Modern culture places enormous faith in explanation. To explain something is taken to be to understand it; to understand it is taken to have mastered it. Scientific, technical, and analytic explanations have transformed our world, delivering extraordinary predictive and practical power.
And yet, explanation rarely satisfies our sense of meaning.
Even the most elegant account can leave us strangely untouched. We may assent intellectually while remaining existentially unmoved. This is not a failure of explanation. It is a category error about what explanation is for.
What Explanation Does Well
Explanation works by isolation. It selects variables, suppresses context, and identifies stable relations that can be generalised. In doing so, it produces clarity, tractability, and control.
This is a genuine achievement. Explanations allow us to predict outcomes, diagnose failures, and intervene effectively in the world. They succeed precisely because they narrow the field of relevance.
But that narrowing is also their limit.
Why Explanation Feels Thin
Meaning does not arise from isolated relations alone. It arises from situated involvement: from being embedded in temporal, social, and affective fields. Explanation abstracts away precisely those dimensions.
An explanation tells us how something happens, but rarely why it matters. It strips experience of narrative tension, ethical weight, and personal consequence. What remains may be correct, even illuminating, but it is existentially thin.
The coldness we feel is not disappointment; it is accurate perception.
Explanation Versus Inhabitation
Explanation positions us as observers. Myth positions us as participants.
To explain a phenomenon is to stand outside it, tracing relations from a distance. To engage a myth is to enter a relational field, to inhabit a world of significance where actions, consequences, and values are entangled.
Humans do not live as detached analysts. We live as agents embedded in unfolding trajectories. Meaning therefore requires forms that can be inhabited, not merely inspected.
The Error of Expectation
The persistent disappointment with explanation arises from expecting it to do the work of myth.
We ask explanation to provide orientation, consolation, justification, or purpose—tasks it is not designed to perform. When it fails, we mistake the failure for a deficit in knowledge rather than a mismatch of function.
Explanation illuminates relations.
Myth stabilises meaning.
Confusing the two impoverishes both.
Preparing the Next Post
If explanation cannot carry the weight of meaning, how does meaning nevertheless acquire depth, gravity, and commitment? The answer leads us to the sacred—not as metaphysical doctrine, but as a relational phenomenon. In the next post, The Return of the Sacred Without Metaphysics, we will explore how myth generates experiences of sacredness without appealing to supernatural foundations.
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