Longing To Know More

A Brief Meditation on Words

2006-09-07T09:11:00.000-05:00

Meaning is transcendent. Words are immanent. There is a transcendent Word. We speak words because we are made in the image of the Word, "that Word above all earthly powers"¹ that was in the beginning with God, that was God, through Whom all things were made². God said. He spoke, and it was.³ (I'm using the terms "transcendent" and "immanent" here in the technical philosophical sense.)

This is why words, when used as words, tend to function more like "clues" than like premises, even when structured like premises. The pattern they form points, not only to something beyond themselves, but ultimately beyond the material realm itself. I say "when used as words" because of the modern tendency to individualize, which manifests itself linguistically in the tendency to think of each word as a container of specific meaning. An individual word is not a clue to anything, in the LtK, sense, because it's not part of a pattern. A word out of context can have no certain meaning. Think you disagree? Bug. What does that word mean?

This is also why, when Western philosphy followed Kant down the Road to Nowhere (which, Ozzie Ozbourne tells us, leads to him - and in a sense he's right), we ended in linguistic deconstructionism. If the immanent can have no connection to the transcendent, then words are meaningless. Then they, like all else in the material realm, can be nothing more than tools for each individual to use for his own petty ends.

But if immanent words need not contain transcendent meaning, but need only form patterns that point to it, then we can retrace our steps back up from despair. Ultimately, in order to embrace words, we must embrace the Word.

More Lewisian Space Trilogian LtK

2006-04-14T09:38:00.000-05:00

Somehow, I failed to notice, on my first read, that the phrase "longing to know" actually occurs in the book Perelandra. In the middle of chapter 2, Lewis describes listening to Ransom, who is about to be sent to Venus, excitedly talking about the prospect of finding out things we don't know about Venus, things precluded from terrestrial view by its thick atmosphere. In response, Lewis "felt a vicarious thrill of wonder and of longing to know."

There's a wonderful passage in chapter 3 of Perelandra about the fact that, "It takes a huge effort to put into words what lies at the border of, and perhaps beyond, articulation," (from the Forward to LtK), and how "words function less like premises and more like evocative clues." (chapter 10 of LtK). After Ransom returned from Perelandra, Lewis had been questioning him on his experience of traveling through space in the "coffin," "and had incautiously said, 'Of course I realize that it's all rather too vague for you to put into words,' when he took me up sharply, for such a patient man, by saying, 'On the contrary, it is words that are vague. The reason why the thing can't be expressed is that it's too definite for language.'"

As an aside, there's something of the feel of this in Dicken's Hard Times, wherein he reveals the idolatry of Rationalism. While epistemological concerns as such aren't as explicit in Dickens' Hard Times as in Lewis' Space Trilogy, the inhumaneness, or inhumanity, of the Enlightenment view of knowledge is ever at the fore. Coketown's magnates attempt to treat all human interaction as merely factually as possible. Only hard facts are allowed to count as knowledge, and all else is strictly forbidden. If Dickens had written a treatise rather than a story about the problem, he might have described the Enlightenment view as "blue book epistemology." Today, we might call it "spreadsheet epistemology." By any name, it blackens our view of the sky, chokes our breath, and knocks us in the head until it kills us.

Clearly, reading LtK has changed the way I read everything else forever.

Concrete and Abstract Clues

2006-03-11T11:04:00.000-06:00

In the book LtK, Dr. Meek gives three categories of clues (used in the technical sense she defines in the book): in your world, in your body, and in the directions. The distinction is helpful but, in my opinion, not very precise. All of the clues are in your world -- your body and the directions exist in your world. So, what we really have is a situation in which all clues come to us (at least initially) from our world, but we distinguish two categories of world-clues (we can just say "clues" since all clues are world-clues) which do not cover the whole field between them. We have:

in-my-body-clues
directions-from-authoritative-guides-clues
all the rest of the clues

I think another distinction can made within all the rest. Some clues are essentially concrete, or material; by that I mean that the sensory data itself acts as a clue. Others are essentially abstract; by that I mean that the sensory data tells us nothing in and of itself; rather, the meaning we assign to it as information is what acts as the clue.

Take, for example, Dr. Meek's illustration of the Magic Eye picture of the dolphins. The dots themselves act directly as clues, they themselves form the pattern. Or consider what we do while driving a car. Much of what we perceive visually of the road and surrounding traffic tells us immediately how to control the machine to accomplish our objective safely. We see the road curving, and we know that we must turn the steering wheel when we reach that curve if we wish to keep the car on the road. The visual data is the clue.

But consider Dr. Meek's copperhead example. In the book, it illustrates clues in the directions, because we have to be taught how to distinguish a copperhead from the forest floor, as well as from a non-poisonous snake. But, the directions having been received, the clues of the coloration and the hourglass shapes on the snake's back are clues from the world which must needs be integrated with the direction-clues. But even though they come from the world, they don't act directly as clues. Rather, the meanings we associate with the information we gain from the sensory data are what acts as clues. Maybe that's not very well said. I'm thinking of it as a chain or hierarchy of the flow of information: eye sees hourglass shapes --> brain recalls ideal hourglass shape, compares these instances of it, and correctly identifies them as real instances of the hourglass shape --> brain recalls that authoritative guide taught us to associate this shape on a copper-colored snake's back with the idea of a copperhead snake. It's what we associate with that shape in the abstract that lets us know we're seeing a copperhead.

Or consider once again the case of driving with respect to road signs (for reasons I'm completely unaware of, I've always gravitated toward making automobile-related illustrations). While visual images of the road itself work directly as clues, the official road signs must be interpreted. We learn to associate certain shapes and colors with certain kinds of instructions. Upright rectangle, white with black letters, small letters at top with large, two-digit number underneath: long before you're close enough to see the words "speed limit," you know that it's a speed limit sign, because that's what speed limit signs look like in the USA. After you've been driving for a short time, you pick up that number in your peripheral vision, glance at your dashboard, and know how much over the limit you're going. :-) The knowledge of your speed, and of what speed you ought to be limiting your vehicle to, is not gained directly from the visual data. It's inferred from meanings you have learned to associate with data of that kind. The image in your eyeball of a shape similar to 35 is not the clue. It must be combined with your understanding of what 35 m.p.h. means in terms of the velocity of your vehicle relative to the road, and with your understanding of the authority of the state to require you to restrict your speed. It's your abstract comprehension of the meaning of "35" in this context that, combined with clues in the directions for driving received from authoritative guides, acts as a clue to your knoweldge of how fast you ought to be going.

I don't know quite how to label these differences. In fact, the distinction isn't parallel to the body-directions-remainder categories, because directions-clues are inherently abstract, while body-clues tend to be more concrete. Nevertheless, there are certainly non-directions-non-body abstract clues, and non-body concrete clues.

Here's how I came to think this stuff through. I subscribe to an electronic newsletter for webmasters that often contains very useful info, but was kind of hard to follow due to semantical irregularities. Everything about the look and "vibe" of the newsletter led me to tacitly assume that it was written by a very sharp teenager or very young man from either America or Great Britain. Some turns of phrase seemed definitely British, but the grammar seemed sloppy and chaotic in a way that suggested a product of the US public school system.

Even though the verbage was frequently confusing, I continued to read every issue because I was able to regularly glean savvy hints and tips. Then one day recently, the writer mentioned the name of his company in passing, and it had the word Singapore in it. Singapore! So that's it. He's an Asian using English as a second language.

Suddenly, I was able to follow him much better. The only thing that changed was that I expected him to sound like an Asian who hadn't quite mastered the English language, rather than picturing him as a poorly educated native English speaker. That was enough to dramatically increase my comprehension of what he writes.

Granted, the clue came from my world: from the writer, through the internet, to my computer screen, to my eyeball. But it served the role of clue, not at that point nor during that time, but afterward. It changed my expectations about what I read from him. It functions as a clue purely in the abstract. It's a clue in my expectations, which is, perhaps, a sub-category of non-directions abstract clues.

Anybody got any ideas for better labels?

C.S. Lewis Knew, Way Back When

2006-03-05T13:50:00.000-06:00

For my next installment in the developing "Artists Have Always Known" series (so far including J.R.R. Tolkien, Pete Townsend, Neil Peart, Gerry Rafferty, Art Blakey, Nashville studio musicians, the script writers for the movie Kate & Leopold, Flannery O'Connor, Steve Talbott, and George MacDonald): C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy. It's clear from certain passages in these books that, on some level, Lewis understood many of the essential principles outlined in LtK. The books were published in 1943.

Adept Perception, Latent Meaning, and Indefinite Possibilities

In Out of the Silent Planet, the unlikely hero is a man named Dr. Elwin Ransom, a middle-aged Cambridge fellow who is a philologist--a specialist in the science of language. After being kidnapped and taken away to the planet Malacandria, he escapes from his captors, and finds himself wandering alone, terrified, and with no idea what to expect. Encountering a large, seal-like creature, he overhears it making sounds that his trained ear knows must be a kind of speech:

"In the fraction of a second which it took Ransom to decide that the creature was really talking, and while he still knew that he might be facing instant death, his imagination had leaped over every fear and hope and probability of his situation to follow the dazzling project of making a Malacandrian grammar.... ...what might not one discover from the speech of a non-human race? The very form of language itself, the principle behind all possible languages, might fall into his hands."

As a philologist, Ransom had become expert at distinguishing language from non-language. He was skilled at knowing the difference between the sub-lingual (but still meaningful) sounds of mere animals and the complex orderliness of a true language. His ears knew what to listen for. This illustrates Lewis' grasp of an epistemology based in part on a "skilled egagement" of the world, which "unlocks" that world for the knower. It also shows that Lewis had some sense of the reality of hidden, or latent, meaning. He knew that a trained philologist (you remember that one of his closest friends, J. R. R. Tolkien, became the most "famousest" philologist in the world) could recognize that a pattern of sound was a meaningful pattern long before he could explicitly recognize any of the meaning in it.

Even more pronounced in that passage is the idea of the opening of indefinite possibilities, what Dr. Meek calls "uspecifiable future prospects" and "expanding horizons," at the moment of profound integration. To Ransom, the possibilities seemed unlimited. As Lewis said in more than one of his stories, anything might be possible now. It would be impossible to predict what might be learned about language from a non-human, non-terrestrial language. But it was certain that profound insights were just beyond his horizon.

The Moment of Integration, and more on Indefinite Possibilities

Later in the same book, Ransom's knowledge of the Malacandrian language had become sufficient for him to converse on an everyday level. But its poetry and song remained over his head for a long time. One day, the subsidiaries finally began to converge for him. Lewis describes it in a way that seems almost as if he were quoting from LtK:

"To every man, in his acquaintance with a new art, there comes a moment when that which before was meaningless first lifts, as it were, one corner of the curtain that hides its mystery, and reveals, in a burst of delight which later and fuller understanding can hardly ever equal, one glimpse of the indefinite possibilities within. For Ransom, this moment had now come in his understanding of Malacandrian song. Now first he saw that its rhythms were based on a different blood from ours, on a heart that beat more quickly, and a fiercer internal heat. Through his knowledge of the creatures and his love for them he began, ever to little, to hear it with their ears."

Again, we clearly see Lewis' grasp of the principles of the moment integration into a meaningful pattern, and of its coincident profound sense of unstatable but certainly real possibilities. It's interesting to me that he attributes to love the motive for his struggle to know. It was through love, not merely through the collection of data, that he learned to know what they knew. Knowledge puffs up, but love edifies. It was through living in community with the Malacandrian creatures, not as a passive observer, that he learned their language and culture.

Seemingly Unrelated Pieces Forming a Pattern

In the second book of the trilogy, Perelandra, Ransom wrestles with, among other things, the issue of the interactivity of Divine Sovereignty, the free wills of God's creatues, and natural occurances. He comes to recognize that:

The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial. The pattern is so large that within the little frame of earthly experience there appear pieces of it between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can. Hence we rightly, for our use, distinguish the accidental from the essential. But step outside that frame and the distinction drops down into the void, fluttering useless wings."

Here Lewis acknowledges the value of the Aristotelian distinction between the accidental and the substantial or essential. But he puts it to work in the context of the understanding that there is a pattern -- his own word -- an ultimate and all-embracing pattern, which transcends the ability of creatures to perceive it exhaustively. Through our "little frame" we can no more see the connection between all the pieces than we can look at both sides of a coin at once. Yet every coin really has two sides despite our inability to perceive them simultaneously, and the cosmos has a real pattern, despite our inability to grasp it all coherently.

Ascribing Importance, and Using the Pattern as a Touchstone

Finally, in the third book, That Hideous Strength, a woman named Jane has been having vivid dreams about alarming and disturbing events that turn out to be real events that have just happened, are happening, or are just about to happen. Her friend Dr. Dimble tells her to visit a Miss Ironwood about it. Miss Ironwood tells her that she (Jane) is a messenger, unwitting and unwilling though she may be, sent as a guide for the salvation of humanity from a great evil.

"...Then suddenly she [Jane] added, 'But how can you know all this? I mean--what realities are you talking about?'
'I think,' said Miss Ironwood, 'that you yourself have probably more reason to suspect the truth of your dreams than you have yet told me. If not, you soon will have. In the meantime, I will answer your question. We know your dreams to be partly true because they fit in with information we already possess. It was because he saw their importance that Dr. Dimble sent you to us.'"

Here Lewis, speaking in a specifically epistemological context ("how can you know...?"), demonstrates his working knowledge of two LtK principles. One is what Dr. Meek calls "meaningful hiddenness." Miss Ironwood says that Jane has reason to suspect the truth of her dreams. Jane doesn't yet know for certain that she is seeing real events. She has concocted possible (if admittedly far-fetched and incomplete) naturalistic explanations for the experiences. Also, some things in the dreams seem to demand a more analogical than literal interpretation. But Miss Ironwood knows that Jane's life circumstances must contain enough sufficient "clues" to point her to suspect the incredible truth.

But how does Miss Ironwood know? Herein is the second principle. She knows because it fits the pattern. She knows a lot of things that are hidden from Jane for the time being, and those things already point to a profound pattern. Jane's story fits into that pattern in a way that increases both its coherence and richness. This is what Dr. Meek calls "the telltale features of the real." Dr. Dimble, who was among the first people Jane confided in about the dreams, also had a grasp on the beginnings of the same pattern, and immediately "assigned significance" to her story. Most people, upon hearing Janes story of awful dreams that corresponded ominously to real events she could not have known of in such detail, would have sent her to a psychiatrist, who would no doubt have put her away or at least put her on medication. Only a very few people like Dr. Dimble and Miss Ironwood, who saw the world as a spiritual battleground, and who had knowledge of the imminence of certain events, would have understood that Jane was the embodiment of a key to averting global disaster.

A Lewisian Bent

One other thing I found interesting while reading the Space Trilogy. The term used throughout the books to describe mankind's condition due to the Fall is the English word "bent." I say "English" because often it is used as if it were an English translation of a term in the Malacandrian language. The creatures of the two planets Ransom travels to are not fallen, and therefore have no corresponding terminology. But they do have some kind of awareness of the possibility of perversion, of turning aside from the will of "Maleldil" (God). They call it "bent." It's interesting that Dr. Meek settled on the same term in LtK. I'm not saying that she got her ideas from Lewis rather than from Polanyi, but it would fit the pattern that she was at least influenced by his writing. Which would mean that it's not so strange that a man writing in 1943 should seem to have nearly quoted from a book written 60 years later.

George MacDonald Saw the Dolphins

2006-02-11T17:37:00.000-06:00

The Chronicles of Narnia are all the rage right now, and for good reason. I read the seven books seven times each during my early and mid teens. This past year, I read them each again, and I must say that, children's stories though they seem to be, they were even more delightful to me at 43 years old than they had been when I was 15. Lewis' primary influence and inspiration for writing fairy stories was George MacDonald, who had lived in Scotland a generation prior.

MacDonald's book Phantastes works on the imagination in ways that only a LtK type epistimology can explain. It walks the reader through Faery Land as seen through the eyes of a Victorian-era young man. It's a most peculiar adventure. At times it hardly seems coherent. But it makes sense to your senses, if not always to your logical mind. As you read it, its immediate affect varies from charming to perplexing to aweing to almost embarrassing in a way. (Come to think of it, the Scriptures have much the same effect.) But when you put it down and go to do other things, the images haunt you in ways that make you realize that you've had a profound encounter with something important. It helps you see beyond the veil that modernity has draped over your eyes.

In the closing paragraph of the book, at the point after the primary character has left Faery Land, he describes lying beneath his favorite kind of tree, a beech, and having a brief vision of sorts of a wise old woman he met in his travels. He says:

"I opened my eyes, and, for a moment, almost believed that I saw her face, with its many wrinkles and its young eyes, looking at me from between two hoary branches of the beech overhead. But when I looked more keenly, I saw only twigs and leaves, and the infinite sky, in tiny spots, gazing through between."

Looking too keenly caused the vision to vanish. Is it not so often true that an attempt at highly precise observation causes us to miss the meaning of what we're looking at? When looking at the Magic Eye picture, you can see the dolphins only if you relax and look through it. If you examine it with the critical eye of scientific, modern man, all you'll see is a meaningless swirl of dots.

When we meditatively and appreciatively take in the beauty and wonder of the Creation of which we are part, we can hardly miss seeing the hand of our Creator, and rejoicing in His greatness and goodness. But if we see ourselves as above it, and Nature as something apart from us, to be pinned down and dissected, we'll see nothing but twigs and leaves.

The same thing happens all too often with Scripture in the hands of Evangelical interpreters, who are influenced more strongly than we know by Enlightenment assumptions. We get so caught up in the definition of individual Greek words, or in the exact wording of an isolated fragment of Scripture (a.k.a., a "verse"), or in trying to make the Bible into a How-to book for personal success, or in trying to find some 1-to-1 correspondence to current headlines, that we miss the story. The meaning is not in the words. It's in the story. It can't be pinned down too precisely, because it's living, and powerful, and sharper than whatever scapel you try to dissect it with. It dissects you. If you stare too closely at the minutiae, all you'll see is twigs and leaves. If you're lucky.

What You Don't Know Can Hurt You Real Bad

2006-02-11T17:07:00.000-06:00

This past July 4th weekend, I turned my ankle in a little hole. It seemed lightly sprained, but no worse -- at first. Over next few days, the pain got worse and worse, and the joint became severely swollen, to the point that I could hardly drive, nevermind walk. The pain became excruciating, and lasted for months.

The sprain kept me from working as much as I otherwise would have, and that put me in such a financial bind that I avoiding going to the doctor. I was certain it wasn't broken, and several people assured me that sprains can take a surprisingly long time to heal. By late October, I was finally beginning to be able to walk slowly.

No sooner was I starting to get around again, when I stubbed the big toe on the other foot. I was making breakfast, and simply turned around too fast and slammed it into the corner of the stove. My whole foot swelled up, and I was back on crutches, enduring more searing pain.

When that failed to clear up in a couple of weeks, I finally broke down and saw a doctor. He was puzzled by it. The toe was not broken, but in some ways it acted like it was. He decided to send me for an MRI. The results of the test were clear: gout. Yes, simple gout. This was a podiatrist, mind you. And I had listed gout as among my previously known foot problems on my chart. He was so embarrassed about having to do an MRI just to diagnose a simple case of common gout, especially in a guy who had a know history of it, that he didn't even charge me for the MRI.

I took a a prescription medication for it for a few days, and the problem cleared up completely. No doubt, the reason my lightly sprained ankle had given me so much trouble for so long was also due to gout attacking the weak joint. The damaged soft tissues and the sharp crystals formed in them by the gout had fed each other and kept each other from healing.

Why didn't it occur to me early on that gout was involved? Why didn't my dad, who has suffered similar problems, think to attribute it to that? Why did my chiropractor not make the connection? Most of all, why didn't an experienced podiatrist diagnose it correctly right away?

We were all led astray, prevented from integrating the clues correctly, by a sort of false clue. The sprain and the stubbing incident pointed us in the wrong direction, effectively blinding us to everything else. I had never had a gout attack last nearly so long. Everyone else assumed, based on my testimony, that some kind of damage to the joint was the key culprit. In hindsight, it seems so obvious.

If the clue we consider most important calls our attention to look the wrong direction, it can make it incredibly difficult to integrate the remaining clues. And the result can be incredibly painful.

Bedevere, the Witch, and Premature Convergence

2005-11-09T11:25:00.001-06:00

In Monty Python's cult classic film, In Search of the Holy Grail, the peasants on Bedevere's land excitedly bring him a "witch," seeking permission to burn her at the stake. The scene is a wonderfully funny example of several kinds of missteps in the process of knowing.

What with the ridiculously long cone strapped over her nose, and the funnel on her head, she does vaguely resemble the witch stereotype. Aside from those, she's actually a rather pretty young woman. It soon comes out that the peasants dressed her up in the nose and hat. The only piece of actual evidence they offer to support their accusation is that she has a wart on her face. One man also attempts to introduce his personal testimony that she turned him into a newt, but as that seems to be news to the others, it can't count toward their "knowledge" of her occult involvement.

The bottom line is, they wanted so badly to find and burn a witch, that they integrated a whole story from one clue--one pitifully flimsy clue, at that. Sensing that the wart alone would not likely convince Bedevere, they created two more false "clues." Having done similar kinds of things myself, I'd like to be generous and guess that they probably didn't consciously intend to deceive, but to reveal. Although they had insufficient reason for their belief, they really believed that she was a witch (or at least wanted to believe badly enough). They dressed her up in hopes that with the help of the extra "clues," Bedevere would see what they saw.

This demonstrates the role that desire plays in knowing. The more badly we wish to believe something, the more careful we must be to make certain that we are relying on real clues, and that the clues in view point sufficiently well toward the picture we think we are seeing. It's important to true knowledge to walk circumspectly. We've all known people like the UFOlogists who made the poster seen behind Fox Mulder's desk in the X-Files: an apparent photo of a flying saucer with the big, bold words, "I WANT TO BELIEVE." It's good to want to believe, as long as your desire doesn't overcome your reason, making you so careless in your treatment of seeming clues that you rush towards an illegitimate or premature integration. The characatured archtypical witch may have warts on her face, but not all women with warts on their faces are witches.

The word "premature" makes me recognize that I hadn't yet thought about LtK integrations with a view toward maturity. In what sense do integrations need to mature? In that they happen, not instantly in the abstract, but in the embodied minds of people living in time. We start with a vague sense that something might be, continue to growing sense of realization, then to the stage of seeing but as through a glass darkly, and, in many cases, on to a full Oh-I-see-it experience.

Sometimes that whole process takes only a fraction of a second. It had darn well better take that little time to judge changes in the surrounding traffic while driving. I suspect that those near instantaneous acts of knowing almost always follow a well-worn path. That is, they are of a kind that we are expertly practiced at. For example, people who have been married for years can often sense what their partner is about to say, or would have said if they hadn't been interrupted, or might have said had they been present. That's because of how many times we've seen/heard/felt clues that form a pattern greatly similar to the current one.

Other times, it takes--how shall I put this--uhhhhh, lllonger. Maybe minutes. Maybe hours, days, years. There's a whole range of reasons I can think of for the term of integral maturity, so to speak. Some patterns are so complex that we must gather many clues from many places before integration can commence, or at least before it can be completed satisfactorilly. Take the meaning of your life, for example; most people aren't likely to arrive at that one until just before they die, or perhaps not even until afterward. Some patterns are of such a design that we must learn to integrate to simpler ones before we are able to get the bigger picture. Put negatively, lack of experience can prevent integration even in the presence of all needful clues. Another cause is false assumptions, that prevent us from seeing what is right before our eyes.

TBC...

Stephen Talbott of NetFuture Knows

2005-10-22T12:10:00.000-05:00

In an early NetFuture newsletter, Steve Talbott spoke about the importance of embodied presence to social interaction. His beautiful description of how we know people and how we grasp meaning reminds me of LtK:

...a friend's face leads me on an inward journey toward his true self. How else can I know him, except through some sort of physical expression? But I must learn to look through this surface, and with its indispensable help discover the one who is expressing himself.

In other words, I transcend his external features if, accepting them, I make a revelation of them. Only when I grasp the inner life of a revelation does its outer husk drop away. I cannot ignore the ink on the page if I would read the words -- and yet, when I do read, it is no longer the ink I am aware of, but the thoughts and feelings expressed.

Of course, when we begin inward journeys towards true selves -- even our own selves! -- we often encounter things that are both surprising and yet vaguely expected. Or if not expected, at least they are seen to fit the pattern when seen in retrospect.

Knowing persons is a special category of knowledge, I think. While the act of knowing any part of the world follows the shape of seeing through particular surface phenomena to the being and meaning behind them, that shape is amplified many times in coming to know other persons. As Flannery O'Connor's stories often make shockingly plain, people tend to be a lot harder to read than do animals, events, or objects. However well you know someone, they continue to surprise you. You can't know a person well enough that you can no longer have a really startling Oh-I-see-it (or should it be, Oh-I-see-you?) moment.

In knowing God, that shape takes on God-sized dimensions, and seems ever just beyond the horizon of our vision. In knowing God, we have the most astonishing integrations, with happy surprises so momentous that fear and joy are mingled indistinguishably. After all, the entire cosmos is His face.

BTW, I think C.S. Lewis captured that sense of joy-fear very well in his portrayal of the responses of the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve to Alsan the Lion in The Chronicles of Narnia. I do hope the upcoming movie of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe communicates that as well as the book does.

Lenses

2005-06-10T12:21:00.000-05:00

Duck Schuler, writing in Credenda/Agenda magazine, Volume 14, Issue 3: Musica - Lectionary and the Church Calendar, uses the metaphor of a lens:
"I think Paul made it clear in Colossians 2:16-17 that, however we organize our lives, Christ must be at the center; that all things point to Him; that He is the substance, not the lectionary or calendar. We use these tools to see through them to Him.

"They act as lenses to bring our myopic and astigmatic vision into clearer focus. We are myopic and astigmatic because of our fallen nature. We need tools such as the Scripture and scriptural principles to act as our lenses. It is nearly impossible to not use some lens. We may either choose those that work or those that don't. But we look through them in order to see what we must see. The lens is not the substance of our study, Christ is.

"So we must choose our lenses carefully and with wisdom. Then we must use them properly." (em)

This confirms and clarifies the idea that the scriptures themselves are given to us, not as an end in themselves to be focused on in themselves, but as clues, in the LTK sense, to point us to God. We are never to place our trust in the means of grace, but only in the person and work of Christ whose grace flows to us through them. Only belief in the promises of God, fulfilled by Christ, will be accounted to us for righteousness. But the English syntax can be deceptive there. We stand not on the promises themselves, as bare statements, but on the Promiser Himself, our Rock, our Redeemer. We must rely in the LTK sense on the clues we are given, since they were given to us, and since they are all that we can directly perceive. But we do so not because there is something magical in the clues themselves. Ultimately, true faith relies on a person, on The Person, in whose image we are made. Ultimately, all roads lead to Rome. All clues point to Christ.

Flannery O'Connor Knew

2005-06-10T12:13:00.000-05:00

In Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 73, Susan Srigley discusses the sacramental and incarnational fiction of Flannery O'Connor. Explaining O'Connor's use of vivid descriptions of sensory experiences to explore the realm beyond them, and get to "the mysterious underpinnings of reality," Srigley says, "To understand the spiritual, you have to begin with the physical, you have to begin with concrete experience to try [to] move towards that deeper mystery. Because that's the way we know." She also reads a lengthy quote from O'Connor's Mystery and Manners that I won't transcribe here, but it tends to corroborate the thesis of LTK in subtle but powerful ways that, true to her style, leave you with your head thundering and your knees a bit weak. I don't know whether Srigley has read LTK, but it would be possible to arrive at similar ideas strictly through the writings of O'Connor, especially the book Mystery and Manners, which is a collection of her writings about writing fiction as a Roman Catholic in the rural southern US.

This shows once again how great artists (in the broadest sense of those who deal in the artistic, including writers) seem almost intuitively to grasp the so-called Polanyin epistemic model. Perhaps it's because God gives them a special ability to see past the material clues around them. You can see that in their eyes, if you look closely. Their gaze always seems to be looking through things rather than at them. You can feel it emanating from them. A great artist walks into a room where you are and your spirit immediately drops its jaw and says, "Ah, the fire burns brightly in this one." They are people driven by the longing to deeply engage the sensory world with their bodies and minds, with the goal of evoking profound glimpses of the stuff that life is ultimately made of. They can almost see it, almost taste it, and they must communicate it to the rest of us or die.

I might almost go so far as to say that an unrelenting sense of true knowing is the key factor separating the men from the boys, so to speak, in the arts. It may be the most important thing we can teach those who are in training in the arts. Every university-level Fine Arts student should be required, in their freshman year if possible, to take a course on LTK. Just my opinion. :-) I can tell you, I sure wish I had been taught these principles when I was a college freshmen majoring in Church Music. How many of us graduated still laboring under the misconception that music is little more than a string of notes, or a painting little more than a collection of lines and colors? "Just a bunch of stuff that happened," quoth Homer Simpson, with uncharacteristic sagacity.

Rhetorical Devices

2004-10-15T13:38:00.000-05:00

Modernism, with its individualistic focus, gave us a disdain for formality, including rhetorical devices. Yet, just as all particulars must take some form in order to exist, so ongoing dialogue cannot be had without rhetorical devices. Consequently, each modern and post-modern generation has rejected the prevailing forms and devices as "formal," and replaced them with their own. This appears to have happened at an ever increasing rate as Western society has splintered and decayed. Each generation seems to think that it has finally arrived at "pure" individual expression, and fails to recognize its own rhetorical devices as such.

Why are rhetorical devices necessary? Is it because they function as placeholders for common clues? The way that rhetorical devices come about has to do, I think, with the way people--and communities of people--associate meaning with things. That is, we assign meaning to things by association. That seems to me very much related to the way that we know the world as described in LTK.

Movies: Kate & Leopold - A Leap in the Dark?

2004-10-03T01:32:00.000-05:00

If you haven't seen this movie then 1) Don't read this and spoil it for yourself, and 2) For heaven's sake, go rent it and watch it! Go! :-)

When I first saw K&L, I hadn't yet read LTK. I interpreted the main message of the story as a version of the tired old "follow your heart, not your head" theme that has dominated pop culture for its whole sorry life. That is not to say that I didn't enjoy the clever meld of sci-fi and romantic comedy. The plot was fun, as the temporal displacement theme always is, and it had some welcome side themes. It was my misunderstanding of the ultimate point that brought a sigh on the first viewing: faith as a blind leap in the dark. But it seems to me now that my conclusion was premature. Through Polanyi-colored glasses, there is more to it than I had thought. It can be viewed as a beautiful picture of how a person comes to faith.

Kate, the chief dynamic character, moves from skepticism to belief (in Leopold) by means of piecing together a number of clues. By seeing beyond the expected to an unimaginable future (and past!) manifestation, she overcomes her understandable disbelief, and comes to know and love Leopold, and, finally, to know her true place in the world.

When we are introduced to her, she is an all-star jaded pragmatist, a true Chick Lit style post-modern woman. She is not at all ready to believe in Victorian gentlemen, nevermind in rifts in time. To her, Leopold is at worst a bizarre acquaintance of her annoying ex-boyfriend, and at best a flabbergasting enigma. She has no time and no toleration for Leopold's archaic, formal manner.

Then, slowly, his sweet, unrelenting noble gentleness begins to win her over. He awakes her repressed longings to be treated like a lady. That, I think, is what helps her take her first halting steps toward faith -- it makes her want to believe, to wish that Leopold were really who he and Stuart claim he is. Among the clues at this stage are:

Leopold's genuine gentlemanliness, his honest care and respect for Kate as a lady
A delicious, beautifully presented breakfast
The prospect of a man actually offering her fresh brioche in bed

Next, Leopold captures Kate's imagination. He builds (though only by being himself) on her desire by continuing, unabashed, to act in accordance with his old-fashioned beliefs and well-bred character in the midst of a world that has long since forsaken such silliness. She gradually ceases to find him irritating, and begins to warm up to him and enjoy his subtle overtures, though she still regards him with perplexity and doubt. The clues at this stage are:

The consistency of his manner ("He is so method!" according to Kate's actor brother)
The rooftop dinner and dance
His gallant horseback rescue of her purse from the thief

Along with her imagination, he captures her heart, her confidence. Though she wavers, she begins to truly enjoy him. She can embrace him, though she doesn't yet understand him. She doesn't yet accept his claims to be from the 19th century. But what he does for her causes her to set aside her doubts for the moment and just enjoy the experience of him. The clues that align with her desires (and with the way she is made, if you'll excuse a bit of my own old-fashioned silliness) just tip the scale against those that align with her sense of normalcy. The clues here include:

He's the ideal spokesperson for her most important client
He lovingly takes care of her
He broadens her view of the world, especially of the value of taking time to smell the roses, so to speak, to enjoy the goodness and beauty that surrounds her

Could he do all this if he were an imposter? Maybe, but not likely. The profundity of the pattern is beginning to be a factor in swaying her to believe.

She sees the name OTIS on the panel of the elevator. Could it really be true? She's now open to accept Leopold's claims about himself. But she's still not ready to jump.

There's a beautiful "lightbulb moment" during her acceptance speech for Senior Vice President of her firm. She sees herself in the photograph from the 19th century. Now she's ready to jump.

But it's not merely a leap in the dark. It's not irrational (well, not from her point of view in the context of the movie's plot). She can see the pattern. She trusts Stuart's testimony and explanation, which accord with the pattern emerging from the subsidiary experiences of the past couple of days. She leaps knowing that she will find herself with her lover. Her lover and, would it be too much to say, savior?

I think that the plot's use of a LTK-type epistemic model is a chief reason why the story rings true. Yes, Bilbo, it has the ring of truth.

If God and Only God Knows with Full Certainty...

2004-09-25T01:20:00.000-05:00

Assuming that the historic Christian view of God's absolute, eternal omniscience is correct: Has Western man's desire for knowledge with absolute certainty been part of mankind's continued pursuit of the Serpent's Edenic offer to make us "like the gods"? Was the relentless pursuit of exhaustive lucidity a form of idolatry? If so, that would help explain why it leaves us feeling so empty. If it is inherently arrogant, that would help explain the difficulty we (OK, I) have holding a heated discussion without becoming smug, snide, and angry.

I have a question

2004-09-25T00:18:00.000-05:00

Is Polanyi just for me'n'you, or for critters and spirit-beings, too? Is the Polanyian model valid for human knowing only; for the epistemic acts of all created beings; for all knowing, period; or what?

It seems reasonable to me that it applies fairly well to animals, at least in some fashion. Observation of animal behavior may bear this out. Watch how butterflies are initially attracted to all brightly colored objects, even the likes of SUVs, until they fly close enough for long enough to discover their misinterpretation. Watch how cats use their senses to know just where to pounce on a rodent in high grass or thick bushes; they can't see the rodent but they can extrapolate what and where it is by the movement of the foliage, by the sound, and by the smell. Is that not a case of the integration of clues to a coherent pattern? Are there elements of the human act of knowing that distinguish it from what animals can do, not merely in degree (if even that) but in principle?

What about angels and demons? What do they know, and how? Can they know things with a certainty that transcends human knowing, or are they subject to the same possibility of doubt about some things? I believe they can learn. Judging by the sweep of history, I'd say the devil has learned a considerable amount over 6000 years about how to better deceive people. He may still be honing his craft. (What, someone who still believes in a real devil? Uh, don't look now, but there's a hungry lion behind you.)

Most importantly, perhaps, what about God? Does he go about knowing the same way we do? Since He created all and sustains all, and all things have their being in Him, A) Can there be any sense in which His omniscience is due to a flawless integration of exhaustively descried subsidiaries? Or, B) Does He simply know, with absolute certainty and perfect clarity, every thing? Is His Knowing utterly qualitatively, or only quantitatively, different from ours? Is human epistemic nature a function of the Imago Dei or of our creatureliness?

If we open the door to scenario A, are we thereby also giving the heresy of Open Theism a toehold? Could the Polanyian model, if widely accepted, undermine Reformed theology?

My head feels funny now. This is your inquiring mind. This is your inquiring mind on LTK. Any questions?

Authoritative Guides and the Effects of Individualism

2004-09-22T13:39:00.000-05:00

One of the means by which we come to know things is by reliance upon authoritative guides. We find those guides in community with other human beings: parents, friends, teachers, elders, clergy, law enforcement officers, journalists, authors, and so on. The guidance can be given in person, or it can come in the form of instructions (in the broadest sense--not necessarily communication primarily intended to be instructive) left for us by fellow humans in various media: signs, books and pamphlets, TV shows and movies, and on the Internet. Either way, the directions come from outside of ourselves, from other selves. We are able to receive those directions, and thereby enabled to know, because we share with those other selves a particular language, cultural understanding, and (in some sense) space and/or time. If it were not for our involvement in community, we would lack many important clues, and thus remain ignorant of many helpful and important things.

What does this say about our prospects for bettering our understanding of ourselves and our world in a society that is radically individualistic and anti-authoritarian? Flannery O'Connor wrote a lot about the importance of a sense of community and society to good fiction writing. In explaning why novels featuring Existentialist heros so often fell short of being convincing, she said, "The borders of his country are the sides of his skull." That has turned out to be a prophetic statement applicable to everyone in every facet of Western society a mere 45 years later.

I once dramatically experienced the effects of isolation on knowing. Sometime in my late teens, I came across an article in Keyboard™ magazine that introduced me very briefly to the idea of musical scale tunings that are significantly different from the one the Western world takes for granted. I had no way to explore it at the time, but the idea stuck in my craw.

A few years later, I purchased my first keyboard synthesizer with a customizable tuning table, and set to work. Because I had no knowledge of tuning theory nor of the history of musical instrument tuning (despite a Bachelor of Music degree, thank you very much!), I was flying blind, and starting from absolute scratch. My progress was as slow as a slug in the sun. For a couple of years I crawled on, learning by personal experience alone. I managed to produce two pieces of crude music in a simple form of Just Intonation. But I still understood very little of what I was doing, or why some things worked and others (most attempts) didn't.

Then the WWW came along, and I discovered a discussion list devoted entirely to the topic of alternate tunings! And it had over 600 members. All this time I had thought I was practically the only person in the world exploring the field. I thought I was a pioneer. How little I knew! What little I knew, and much more, had already been known for centuries. It was so basic that the subscribers to the Tuning List seldom thought about it anymore--it was part of their working assumptions.

Immediately, I was learning more on any given a day than I had learned in my first two years working in isolation. After a couple of years reading and asking questions, I even got to the place where I could occasionally contribute something that a few others found useful. My success at inventing and using alternate tunings blossomed.

Through the Tuning List, I gained knowlege of what was known, what had been tried, what was and wasn't generally found useful, and why. That gave me a sense of where my efforts might best fit with those of others, and set me on a trajectory exploring a kind of tuning that had been outlined by a brilliant mathematician but never worked out by a musician. Soon, I had a web site explaining the method, with dozens of tunings ready to be entered into keyboard tuning tables, and even several musical examples. (If by some strange chance you're interested, visit my home page and click on the link to The Sound of Phi.)

If I had continued to work in isolation, I would know next to nothing compared to what I know today about tuning theory. I might well have become so discouraged as to give up.

Not everyone on the Tuning List learned as much or as rapidly. There are various reasons for that, I'm sure, but one is that several of the participants are simply unteachable. They refuse to be taught. They attack anyone who tries to teach them. They are convinced that they are the source of true knowlege. The suspicion of authority bred into them by our society prevents them from taking advantage of the wealth of wisdom at their disposal.

The list is led by a handful of geniuses who are well-read, highly experienced individuals next to whom I am practically a moron. They are eager to share what they know. But some people take offense at the learnedness of others. They are suspicious of education, suspicious of articulateness, even suspicious of well-laid arguments. They won't submit their work to the scrutiny of others, believing that whatever came most lately from their own private inspiration (as they think it) must be the most valuable work ever done. And so they sit, alone in a little boat called Ignorance, adrift on a sea of knowledge.

Such attitudes are prevalent in our society at the beginning of the 21st century in every field of human endeavor. As long as they hold sway, they will continue to mitigate against significant epistemic efforts for all of us.

Puzzling

2004-09-20T08:42:00.000-05:00

One of the unusual features of LTK is that it teaches us about something we never knew, that we've nevertheless done all our lives. It's such a funny feeling to be saying, "Oh, yeah! That's exactly what I do." And being excited about this simple affirmation. It's cast in a whole new light. I now know that I knew.

I had my own terms for it. What Dr. Meek calls integration, I called putting together The Puzzle. What she calls clues, I called pieces. I have been looking for pieces, and trying to fit them together, my whole life. It probably consumed more of my mental time and energy than any other single task. I just didn't think of it as an act of knowing since the Picture was resistant to explicit description. [In the voice of Homer Simpson:] Lousy false assumptions.

For example, my dear, patient wife would sometimes get just enough of the anti-Christian or anti-American or anti-Bush rhetoric on some Public Radio show, after, you know, like 30 minutes of it. "Why do we have to listen to this crap!" she'd finally cry. "I'm looking for pieces," I'd say, in my most assuaging tone, hoping to blow enough head off her steam to be able to listen a little longer. I was filtering -- heavily. But I was gleaning insights into what was happening in the wide world, expanding my horizons of rationality, trying to understand the causes of alternative perspectives, systematically filing things away for future reference. I knew that the pieces would fit together with others, somewhere, sometime, and aid my understanding of the world on some level. I knew there was value in it. I just didn't know it was knowing.

The Puzzle is not a totally inept metaphor for connecting the subsidiaries. It actually fits certain integrative acts rather well. The problem with it as a general model is two-fold. First, it made me think of it as something two-dimensional rather than polydimentional. Integration can happen in any number of dimensions at once.

Second, it made me think of the Picture, the pattern, as something static rather than dynamic. I was seeking to pin down a moving target. But you can't do that without getting off the merry-go-round, as John Lennon put it. The fact that the pattern is in motion through time, and, as all time-bound phenomena, evolving as it goes, may be behind the "unspecifiable future prospects" we sense when we have contacted reality through integrating subsidiaries. A puzzle can only manifest these prospects in the limited sense that you can be surprised about where a piece happens to fit; that is, about what it looks like in context compared to what it looked like by itself. That's not nearly complex enough to analogize most human acts of knowing with their webs of unpredictable implications.

The Role of Pain in Knowing

2004-09-20T00:31:00.000-05:00

Sometimes we choose to disconnect from clues or resist integrating them when we can sense that we're not going to like the pattern. We don't always want to submit to the real. Reality bites sometimes.

But failure to connect, integrate, and submit can cause pain, too. And that can be just what we need. If not submitting hurts worse than submitting, we may reluctantly accede.

For children of the Heavenly Father, this can take the form of spiritual discipline, being stabbed by Grace, like Mary, whose soul was pierced by a sword. We speak of learning things through trials. How does that happen? Does pain open pathways in your brain, allowing information to be processed that would otherwise have gone out the other ear? I don't think so. Pain helps learning because it motivates us. One thing it can motivate us to do is refocus, to face the painful truth.

Sometimes it can even give us a glimpse of the Clue Maker Himself. The Apostle Paul spoke of knowing in connection with pain. He wanted more than anything "to know [Christ], and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his suffering." Sometimes pain helps us know fellowship with the one who experienced ultimate suffering.

Anguish can be a blessing in disguise. "Life is pain, Princess. Anyone who says different is selling something." When you look at the Man in Black, do you see Wesley or the Dread Pirate Roberts?

Broken, bent, & alternate patterns; church music; and shepherds

2004-09-18T23:41:00.000-05:00

Ultimately, I think, there is only one great Pattern, and only God can see it fully. We creatures are only given the ability to see distinct parts of it, or, in rare moments of insight, to have an instant in which we see the whole but as through a glass darkly, and can never seem to recall exactly what it was that we saw. Pink Floyd, in the song Comfortably Numb, put it brilliantly:When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown, and the dream is goneThe Pattern is simply too grand to wrap our little minds around. Besides, in a lifetime we have opportunities to encounter only a tiny fraction of the clues needed to point us to anything like an integration of the complete Pattern. And so we speak of many patterns: the flavor of a dish, the body of the doctrines of our faith, traffic patterns, fish habitats, and so on. And that's fine, that's consistent with our creatureliness.

Ultimately, all of our integrations are partial with respect to The Pattern, but it is possible to speak of patterns in a restricted sense, with respect to a particular person, idea, event, and so on. But most of the time even those integrations are partial, incomplete, not a fully orbed view of that part of the pattern. This produces the sense of a broken up or spotty pattern, or perhaps of a fuzzy view of it.

It seems to me that problems with integration arise when make mistakes with respect to clues. Often, we overlook important clues. That results in incomplete integrations, or partial integrations. For example, we might fail to notice that the cars in front of us have slowed down, and end up having to slam on our brakes; the overall pattern of the road and traffic was being integrated by our brains more-or-less correctly - we weren't driving completely the wrong direction, and our speed would have been safe at that place under most circumstances - but a crucial piece of information was missing or misinterpreted. That's what auto insurance is for. And seat belts.

We also make mistakes with respect to the integration process itself. Under the pressure of various desires and motivations, or simply through inexperience, we may attempt to force clues together that don't belong to the same part of the pattern, or to force them together in awkward and, um, unfitting(?) ways, producing a warped view of the pattern. For example, when faced with a flooded road, we might be so determined to get home that we ignore the perenial plea of rescue workers not to drive into it, and end up being washed downstream. We think we remember where the roadbed is, and we think we know that the current couldn't be strong enough to carry away our heavy car. We want to believe that it's safe to cross. But every year, numerous people are wrong. Their view of the pattern was warped enough to cause them severe loss or death.

So, here we are, all walking (and driving!) around with warped, fuzzy eyes, seeing a set of disconnected, warped, fuzzy patterns. This, I think is what Picasso, Dali, and Duchamp were trying to show us. We've all got our own little private modern art show going all the time. I don't think that condition was new to the 20th century. What was new was giving in to it, trying to ignore the transcendent, and pretending to believe that what we perceive is all there is. Again, Pink Floyd sums it up memorably, from Dark Side of the Moon:All you touch, and all you see
Are all your life will ever beAnd thus, at last, everything under the sun was in tune - but the sun was eclipsed by the moon. But that's a matter of art philosophy, not epistimology. There can be no epistimology during a total eclipse. So let's shed a little light on the subject, and get to what the title of this post forboded.

With that background, I was thinking about the rightness of being predisposed to accept some ideas and reject others because of having integrated a certain set of clues toward what looks like a fairly coherent pattern (ch 19, The Power of the Pattern). Even that is not a straightforward, black-and-white situation. It admits to degrees. That is, we are not limited to either fully accepting an idea because it fits an integrated pattern, or fully rejecting it because it doesn't fit. We can be, and often are, somewhere in between, and in motion toward one or the other.

With respect to fundamental beliefs, most of us spend most of our time being reasonably confident about the pattern(s) to which we have integrated to date. Ordinarilly, we don't worry about whether the floor of our house is really level, whether our foot will touch down when we expect it to, and whether it will hold our weight. We just walk, confident in our embodied sense of our environment.

But there are many things with respect to which we waver, oscillating between alternate or even opposing ways to integrate the clues, either unsure how the clues integrate or unsure which of two (or more) appealing but incompatible potential integrations is truer to the Pattern. Or sometimes, it's the pattern which appears to be wavering, shifting, not altogether coherent; sometimes that's because we're trying to force some things to fit that don't belong, and sometimes due to simply having too few clues in view (whew!), too few pieces of the puzzle fit together yet.

For example, for a few years, I was convinced of four of the five legendary and controversial "points of Calvinism." But I was hung up on that middle one, the dreaded L of "Limited Atonement." Over a period of years, I went from being strongly opposed to it, to having this gnawing feeling that it was true but not wanting it to be, to feeling ambivalent about it, to warily thinking it might be true, to thinking it probably was true but still not accepting it and teaching it. Then one day, reading R.C. Sproul's book Chosen By God, the lightbulb came brightly on. The pieces fit. "Oh, no! I'm a Calvinist!" I said with that tone little kids use when they say "brussel sprouts."

There are some parts of the Pattern that we close our own eyes to, patterns we refuse to acknowlege. Our bentness is ever blinding us to parts of the Pattern that would make clear to us our creatureliness, limits, and bentness, and thus our need to repent and submit. This can keep us in a state of flux between one or more seemingly possible integrations, even when we know (or strongly suspect) which one is truer. For example, none of us wants to see how prideful and idolatrous we really are. We are saturated in the clues to the pattern of our wretchedness. They are found in most of our words and deeds. But to see it would make us too poor in spirit, it would cause us to mourn too deeply, to fall flat on our faces before God and cry for mercy, to become meek, and love our enemies, and all that other stuff that is way yonder too much for our flesh to bear. So we willingly turn a blind eye.

Now, Christians are people who are being conformed to the holy, incorruptible image of Christ, while still living in the fallen world. While our inner person has been given new life, we contend daily with what the apostle Paul called "the body of this death" (Romans 7). We are in the process of being straightened out, but we still suffer the dreadfully frustrating effects of the bentness we all inherited from our mutual longfather, Adam. Consequently, while we have the influence of the indwelling Holy Spirit to help us integrate toward the truth, we also must constantly fight the influences of the flesh, the world, and the devil pushing us to warp our integrations in fleshly, worldly, and demonic ways.

Apply that to the subject of church music. All church music facilitators know that one of the effects (not the primary purpose) of having a bunch of music before the sermon is that it helps restore the congregation to a state of mind in which we are more ready and willing to receive the Word. In LTK terms, the music provides a set of clues compatible with and complimentary to those of scripture (ideally), helping to predispose us to a scriptural (that is, True) integration. It occurred to me the other day that church music ought to sort of shepherd our minds toward a spiritual integration rather than a worldly or fleshly one.

I gasped at that thought. Shepherd! The shepherd as a model for the authoritative guide. A Polanyian meditation on Ps 23, anyone?

That, in turn, got me thinking about the beauty and wonder of metaphors like "shepherd." It struck me that the Polanyian epistemic model accounts for the power of metaphors and similes, poetry and stories, to communicate truth -- more powerful than exhaustive lucidity by a fair piece. The same cannot be said for the traditional Western model.

Groove as a pattern of integrated clues

2004-09-18T23:36:00.000-05:00

The concept of a musical "groove" alone should have tipped me off about what knowing is about. It's impossible to explain what a groove is, and impossible to pin down precisely what makes it up in any particular piece of music. Yet every good musician feels the groove, and can lay effortlessly into it with no more than a bar or two to inform him/her about the nature of it in a given piece. When one musician shifts the groove in the midst of a piece, the rest adapt almost instantly. I watch it happen every week, and sometimes get to participate in it. But it never ceases to amaze me. You could call it an oscillating bed of complex human interactions, in which every element is a feedback loop for every other. But that only makes it sound like everything it's not. "It's a feel thing," they say. Body clues. And it's the kind of thing that requires, for most people, an authoritative guide to learn.

Jazz, dirty jokes, and Fresh Air

2004-09-18T22:25:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, the National Public Radio program Fresh Air ran an interview with saxaphonist Branford Marsalis. He told an amusing story about legendary jazz band leader Art Blakey that was interesting in light of the idea that "words work less like premises and more like evocative clues." When Art noticed that his band members needed a little help grasping some of the subtleties of playing in a jazz ensemble, he would "use these really coarse jokes to illustrate points that he would never really explain. You'd have to come to it on your own." One joke, for example, had the point that experience teaches patience, while the young tend to rush headlong into trouble.

Further, while one would not likely explicitly expect a jazz band leader to teach through dirty jokes, it's not completely surprising, either. It fits. It's a jazzy thing to do, no? By contrast, if your theology professor were to try this tack...

Marsalis also described the most important thing he learned from Blakey, who played drums. Blakey didn't just lay down a hot groove. He used his drums to support and help build the other instrumentalist's solos. "Rather than just being off in the corner doing his own thing -- you know, you see those drummers with their heads turned to the left, and they're just thinking about what they're playing, and not paying attention -- he really pays attention to what you play... He was on it."

What he seems to be describing is a characteristic I have noted in all good studio musicians. However talented a player you might be, however technically skilled, you don't get very far as a studio musician unless you discipline yourself to do what Art Blakey taught by example. Focus on what everyone is playing together, not on what you are playing. Jamming musicians are doing a truly remarkable thing: they are simultaneously relying on the clues the other musicians are creating, and creating clues that the other musicians are relying on! Unless all the musicians are focused on the coherent pattern they're co-creating, the parts won't gel. The pattern won't cohere as it should. It will emerge only in fits and starts at best. We've all heard this happen when listening to inexperienced players, especially arrogant ones. Aye, there's the rub. Good jamming requires mutual submission, both to the pattern and to one another.

And remember, this is all happening in real time. To analyze even one part, even your own part, is going to slow you down and throw you and everyone else off. It only works when everyone is focusing through the clues, integrating them into a pattern. Good musicians do this all the time. And it's extraordinary every time. It tends to produce unexpected, joyful music.

Marsalis gave a final tell-tale clue about this: he said that learning this helped him recognize that jazz is "far more intricate than it seems on the outside, when you're sitting around thinking about your own chord changes." He knew he'd contacted the real because of the profundity of the pattern.

Just more confirmation that the Polanyi model is a good model. Yes, Bilbo, it rings true.

Ad Sense

2004-09-18T22:21:00.000-05:00

This is interesting. Google's Ad Sense engine uses a method reminiscent of the LTK principle of integrating clues to a coherent pattern. That's how it uses content decide what ads are most appropriate to show on a given web page. Of course, the decision is based on an algorithm, not on the fuzzy, emotionally-influenced inductive reasoning we humans use.

FYI

2004-09-18T22:02:00.000-05:00

I should have said at the outset, to follow me fully it will help if you're familiar not only with LTK but also with two movies: Monty Python: In Search of the Holy Grail, better known simply as The Holy Grail; and The Princess Bride. I frequently quote these movies without reference. It wouldn't hurt to be familiar with The Lord of the Rings, either. That's a book, you know, not a movie. :-)

Pop music refs that exemplify LTK principles

2004-09-18T21:58:00.000-05:00

Not only books and movies, but numerous songs have grabbed me in fresh ways since I began reading LTK. They give us clues that either artists have never entirely given in to the Western epistemic model, or that the model has been crumbling for some years, or both. Here are a few examples.

From the old love song Only You, a reference to clues in the body aiding an epistemic act:
"When you hold my hand, I understand the magic that you do."

A remarkable example of "seeing" through the clues and embodying them so as to make them an extension of him:
Pinball Wizard (The Who):

That deaf, dumb and blind kid
Sure plays a mean pinball

He stands like a statue
Becomes part of the machine
Feeling all the bumpers
Always playing clean

From ch 21 of LTK: "Not to decide is to decide. We have to push on in the face of something short of a glaringly obvious pattern because there is no other option." I couldn't help being reminded of the song Freewill by Rush:

Each of us
A cell of awareness
Imperfect and incomplete.
Genetic blends
With uncertain ends
On a fortune hunt that's far too fleet.

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill;
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose freewill.

I might quibble with him about whether "freewill" and a "ready guide in some celestial voice" are necessarily two different and opposed paths. A little Upper Story/Lower Story dualism going on there. But while I suspect that this song is in part an unfortunate lashing out at some form of Calvinism in the author's background, he has nevertheless demonstrated an integration to a partly coherent pattern. And he's a real good drummer.

Speaking of rush, in chapter 22 it says, "You can't rush reality." I made a sideways connection to The Princess Bride, in the scene with Miracle Max. Inigo says, "Sir, we're in a terrible rush." Max responds, "Don't rush me, sonny. You rush a miracle, man, you get rotten miracles."

Well, LTK just might be the chocolate-coated pill that brings some dead minds to life in academia (and maybe even the evangelical community!) Think it'll work? It would take a miracle.

LTK benefits, Pt.3: J.R.R. Tolkien

2004-09-18T21:56:00.000-05:00

The Lord of the Rings is also a rich source of examples for LTK concepts. Tolkien seems to have intuitively grasped this model of knowing. What you learned through philosophical study and purposeful thought, he learned through stories. And what you teach largely through, dare I say, lucid, structured premises, he teaches through stories. Of course, my words there must be taken more as evocative clues than as premises. :-)

Most recently I noticed that many of the episodes in the story beautifully exemplify determined resolve -- resolve made in the light of often rather vague clues on the one hand, and in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds on the other. This comes through far better in the book than in the movie, but one of Gimli's lines in the movie sums it up memorably: "Certainty of death, small chance of success -- what are we waiting for?" While Frodo's flight from home, journey with the company, and march to and through Mordor is obviously the primary example of determined resolve in the book, my favorite is when Aragorn leads his fellow rangers, along with Legolas and Gimli, through the Paths of the Dead. For clues, he had no more than dark hints from his authoritative guides, Elrond and Gandalf; the tradition that he was the legitimate heir of Isildur; and the dire need for the plan to succeed. For opposition, he had the knowledge that no man had ever survived those paths; the dismay and discouragement of Théoden, Éomer, Éowyn, and their riders; the fear that flowed palpably from the dark door in the mountain; and the fear of even the horses to enter it. Yet he never hesitated, never flinched, and thus he led his followers (and their horses, the movie version notwithstanding) through the dark, chased by ghosts, and out the other side to victory. Sadly, the movie robs that episode of its greatness by making it revolve around a magic sword. I wanted to shout, "Alright, he's got a +3 Sword of Ghost-busting! Now if only he can roll an 18." Sigh.

For me, Tolkien's Middle-earth writings have a unique feature among works fantasy literature. In fact, the Bible is the only other book that shares this feature for me. And that is, the appropriate question for it is not, "Have you read it?" but, "Do you read it?" Since my second time through LotR I've never really stopped reading it and the literature that surrounds it. And so it was that I was reading chapter 16 of LTK on the same day that I arrived back at book 4, chapter 8, The Stairs of Cirith Ungol, in LotR. That afternoon, as I sat in the parking lot of my wife's company, I read your words:

"In the moment of profound integration, we experience a sense of the future possibilities, prospects, horizons of the thing we have encountered. There are sides we cannot currently see, behaviors we suspect but could never predict, implications only some of which we can reason out, but which in their incompleteness may lead us to uncover new and transforming dimensions... This sense of possibilities furnishes us with a second indicator that we have contacted the real."

Later that evening, my jaw dropped open as I gained a renewed sense of the meaning of a conversation between Frodo and Sam, as they sat in a dark crack in the lifeless rocks on the side of the Mountains of Shadow, half way up from the Dead City toward Shelob's Lair:

(Sam:) 'I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?'
'I wonder,' said Frodo. 'But I don't know. And that's the way of a real tale. Take any one that you're fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don't know. And you don't want them to.'
'No, sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did...'

A real tale, Tolkien teaches us, is one that draws us on with the anticipation of future possibilities, yet ends in ways that are unexpected and at the same time satisfying in their sense of setting things to rights. Now, what in Middle-earth are two lowly little hobbits, one of which is a simple gardener -- smack in the midst of their darkest and scariest hour to date, no less -- doing, discussing the epistemology of mythology? Only Tolkien. Any Lit prof (or movie script writer!) would surely chastise him for letting the action sag at such a crucial point, nevermind for letting the characters step outside the story to look at it. But he pulls it off, using it to connect LotR with a much broader tale, tantalizing his readers with the sight of it, and inspiring a sense of wonder in the reader about his own life that is unsurpassed in any other human work I know. I think the reason he was able to do that is partly that he had, on some level, a grasp of epistomology that was informed more by scripture than by Western culture. Of course, I could be wrong...

LTK benefits, Pt.2: Fishing

2004-09-18T21:53:00.000-05:00

It might surprise you (or it might not) that fishing is an incredibly rich source of examples for LTK concepts. Ahh, the epistomology of fishing...

There's a family fishing story about my cousin Darren, who is entirely an indoor type, that has delightful epistomological overtones. My brother, Jeff, the consummate outdoorsman, once talked him into going fishing with him. As they were drifting around the edge of the shore in a small boat, Jeff began to notice that Darren had gotten a huge clump of weeds around his lure which he never bothered to remove. He kept flinging it back out into the water, weeds and all, and dragging it dutifully back in. Jeff asked him how he thought he was ever going to catch anything like that. Darren replied, "Ah -- fish don't know." And thus it became a saying and a proverb among the people, as it is to this day. What makes it so funny, of course, is that everyone (except Darren) knows that fish DO know. You can't fish very long and hold on to the idea that animals operate soley by instinct. Fish know.

One LTK concept that is brilliantly illustrated by fishing is that of meaningful hiddenness. Fishing is all about assigning meaning to the gaps. Seldom can a fisherman see where the fish are, or where his lure is. Nearly all the action takes place beyond the horizon of visible clues. That is, in fact, a primary draw of the sport. Besides clues from the sense of smell and the feel of the air, what a fisherman sees is things like the geography of the shoreline, the color of the water, the ripple of the waves in the wind or over rocks, the angle of the sun, the location of shade, the proximity of branches to the water, stumps or brush or weeds under the water, the angle of his line at the water, the tension in his line above the water, and so on. If he's lucky, he'll see a fish hit the surface somewhere. To that he adds what he feels as he reels in his lure, where it bumps against things or gets tugged at by the current or, dare he hope, a fish. It's quite possible to learn to recognize the differences between the feel of bumping over a muddy bottom, a rock, a log, or a branch by how your line tugs. Most important, of course, is to be able to distinguish all of those from the tug of a fish striking. From all those clues together, he gets a sense of the future possibilities of a catch, maybe the catch of a lifetime. That's the hope that keeps us fishing until dark, and then some, and that keeps us going back.

The successful fisherman has his senses wide open, eagerly intent on the clues in the world around him, and the clues he feels in his body (and its extention, the fishing rod), all interpreted through his past experiences and the memories of words and actions of those he considers authoritative guides. When a change in line tension is detected, there is seldom time to think about what to do. You just embody the clues for all you're worth! Sometimes you're mistaken, and have to either drag a branch aboard or cut the line. Sometimes you're mistaken and miss a fish. But you live for those times when you, er, "contact the real."

Even when you do, it's nearly always surprising the way it happens. That's why fishermen can regale each other for hours with stories about the big one that got away, as well as the ones that didn't. Maybe one in 1000 fish is caught just the way you expected by doing just what you thought ought to be done. But every strike and every catch feeds your sense of what ought to be done in ways that can never be expressed with anything resembling exhaustive lucidity, and can seldom be expressed at all. And it wouldn't do you much good if you could express it. The best you can usually do is something like, "I cast over there and let it sink a little, then reeled kinda slow." But, of course, you can never cast "there" again because that "there" is gone forever. But you'll encounter places that look, in ways you can't quite wrap your line around, similar to "there." Or at least they feel like they might, to those who are learning to assign appropriate meaning to those kinds of gaps.

While I've never gotten into hunting much, it has got to be as rich a source of examples as fishing is. I have no doubt that your whole book could be rewritten with the Field & Stream crowd in mind, sending the message to an entirely different audience than LTK is likely to appeal to. That's probably true in a whole range of fields.

LTK benefits, Pt.1: Life and Wife

2004-09-18T21:43:00.000-05:00

The following three posts are from the first email I sent to Dr. Meek after reading the book.

[Begin Quote]
The book started out a little shallow and slow for me, actually. I thought I might end up being disappointed. Just goes to show what surprises can lie just beyond the horizon...

It strikes me that the model for knowing that you describe in LTK is actually the one found in scripture. All my life I've heard and read explanations about the meaning of epistemological terms in scripture. It's obvious that statements like, "Adam knew his wife...," and "...that I might know him and the power of his resurrection," cannot be understood using the traditional Western model. But somehow the message communicated by preachers and teachers usually amounts to no more than, "Those ancient Hebrews had a funny idea about what it meant to know," or "The word 'know' is being used euphemistically here," rather than "This gives us a hint about what it means to really know." We have been, you might say, "disinclined to entertain counterproposals," and "ill equipped to recognize counterevidence" with respect to our very model for acts of knowing.

LTK has helped me understand everything better. I understand my wife better. For 16 years we've been having conversations that run something like this:
[David] Blah, blah, blah.
[Deborah] Blah, blah, bleh, bleh, blih, blih.
[David] Wait! Let's not talk about bleh and blih yet. I was just talking about blah.
[Deborah] How can you talk about blah without talking about bleh and blih?!
[David] I can only talk about one thing at a time.
[Deborah] It is one thing. It's all one thing. They're related.
[David] No it's not. They're different things. Blah is such and such, while bleh is so and so, and blih, is, well, it's kind of related but it's not what I was talking about. You're confusing things.
[Deborah] No! They're they same thing. You can't just talk about blah without bleh and blih, too. They're one thing.
[David] Well, I'm sorry, I see them as different and I can't talk about more than one thing at a time. Please, let's just talk about blah, then I'll be happy to talk about bleh and blih all you want. One at a time.
[Deborah] [silent brooding]
[David] [sigh]

Now I see what she means. She sees blah, bleh, and blih as clues that integrate to a coherent pattern, one which she cannot yet name. She sees them all in terms of their relationship to the pattern, and sees no point in focusing on them apart from each other. And she's right. Now I also see why, when she can't explain to me exactly why she disagrees with me, and I ignore her intuition and proceed on available hard data, that we usually get burned. Thank you, Lord, for a wife who sees the pattern.

LTK has helped my work. As a recording and mixing engineer, my job is to capture disparate musical elements and blend them into a seamless stream of musical audio. I'm prone to focusing on the tracks (individual musical parts) one at a time, making each sound as "good" as it can. As you might guess, that approach does not usually yield the most harmonious outcome. I've had to learn to go for the big picture. But it was difficult for me, and I often found myself obsessing over details that I knew good and well were relatively insignificant. Once I began to see musical listening as focusing through the clues to a coherent pattern, I was able to see mixing in terms of placing those clues so as to make them most accessible, and such that they best serve listening through them rather than to them. Immediately, I began to put better sounding mixes together in less time, and having more fun doing it.

LTK has helped me better understand the legalistic Christian fundamentalism I grew up in. We were focused on clues, both in Bible study and in life, rather than focusing on the One to whom the clues pointed, and on the redemptive story He was telling us. We strove to be obedient as an end in itself rather than moving through obedience to focus on God, as you put it, living in the clues to reprompt the focus.

Who knew?

2004-09-18T13:59:00.000-05:00

What do you know? How do you know you know? How do you know you're not dreaming, or that what you see with your waking eyes is not an illusion?

Don't ask Descartes. He never got out of the oven, as far as he knew. Ask Esther Lightcap Meek, author of Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People. She knows. She knows she knows. And she has graciously shared with us how we can know we know, too. Far from offering a false promise of unattainable absolute certainty, LTK offers something worlds better: the prospect and recognition of confident contact with the real through integrating environmental, sensory, and normative clues toward coherent patterns. But that's all wrong and wide of the mark, to paraphrase Sam Gamgee. It ought to be sung.

LTK gave me more lightbulb moments than a presidential candidate at his party's national convention. Dr. Meek calls them "Oh! I see it!" moments, OISIMs hereafter. By the time I got done reading the book, I was drowing in a flood of OISIMs, and it doesn't look likely to recede anytime soon. This here's my boat.

So, don your sunglasses, your lifevests, your thinking caps, grab your magnifying glasses and whatever else you think might help, and climb aboard. Let's go for a wild ride, a risky cyber-adventure. We'll sail the good ship Hope up and down the Epistemic River, expanding our "horizons of rationality" as we go. We might even get shot at by Pomo indians.

But we're not just after adventure. We're clue hunters. Yet we won't focus much on the clues themselves, either. Ultimately, we want fully coherent integration. And we won't go until we get some.

If you've read LTK or are familiar with the epistemic model of Michael Polanyi that informed and inspired it, I welcome your participation. If you haven't, Longing to Know at Amazon.com

Wake up, Neo.