Doug Serven conducted an email interview with Dr. Esther Meek, Professor of
D.S. How did the writing of LTK come about? What prompted you to write this book?
January of 2000 was the first time I ever had the chance to try out my hypothesis that “Polanyi helps,” our understanding of presuppositionalism and knowing God. I had some stellar students in that epistemology class, students headed for campus ministry, who asked me if I could write “the book.” It was within a month that I had a request from an editor at a publishing house to consider writing a book.
That started the process. But the ideas had been simmering slowly for years.
D.S. Why do you think this subject is important?
Our lives are a tapestry of acts of knowing. What you presuppose about how you are supposed to go about knowing affects, for good or ill, all your knowing. So it also affects your entire life. Good or faulty approaches impact culture and society; and they impact people’s understanding of how one knows God.
One powerful example of how assumptions about knowing radically and broadly affect us is this: people in this culture tend to think of faith as one sort of understanding and reason as a totally different sort. Obviously this impacts how people hear the Gospel, as well as how Christians understand and go about knowing God. Another obvious example is how we are inclined to view knowledge as limited to “statements and proofs,” consigning unspoken and skilled knowing to either psychology or mysticism. As a result, I think we have let those human capacities atrophy.
We don’t have any choice about doing epistemology, whether we have taken a course in it or not. We can choose only to do it well or do it poorly.
D.S. Who is this Polyani fellow and why should we care? I started his Personal Knowledge book, on your recommendation, and couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
starters, his name is spelled, Polanyi. [DS: oops] Michael Polanyi was a
Hungarian scientist-turned-philosopher who died in 1976. As a young research
I think in Personal Knowledge he is writing to scientists more than to us ordinary people in that book, but you easily get the idea that he is offering argument after argument for the existence of the “tacit coefficient” in all knowledge, even the most dispassionate and precise scientific knowledge. Even the most formalized equations presume the tacit and skilled assessment and personal, responsible commitment of a human knower. Sure, 2 + 2 = 4, but it takes you deeming expertly that that line of marks on the page has mathematical significance of the sort that it does, and also that it applies to the number of address labels I just printed out for the upcoming lecture series. Hence, personal knowledge.
A research scientist’s picking a problem to study, or generating a hypothesis, or knowing he/she is on the trail of something big and determinedly pursuing it in the absence of support, or having a sense of the possibilities of a discovery, are all cases of there simply having to be more going on in scientific knowing than is captured in impersonally, exhaustively articulated encapsulations.
I love this phrase from another work: Polanyi warns of the danger of “unbridled lucidity.” (That’s a good one to remember for the health of your marriage.) Suddenly, a divorce between science and the artistic experience, for example, melts away. So does a divorce between faith and reason…
Lots of great thinkers in modern philosophy, and especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, saw themselves as reinventing philosophy. In that sense, Polanyi is right in the middle of the pack. Polanyi’s unique and I think wonderfully helpful contribution was to identify the subsidiary-focal structure of all knowing: how we rely on, attend from, clues, to focus on a pattern. That’s the nerve of his proposal, and it is dynamite. It makes sense of all kinds of things (here’s one from the Christian life: the distinction between legalism and obedience. Wouldn’t that solve some problems!)
You don’t have to be a research scientist or
professional philosopher to be involved in acts of coming to know or in
epistemology. You just have to have lost your car keys, or give birth to a
baby, or care for your rosebush, or mix soundtracks, or want to learn how to
Pittsburgh’s beloved #7, Ben Rothlisberger. So understanding how knowing works makes sense of what you already do, and does it in such away that restores to you a surprised delight and greater skill in it. Seeing knowing as “the profoundly human struggle to rely on clues to focus on a pattern and submit to it as a token of reality” helps us be better at it. Whatever you are doing or thinking, as I say, “Polanyi helps.”
Last note here: you might find some of Polanyi’s later essays more accessible and quicker entres to his thought. Take for example, “Tacit Knowing,” in The Tacit Dimension. There are others listed on my website (here).
D.S. You use the metaphor of knowing your mechanic – explain that to me.
Longing to Know's primary analogy is, knowing God is like knowing your auto mechanic. I argue in the book that it helps some people considering Christianity who are struggling with epistemological issues to think afresh about how knowing works. I think that because it has been true of me. I have always, in justifying my own Christianity to myself, tried to show how it involved ordinary knowing, just like knowing in all other pursuits. (I don’t in anyway mean to minimize how radically transforming it is to know the living God!) So you can maybe guess why I would compare knowing God to knowing my auto mechanic. And in light of what I just said about a Polanyian model of knowing, you can also guess how. What you might not be able to guess without having read LTK is that it is so much fun. LTK is a very fun book, I think.
D.S. We’ll be the judge of that…. I go to the Chevy dealer and get charged too much but they say the quality is better. What do you think about that?
I think you have on your hands an ordinary act of
knowing. What do YOU make of it? Do you continue to go? How do you interpret
these remarks? How do you weight the words of competing authoritative guides?
What’s your sense of how the car runs when they’re done with it? One thing I
might say is, if you and I still lived in
D.S. I’m sure Keenan will appreciate the mad props. Some say that your approach is too fuzzy, too relational, too light on formal logic – how do you respond to this?
I’d say that they missed the epistemological import of the proposals, and also that they did not read carefully enough. The point is that we restrict our picture of knowledge to statements and proofs to our peril, not that we engage in statements and proofs to our peril. The most formalized proof is fabulous and works only to the extent that we acknowledge that more is going on than proof.
To quote Polanyi: “While tacit knowledge can be possessed by itself, explicit knowledge must rely on being tacitly understood and applied. Hence all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge. A wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable.” (“The Logic of Tacit Inference,” in philosopher Marjorie Grene’s collection of his essays, Knowing and Being).
Formal logic, apart from the risky and relational fuzz of subsidiary knowledge, wouldn’t exist. When we know how to be intentional in our lived embodiment of the subsidiary, when we hone our indeterminate skills of formal reasoning and of connecting with people, we can be, and only then can we be, dynamite logicians.
Plus, I think LTK offers a solid argument for the foundational role of the subsidiary in knowledge, full of sound reasoning, and also for the value of this approach to considering Christianity. If a reader thinks it’s relational too, that’s actually wonderfully gratifying. If they think it is too fuzzy, I fear for their attitude toward the messiness of life.
D.S. So what is knowing anyway? Can we know anything? How do I know this conversation is really happening?
Knowing is an active shaping of clues into a pattern that engages and unlocks the world. It’s something humans do irresistibly, and just because they long to make sense of the world. It starts from where we are, kind of from our toes on up and out through our fingers, vectors us strugglingly, gropingly, outward, and involves pushing ourselves to look through rather than at the pieces of the world before us to grasp a joint meaning.
Too many words there? Just think about the last time you said about another person, “I want to get to know her.” And think how you felt and what you meant, and how you went about it, and why.
And then think about whether in that context you were asking, Can I know anything? Or, How do I know this conversation is really happening?
D.S. Maybe I’m just imagining it all, this whole internet
thing, this crazy, messed up world…
[pulls himself together] Can any of this help me know God better?
My answer is, ecstatically, YES!! How it makes it better may be simply that it confirms and validates the instincts you already had. We’ve rightly felt that our relationship with Jesus was what it was all about. We haven’t been encouraged to think that that relationship, with all its rich interpersonal indeterminacy, its risky passion, its agony and ecstasy, its singing “Knowing you, Jesus, knowing you...” is centrally epistemic, that it just is the heartbeat of an act of coming to know: belief just is the epistemic act.
It makes a whole lot more sense of things the Bible indicates about knowing God, and a whole lot more sense about how the Bible itself works to facilitate our knowing him, how the covenant is an unfolding relationship that involves our getting to know God, etc. “Know,” in the Bible, beginning with Adam knowing Eve, is hardly cerebral!
Once we’re tracking with this model of how we know, then we can grow our being intentional about it, and that just makes knowing God that much better. It also makes knowing everything else better, because it helps to see that, to convert the aphorism, knowing your auto mechanic is like knowing God.
Which leads me to tell you the thesis of my next book, Inviting the Real: I propose that we should take as our paradigm of all acts of knowing the interpersonal covenantal relationship. I call this “covenant epistemology.”
D.S. Do you have any good stories that have resulted from your book?
Just about every individual’s response to the book has been and continues to be a great story. Many of them too have been incidences of others’ showing me what I didn’t know I knew, if you know what I mean. I absolutely love how when people read the book, they come to know me, and then they just walk into my life as if they had known me forever.
Like the young female artist a young male reader brought to my house to meet me, on Thanksgiving just at the moment when I had pulled the turkey from the oven and the countdown sequence to dinner had been initiated irrevocably. She came right up to my elbow at the stove and starting talking a mile a minute about LTK and art. It quickly became evident that I am a total failure at multitasking when there is a conversation about ideas in the offing. She interrupted the barrage to say, “Here, let ME carve the turkey!”
I love the ones where people have registered huge
change in their outlook. Like the recording engineer in
D.S. Are you available for speaking? What new projects to you have up your sleeves?
I love speaking because I long to know people, in particular, people reading LTK. I love the challenge of adapting the message of LTK to every skill group and epistemic activity: business, counseling, education, assessment, engineering, sports, music, pastoral care and church outreach. Do please invite me.
I have already generated a string of “LTK and…” from various speaking and writing opportunities that I would love to make available in some way. There is also much to be done in a scholarly way in papers and conferences in articles. I hope that that may happen. Thinking requires protected and leisurely time. That is a rare and precious treasure.
I would also love to explore some way to make this a team effort. Readers help me so much when they enter into the LTK conversation—my knowing is very much communal—and when they connect me with others or facilitate events that do so
© 2005, Doug Serven.