I delivered the following talk in our college chapel entitled “Why Learn?” (This work is creative commons licensed 2.0 share-alike, which means you can do anything you want with it, including print it, distribute it, download it, put it in a book, change it, sell it, and all without telling me what you’ve done.)
Today I would like to present an answer to the question: “Why learn?” We are in a college, and in college, learning is important…but why? Why do it? Why learn?
Normally, in my life as in my classes, I like to ask: “What is ____ (something)?”, which is a metaphysical question about the nature of a thing. But my present question, “Why learn?” is seemingly not a question of metaphysics, as the study of being, but of motivations: Instead of asking “What is learning?” we are asking: “What is the motivation for learning? What is the point? What is the purpose? Why do this action?”
However, we might also say that this question, “Why learn?”, happens to be a metaphysical one, that is, a question about being, after all, it is a question about causality, about purpose, and about the nature of things. And so off we go in our metaphysical journey for the cause of learning. Exciting, right?
Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, and following him, Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae, posits that there are four senses in which we say: “this is the cause of that”, how we answer the question: “Why?”
- The material cause,
- The formal cause,
- The efficient cause,
- The final cause. (Acronym: MFEF)
First, let us look at the material cause of learning. The material cause is an explanation of the physical embodiment of the action or thing. One might call this the “sciency” cause. For instance, “why is the sun hot?”—the cause of heat from the sun is the transference of energy from nuclear fusion at the core of the sun radiating through space. A material cause of learning in a classroom might be that a human is in a room with another human (or a book) and certain auditory and visual signs are decoded by their brain, which, through complex electrochemical reactions, changes their neurological configurations. Nerd stuff.
The material cause of learning could be a sound, or a word, or a thing that when sensed is translated into biochemical responses in a body, specifically in a brain.
So why learn? Because you happen to be a living human being with a brain, and you are in a learning environment, that is, where words and sounds and signs can interfere with your normal brain chemistry and cause neurological changes. Learning is an accident—you happen to be at college, there happens to be some schmuck who is communicating something to you, and you happen to hear or read it. When you finish college, you could finish learning. If the material cause of learning is your only motivation, then you will only ever learn when you are forced to by the circumstances.
What about the formal cause? The formal cause is an account of why a thing is the kind of thing it is, how it should function, and what specific functions are accidental or essential. For instance, why is the sun hot? A star is a very large gaseous object (like me after Taco Bell), and the mass of the star nearest to the earth, the sun, is sufficient to squish atoms together, and when this happens some energy is lost in the form of heat. Stars metabolize themselves, like our cells eat our own bodies’ fat when we are hungry and haven’t eaten Taco Bell in a while. We burn calories, stars burn gas. Now, it is not essential for a star to be hot—a star could be cold, and still be a star. Some brown dwarf stars can be as cool as 80 degrees Fahrenheit—scientists call these “failed” stars. They are not really doing what stars were intended to do. One of the reasons for stars, according to Genesis 1, is that they illuminate, and “failed” stars are dark. Bummer. But even “failed” stars fulfill their function of being large gassy objects.
A formal cause of learning might be that humans and other creatures are by nature not all-knowing, we are makers of meaning, that is, we are constantly trying to make sense of ourselves and our world, and we are temporal, that is, we live in time, and by living we change, and change, if it is to be to a better state, requires design, purpose, and meaning-making. Humans were created to know, to learn. If as humans we were made to bear the image of God, part of that image is to know, that is, to reflect his mind, and since we do not know all things, we will need to come to know. How will we come to know? It seems that to come to know we’ll need to learn.
So why learn? The nature of humans is to learn. It’s why three-year-olds ask such interesting questions. The nature of learning is to come to know more. If you don’t know everything, and you need (or want) to know more than you currently do, you need to learn. We learn because we are knowers who are not-yet-knowing.
Why learn in college? Because you don’t yet know everything you will be taught. A cold star is a “failed” star; a student in college who is not learning is a failed student; a person after college who does not keep learning is a failed human. Don’t fail life; don’t be just another large gassy object.
Let’s now think of the efficient cause of learning. The efficient cause is an agent that makes things change or come to be. For example, while the material cause of a murder is a knife in a person’s back, and the formal cause is the plan to stab the guy when he’s not looking, the efficient cause is the murderer—the murderer is the one who ultimately caused the murder to occur, not the knife or the scheme to kill: knives and murder plots don’t get sent to prison or the electric chair. The efficient cause answers the question of “Why?” with a question of its own: “Who? Who or what did this?”
An efficient cause of learning might be that a person decides that they want to know more about something, or a teacher or institution or company wants someone else to know something, or a parent tells a student: “If you don’t go to college, it will be so hard to get a job that you’ll have to live in our basement until you’re 33, and by that time you’ll be such a loser that even I will not want to hang out with you.”
The only way to learn most things is to decide to learn. Have you decided to learn? Ultimately, if you are only learning because someone else told you to, then when that someone else is gone, so is your learning, unless you make a decision to learn. You are a free agent: you have the possibility to decide to learn for the rest of your life. A college professor may tell you to write a long paper about something: if you only complete the paper because the college professor told you to (and not because you decided you wanted to learn), that professor is the efficient cause of your learning. When the class is over you will turn into that same dumb person you were before class because now no one is telling you to learn.
God, as an agent, a decider, decided to make people one day (day six, to be exact). He decided to make an animal that learns, who learns more than where to pee, or what to eat, or when to take a nap. He made a rational animal (in the words of Aristotle) capable of learning goodness, truth and beauty, an animal capable of rational decisions (for instance, decisions to learn), and an animal able to come to understand the world, to occupy it as a knower coming-to-know, an animal that reflects God’s own image by knowing.
Not all that can be known is good to be known, however; the knowledge of good and evil, for instance, seems like a bad thing for humans to learn. Also, how to die—again, not a good thing to learn, and not proper. Obedience to the will of God was one of the first things humans had to learn, and we didn’t learn that very well. Jesus, however, as a good human, a good animal who learns, was a rational animal who learned obedience. Jesus, in the Temple at Jerusalem, was found by his parents who had been looking for him while he was hanging out in one of Professor Rick’s classes in Bible college and was asking such hard and deep questions that not even the Rt. Rev. Dr. Prof. Richard Lee Wadholm, Jr. Esq. could answer them. After this incident, Jesus learned as Luke says in his gospel: “And the child continued to grow and become strong,” as Samuel had long before him, growing up in the Temple, “being filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him” (Luke 2:52). Why was Jesus hanging out in the Temple in one of Rick’s classes as a child? And why was Rick there 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem. It’s a mystery. When Jesus’ parents asked Jesus, he said: “Why are you searching for me? Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” They didn’t understand, and perhaps neither do we, but we do know that Jesus loved the Father, as well as his own earthly parents, to whom he was obedient (in other words, by whom he was spanked) and Jesus knew where he was supposed to be: listening to the teachers and asking them questions in his Father’s house. Jesus knew where he was supposed to be, and he therefore chose to be there. His parents didn’t tell him to be there. People didn’t expect him to be there. He was there. And he was there because of who he was. He was the efficient cause.
The final cause of learning (as you will remember, the amazing acronym MFEF stands for material cause, that is the sciency cause; formal cause, that is, a thing functions as it does because of the kind of thing it is; efficient cause, which is the person or thing responsible; and the final cause, which is also the final “F” in the acronym) is the end or the purpose for which a thing exists, as in “What is the purpose of learning?” or “What is the purpose of humans?”
So, what is the purpose of humans? Why were we created? To be large gaseous objects? Why do I exist? To know the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, to know the one God and enjoy his goodness as I enter that goodness by his power, the power of a new life, a new human, one born from the ashes of my old life, that dead man who died with Christ, that life of shame in which I used to live, raised now through the power of the Spirit, the Spirit who raised Christ from the dead to be in the presence of the Father in glory and who likewise raises me day by day to be in communion with Christ and the Father; to love, to love God and my fellow humans, to be a friend to my enemy, to give my life for my friends, to die daily for you, to live for Him. If I have a body, my body is meant to do good and not evil. If I have a soul—and I do (and I hope you do too)—my soul’s purpose is to be like him who created me, not a mere rational animal, a monkey with a mind, but a being made in the image of the invisible God, reflecting him and his purposes and ways of being more and more, so that I might be made like Christ, who is the exact representation of the Godhead bodily, so that his kingdom, and not mine, will come, and so that his will would be done, here and now in this world as it is in heaven.
What am I meant to do and to be as a human? I am meant to love and know his love, I am meant to know him and my world and love him and my neighbor. How shall I love him if I do not know him? And how will I know him if I do not learn? To be human is to live with this purpose in my life: to learn.
And what is the purpose of learning? Why learn? To know. What is so important that I would give my life and everything I have to know more? Is it wise to live for learning?
If we read Proverbs 2:1-15 and 3:13-20, we find that wisdom is more precious than any other thing, that by it the world was created, that it keeps us from destruction and immorality, that it leads to goodness and a good life, and that if we love wisdom, we thereby love and fear the Lord.
Why learn? Because you are a human with a brain in a place of learning. Why learn? Because you are a human, and humans learn. Why learn? Because you choose to learn because you choose what is good. Why learn? To know…because you love wisdom. You were made for this, to learn. So, learn…please.
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