THREE QUESTIONS

When it comes right down to it, everything we can ask about anything boils down to three questions:  What?  Why?  How?

Perhaps I shouldn't be so stingy with my words.  More fully these questions are:  What exists?  Why does it exist?  How do we live our lives as a consequence?  Each of the six branches of knowledge, as I have summarized in the right-hand sidebar, addresses one of these questions.  Metaphysics and epistemology answer "what".  Theology and aesthetics answer "why".  Ethics and politics answer "how".

There's more to this than clever categorization.  It is the recognition that knowledge has more than one foundation and the proper identification of those foundations.  The knowledge needed to answer one question differs from the knowledge needed to answer the other questions.  For example, the answer to "what" constitutes scientific knowledge, in the broad sense of being falsiable.  In our modern era, we are enamored with scientific knowledge because of the great confidence we can have in it.  Yet, scientific knowledge can only answer the question "what" and no other.  We make the error of scientism if we argue that the questions "why" and "how" can be answered scientifically, or if we argue that these other questions are invalid because they cannot be answered scientifically.

The answer to "why" requires aesthetic knowledge, which are synthetic truths we have induced from the facts that answer "what" but cannot be expressed as a falsifiable statement as scientific knowledge can be.  Order and purpose exist in our universe, but comprehending the truth underlying them, God and beauty, is not reducible to science.  If we deny the validity of this knowledge because it is not scientific, we then deny ourselves an objective foundation for moral knowledge, the answer to "how".

This is because only aesthetic knowledge bridges the chasm of Hume's dilemma, the "is-ought" breach that divides fact ("what") and value ("how") into separate realms.  Moral knowledge requires the truths of aesthetic knowledge to set the objective premises from which we deduce the proper course of action to take in a given circumstance.  Without aesthetic knowledge, no particular end an individual may chose can be proscribed, because the scientific knowledge of "is" can provide no deontological foundation for "ought".  Hence, ethics and politics would be reduced to nothing but exercises in the most efficient means of achieving an individual's subjectively chosen end.

Thus, the answers to "what", "why", and "how" define the separate foundations of knowledge.  Each category has its own method to the truth, yet one depends upon the other for us to obtain the fullest knowledge we can about ourselves, our universe, and our relationship to it.