Who am I and Why? vs What am I and How? 4/28/2025 (draft)

Who am I and Why? vs What am I and How? [1]

There may be a useful analogy between the way individuals develop maturity and the way societies develop maturity. The adolescent asks: Who am I and Why? This develops personal identity, a sense of a separate self with purpose and meaning. This stage emphasizes our individuality, and, in society at large, this question is addressed chiefly by religion and the Humanities, as both religion and the Humanities central goal is to offer humanity purpose and seek meaning. But the next stage of development is the more mature stage. In this next stage we ask the question: What am I and How? Which I see as the question Zen Buddhism asks, as I understand it. This question is directed at our existential predicament; that is, how do we find purpose and meaning in a meaningless existence? I can only speak for Western societies, but a look at Western philosophy and literature show that this question has been asked by an inspired few for over a century, Dostoyevsky, Kirkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, and many others since as we explore and elaborate ideas on the implications Existentialism. But only in recent decades, due to cultural lag, has the mature question of What am I and How, the question that confronts our existential predicament, filtered down to the masses at large.

I feel that many of our current crises are caused by society finally confronting (if only, for many, subliminally) the question What am I and How. Because much of Western society is still in adolescence asking Who am I and Why in a world where science, and evidence, even in the Arts, increasingly shows that the Who is a fiction, and that in a brute, hostile and indifferent universe, there is no satisfying answer to the question Why. If humanity is to survive, if it is to mature enough to survive, it will have to successfully address the question: What am I and How?

But first a caution. We might be tempted to answer the question What am I and How by saying I am a father/mother parenting, a doctor/mechanic in an occupation, a teacher/student, teaching or learning, etc., but these responses do not satisfy the question of What am I and How, instead, they indirectly respond by offering a social construct of a particular Who ( I am a mother) and a social construct of a particular How (I parent). However, any frank and direct response to the question What am I and How must be straight forward in the sense that What am I and How is a question most appropriately answered by empirical evidence; that is, science. And underneath all the stories, myths, and other confabulations human imagination invents to rationalize human existence, science frankly tells us that What am I and How is a function of nature; that is, we are subatomic energy self-organized into self-aware, thinking organisms, and that the only authentic truth of existence is our own, subjective, immediate experience of it. Realizing this, we, and civilizations at large, can grasp our place in nature, if not the universe, as one with it.

Though, that would require partially shedding the pesky ego and the many and diverse narratives that engender and nourish it.

Can we fully embrace the What and How? and let go of the Who and Why? Maybe the words of Elmer Gantry can help:  

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

[1] Not to be confused with the famous law firm Dewey, Cheatam, and Howe.