#79 Loving to Know and Subsidiary Focal Integration with Esther Lightcap Meek

 with philosopher Esther Lightcap Meek, Professor of Philosophy emerita at Geneva College, in Western Pennsylvania

exploring from-to fractals, Michael Polanyi, Meek's Indeterminate Future Manifestations, the difference between information and knowledge, epistemological therapy... and all with some laughter and good cheer

Happy holidays! These conversations are part of research: to skip the research ramble, go to 26:30. This episode explores the intricate relationships between knowledge, information, reality, and love with guest Esther Lightcap Meek. Building on the ideas of Michael Polanyi, Esther and Andrea delve into the concept of ‘subsidiary focal integration’ and its implications for how we understand reality. The conversation addresses the limitations of viewing knowledge merely as information, the importance of bodily cognition, and how love and communion with the real are fundamental to genuine knowing. It shows how philosophy can be understood as therapeutic, a dynamic process that connects us deeply with ourselves, each other, and the world.

00:00 Introduction to the Concept of Reality and Information

01:46 The Role of Subsidiary Focal Integration

03:36 Exploring Covenant Epistemology

04:54 Understanding Bodily Cognition

06:44 Introducing Esther Lightcap Meek

08:50 The Journey of a Philosopher

10:46 The Importance of Subsidiary Focal Integration

13:02 Practical Applications and Everyday Philosophy

16:40 The Role of Philosophy in Real Life

26:31 A Conversation with Esther Lightcap Meek

49:34 Integrative Knowledge and Liberation

50:25 Epistemological Therapy and Embodied Cognition

52:37 The Role of Subsidiary Focal Integration

54:58 Daisy of Dichotomies and Modernity

57:54 The Interpersonal Nature of Knowledge

01:11:20 Covenant Epistemology in Education

01:18:35 AI, Tools, and the Real

01:29:14 The Role of Love in Knowing 

A professional philosopher, author and speaker, Esther offers her own distinctive, down-to-earth, approach to the philosophical matters that ground and permeate our lives: humanness, meaning, reality, knowing.
The book Andrea and Esther discuss here is Loving to Know.
Link here to Esther’s work and books: https://www.estherlightcapmeek.com

Tacit Knowledge

Michael Polanyi

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Transcript

   📍 you only have certainty if you cut yourself off from reality.

we've, we've lost our, our confidence, if not even our taste for the real So that's part of what's going on. So that I think in that setting, AI and all our, you know, temptation to be on our phones all the time and think that's reality, that it, it might not be so tempting if we weren't so vulnerable already.

 So when I'm talking about bike riding, I say once you figure out how to ride a bike, the world comes to you in so many possible bike paths that you never saw before.

and it's because you're in, you become embedded. the knowledge as information, knowledge as focal information paradigm, the information actually cuts you off from reality such that you might not even care about reality 'cause you have the information. that's called positivism.

You know, I've heard plenty of scientists talk that way. You know that this is just about the data.  And my job, and, and what I'm doing is teaching them what they've been doing all along. what I see myself doing is kind of relaying the accents under what it is that they do when they know so they can see it. Because modernity teaches us to misdescribe when we self-describe.

We haven't put the right words on what we actually are doing well. So the things that we're doing well don't get honored and can and they can atrophy.

  📍 there's nothing wrong with information, but there's everything wrong with information as the philosophical paradigm of how we know, So you gotta collect information, but why do you collect the information? You collect it so you can wear it, you indwell them. Subsidiary. And so what pe the, the word, the idea that practically everybody is missing that PNI has, is the idea of the subsidiary. So even when your students rightly feel like they want their cognition to be embodied, they're not given the word subsidiary, they don't get this from tooth thing.

  he really felt like this subsidiary focal integration is what, resolved the presumed mind body problem.

and just in an ordinary way right now. To try to understand my mind. You're indwelling my body right as I am yours. So, so, you know, it's a very exposed thing to give a lecture, for example, because yeah, you have to welcome people to indwell your body to get at the what we call the mind.

and you gotta indwell your own body to get at the mind too.  Uh, actually was on the faculty at Manchester University when Alan Turing was Polanyi says in a footnote, in personal knowledge, I dissent. I dissent from Turing's idea that machines can think, and actually the two of them put on a, a symposium and invited scholarship to enter into this, this conversation.

And, what he says is that, that could never be because knowledge is inherently uniz.

So I think you can kind of quick associate it with me saying, well, information is not knowledge. It's not knowledge. So, but when you, again, when you think of the baseball pitcher or you think of the trainer of sea biscuit, that's way richer.

It's an artistry. It's an intimacy.

  📍 because knowledge is inherently uniz.

  📍 Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. Today's guest is Esther Lightcap. Meek, what a beautiful name. And she is a philosopher who believes that knowing is an act of love. She is the professor of philosophy emerita at Geneva College, which is in western Pennsylvania, and she's written all sorts of books and she's really dedicated her career to making philosophy accessible.

And transformative for people in all walks of life, from academia to wherever any person might be in the world. She was trained at Temple University. And, uh, we talk about that a bit here and how she found the work of scientist turned philosopher, uh, Michael Palani, which opened her philosophical path. And now she's opening many of our paths by introducing us to Polanyi. And it's an exciting discovery for me. And I hope so for you too. There is a research ramble coming up,  for those of you who are interested in the way making approach and And in connecting all the dots between all these different podcasts because this is basically like one big research piece. putting a lot of different ideas together in different ways and showing my inspirations, showing our inspirations.

It's probably gonna evolve to a podcast that's a little bit different next year, but that's what it's been this year. here's kind of the last research ramble of the year. For those of you who've been following along and are, are following the philosophy, those of you who just wanna hear Esther, just skip right ahead.

It's no problem at all. I'm really glad you're here and it's really beautiful to hear Esther talk about her work. that starts in about  📍 20 minutes from now. Just go ahead, for the rest of you, here's the research ramble. Thanks for being here, everybody, and happy holidays.

, Hello everyone.

Today's conversation I think is gonna be the last that I published this year, so hope it's been a good 2025 for you.  can't believe it's already over and there's still so much to do, But I really wanna get this episode to you because today's conversation explores information and knowing what the difference is between those and control and communion or what.

Today's guest calls Covenant epistemology. It also tries to get at some things I'm trying to get at in all these conversations and in all the other work I'm doing, and that's what I talk about is holding paradox or bodily movement as already being cognition. And this is coming at it in a different way, which I hope will, will be helpful through the ideas of Esther Lightcap Meek, who is the guest today, and also her building on the work of Michael Polanyi, who I had not read before, b Karen Wong both.

Recommended this work to me, uh, this year recently. And so I found Esther's work through them and it's inspired also by Parker Palmer, who I talked to earlier in the year. Hopefully you've listened to that one. And so anyway, the basic idea that I'm trying to express is that. We know through our bodies before we know through our, what we think of as our mind, as our thinking.

All this stuff we call mind, which is thinking and memory and all the stuff we're aware of, which we often identify with completely. But as I often say, it's just the tip edge of our bodily cognition of what is really cognition, which is how we make our way through the world and activity, and all these tip edge layers of cognition.

Like thinking the stuff we're aware of, all these kind of words and image-based experiences that we think we're having of ourselves are actually 📍  embedded within and extended and an extension of all this action of our body. And not only our bodies, but also of everything the body is encountering and Polanyi's work, which I'm just discovering again, is really helpful, uh, so far because he talks about this process.

Through something that he, and then Esther also who's extending his work in a really beautiful way that we will talk about, um, describes it as focal subsidiary integration That is kind of what I'm talking about here. it's like we're always bringing some of this subsidiary into our focal awareness, which also changes.

What is subsidiary or what's holding us? What is this dynamic ongoing encountering, and then that also changes what can become focal and so on and so forth. So we're sort of co-creating all the possibilities for cognition, including emotion. As I understand it though, again, that would be controversial.

But when I talk about cognition, I'm talking about something like love and through these layers of communication. So, okay, there's way too much to unpack in there, to really do it justice, I need to read more. I need to talk to Esther more and all that will come, I just want to try to introduce a little bit here now, and I'm only gonna focus on the book.

Loving To Know by Esther. That's the one I read before I talked to her, and that's the one that we will discuss here. But she's also written quite a lot of other books like Longing to Know or A Mother Smile is Her Most Recent. but this one is about loving to know we can.

think about what I just said through, through that title, even that knowing, the way we're often taught when we go to school is about learning things like two plus two equals four, or it's about information processing. We hear that a lot, but all of that is actually the surface, literally, of a sort of deeper knowing.

It's the tip edge of this ongoing action embodied ecological action or bodily and ecological, and this whole thinking discursive part of our relationship with ourselves that we often take for granted as ourselves is really just the tip of the iceberg. Esther doesn't actually put it like that, but this is what I'm drawing from it.

She puts it in terms of covenant epistemology. And that orients a definition of knowledge as apprehension, bodily apprehension. So rather than the tip of the iceberg, this information comprehension part being what we think of as knowledge, it's this apprehending. So you can hopefully see how that connects.

So like knowing your timetables is great, but the surface. It's a surface of a much deeper bodily knowing Esther talks about it is wearing, you know, you, you learn stuff so you can wear it. I, I understand what she means by that, but I almost think that it's not even that you're just wearing it, it's really becoming sort of part of your way of encountering.

But I think we, we basically mean the same thing there. So if we understand loving as this bodily being in the world. In the way that, for example, Parker and I discussed, then we can also understand Esther's thesis here, which is that instead of knowing so we can love, we are actually already loving and loved.

I would add we are love and that's the only way we ever can know. That's the only way we ever can develop something like thinking or mind or the stuff that we identify with as if it's everything. Esther talks about when she was a kid that she worried she could never know anything outside of her head.

that, you know, she was aware of her thoughts, but how did she know there was anything else or anything real? And as she talks about here, it wasn't something she felt she could talk about in her community. she'd become aware of this sort of the tip of the iceberg as I'm expressing it here, of what we call mind.

And like so many of us, it was isolating her. It felt like she was trapped there. Like if that's everything, how does she know there's a real world? How does she connect to it? It's like you're stuck in this little box or something. And then eventually she found Polanyi, Michael Polanyi, and something that she, he said something about the way he.

Articulated it was, it, it sort of popped her out of that, and it helped her understand that even to get to that place of awareness of self and knowing that you've been being held or known by something bigger, so to speak. I'm, I'm kind of adding my words here, of course, but it's that you. This, she talks about it as from too, which also comes from Polanyi.

But for you to even be able to be asking those questions, there's already something you know that's deeper than this tip edge thinking that you're experiencing. And this starts to get at this whole holding paradox idea. And it's quite hard to put into words, it's a process of coming to know. More of yourself as yourself, and also becoming aware of what you think of as self and body, as even beyond what you might be delineating it as.

So Esther Light Cab Meek expresses this in her book by showing us that knowing is this transformative encounter and it is this long before. It realizes itself before you realize it. we get to this idea that philosophy is something like epistemological therapy in a way. It's a verb of healing or sort of, you know, opening or noticing those portals and those places where we are already connected.

And, you know, helping us with this feeling of being trapped in our heads or identifying with our thoughts. You know, we're not our thoughts, but we often assume that we are. And how do we become aware of that? How does that not become an illness? Or if it isn't, if it has become somehow, uh. Destructive. How do we notice it and, and heal it?

That's part of this, and it's where the idea of dichotomy comes into her work and connects also to what we often talk about here because we often have this thinking self and we see it as in contrast or, you know, blocked off from everything else. The mind versus the body. Or us versus them, or even me versus myself in some sort of strange way.

knowledge can become sort of formalized. We think it's formalized or codified and made into something that's like absolute and unchanging and blocked off in this little box. But actually in the way I've been trying to discuss knowledge is this. Ongoing change in dynamism, just like our bodies, just like everything we encounter.

that's not formal, usable. It doesn't mean that it's not, consistent and regular and real and findable in all of that, but you can't just formalize it into something that will always hold. Philosophy is a verb and knowledge is not formal. it is consistent and real. 

Information is formal. Realizable information is the representational, communicative language and all this other stuff, images, and so on that we create. It's very important, but it's really the tip edge of what we're thinking of as knowledge. I.

That's kind of the paradox to hold here.

And it's also where Meek challenges this modern tradition that treats knowledge as objective facts. So it's not that there isn't something objective. Of course there is, but there's not this sharp division between knowing that as, as the subject and what is known, it's, it is still an ongoing creation.

And that's this connection between the bodily movement. And our knowing, of that bodily movement and this kind of layering and how it can be therapeutic to realize that and feel back into ourselves, which is always possible. But until we realize it and have ways to help one another do it, we don't do it.

And it's, this can be hard. We wanna feel back into that connection we have with all that we encounter and with our emotions and with the love that is us and that is holding us, and it's not sentimental, but is literally just how we come into this world, and how this world is continuing It's because our bodies have this loving relationship to themselves, which by the way isn't always like pretty and nice, but, and because the world has that possibility within it, that we can know So that's what comes to mind right now as I want to introduce the philosopher Esther, like Cab Meek, who is, as I said, the author of Loving To Know, which is the book we talk about here, but also longing to know and. A little manual for knowing and Mother's Smile and many others, which, uh, she and I will hopefully talk about more in the future.

And again, it's a lot about Michael Pal's work, and he was a Hungarian British scientist and then philosopher, uh, mostly working in the early 19 hundreds, passed away probably before most of us were born. Or, or maybe in the seventies. He, I think 76, he passed away. So his work is about threading. This focal subsidiary integration.

And what does he mean and what does, how does that relate to all this? All this? Well, the quick answer is that it has a lot to do with what we talk about when we talk about participatory sense making or ecological psychology, or perspectival realism, all these other things that we bring up here because it's about bodily relation at different levels and knowing as this ongoing, immediate action.

Which is oriented in many different ways, and which depending on from where you assess it is going to look different, even as it's one continuous process, or not one continuous process, but even as it's continuous process. Polanyi discusses this as a process of knowing, Where we can understand it as a relation of what's focal, which is sort of what our awareness is focused on.

Maybe think of it as like the spotlight. What's in the spotlight, and then all that's being experienced. That's not in that. Area of focus, but that actually makes that point of focus possible, so to speak. And so it's like, you know, you're walking through the city and your body's aware of and encountering so much more than your actual thinking mind is aware of.

It's again, that tip of the iceberg sort of thing. Uh, and we can also understand this when we look at how we come to do things like ride bikes or play a sport or do some sort of craft, and there would be all kind of psychology and neuroscience relative to that. Which I know a lot of you are thinking of now, but just let me just stick here with Esther's view and, and P at first we might have to focus on what the body's encountering, like when we're learning to read or ride a bike. But then we indwell that, or we wear that, as Esther might say, or it just becomes part of our body's way of enli aligning with our encounter, as I might say. And we don't have to focus on it anymore, and yet it's holding whatever we're focusing on, if that makes sense.

and it's, and there's a constant interchange between all of this, between what we're focusing on and that subsidiary process. But if we focus too hard on the details. If we sort of try to break it up and make it into a dichotomy, then we do something that's actually representational. and that can be positive for a while.

That's where the information comes from. But if we mistake that representation with the actual process, then we're more prone to have something destructive or, or even something that's, um, hurting us an illness. So this is that unhealthy state that. Is assumed in this dichotomous stance, which Esther talks about, she talks about a daisy of dichotomies and how we, we kind of get away from the center by, by creating these oppositional ideas and then sort of believing in them.

So we think loving and knowing, for example, are, are not connected or mind and body are not connected, but in fact they're co-creating one another and believing that they're separate, does something, um. Painful frankly, to, uh, our experience. because you're loved and that love is what your body is doing.

but she is saying that instead of knowing to love, we're loving so that we can know. So, so maybe you can feel the kind of rigidity of the current age in a way. And how we do take these representational. separations this information as if it's everything or even our thinking is everything divorce from our body, maybe even.

And there's a rigidity in that that maybe needs some therapy in the way that Esther is offering. part of that is treating information a little bit differently, 

 And knowledge not not as something that's information that's collected and controlled, but rather something that's dynamic and bodily and our way. of becoming aware of the real, being able to handle more of the real together, and that's a connection rather than a disconnection.

it's that sort of knowing that her work is trying to open us back into, at least as I feel it, because that is the knowing that is. is is us and is connecting us to what is real and, and the reason we are real. It's this most human act of embodied subsidiary, focal integration that is genuine knowing, as she presents it.

So, if we think about cognition in this subsidiary focal dynamic, then it's not a voice in our heads. It's not processing information. It's an embodied ecological layered fractal. From two in many directions relational act that we're just beginning to understand. And that is much, much deeper than our actual thinking right now than what we're aware of, what we can be aware of.

And we're already in touch with reality. We're always in touch with it. The very fact that we can think about it means there's something there that we already know. the question is whether we can trust this and whether we can find our way back into, uh, being what meat calls lovers of the real, whether we can care for ourselves really is how I would put it, I guess.

can you care for yourself for your own self, your body, and all that you don't yet know about yourself and Can we see one another that way? Can we help each other find the energy and the time and the chance to remember this and fill into this in our individual lives, but also the way we exist socially and, and otherwise?

Finding Polanyi in this, what feels to me like dialectical layering of focal and subsidiary is what gave Esther a way to understand that she'd always been in contact with the reality. She wasn't stuck in her head. And she talks about that a bit here. She writes about it a lot. So the problem wasn't insufficient proof, but it was that she was mis describing her own.

Reality, uh, because that's what we're taught to do. She says some really profound things about that, about the way modernity teaches us to misdescribe our own reality, and this is part of being. In communion with the real or loving to know because we're born in it and of it we are love. Otherwise, we couldn't know we are here.

It's that iceberg that could only rise above the water due to the fact that it's in the water and is the water. 

 One term that Esther uses is indeterminate future manifestations. And basically this is this idea that you already fill something in the future that you don't yet know. You can't put words on, it's not information yet, but somehow you sense it. And this is actually what. This focal subsidiary integration is showing us that happens, it's also what helps us understand that we're already grounded in reality or something bigger than what we understand with our thinking mind, especially than the information that we have.

This also reminded me of something that Lisa Marowski and I talked about in one of the previous episodes because she said something to me about, You can't question if you don't already know.

I found that echoing a lot in this Polanyi and in Esther's work, this sort of seeming contradiction that for us to know anything or law of anything, we must already. Know it and be loved. And I know that sounds confusing, but that's that holding paradox that sort of forces us to break open these old categories and just sit with this feeling, even if it's, we can't quite understand it.

seeing information as different from knowledge, but also a way into knowledge that we could use to deepen communion and stewardship. And it's a little bit disruptive and even frustrating, but it's part of realizing that we're not closed systems or boxes and that what is us is in constant shift in dynamics, but it's also always connected. There's no other. There's no, there's no outsider, insider, beginning or into all of this. And care is the way we come into more of this.

As Esther says here, you can think of the difference in life and performance that we see in a story like, sea Biscuit. I don't know if you remember that story about the horse that was treated terribly. And then this one caretaker saw the horse differently and the horse of course, sort of blossomed. Esther brings that story up a little bit here because just to show the difference between trying to control something, trying to make life become something, and caring for it, and being in a covenant relationship with it in communion and the potentials that open. Once we shift that orientation, the way the intru, the way the caretaker of the horse shifted, the relation between human and horse.

Another, image she brings up a lot is those magic eye moments where you look at something and you can't, and you suddenly see a pattern pop out. I don't know if you've ever seen those, basically the idea is that, you know, we're always close to revelation if we just dare to shift our orientation a bit, and if we allow ourselves to fill into the care that is holding us, which is really scary to do, I know that. But it is. It is possible. Just let it be possible. It's the hardest thing thing sometimes, but it's also a real place and it's flow and grace and all those words we use to try to talk about it. And this resonates with this podcast with way making withholding paradox because it's referring to this philosophical skill or, or action of being able to, of holding seemingly contradictory ideas in mind at once. And in so doing, not trying to resolve them, but instead feeling into the expansion that's, that is there, and that is connecting us to what feels like it's beyond us.

So we're learning a way to hold what seems in irreconcilable, we're doing that by connecting with something like care or love that's holding us. And that's not sentimental or easy, but that is there. It really is there. So you can think of this via all kinds of dichotomies, absence, presence, control, covenant isolation, membership, and of course mindbody.

But basically what Esther and Polanyi are doing is opening this conversational path. With you and yourself, with you and them, with you and me, with you and others, so that we can move beyond what we've maybe, tried to codify or make a little bit too rigid by taking representational, communicative symbols or ideas as the actual kind of continuous process.

So that means that knowing is less about information. As Meek would say, and more about transformation, it's less about comprehension and more about ongoing apprehension. So that rhymes with a lot of what we've talked about here and. you know, knowledge is knowing philosophy as a verb, active relational process, participatory, and this epistemological therapy that Meek offers is hoping to kind of, you know, dispel some of the presumptions that might keep us from that communion.

so you're already in touch with reality. That might be the main idea here. You're already. Beyond the self you identify with as you're thinking. And bodies are already cognitive way before they can think or imagine there's a mind to them. So don't worry if that sounds kind of wild. And don't worry if it sounds completely obvious.

Either way, it's good. And uh, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Esther Lightcap Meek, she is just a joy as you'll hear. There's also just a lot of good cheer and laughter and a few little notes. I should say that there, we were of course doing this in a video call and sometimes we were communicating with our bodies like she's nodding and stuff, and you might not be able to tell that in the audio.

Sometimes there's like an affirmation that isn't auditory, but I think now that I've said that, you'll notice. Yeah, also there was some internet trouble and there might be a few little moments where there are some cuts, but 📍  hopefully it'll just flow right along. So thanks for being here. Thanks for listening this year. Thanks for whatever way you might've supported this, even if it's just by having a good thought about it. I really appreciate it. It's uh, not easy actually to make time and do all this, but um, it's really worth it and, yeah, thanks for. For giving me a chance to do it, man, I just send you a lot of love and whatever you might need today, I hope you, you get it, you feel it, you give it, which is even better.

All right. Bye.

  📍 Okay. Well, hello Esther. It's so wonderful to have you on love and philosophy. Thanks for being here.  

Well, you're so welcome. And, and I'm so excited, you know, love and, and philosophy. What a great title with full of all kinds of resonances and possibilities. So I look forward to a good conversation. 

Indeed.

It's not an easy title either. Talking to a lot of philosophers and neuroscientists, uh, the love part is often a bit hard. Um, I don't know if you've encountered that at all with your, your work talking about love in any philosophical context or, 

you know, I, I, I haven't, I mean, and I haven't talked to that many neuroscientists, but to me it's just not, it, it seems so obvious.

Um, and I really have been doing a bit of my own thing. Um, so I've been charting my own course and, um, I think, and, and the people that I think of as my audience are not in the ivory tower. You know, they're, they're in the streets. Yeah. And that I, I think usually if I have some time, you know what I have to say really resonates profoundly, um, I don't see.

What I usually see myself doing is, um, helping people see that this is what they've been doing all along. So it's kind, kind of restorative. 

And I think a lot of people resonate with that, and I love it that you're just doing your own thing. Um, how did you get into doing, doing all this? I know you had some big questions as a kid.

is that a good place to start for how you became Sure, 

yeah. A philosopher, so, well, I, um, I think of myself as, um, starting when I was 13, but now I, I don't think that anymore. I think I started with babyhood, but, but at 13 I found myself with really skeptical questions. And, uh, one was, how do I know that God exists?

I, I was, uh, in a Bible believing church and family, um, but I was missing a premise, I think. And um, so how do I know that God exists? And the other is, how do I know that anything exists outside my mind? And that seemed to me glaringly obvious that I was certain of the contents of my mind, which is pretty hilarious.

Um, and just because I was in touch with that and that was certain, it was actually blocking me from reality. So a picture, kind of a picture of me in here, in the world out there, and then this screen of ideas, uh, or mental content that actually prevented me from, from. Uh, being sure it was true. So you had that 

feeling as a kid already, like did, I mean age 13?

Did you feel that kind of blockage? I know you probably wouldn't put it in such words, but Yeah. 

Yeah. Well, I never told anybody 'cause uh, you know, I, I, I just, I knew they were odd questions, but, but I just felt like I had no proof that the world was outside my mind, and that seemed to me to be like, the most foundational thing that one needed to have proof about.

So, so, um, yeah. In, in my more recent writings, you know, I, for, for many, many years, I called myself a baby skeptic. But now I see it was, I wasn't a baby skeptic, I was an adolescent onset skeptic. So that's, that actually freed me up to see how exuberant I was about real reality as a baby, as a child.

Why was it a secret? Why couldn't you tell people this? Because I feel like this is a, in a way, a very, a lot of us can resonate with this. I'm resonating with this. I, I remember being a kid and having questions and, but I also resonate with not being able to really feel like you could express that. What, what was that about for you?

Why couldn't you talk? 

Well, the main one was, you know, I was surrounded by people who loved Jesus. Mm-hmm. And, uh, uh, I, you know, if you, you have questions, uh, uh, if you're skeptical about the existence of God, that sounds like sin, you know? So, so I was a very dutiful child, and so there wa I don't think anybody around me would've, you know.

Been open to my expressing that. And then honestly, I thought the question about the world outside my mind was no. Like, it was just, it sounded ridiculous. Yet I, you know, I, I couldn't discount it, but I, I sure wasn't talking about it either. 'cause nobody else seemed to be having problems, you know, not that I asked them.

Right, right. So, uh, moving on real quickly from that, you know, it was in high school that I, um, read the, some of the work of Francis Schaefer, and that's when I feel like I realized that my questions weren't sin, they were philosophical and that responses to them had shaped whole cultural epics across the disciplines, which fired my imagination for interdisciplinary studies.

But then I still didn't realize, I didn't know you could actually study philosophy. And when I found that out. It took me 12 hours to change my life and, you know, go study philosophy because it just, um, it just, I felt morally obligated. I was sure I, I wasn't smart enough, but I had to, I had to do it because I felt like those were the most important questions.

yeah. How, how much did you think about this, do you think, as like an adolescent and I mean, was this, this was This was a pretty urgent feeling in you, I guess, right? 

Yeah, and I guess I would say I think I lived a normal life, but, and I don't remember a, a continual existential, ongoing angst about it. But, you know, obviously. There was something about it that seemed absolutely fundamental. And it, to me, all along, especially as I got into philosophy, it just seemed so obvious to me that the fundamental questions were the most important ones because they were like the bottom, the foundation of whatever anybody's argument.

it just always seemed to me that the, the most fundamental. Questions were the most important because they affected everything else, which will make a philosopher out of you. 

Yeah. And I think it relates to what you're talking about, about street philosophy and philosophy being this everyday thing or even a therapeutic, approach.

sometimes people have to go through academia and all the study to realize that, that that's actually what it is. But it sounds like from the beginning you were integrating it in a way to use that word. Um, maybe not. I mean, 

I do. No, you just described sounds accurate to me. You know, I, it became apparent that I needed to study philosophy and then it became apparent that if you study philosophy, you have to go as far as a PhD if you're gonna do anything with it.

And I did all that. And, although even I addressed this matter in my dissertation, I don't, I didn't feel like it was resolved. I felt like I still had the questions. So. Also like I as tell in my new book, the Mother Smile. Um, you know, I, I had babies by that point, so, so I had a life to live and I was like, this was like down to earth life.

And so I, because of them always had a drive to, to take, to just step out of the guild and, and make it every day. And finding Michael Pei's work around when I was, let's say 24, um, you know, really gave me an epistemology that, that, uh, started to allow me to do that.

Well, it just seemed to me that, um, I'm not done my work as a philosopher until I can express it for every day. 

when you were doing your degree though, were you trying to do the conventional, you know, the conventional way? Is that sort of where you were and Yeah.

And what gave you the confidence to, was it Polanyi maybe, or how did you find, because it, I think it takes a certain kind of confidence to even begin to write the way you wrote your books, where you kind of say like, okay, philosophers, uh, I'm gonna do this. You're kind of holding both things, right?

Obviously you've studied your philosophy. But you're also taking this confident stance that this is gonna be about real life. Yeah. Which is not an easy thing to do in academia. So I'm super appreciating that. Oh, I appreciate it so much. Yeah. 

Yeah. So, because at, at the beginning of Loving To Know, which is the book that you're, um, primarily interacting with, you know, I really do say, look, this is for ordinary people, but it's also for, you know, the philosophers.

Because the philosophers are ordinary people too, you know. Um, so, and I do feel that, you know, the approach that I take in, in loving to know and the things that I develop are actually really essential to philosophy. It's just that nobody talks that way. 

I think so too. And I think it's really about all those main problems that we would list as philosophers, you know?

And I actually think bringing pian in is really. Wonderful. And even though it, it is written in a way that's very easy to read, and we're talking about life in a direct way, which is really refreshing, and you don't have to be a philosopher to read it. Um, you know, as the book goes along, it's quite philosophical.

I mean, you're layering things together and you know, you, you can tell you've thought through it as a philosopher. Um, but I think this talks to this focal subsidiary integration aspect, which I would like for you to maybe unpack a bit because I feel like we already have been talking about that a bit.

Like, that for me helps me understand that childhood experience that we have of where, you know, that that movement of kind of the subsidiary becoming focal or, or noticing the patterns, um, but also, you know, in philosophy itself, uh, how, how we might need to focus on particular kinds of academic sources at first so that we find our confidence.

Um, so, so all of this for me becomes by the end of the book, uh, really. It almost like a practice in practice, you know, like the book is a practice of the practice, but what is that practice like? How can we unpack that for people that, 

hold on. Oh, that's so great. You are, and you are just like connecting on a very high level.

This is wonderful because it has everything to do with dissertations. so when I talk to most people that I talk to, I start with riding a bike. 

Yeah. Your dad. I think I, I remember this. 

Yeah. The bike stories and loving to know. And, um, but, uh, I get people to, um, identify in their own life, um.

Aha. Like a a, an example of an aha moment, a moment of insight, but also what's a skill that they have because, because skills, uh, are help you, uh, show the subsidiary focal integration, um, in the performance. So skills are pretty easy to get people talking about, whether it's penmanship or crochet or mm-hmm.

You know, athletics or music, you know, especially something with an instrument. Mm-hmm. Uh, helps people see. So in the case of the bike, you know, uh, as you're beginning to learn a skill, you focus on. Disparate things that you're being expected to put together. So, uh, you know, the bike for me was an alien contraption that I did not trust, and I didn't know how one would ever keep their balance on two points, which is pretty funny.

Uh, my body was totally opaque and my father's words might as well have been another language. Right. So all of it was opaque and disconnected and so he's telling 

you to balance or something right. As if you would know what that is, right? What is 

that? Yeah, he yells balance and pushed me. He pushed me down the hill, which, you know, isn't exactly a bad thing to have done because he knew he couldn't put it into words.

Right. So, so he hoped by the end of the hill I would be riding. Mm-hmm. Well, when you get so you get the skill, what happens is all those things that you were focusing on. You come to indwell and Pei's word is subsidiary. So when he says that, it means, uh, you rely on them to, uh, shape or focus the pattern.

And actually the pattern is the thing that interprets the clues to you. So the clues are subsidiary to the pattern. That's why where he gets the word. And, um, yeah. So when you get, so you can, can keep your balance on a bike, you realize that keeping your balance like that sense, that felt sense of balance is a essential to the riding, but it's also subsidiary.

So if you, if you were to focus on it, you'd probably fall off the bike, right? So, so pei's point is all knowing has not one but two levels, the from level and the two level. And your job is not to get rid of the subsidiary. Your, your job is to actually cultivate it as from awareness, so that if you're in a skill or in an artistry, if you think of, you know, uh, I don't know.

I always think of examples that I've never done, like, you know, surfing or driving, you know, that sort of thing. Or just driving a car. You know, it's not this linear focal step-by-step process. It's that you artfully indwell a car and you do subsidiary with, with intentionality the things that you need to do to, to, uh, carry out the performance.

So your focus is not on your foot on the pedal. Uh, and if it were, the car would. I mean, you'd, you'd have an accident. You'd have an accident. So if you revert to fixate on what you ought to be in dwelling, subsidiary, Polanyi called that destructive analysis. And, uh, some it has to, that's where you start.

It's kind of, it has to be done from time to time. But the point is that, A, it's meant to be temporary. And b, it's not meant to be the paradigm of knowledge. So focal information as the paradigm of knowledge it has, is what has, uh, infected modernity. You know, if acknowledges information, what that does is actually cut you off from reality.

Yeah, which is why I had the problem. 

Yeah. I love this on so many levels. Let me just be a little messy and you take it where you want. But coming out of neuroscience, I think of cognition as, an act that's that subsidiary that then maybe some part of it is focal, which is what we think of as our, our thinking, this whole voice in the head thing.

But it's really just the focal part in this kind of, kind of support that's always there too, or I'm not sure how you could maybe clarify it better, but as I read the book, I start to notice you're kind of showing us that we're part of a, a sort of larger process that we can trust but then you can't keep thinking about it all the time.

Like, we don't think about what the alphabet is and all this stuff when we're reading. I don't know if that makes sense, for you or if you wanna. Bring up maybe the, what the body means in all of this or something, but for me it feels it's actually solving a lot of those seeming mind body problems, right?

Yeah. In a way. Yeah. And Polanyi himself does have an essay that you might like to read. It's in the collection called Knowing and Being, can't remember the name of it, but it's the, the two last, uh, essays in there. I think it's the next to last one, but it's a, he really felt like this subsidiary focal integration is what, uh, resolved the presumed mind body problem.

So, and you know, as I think just in an ordinary way right now. To try to understand my mind. You're indwelling my body right as I am yours. So, so, you know, it's a very exposed thing to give a lecture, for example, because yeah, you have to welcome people to indwell your body to get at the, the what we call the mind.

So, and you gotta indwell your own body to get at the mind too. So there's all that. Now, let's see. Have I lost the train of thought? Oh, I, I know what I thought maybe you were headed toward is you said something about trusting, trusting maybe what's beyond you. And so like, what, what I would like to say is Polanyi said all knowledge is from too.

From to, from the subsidiaries to the focal pattern. But, and this is the what I let, what captured my heart in pni and I did my dissertation on, it's also from to and beyond because what he, I, I'm the kid that felt like she had no contact with reality, you know, and here's this premier scientific discovery that would blithely say, oh, by the way, you know, you've made contact with reality.

Like, who says that? And that's exactly what I needed to hear. When you have a sense, an uns specifiable sense, you can't put it into words of indeterminate. You can't say what it is, future appearances or manifestations. So I called that the IFM effect, and that's what I wrote my dissertation on. Well. Those IFMs or indeterminate future manifestations.

You know, a, a simple way to say it is possibilities. You know? So you found my work and you said, oh, there's a possible, there's a possible podcast or two in this. Right? So, so, so that's possibilities, and it's actually those possibilities that you feel. But you can't, you can't even test them because you can't articulate them.

But you've got this felt sense that it's like you walked into a place that there's a space and it's fraught with richer meaning. Okay. Exactly. Yeah. So I would say if you think back to learning to read, right? Uh, you struggled to learn what the letters. Say, you know, you struggled to write them. I, I taught my kids to do this, and then I handed them a little book and, and got my camera and, you know, they were following the rules that they had learned, and all of a sudden they went, oh.

And they were reading. So what that oh moment is, is when the, the, the letters on the page went from focal to subsidiary. And you ha honestly, you have got to have subsidiary focal integration to read and to make meaning. Because what happens is you've gotta indwell the text. You know, you're not, if you fixate on the s that's the end of the story.

You know, because you're, you, you've just blocked the view to, to whatever the reality is. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, or, or, mm-hmm. Whatever it is. But, but no, you w you wear the text, meaning, you know, you, you read, you're reading. That's what we mean by reading. Right, right. So reading is putting it at the subsidiary to open the world to, and through the integrative pattern, to all kinds of possibilities.

Hmm. That's really wonderfully said and yeah, when I read your work, or actually some people told me about it just recently, so I'm just like, this is the first book I've read of yours. So hopefully this is the beginning of the conversation. But it wasn't that I thought, oh, there's a podcast in that.

Definitely not. It was more, uh, because I'm a philosopher and the reason I do this is like to try to make it public what's happening in the same way that you took the picture of your kids, in a way, I like to, to show this exact process that you just described in a way where you're coming into awareness of what's been holding you all the time in a different way.

And it's, it's an aha kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's, which I feels like Isn't that what, what this knowing is in a way, So the, 

if you, if you wanna, uh, so I feel that, uh, when I teach people subsidiary focal integration and teach them my philosophy, uh, they're not gonna be taken like out of their comfort zone into some alien word, full of realm of jargon.

They're gonna be restored to themselves. Mm-hmm. And my job, and, and like what I'm doing is teaching them what they've been doing all along. And what I see myself doing is kind of relaying the accents under what it is that they do when they know so they can see it. Because modernity teaches us to misdescribe when we self-describe.

Right. So we. We haven't put the right words on what we actually are doing well. So the things that we're doing well don't get honored and can and they can atrophy. Right. And that was Pei's point. You know, if knowledge is explicit information, no scientific discovery could ever happen. Hmm. But it does. So fix your epistemology if you want science to continue.

Wow. This is really rich because as you're talking the last two times, it reminds me, I mean, it feels like opening, um, pathways between what is connected or something like that, which is a very different feeling from there being these separate containers, which is more like what we learn in. Education. So I feel like, you know, that's that integrative I guess.

But you're sort of opening up whatever's all come from the past till now and into the future through these different maybe ways of becoming, I'm thinking of the magic eye where you suddenly, you know, I love that. Where you suddenly see this kind of new thing that's been there all along. And I guess like that's really different from that dichotomous way that a lot of us assume.

Right. And that's even in our language. 

Oh. Oh, it's very liberating. It is so liberating. I mean, I have seen repeated transformation in my students. Teaching them this. It's, it's a beautiful thing. It's a beautiful thing. So, 

because they, because they connect to it in their own life and in their own body. Is that, yeah.

So it's different than just sitting there putting something in your head, kind of that idea. Right. 

Right. Because if, and that's why, you know, I can't write epistemology textbooks because, uh, you're, it's not gonna be additional information that fixes this. Okay. I gotta say some stuff, but it, it's, that's why I use the word therapy.

It's something that you've been bodying that's mistaken. That you need, that needs to be reoriented. 

Yeah, you do. I love that you talk about that epistemological therapy or even being a. Sort of philosophical therapist, um, because I think it connects also to the body too. And it's because you're not talking about just talk therapy.

I mean, you talk about dance and the body's a very important part in all of this. And, um, I actually feel like maybe that kind of academic world is starting to realize that too through something like four e embodied cognition and all this. They're trying, we're all trying to kind of come to this. young students now want.

To understand knowledge and cognition through exactly what you're presenting, this lived bodily way. Which doesn't mean we like get rid of all the other stuff, I'm thinking about the dichotomies or the daisy of dichotomies or this kind of conventional way that you talk about in the first part of the book.

So if you see knowledge as focal information, right? and, and we do, that's what, that's what the mindset is that defines modernities knowledge is information and then your job is to collect it. 

Exactly, 

yeah. The information.

That's what people kind of assume is what we're talking about. So that's what I'm trying to bring up here. So, 

Well the thing is, uh, what information, like what is not expressed in that is that information is articulated in sentences and it's focal.

Meaning you focus on it. Okay? So somebody might like say, well, what does that even mean? Well, there's good reason they might say that, but, but you know, if you think of writing sentences up on the board, you know, or like, you know, people are just liable to say, well, two plus two is four. Right? Okay.

That, that's gotta be knowledge, right? Well, there's nothing wrong with information, but there's everything wrong with information as the philosophical paradigm of how we know, okay? So you gotta collect information, but why do you collect the information? You collect it so you can wear it, so you what you want.

You learn the times tables, so you indwell them. Subsidiary. And so what pe the, the word, the idea that practically everybody is missing that PNI has, is the idea of the subsidiary. So even when your students rightly feel like they want their cognition to be embodied, they, they're not given the word subsidiary, so they don't get this from tooth thing.

But if you are gonna be a baseball player, you better be doing subsidiary focal integration, or you will not make it as a professional. You know, it's like an, it's, you cannot play baseball if you're not doing subsidiary focal integration. So, and then we start, you start saying, okay, baseball, well now that might lead to this daisy of dichotomies where we think, well, if it's physical.

You know, it's not what goes on in the classroom, it's kind of mind, we can think it's mindless or even when we start talking about, you know, training our bodies, we use the word motor memory, which we, which can tend to continue to, to treat our body like a machine that needed to learn, like AI needs to learn, right?

So it's not, it's not a felt body sense, but if you see an athletic artist, you know, like we at, in the Pirates in Pittsburgh, um, have a, a, a, um, pitcher that just won the Cy Young Award, you know, and there's just like nobody that can get a hit off of this guy. You know? He's like, and he's young. He's young, young, young, but somehow his body has, is this rich wisdom.

Of, of, uh, being a, a, a pitcher. But then see what what we've inherited in modernity is okay. Yay. Knowledge and knowledge is information. Best example would be science. Uh, has something to do with objectivity. Uh, so yay. Objectivity. We love analysis. Co breaking it down to the bits. That's when we think we've got control.

Actually, this is a kind of a co control approach, which is what modernity is really all about. I think it's control and power, right? Uh, so, yay. Objective. Yay. Science. Boo emotion. Yay. Knowledge boo. Faith. Yay. Reason boo. Art. Yay mind boo body though that's, you know, so complicated now. 'cause of the whole neuroscience thing, I would say we also tend to say this is male yay male boo female.

Not, not that any particular man might think that way, but somehow, you know, this masters and possessors of nature that set up modernity is very masculine sounding like it's about triumph over a female. So those, those binaries, and the reason I'm talking about a daisy is I developed this as a diagnostic to help people see that they've got all kinds of presumptions about knowledge.

Right. So it, it's knowledge or it's not knowledge, it's faith. So as a Christian believer, the faith reason, divorce, you know, is a big thing. You know, do you have to give up your mind to love Jesus? Which is, I, I think any Christian believer, uh, gets confronted. Like people considering Christianity have their, their nose pressed into that, you know, which is what the book longing to know is about.

So, so, um, I think that whole, all those dichotomies are endemic to, to modernity. Another thing that's endemic is on that di that daisy of dichotomies, there's no, um, role for responsibility like taking personal covenantal responsibility to risk, to pledge, to invite reality. None of that's on the day on the Daisy.

Mm-hmm. So I think we, you know, I like to, um, stack on the metaphor. So, um, I think we need to torpedo the daisy. Just tear it up and start over. And I find that Ian subsidiary focal integration does, it doesn't even like critique the daisy. It just dispels it. 

Yeah. Gosh, Esther, there's, there's so much in here with, control, for example, you brought up control, which is very different from this commutative covenant.

View way that what, that you present in the book and that you're living. but I guess what I'm trying, what I wanna bring up is, this is kind of hard for people. I don't think it's maybe hard in certain circles. Like if you're in a religious, community that talks about love and stewardship and a lot of the things that you get to in the book, but I know a lot of people who are listening to this maybe are in a different kind of community where if you talk about these kind of things you probably get laughed at and you can't write your papers about them.

And it's hard, right? Like there's something there about the control that you're supposed to always have control, and the way you show it is not by being in your body and, and dancing. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. 

But which is more objective, uh, like, uh, like my point. Well, and that you, you, uh, cotton onto, uh, Parker Palmer, he's the one that says this, you know, uh.

Is it more objective to garner information or is it more objective to, uh, dance, uh, dance with another person? You know, like a personal relationship is actually way more objective because you don't have control. Mm-hmm. And, and see in on the daisy we've thought, yay, objective. And, and so all the, the, um, the, uh, you know, pedals or whatever members of the ordered pair are in the center.

Clustered in the center, and then out on the pedal are, are the delegitimate ones, right? So if, if knowledge is objective, your only alternative is subjective. Well, so again, where does inter person relationship, where does it show up? On the daisy, it doesn't show up at all. But if you stop and think about it.

If you wanna, if you think about the word objective, it ought to have at least as one of its meanings, something beyond me, right? I mean, the push is to keep myself out of it, to be objective. That's where PNI starts, personal knowledge. And he said, well that's dumb 'cause, 'cause you can't have science if you don't have a great scientist.

I think that is the real knowing. But I guess what I wanna also appreciate is that it's scary. Yeah. And a bit hard. And maybe that's why we created all these seeming blocks and containers, you know, because you're so vulnerable and you're so having to realize you're not, you are these personal relations and I, I guess I'm just trying to put out that that's actually. That takes a kind of practice, with other people, doesn't it? 

Yeah. You know, and the people, the students who have struggled the most are the perfectionists. Mm. So there is something OCD about. The information side is OCD, you know, so, so if we're control freaks, it's kind of because it's the air that we've, we've inhaled.

So, but do, isn't it, you know, when you start to think, well, maybe control is endemic to this modernist approach to human mastery, possessing nature control, letting, having, you know, doing, making it do what we want, right? Mm-hmm. Uh,

if you start to think of, of that in relational terms, don't you see that, that sort of posture. Would make reality not what it really is, but uh, it would reduce it to compliance and turn it into like, we can't get to know it. We can't get to know it. I mean, you can't do that to a horse and have the horse flourish.

Right. Right. I mean, endless stories. Endless stories. I don't know if you know Sea Biscuit that speak of horse? Yeah, I do. I read the book. Yeah. So that was one abused horse. And then when he was loved, he gave his heart, he gave his all, you know? Mm-hmm. And became a great horse. So, so that, that's what, that's, and this is where I thought maybe you were going maybe a little bit back is, is that's way more three-dimensional.

And so in loving to know, you know, when I say, when I like starting from the pian idea that knowing is from, to and beyond that it opens these possibilities in longing to know. I say it's not like reality answers your questions so much as that it explodes them. So it kinda redraws the playing field and you are the one that's being questioned sometimes, but, but it's almost like there's a person there.

So, you know, that moves me toward trying to argue also in loving to know that reality is person like. And that, and if that's the case, then if you treat it like a person, that might be really good, you know, wise epistemic practice, which is what inviting the real is about. 

I love the invitation to the real and, the way that the real, it's this potency and this, this, you, you mentioned Parker Palmer and I talked to him recently and we talked about, maybe love is what's holding us even when we can't feel it.

And I think that relates to what does, does that make sense for you at all? 

yeah. So the subsidiary in a way is, is a, a kind of intimacy. Mm-hmm. It's also a kind of trust. Mm-hmm. So if you think about becoming a great bike rider. Or a great guitarist. There's an intimacy, a communion with that instrument.

Right. But there's also, and this is what I was gonna say. Okay. The aha moment. So what, when you have an aha moment in the, in the context of a skill, when you have the, oh, I'm a bike rider moment, I figured it out. Uh, or if you make a discovery. Um, so I have a wonderful Copperhead story in longing to know. I think there's a tarantula story, loving to know, but the copperheads and longing to know where I spied the copperhead.

And he was sitting at my feet looking up at me in the presence of my three small children. So anyway, my world shifted, right? My world shifted. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But when you have that aha moment of discovery, what it feels like is you have like the, the veil has dropped and you are eye to eye with that reality.

You're looking eye to eye. And um, then it like that, it's like, okay, there's somebody there and what's more, they were looking at me before I was looking at them. Right. They found me first. And so that's the being known thing, which I think you mentioned in your notes too. So you were being known before the.

You recognized that and that's exactly, yeah. Way four, three dimensional. It's like, how can that not be objective? 

That actually I think might be something like an epiphany for some people, because then what you were saying before, you can understand that it was always there, but you, you hadn't, uh, had that kind of, uh, what is it like, you talk about differentiation and longing and loving because I, I feel like all these things are in that, in that moment of the reel, of the invitation of the reel of that.

I think we've all had that time. Whether it's when you first learn to read, when you ride a bike, when you see the copperhead suddenly, or even in a more mundane way, when you look at the magic eye and suddenly you see the pattern just suddenly, you know that, that sense of being in a different reality, even though it's the same reality you've always been in, how is that also a way in which we are.

It's beyond dichotomy. I mean, it's, things are still different. It's not that we've made everything into some one thing, but So, so how do you Yeah. What, what's, what can you say about that to 

say that you constructed it? I mean, that it's like, you know, it's just No reality was looking for you. Yeah. Oh, and it's like, oh, I've been seen.

I've been seen. So, so there, this takes an incredible humility. Yeah, but it's so, it's so joyous. And then see what happens is if you figure out, let's say, so this guy, Paul Skees is the Cy Young Award pitcher. Somewhere in his childhood, his youth or childhood, something must have clicked and he went, oh. And what happens is, is when you have that aha moment, you are actually embedded in reality.

You, it is like you connect with it. I know how to pitch, uh, whatever ball. You know, it's like the, and then the world opens up to you in possibility. So when I'm talking about bike riding, I say once you figure out how to ride a bike, the world comes to you in so many possible bike paths that you never saw before.

And, and it's because you're in, you become embedded. So unlike the knowledge as information, knowledge as focal information paradigm, the information actually cuts you off from reality such that you might not even care about reality 'cause you have the information. So, you know, that's called positivism.

You know, I've heard plenty of scientists talk that way. You know that this is just about the data. Well, that's, you know, I'd like to say something crass at the moment, you know, that's just crazy, you know? So, but to, to have to find yourself, to have been thrust out into this beautiful world that was your own all along, you know?

Mm-hmm. And that, that your intimacy is encounter and count. Of course, it takes everything you have. That was, that was Pei's point. But that isn't subjectivity, that's humility. That's covenant. It's intimacy. And you know what I'm arguing in my last book, the Mother's Smile, is we were born into that encounter.

We, we were born into the most sophisticated philosophical paradigm. We're born into it. 

I just had a conversation too with someone, a neuroscientist philosopher talking about being in the womb and how we're always nested in this way and how kind of, when you were just talking, I was thinking of the larger nesting of, what we're all in still.

and that, I can't remember exactly how you say it in the book, but that where reality sees you or where, where you feel seen by life in that way. that makes me think of what you were saying about the objective and what Parker has said and stuff about the most objective thing being that it's a different idea of what self is though, isn't it?

It's it's not. 

Yeah. Yeah. Self is no longer the absolute anchor and guarantee, guar guarantee, the edn point for certain knowledge, which is what Descartes gave us. 

And it's also not static, is it? I mean, 

right. That's right. But it's not subjective. I mean it not in the, the same sense it's, it's, it's, it's all of you with all of it in communion.

It's that communion. Yeah. That interpersonal relation we were 

made, this is what we were made for. Communion with the real 

We were the lovers of the real. 

Yeah. And, and that interpersonal, connection and that relation, sometimes you talk about it, I think even as stewardship, um, or, you know, there's a responsibility to it too.

It's, we're not going to extremes here, and yet it's an extreme place to be, uh, to fill, to be, you know, it's so alive. And, um, how is like, you know, to, to relate that to knowing, because. This is a different kind of knowing than the information in the head thing that we were talking about before. Um, 

well, I would say, yeah, this is knowing and that's something else.

Okay. 

So, you know, like David Schindler says, well, if, if you don't have knowing and all you have is information, well it's better than it might be, but it's not knowledge because what the knowledge is is communion and all you need to do is be a baseball player to see that. Right? 

Yeah. I, I, I agree with that and I think we can understand it when we're doing something like playing baseball, but when we're doing something like learning in a classroom, which is changing now, um, it feels really important that we try to connect this, uh, in the way that we teach even, and even what, what teaching is, what education is instead of.

Now we have a very different relationship to that information side. And there's something about that communion and that, that way of knowing that feels so crucial right now. 

Yeah. Well, so I, and, and I, you know, I'm an emeritus professor, so I've had some classroom experience and, and I have taught lots of students this, and then their concern is, well, my classes, my other classes don't get this.

You know, well,

do you remember? I said There's nothing wrong with information. It's just wrong as a paradigm. And, um, I think that this covenant epistemology, and with its subsidiary, focal integrative component, which I'll always have, what it does is it makes information sing. So if you wanna do the, the best by your information, again, what you wanna do is wear it.

So like, you know, I started life in chemistry. Well, that periodic table, it needs to be somehow printed on your psyche so that you see the world in those columns. Right. Um, so I think in, in, in any place where learning is going on, there's some things you can identify that maybe you have been overlooking.

One is, I had told my students, you always wanna find a professor that's got a twinkle in their eye. Mm-hmm. So they, they're rap sodic about their own work. And you know what they like you too. Right. So that means they like teaching. Mm-hmm. So that twinkle is, is a. A piece that I, I would wanna underline an accent of the other.

Another would be, I think that co I wish my, you know, that colleges would see that their job is to cultivate lovers, you know, to cultivate lovers of the real, the whole thing you can do with data and assessment, educational assessment, that's all stuck in the modernist epistemology of knowledge is information, which means it's not going to give you the read on whether you've made a lover of the real.

But when you see students who graduate and they're glowing and so excited to get involved in the human genome project, it's that love. It's the love that's a clue that the education has happened. So, uh, and then you see every, every discipline has its moments of destructive analysis. If you're go, if you're gonna.

Learn the Hebrew Biblical, he Hebrew, you know, you gotta, you gotta promise to love, honor, and obey the syllabus where the teacher gives you these assignments and you gotta trust that that's gonna get you to the place where you can see reality, right? You have to, that's part of the commitment angle, the covenantal angle.

So, you know, every student has to commit. If, if they don't commit to do the homework, there is nothing I can do. I taught logic for 45 years. There's no way you can do logic if you don't do the home. So, but you, you know, I remember one student who did really well, you know, and had this surprised look afterward.

He said, well, early on I decided I would do exactly what you said. I said, good, you know, and that got him out. You know, and it's, and I would say to my logic, students, okay, what the goal is for you to wear your logical, you know, I kept saying, you wanna stick this in your pocket, you know? Yeah. And then, and then the world comes to you in, in, something like a logical structure.

It's like inviting the real by doing that, by doing the work and communicating. I think also you probably must, in your classes, there's, there's a sense of that you're not alone. Right. Even though you gotta do the work alone at home or whatever. It's, it feels more, I'm thinking of in your book when you talk about, some of the students who were friends, like their whole life and they love learning together.

Yeah. That kind of really stayed with me. Or even your book club or these kind of things where you're doing it together and you, there's, that's a different feeling than I see a lot of students where they feel like they're alone and they're fighting all their peers. Yeah. Even fighting their teacher, you know, maybe.

Yeah. So, so in my course in which I taught longing to know and Loving to Know, the third component of that course was a project and uh, so I called it a covenant epistemology project, and the students had to identify and get approved and act of coming to know that they would then undergo, and then their report was to identify all the features of knowing Allah.

Covenant epistemology. Okay. So there was the authoritative guide, there was the aha moment. Uh, there was where I was living life on the terms of the yet to be known, you know, as meant throwing as much of that terminology on it as they could. And that's what they presented in class. Well, at that moment I was sitting in the back of the room doing nothing and they were teaching each other and getting to be bosom friends in the process because it was just heaping on one proof after another.

If you look around this office, I'm not gonna take you on a tour, but there is covenant epistemology projects that I ended up wonderful in my room. You can actually see one there. That is, yeah. Oh cool. that's arm knitting. No. So you use your, your arms as the needles of the knitting. Oh. What she did in that presentation was she got us to knit on and off of each other's arms all around.

Oh, 

wonderful. 

Yeah. She gave it to me and wonder because I'm too hot to wear it. Something. Yeah. 

Yeah. Wow. There's just so much in there. And education itself is, it feels like it's in a crisis because it thinks AI can do everything a teacher can do, but actually this might be the moment where we go to that and we understand that.

we need to learn that that's actual education, that spirit that you're describing there and that, that feels really inspiring to me. The personal, the invitation to the real, which I, I definitely feel in your book too, and also that love. You're worth loving, right? Like that sense in the classroom that it, it's worth something to do this.

I think a lot of people miss that now, and that's part of that spirit too. And I know you need to go 'cause you have other responsibilities today. So 

I have a few more minutes, I'll run out. Oh, you do? Okay, 

good. So yeah, so yeah. So, what would you, if, if, if you were going to try to think about this age right now where everyone's freaking out a bit about, AI and we're just gonna let AI take over everything and How, how do we, a balance isn't the right word. Like your, your dad screamed out to you, but how do we hold the differentiation of that kind of amazing technology or whatever and what we were just talking about there, because I see people really struggle with how to get back in their body, or how to fill the community or wear, wear these things in the way that you're saying now.

You know, because like a lot of kids just grew up without that. act as knowing, and, and all that's coming to mind. Also, the longing, you know, that this isn't like a. We're not satisfied or something. I mean, there's a longing that's very important, like your preacher told you, or whoever it was told you, that's the most important word. Yeah. Right. All, all of that's coming up. So I don't know.

You take it anywhere you want, but, well, one nasty 

thing about modernity is, we distrust reality and we, we have forgotten that knowing, of course, is about knowing the real. So it it, like, I call it the devil's bargain in, in, uh, mother's smile. It's like you only have certainty if you cut yourself off from reality.

So we've, we've lost our, our confidence, if not even our taste for the real and. So that's part of what's going on. So that I think in that setting, AI and all our, you know, uh, temptation to be on our phones all the time and think that's reality, that it, it might not be so tempting if we weren't so vulnerable already.

So the, so there's that, um,

pni, uh, actually was on the faculty at Manchester University when Alan Turing was And Polanyi says in a footnote, in personal knowledge, I dissent. I dissent from Turing's idea that machines can think, and actually the two of them put on a, a symposium and invited scholarship to enter into this, this conversation.

Um, and uh, pei's got a little two page essay. It's called Intro to Introduction to Cybernetics. That was the old word for I know cybernetics. And, um, what he says is that, that could never be because knowledge is inherently uniz.

So I think you can kind of quick associate it with me saying, well, information is not knowledge. It's not knowledge. But for, for AI or for, you know, Turings can machines think, you would have to say that it's, it's, um, formal realizable knowledge is formalize. So, but when you, again, when you think of the baseball pitcher or you think of the trainer of sea biscuit, that's way richer.

It's an artistry. It's an intimacy. You know, another movie this comes out in is, um, Sully. 

I haven't seen that. 

Well, it's about the, uh, pilot that actually landed the plane on the Hudson River. 

Oh, wow. Right, 

right. So there, yeah, the, he makes, you know, the deal that, you know, the computers say he could have gotten back to the airport.

Well, he knew he couldn't. Right. 

so it's a kind of listening to what your body or something, or I mean with solely or with, or is it the, the being in relation to the current. 

Alright. Okay. Back back. So back to why I brought up Polanyi. Polanyi would say artificial intelligence is a wonderful tool and what, what Polanyi said about tools and theoretical frameworks too is that they're meant to be subsidiary in dwelled.

You know, that's where does the information go? Well, you wanna put it at the subsidiary. And so, like somebody said to me in a, a conversation yesterday that, you know, just even in the last few months as a business design thinker, you know, he can now do. The work of that it would've taken a team of 10 people to do, he could now do by himself because of ai.

Well, the fact is he is still doing it. You know what I'm saying? And so, so more of it has become like, if you get a good tool, it kinda leverages whatever, but you don't worship the tool. I mean, and, and actually, you know, it, I do think computer scientists love their software and love their, their, um, their computers.

But it's a, it's a subsid. It's meant as a subsidiary the way you'd love your guitar, right? If, if you're, if you're making music. So I may very well be incredibly naive. There's so much, I don't know. Um, but it, it just seems to me a question of what you've got a above and what you've got below. 

Actually, it's very refreshing because it just feels kind of putting it in perspective that.

It's, it's another way to be in vicinity, maybe with the real or something, without it becoming the real. I think that's the kind of the trick that people have maybe grown up with, thinking the screen is the real. Mm-hmm. And that's maybe the hard thing to realize because then you have, like, you know, when you're in vicinity, when you're with a bird, whether you're with another person, when you're with your friend, that, that's a different and a real kind of knowing in the way we've talked about.

But I think if you've had the mediation of the screen mm-hmm. Since you were born, it can be, you know, you have to relearn that in a way, or you have to learn that or, or something is, 

yeah. So for, somebody said to me at a recent conference, why, why isn't the internet just as real as the world?

Uh. Well, I guess one thing I wanna say is it does seem to, uh, there's something about it that seems inclined to vice rather than virtue. Um, you know, we, we all kind of have a sense that this is not good for our children, you know, and, um, you know, and I, one of the things about my kind of subsidiary awareness that I cherish, cherish, cherish, cherish is orientation.

Like, I wanna know where North is South, east and West, and I want that to subsidiary fill in my driving. I, if I don't know which way the sun's coming up, you know? Mm-hmm. And I wanna be able to say, well, you wanna get to the mall, you wanna go west from here? I wanna, but if people have grown up on Google Maps.

They're deprived of the opportunity of learning that intimacy. So, and I think you would find that with any kind of craft or skill. Like one of the books I talk about in Doorway to Artistry is one my artist's son-in-law recommended, which is called, um, fewer, better Things. And, and, and he talks about the, uh, he talks about material intelligence.

You know, that really, this is dumb, not smart, right? This is a dumb object, 

funny. We call it smart, right? 

We call it smartphone. And you know, he's a curator of a museum, but he talks about skilled learning. He talks about his grand, his somebody, some kid, girl in his grandfather's generation who, um, she babysat at the neighboring farm.

H this is how the book starts and the pig. Something happened to the pig and she had to butcher the pig. She knew she had to butcher minute or they'd lose the pig. So she, and she was babysit. I dunno, you have to go. I'm not very good at remembering such things, but go read it in the book. It reminds me of Charlotte's Web, which is so 

sad.

Yeah, right. Something, something. but anyway, you know, when you start, stop to think of the, you, you, when you start to think of the craft that can get lost or, you know, here, you know, my temptation, I'll be very frank, you know, I've had, I've had a body issue that's kept me, you know, laid out a lot for the last several months and I've gotten really good at Sudokus.

Oh, wow. What I've found is I don't, if I'm on my phone all the time. My, my head somehow doesn't have the space of reverie or mm-hmm. Wandering or just kind of that presence to, to just following your thoughts. It's, and even if I'm listening to a book, even if it's a great book, my, my, I don't have that leisure, you know?

Mm-hmm. From, from my mind that I'm sure is essential to artistry. You know, if I'm gonna have a new book idea, I better get off my phone. That's how I feel. 

There's something really rich in that. There's like 5 million things I'd like to ask you now, but it's at the end. So, I mean, one thing just why don't we talk about Polanyi more, but that will have to be another conversation, but what, what, in all that you were saying, you brought up, and in the book too, there's a kind of sense of in your orientation or I think about this a lot because of thinking about the hippocampus and movement, but just being in a space and knowing where you are in relation to everything else and how that metaphorically, I think feels very important.

But also like literally kind of that sense of what you're in relation to. And when we are in relation only to our screen, it's narrowing. Yeah. 

Like a fe feeling that somebody's behind you? 

Yeah. Or that you're in that, like, multiplicity or, or this constellation rather than, flatland or something.

Um, I guess we, we do have to go now, but I, I wanna bring it to love because a, I don't know if you have any experiences of, of love that you wanna share, even just, uh, of Polanyi or something. I don't know. Like, what's, what's that word mean for you? Or what is it? Because it, it's such an important part of this book of course, but it's also, you know, it's where we kind of go in the end.

It's not even mentioned that much, but it's so much a part of it. And then we get to the invitation of the real and then, And then love feels very potent. 

But in longing to know, I said, well, knowing's a little like a marriage and you gotta promise to love, honor, and obey.

And then if you are having, having promised and covenanted, if you are blessed, reality will self-disclose, right? Like literally. So, so the covenantal dimension of knowing, it's like you, you are not entitled to reality. You're not entitled to it, right? That was the arrogance of, of modernity. Um, so, so there's that.

But here's what I've said in doorway to artistry and that might, I don't know, it might be my favorite book. It's certainly my happiest book. Um, yeah. You know, all this inviting the real stuff. Well, guess what? Reality was inviting first reality shows up and welcomes you and says, here I am, and I, I'm just following David Schindler in this.

You know that that's the moment of beauty when you say, look at that, right? And then what he says is, beauty attunes us to respond and love. So when we notice something, it's like this thing that said, here I am kind of commanded our attention and then our devotion. So that's where we promised a love, honor, and obey.

So for any student choosing a major, there was a moment of love. There was a moment when they fell in love with something. Parker Palmer says, geologists are the ones that hear rocks speak. Okay, and then what do you do? You just follow it in love and love makes you a better knower. So all that's in the loader stuff in in Lovington know.

It's like you need to be fully four dimensional to be a self-giving love. That's what he talks about. So to be able to and to be a great knower, I talk about the this as readiness to know and little manual to know you, you need to be fully formed. Having had a kind of a  📍 face-to-face encounter in, in the, in the, with, with the, the gracious in breaking of new being so that you, you grow a taste, a love, just a love of reality.

You wanna be lovers of the real, 

Andrea, I've gotta go. I know, I know. Thank you so much Esther. I hope you have a wonderful day. Yeah. 

Come back after me again and, and I'll tell us we 

wanna 

continue 

this conversation and thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so much and thanks for all your writing till soon.

Have a good day. Bye. Bye.