Our Purpose Is Not Understanding

There is a line I keep circling back to in my own thinkering: our purpose as organic entities is not understanding. Understanding is an instrument. It helps us discover, organize, and sometimes even improve our circumstances. Yet to live and to love and to believe is to be called toward something more than clever comprehension. Our purpose is becoming. We become by improvising our way.

This is not an invitation to abandon clarity or critical thought. It is a shift in emphasis. If I treat understanding as the end of the story, I make myself into what Ortega y Gasset would call a thing among things, defined by a static “nature.” If I treat understanding as an instrument, I instead acknowledge that I am in motion. I am a project. I am my self and my circumstances, and if I do not take up those circumstances as a task, I do not save myself (Ortega y Gasset 2002, 216–17). In that shift, reason stops being a cold, detached spotlight and becomes more like what I have been calling vital reason: a way of inhabiting my life that improvises toward possible selves.

In that earlier aphorism I wrote that we do not know where we will end up because we cannot see that far ahead. What we do have is a very weird pairing: a memory of where we have been and an awareness of how we are together now. From that pairing, each new day opens the possibility of becoming more than we could have imagined. This is not mysticism in the sense of ignoring the material conditions that press upon us. It is existential honesty. Life is fired at us point-blank. We have to make something of it (Ortega y Gasset 2002, 216). The question is not just what we understand, but what we are willing to become in, with, and through how we understand.

Ideas Held, Beliefs Inhabited

Here Ortega helps clarify why this shift matters. He famously says that we are ourselves and our circumstances. Less often quoted, but crucial for our purposes, is his distinction between ideas and beliefs: We hold ideas; we inhabit beliefs (Ortega y Gasset 1984, 78–79). An idea is something we can lay on the table, examine, revise, or reject. A belief is the ground we are already standing on, the air we are already breathing. We usually do not see beliefs. Rather, we see through them.

When I teach or write, it is easy to imagine that I am mainly dealing in ideas, little packages of meaning that can be transferred from one head to another. Yet if Ortega is right, the deeper work is not swapping one set of notions for another. It is slowly transforming what people inhabit. Ideas move quickly. Beliefs take time. As I once put it on my blog, if Ortega is correct that we hold ideas but we inhabit beliefs, indeed that we are our beliefs, it takes time for the notions to seep all the way down into the dwelling place (Brown 2021).

This distinction lets me be more precise about the kinds of reason I have been sketching. Instrumental reason mostly handles ideas. It asks which means efficiently serve which ends. It is very good at tweaking systems without ever asking whether the underlying beliefs about life, value, and the human are worth inhabiting. Vital reason moves closer to the level of belief. It asks, given who I am here and now, what kind of life-project is possible and worthy? Which projects, which relationships, which struggles are worthy of this one finite biography? Meta‑reason, as I have been playing with it, leans over the edge. It joins Jaspers’ sense of a leap toward transcendence with Ortega’s insistence that human beings have no fixed nature, only history (Jaspers 1971, 179; Ortega y Gasset 2002, 216–17).

To say “no nature, only history” is not to deny embodiment or limit. It is to deny that there is a pre-written script for what I must be. Stones have natures. They cannot become other than stones. Humans have histories. We become what we are by the way we respond to what happens and by the way we let those responses harden into beliefs we inhabit (Ortega y Gasset 2002, 216–17). This is why I keep returning to the boundary situations: guilt and innocence, struggle and ease, suffering and joy, chance and purpose, death and birth (Jaspers 1971, 184–218; Brown 2024, 24–32). These are not expressions of an eternal human essence. They are recurring thresholds where each of us, in our circumstances, must decide who we will be. The decision is never once and for all. It repeats, it revises, it sometimes contradicts itself. But over time, those repetitions compose a biography, and that biography is what Ortega means when he says that what nature is to things, history is to human beings (Ortega y Gasset 2002, 216–17).

From Transisting to Wyrding

If this is right, then the work of liberation cannot be limited to exchanging bad ideas for better ones. It must also touch the deeper layer of belief. Critical pedagogy has known this for a long time. Freire’s “true word” is not a clever slogan; it is the convergence of reflection and action that changes how a people inhabits the world (Freire 2000, 88). bell hooks’ practice of freedom in the classroom is not about mastering content; it is about forming subjects capable of choosing themselves differently within and against oppressive structures. Queer theory, in its own idiom, has insisted that categories like man, woman, straight, gay are not neutral descriptors of nature, but historically contingent ways of arranging bodies, desires, and norms. To queer is to pry open those arrangements so that other ways of inhabiting belief can become visible, and then livable.

In my own work I have named a first move transisting. Resistance, as important as it is, often remains reactive. It defines itself against the order of things and risks being captured by that very order as its negative mirror. Transistance attempts something slightly different. It looks for sideways moves. It twists within the circumstances instead of only pushing back. It asks not only, “How do I say no?” but also, “What new path can I trace through this terrain, given who I am and who we are together?” (Brown 2024, 32). This is still risky. It can fail. It often fails. That is why Jack Halberstam’s embrace of failure as a queer resource feels so vital here. Failure unsettles the beliefs we have inhabited about success, normalcy, and worth (Halberstam 2011).

The second move I have called wyrding. Wyrd, etymologically, is related to “toward” and to the old sense of fate as that which is always already weaving. To wyrd is to lean into that weaving with intention. Not controlling it. Not pretending to be the sole author of one’s life. Rather, taking up the threads that actually pass through one’s hands and learning to twist them into new patterns. Wyrding is what happens when vital reason gets patient. It returns again and again to the same dyads guilt innocence, struggle ease, suffering joy and asks, “What belief am I inhabiting here? Is this really the only way to be in this situation?” (Brown 2024, 45–48).

At that point, the aphorism with which I began becomes less a statement and more a practice.

Our purpose as organic entities is not understanding. It is becoming.

Understanding remains crucial, but it is no longer allowed to pose as destiny. It is returned to its rightful place as a tool in the hands of beings who have no nature, only historic beings who must, day by day, improvise their way through circumstances they did not choose toward selves they are not yet.

References

Brown, Keith Wayne. 2021. “Beholding the Beheld.” Call Me Maggie (blog). April 23, 2021. https://callmemaggie.com/2021/04/23/beholding-the-beheld/.

Brown, Keith Wayne. 2024. Queer Faith, Wyrd Hope, Loving Struggle: A Reconsideration and Application of Karl Jaspers’ Existenzphilosophie as Liberatory Praxis. PhD diss., University of North Texas.

Freire, Paulo. 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th anniversary ed. New York: Continuum.

Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure.

Jaspers, Karl. 1971. Philosophy of Existence. Translated by Richard F. Grabau. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Ortega y Gasset, José. 1984. “Man, as Project.” Translated by Samuel P. Moody. In The Humanist Philosophy of José Ortega y Gasset, 78–79. Lander University Philosophy Department.

Ortega y Gasset, José. 2002. History as a System and Other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History. Translated by Helene Weyl. In The Essential Ortega y Gasset, 216–17. Arlington: University of Texas Press.