Understanding something involves seeing it on its own terms, seeing it as it is, within a richly furnished context. Explaining something involves talking about it in terms of something else, something outside of, or behind, or beneath the thing itself.
Understanding the apple hanging red and heavy from the branch is to see it in terms of its trajectory from blossom to swollen fruit to rotting heap on the ground to worm excrement nourishing the roots and to the seed traveling with the bird to bring the tree to another valley. The redness of the apple is a beacon, an invitation. To explain the apple is to present a description of genetic plans and protein synthesis and sugar manufacture and transport, where its redness is the result of the human visual system’s reaction to light of specific frequencies—with understanding, the apple’s redness is a meaningful thing in itself, with explanation it becomes light wavelengths and neural signals.
Understanding is a form of communion. Explanation reduces the world to abstraction, so that we might gain power by pulling it apart.
