belongs together. Thus the intrinsic relatedness is not seen, and instead, external connections are introduced with a view to overcoming separation. But the form of such connections is that they, too, belong to the level of separation. What is really needed here is the cultivation of a new habit, a different quality of attention, which sees things comprehensively instead of selectively.

When things are seen in their context, so that intrinsic connections are revealed, then the experience we have is that of understanding. Understanding something is not the same as explaining it, even though these are often confused. Understanding lies in the opposite direction to explaining. The latter takes the form of replacing a thing with something else.

[Explaining] is certainly invaluable for manipulating and controlling nature, but this is not at all the same as understanding nature—even though, under the influence of the dogma, we now think that it is. Considering nature exclusively in terms of cause and effect leads us to search for a mechanism for every phenomenon. But when we succeed in finding a mechanism it does not mean that we understand the phenomenon. We can then manipulate and control the phenomenon, but we do not know what it is. Eventually, under the influence of our success with the principle of mechanical causality, we begin to think that the question of what the phenomenon is has no meaning—whereas it is we who have lost sight of the possibility of knowing this. We will come to feel that if we know the causal mechanism of the phenomenon, then we do know what it is. The quest for explanations in terms of causal mechanisms eventually leads to the notion of a field of force. This is a subtler notion than mechanism, but not fundamentally different in kind.

- The Wholeness of Nature, Henri Bortoft

This seems to me apt when considering the Gibraltar Orcas attacking boats. Researchers seek to explain, so that they can control; in the paper I have been writing, I have been trying to find a way to understand.