https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Dj1Y9ppKluk
Welcome everyone. I’m very excited about this. I’m very thoroughly excited about this. I’ve always wanted to talk to Esther Lakecapmeek. I’m currently reading two of her books, Longing to Know and Contact with Reality. She, like me, is clearly deeply influenced by Polanyi and she, like me, is reading other people like Marla Ponte and DC Schindler to try and make a deeper sense and a deeper understanding of Polanyi’s work. And she, like me, I believe, because this is part of the spirit of Polanyi, is trying to integrate the practice of science with the understanding of spirituality. And so I’ve just, I’m just, look, the title of the book, right? Longing to Know. It’s just, it’s just so appropriate for a lot of the things that interest me and have influenced me. So first of all, Esther, just deeply heartfelt welcome. It’s so good to meet you and get, be able to talk to you. Well, thank you. I feel like you’re bringing me out into the mainstream. From my little Eddie in some corner. Well, that’s, I mean, your name has frequently been recommended to me along the way. I’d already been reading you and other people recommended you from what Sevilla King calls this little corner of the internet. All the people working around sort of the, what I call, what I call the meaning crisis and related things. So maybe, you know, as a way of lifting you into the mainstream, if you will, maybe tell us a little bit about yourself, you know, about your philosophical journey and apprenticeship. What you see as your main sort of philosophical task now and why that isn’t just an abstract sort of academic thing, because it’s clear from your work that although there’s academic rigor, that’s not the place where you want it to finally land. You don’t want to just land within academia. So if you could take some time and lay that out for us, that’d be great. It’s an honor to be asked to do that. So thank you. Like you, apparently, I began life in a Bible believing Christian home and church and I recollect around age 13 having what I later realized were skeptical questions. One was, how do I know that God exists? But the other was, how do I know there’s anything outside my mind? So I was a baby Cartesian and didn’t know. And of course, that sort of thing was not talked about at church. And I just thought it was sin or something. So I didn’t get into trouble by ever voicing that. And then it was in my high school years that my mother, who worked at a Christian bookstore and read all the first editions, I followed her red pencil underlinings through Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who Is There. And that’s when I began to realize 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 imaginations for interdisciplinary ventures. And then it was only later that I, it was in a conversation with a very excited student who was telling me about all he was learning with this professor, Jim Greer, in his philosophy classes, that it was in the next 12 hours that I made the choice to change colleges and change majors to study with this man sight on scene. And I feel like that was the eye-opening moment that philosophy, not chemistry, I mean, I like chemistry, that’s what I was studying, was what I needed to pursue to start to get at putting these things together and getting at what I was after. So I haven’t looked back from then. And I found my experience was that philosophy, at least at the undergraduate level with that marvelous man, really revitalized my faith. I felt like I’d been given answers, but didn’t know what the questions were. I plowed through to a PhD because I felt like it was the right thing to do if I was ever going to be in a place to help other people get their feet wet in philosophy, which is what I felt was of value for me to do. And the graduate experiences were dry as dust in an analytical sort of a surrounding, but along the way, some young man gave me Michael Polanyi’s personal knowledge to read. And just at the point where I was trying to figure out a dissertation topic, and I wanted to stay as general as possible, and I also loved the interdisciplinary, and I also did, I love science too. So his work commended itself to me as a viable place. And then along came, and I’m sure you know this name. Do you know Marjorie Green? Yes. Yes. So she was visiting professor where I was, and I studied my postmodern and Merleau-Ponty and stuff with her. And if I can grow up to write philosophy like her, I’ll do a good thing because she’s just a fantastic person and quite, you know, in a way the philosopher that Polanyi never was. But then, my life going on, you know, through past the PhD, I didn’t feel like I had the answers I was looking for or understood anything about epistemology or anything. And I still had the skeptical question. So what I had been tantalized by in Polanyi, that you know, and contact with reality is my, you know, my less embarrassing version of my dissertation and a little bit brought up to date. But this scientific discoverer just was confident that you know you’ve made contact with reality when you have a sense of the possibility of indeterminate future manifestations. And that sentence was the water of life to me, still is, I just got chills. And that’s what I wrote my dissertation on. And so it’s as if this scientific discoverer was assuring me, yes, you make contact with reality. And here’s these, you know, exciting, inexhaustible range of future manifestations. And I am a very excitable person. And I just thought that was magic. And so then, eventually it came to the place where I got to start to teach this, I was almost 50. And then to write it in a book and the book longing to know really is me trying to justify my own Christianity to me. Yeah. And so it’s a book for people considering Christianity, which I think is everybody who have questions about knowing. And so for me, I felt like to just when I read Pallani, I felt like his epistemology just resonated with what I thought Christianity should have as an epistemology. And it really, it just, it was very affirming for me. And so that’s what I wrote about. So in longing to know, I asked, you know, how does knowing work? And then let’s revisit knowing God in light of this approach to knowing. And oh, by the way, I think it’s going to fix your golf game too. So, and so that’s been my agenda to say, look, this is how knowing works in every area and getting straight on it will make you better at what you’re already doing. So that’s the angle I’ve been continuing to pursue through ever, ever since just ever since. So business seminar, you know, or, or right now I’m writing on a book, a book on artistry. I’m starting a series, taking my proposals into different areas. Next one might be therapy. Another might be education, but that sort of a thing, because I think this is, I feel like Pallani’s account about how knowing works is kind of a trump card. You have to do it to deny it. So it, it just seems like what I’m doing in my epistemological therapy is kind of relaying the accents on people’s lives so they can see what they already are doing in the way of knowing that is not the scientific method, you know, or, or any other sort of methodological, methodical procedure. So, so I listened this morning to your Four Horsemen of Meaning conversation and you know, you uttered that sacred word insight, you know, and the idea of transformation and what you’ve used, somebody used the wonderful word proleptic. You know, I have a crass way of saying it that I wouldn’t ever say in public, but you know, learning kind of happens in a backwards sort of a way, you know, and it’s not linear, linear. You’ve got to have this kind of, this graced intrusion of, of, of, of an insight that actually is transformative. So that’s, that’s, I’ve taken that Pallani and epistemology and then what I’ve done is I’ve augmented it. It, my philosophy will always have that component because I think that that torpedoes and dispels a Cartesian modernist epistemology and it does it really well, but then I’ve augmented it because I think this is implicit in Pallani’s work, though it wasn’t what he was about, to say that this is suggesting a livelier interpersonal dynamic. So, so even in Longing to Know, when I talk about contact with reality, it’s more like, you know, it’s not that reality answers your questions so much as that it explodes them. So it’s like reality contacts back or maybe even first. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what you’ve got lends itself well to recasting the paradigm of knowing, and this is the thesis of Loving to Know, the paradigm of knowing is the interpersonal, covenantly constituted relationship, best typified, I think, by the redemptive encounter where, you know, somebody walks in and transforms your life, you know, so that’s what Loving to Know is about. And I, but I find in all my years of teaching this, that if I start talking about love in connection with knowing and don’t do the Pallani and groundwork, you know, I talk about a daisy of dichotomies, my daisy of dichotomies, well, love is an emotion, it’s out on the pedal and, you know, you might add it to knowing, but it would be different from knowing. And I want to dispel that whole thing and start over again, so that you’ve got a dynamic of inviting the real, you know, finding that the real was there for the first wooing you, and then you’ve got more of a dance of overture and response. And the goal of knowing, and I think the goal of humaneness is communion with the real. So what you’re going for is not comprehensive information to the end of certainty and control and commodification and power and all that, but what you’re going for is way more intimate, way more objective, way more fun and lively, and it’s communion. And I’m talking gardening, you know, that just anything, you know, if you’re a guitar, a guitarist, you know, you want an intimacy, a communion with your instrument, with your jazz ensemble, you know, all of that. So that’s kind of where I am now. Loving to Know came out in 2011. I call it the big fat. And the real reason it was fat was it was pregnant. And so the little manual for knowing is just a skinny version of Loving to Know. And then Contact with Reality came out, you know, long after it was begun. So how am I doing? That’s fantastic. That was amazing. And I resonated with so much of what you were talking about, but I didn’t want to interrupt your flow at all. That was great. I appreciate that consideration. Well, there’s so much, there’s so many points. I mean, I’ve been pursuing a lot this project of D’Logos and a dialogical model of knowing the deep interconnection between loving and knowing different kinds of knowing this sense of connectedness, contact, and then again, all the plan and stuff. And the thing that impresses me about your work, you’re right, it does reach into gardening, but it also reaches into Mino’s paradox. And it spans all of that. And so I’m facing a poverty of riches here kind of thing. There’s so many things. And if I can add one more installment that I’m sorry, I should have put this in, but you mentioned David Schindler. I stumbled on his work in 2014 and I fell in love. Me too. And in my analytic training and in my church, neither place had I ever heard classical Christian metaphysics. And then to hear the ardor and the machine gun metaphysics with which he carries it forth. The first thing I read by him is the essay called Surprised by Truth. And I felt as if I had taken the test and gotten an A and now somebody gave me the textbook. Right, right, right. So my recent years and now in my work, what I’m trying to do is develop the metaphysical therapy to go with my epistemological therapy. Right. I think it’s listened all along, but I’ve needed to do the ton of work that Bishop Baron learned in the cradle. Well, I mean, I know I’ve read Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason by Schindler, Love and the Postmodern Predictment. I’m going to the Catholicity of Reason right now and I’m reading some of the people he talks about like Clark and Balthazar and people like that. So yeah, I’m doing a pretty deep dive. I’ve been swimming in that stuff for the last seven years trying. Yeah, yeah. And trying to connect his understanding of Plato to sort of an implicit phenomenological understanding of Plato that’s within Marleau-Ponty. And so it’s just been really, really eye-opening. I find everything that he writes is brilliant. I recommend it as soon as I read it. I think Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason is the best book I’ve read. I don’t think I even own it yet. I know I need to work through that. It’s the best. It’s the best commentary on the Republic I’ve ever read. And it might, in fact, be the best on Plato that I’ve ever read. And I’ve read it with other people. I’ve not just read it. I’ve read it and studied it, discussed it. And I have taught Catholicity of Reason in my Philosophy for Theology class repeatedly. It’s an amazing book. So I’ve gone through that several times. And then Love and the Postmodern Predicament, too. Yeah, and Love and the Postmodern Predicament is a weird- I endorse that, by the way. So proud of that. My name’s on the back of his book. Wow, that’s great. That’s great. Yeah, so I mean, it’s kind of odd that you and I haven’t met up until now. But I’m glad- so I’m trying to think of where to start. So first of all, I agree with you that love is not an emotion. I think that’s a mistake. It’s definitely not a feeling. It’s not an emotion. It’s much more like an existential mode because of the way- if I love somebody, that can make me jealous, angry, happy, sad, depressed, gleeful. It’s not an emotion. It’s an existential mode. And then for me, and this is part of the Neoplatonic Christian tradition, this idea of a kind of knowing by loving and that what that means is something like there are truths that are only disclosed to us as we enter into a transformative relationship, but we’re transformed- we’re undergoing transformation in order to come into more conformity, more contact with the way a reality is presenting itself to us, which is very analogous. And I think you alluded to something to this earlier, analogous coming into a deep loving of another person. I’d like to use that metaphor or analogy and I say, if I come to my beloved and I say to her, you know, you remind me of all the other women I’ve been with. I’ve got you categorized really well. I know how to manipulate you really exceedingly and I’ve got all the skills I need in our relationship. We’re done. It’s complete. It’s like that relationship is now destroyed. And so, and I say to people, if you’re thinking of knowledge along that line, you’re going to often cut yourself off from the most important kinds of knowing that are available to us. Instead, you want to be able to say something like, well, I don’t come to a point of certainty as that kind of closure and that categorical grasp. You better not. I’m leaving you. Yeah, exactly. Instead, you get into something more like I talk about faithfulness, where it’s just more this continuity of contact, which is I’m going to recognize that you are continually going to break into me from outside of any conception I have of you and continually call me to transform in response to that. And I will feel I want to afford the same for you. And then I say, if you look at that model, you see it, for example, in the symposium with Plato, you can see it in Schindler’s work, right? This idea that we can end, we can, well, I’ll use your example, right? The gardener can have that relationship to their garden, right? Or the auto mechanic to the car, right? Or for me, the Tai Chi player to doing the form. And what I think for me is important about that is it brings in a dimension. I’ll stop in a minute and let you respond at length. It brings in a dimension that has been lacking in the analytic understanding of knowledge. So the analytic understanding of knowledge has been satisfied with semantic meaning as that in terms that, you know, semantic meaning, truth, and then, right? But this, what we’re talking about now, this is what, and this is, I do a lot of work on this, this is what is philosophers like Susan Wolf or psychologists like Hicks and others are calling meaning in life. This is this sense of this dynamic, dialogical connectedness. This is meaning in life. So if you ask people what makes their life meaningful, they don’t list facts. They list connections. I feel deeply connected to myself, to other people, to reality. And it’s that, and it’s a dynamic living kind of connectedness. And this way of knowing, it doesn’t exclude semantic meaning, but it brings in this deeper, this meaning in life aspect. And for me, that affords a possibility of linking the idea of knowledge back to the idea of wisdom, you know, the kind of knowledge that helps to make a life more meaningful, more fulfilling, richer. I wonder if, does any of that land for you as a way of thinking about what you’re reflecting on? Well, I would like to add the key word, as far as I’m concerned, in Pallani’s work to this discussion, and that is the idea of the subsidiary. Yes. So what you’ve got in a knowing, in any knowing, is a two level from two, subsidiary focal integration to an irreducible pattern. And that’s that knowing. And I find that we need that idea of the subsidiary, because I feel like that’s the key thing that you have to get about Michael Pallani. And I feel like, if I can just say this. Please. Oh, dang, I’ve lost my train of thought. But, oh, I know what I was going to say. For me, the modernist, the defective modernist epistemology, and, you know, my little schtick in life is to talk to kind of people on the street, like what the kind of the street philosophy is, because I, for one thing, I’m not an expert at all the philosophers, you know, but I do think I’m picking up on kind of the ordinary, what people usually think. But I think modernist epistemology renders knowledge, focal explicit bits. Yes, yes. And what Pallani is saying is that blinds you to the real, it blocks the real. So, you know, what he said was, if science worked like modernist epistemology said, no scientific discovery could ever happen. Exactly. So changing epistemology. So, really, for you to be able to have meaning at all, like for my words that are, you know, coming out of my mouth and my hand, stuff, for any of that to mean anything, you need to be subsidiarily indwelling it to open onto a farther real. And so it’s not like, okay, we can have this kind of knowledge, and then we can have this kind of knowledge. Oh, no, there is only one kind of knowledge, and it’s subsidiary focal integration. And that puts it all together. And I wonder what you think of that with all your expertise with different kinds of knowing. And in particular, I wonder how you feel about Pallani’s essay called, well, the two at the end of knowing of being one is life’s irreducible structure. What’s the other one? One. Logic of psychology. Let’s see if I got. Wait a minute. There’s another one she’s got in here. The structure of consciousness. That’s the other one. Is that in knowing and being? Which one is that? It’s in her collection, Green’s collection. I haven’t read that. I just got it about a week ago. So I have to. My favorite genre in philosophy is critical introductions. And this one is fantastic. I mean, in three pages, she does Pallani, but then her collection of essays in there. So I do commend it to you. But I’m curious to see how what Pallani was thinking about mind, body things at all goes with your. Well, very much. So first of all, just to try and stitch what you said together with what I was saying about that reciprocal that dialogical relationship. I mean, what I was basically talking about is a mutual indwelling. Right. And that and what does that mean? And it’s one of the things I find interesting is about Marla Ponte and Pallani both independently came to the tapping the cane metaphor. Did they ever communicate? I don’t believe so, did they? Did they ever discuss? I mean, Marjorie Green and her unshy and unretiring way said, Michael, you have to read Marla Ponte. And so he dutifully did so and footnoted. But, you know, my conclusion in contact with reality is really I prefer Pallani to Marla Ponte, just like Schindler does. He doesn’t, you know, embrace phenomenology either for similar reason. That is we’re realists. And, you know, we’re interested in an in exhaustive real, which I don’t think phenomenology even acknowledges. So. Well, I might disagree with you on that. I think Marla Ponte does when he rejects his world’s reduction for what I call the eidetic deduction. He definitely has a place for the inexhaustible. But I agree with you that there are certain prevalent interpretations of phenomenology that make it very idealistic and rather than realistic. But that. And there are phenomenological realists as they’re called, you know, like JP too, as a phenomenal realist. But back to your point about what about, right, about integration of the subsidiary into the focal. I’ve been pointing out how that is that’s even it’s often implicitly presupposed in a lot of the current models of consciousness. I published a work, a book chapter with Leo Ferraro on trying to use that to understand what is happening within consciousness, within meditation. So like, you know, you’re tapping and you can be you’re aware through the pencil of the phone, but then you can become aware of the pencil through your fingers and you can become aware of it. And when people get that sense of how they can step back and look at what they were previously looking through, that is how I try and explain the movement of mind you’re trying to engage in in meditation rather than just focus on your breath. Because that that is inadequate for getting people to become aware of this dynamic structure of attention. All they do is they just have a metaphor of doing this. Right. And what they’re not doing is becoming aware of weight. You know, attention is this layered dynamic structure that’s doing this and doing all of this recursive integration, like in this highly layered fashion. And so that’s an example of how I use it at, you know, both trying to teach and explain what’s going on in mindfulness. About the more general thing about mind and body. So I take that view, although I do distinguish between kinds of knowing, but where I in fact make ultimately a kind of Polanyian argument for what I take consciousness to be, which is what I call a participatory knowing through perspectival knowing of procedural knowing. And so the right, and you can’t you can’t ever make your participatory knowing fully focal because it is that right. It’s that ultimate, well, the usual language contact with reality that grounds and makes possible all the other kinds of knowing. So that’s ways. So the idea is participatory knowing is knowing by communing. Right. And that takes place below. You don’t have to be an internalist. You don’t have to know that you. So I think that there’s ways in which the way reality unfolds, evolution unfolds, culture, cognition that by that shapes me and the world to fit together. And therefore, I know it by being it. But that right makes that that creates what Gibson calls affordances. Yeah, I know that language from green because yeah, you know, lost their biology. Yes, exactly. Participatory. So a biological instance of participatory knowing is something like an organism’s niche construction very much shaping the environment and being shaped by the environment, realizing and being realized this co-realization process very much. And that opens up for an organism affordances like the grasp ability of the cup of the bottle, a real relation between. Yeah, but I like the language of encounter and epiphany and and and that sort of mutuality of of it’s personal, but it’s not subjective. That’s exactly the point. That’s exactly the point. Yes. With it and and other that you regard. I mean, that’s the other thing that’s so awful about the modernist whatever is this dismissive disrespect of the other. You know, that’s just or or or the the the super evaluation of the other as something that is cannot be contacted. Like the the way that postmodernism picks up alterity and otherness and then makes it as something that is perpetually unreachable. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, in a more sort of convoluted fashion. And so and then on top of what I would call the participatory knowing, right, certain affordances are drawn up into the way you’re sizing things up, how things are being made salient to you. This is your perspectival knowing. This is knowing what it’s like to be me here now, right? And your participatory knowing through your perspectival knowing is what I would argue consciousness ultimately is. And so you can see through and through that’s very it’s a very Polanyian kind of structuring of the understanding. And I do I contribute to this is please please deal about destructive analysis. So if if the pianist reverts to think about their fingers, of course, like, right, right. So obviously, and and he talks about, well, that that can be valuable. It’s also it also takes it’s a risk. And I come back to that. But what I’ve tried to say is, somehow, we’ve got to get in touch with the subsidiaries and develop an intentionality, and even an artistry about the subsidiaries as subsidiary. Well, so I wonder if that’s maybe something that you are working with in what you’re saying. Very much. I think. Yeah, I’ve been invoking the term virtuosity myself also, and trying to integrate virtue and virtuosity and the virtual. And how how are all these terms related to each other right now? Because we’re throwing them out in the culture, but we haven’t bothered to carefully reflect on their possible relations. So let me so the work I do on mindfulness is to try and use a Polanyian frame to explain the pretty well, you know, empirically confirmed idea that mindfulness affords insight, which of course is also a traditional claim, but pasana means insight, right? But pasana, a kind of mindfulness meditation. And I think, well, let me try it. And this maps onto a lot of convergent literature. You do this initial move where you step back and look at the subsidiary, and it’s, you know, sort of destructive. But it’s actually it’s actually adaptive. It’s what we call in the insight literature, breaking frame, you’ve right, you’re looking through your frame, it’s completely subsidiary, and you don’t realize how it’s distorting. And then what you do is you step back and look at it rather than through it. And then you realize, oh, oh, oh, and that’s a meditative move. But then that you can’t stay there because notice now I’m disconnected from the world. And I don’t know if I’ve made a good correction to my glasses. I have to now do with the contemplative move, I have to now rerun, reengage the integration machinery, and see if I can actually indwell deeper into the world. That’s what contemplation is. And then what you want to do is cycle between them. This breaks in an appropriate frame. And this affords a new and more encompassing frame. And what I’m doing is I’m doing there’s sort of that those three moments, there’s the breaking frame, right, and then I’m throwing myself into the dynamic self organization of integration that affords me now making a frame, I break it, I commit to reintegration. And now I see as I haven’t seen before, and then I’m constantly looping between them, because they correct each other, they afford each other. And so that for me, is the way in which I try to integrate the the the Polanyian understanding of attention and right into mindfulness and its relationship to insight. Yeah, that’s that’s, I’ll have to think about that some more. Because I think I certainly he’s got that, you know, back and forth. Yeah, that is essential. And, and I do too. And the lovely thing about this is it’s it’s obviously so asymmetrical. You know, so I, yeah. So I just have to think more about the the way you’re you’re saying it. I, well, of course, of course, I mean, the interesting thing, John is, in this book, I’m trying to write that I’m having such a hard time writing on artistry. I’ve got this extensive part on presence, right, which I think of as mindfulness and, and not that I, I’m not intimate with mindfulness so much. But it seems to me, and and I would this be, I’d be glad to have your insight on this. It seems to me that when I think about what presence is, I’m putting together a whole bunch of things. One is attention. Yes. And one is composure. And consent, I think consent is this huge, huge thing in any act of coming to know you have to, like, like a somehow a student has to, you know, lay out the syllabus and say, Okay, I’m going to do this. Right. Nothing’s gonna happen. So that kind of, kind of consent, and it seems and I know in my book right now, I’m kind of putting those all in this same area of presence, I think of the, the man of the gatherings that, you know, is found at the end sitting composed and in his right mind at Jesus feet. It’s kind of like that it’s or like a dog sitting waiting for his treat. You know, so maybe I’m pushing together more things than no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, I can’t believe the synchronicity. So I’ve just published three papers this year on on this and a very weird way in a very not weird way, a very odd case of presence. So the the area and cogs side that’s doing a lot of this is of course in VR, because the defining feature, the realness of VR is not the sense of conviction about VR, virtual reality, virtual reality. Okay, we’re doing it right now. Right. Right. And so what like, why is it that like, you feel real to me? And it’s this sense of presence. And so you can think about it also in video video gamer designers are like, because if they can get the player to feel like they’re present, then the game just takes off. Right. And it’s not. And here’s one of the key things, even from the video game work. And then I’ll talk about this special case in a second. It’s not verisimilitude. Right, you can have a virtual environment that looks like technically very realistic, no sense of presence. And then you can have something really weird like Tetris. And it creates a tremendous sense of presence of being here now and in the game. That’s the common metaphor. I’m not out here. But again, the contact metaphor, I’m in the game. I’m really there. Right. Now I want to, it’s a belonging and it’s interesting to try and figure out what it is that’s going on there. And let me try and what Dan Schiappi and I, we published three papers on, you have the NASA scientists on earth moving the rovers around on Mars. And what they look for, and in addition to, you know, math and blah, blah, blah, they look for people that can be the rover on Mars. Yeah. So in dwelling. Exactly. Exactly. And what’s interesting is going back to what we said earlier, is that it’s, and what, like one of the main ethnographers, Bertessi talks about this kind of loop about, right. So what they do is they anthropomorphize the robot, but they also technomorphize themselves. So they’ll do things like this. There’s a scientist, she’s sitting and they’re figuring out how to move the rover and she’ll pick up her phone and she’s sitting on a chair with wheels and she’ll put it in front of her and go, we need to do this. We need to do this. Right. And she, what she’s doing is she’s becoming the rover and she’s enacting it. And she, right. So they, they technomorphize themselves and they anthropomorphize the rover. And then they get into really, really interesting places. They’ll say things like this. And this is so exciting, like for a rocket scientist, hard-node scientist, they’ll say things like, you know, I was in the garden and I was gardening and my right wrist was really sore. And then I got to the lab and spirit, that’s the name, ironically enough, spirit. That’s when the name of one of the rovers it’s right wheel was stuck. And I don’t know. Right. And they do, I don’t know. I mean, there’s some sort of sympathetic connection and they’re struggling, right. They’re struggling because they have this flatland epistemology, ontology, and the two options to them is it’s all just crazy or it’s magic. They don’t have an epistemology and an ontology that’s rich enough to allow them to talk about that because they can’t deny it. In fact, they rely on this. They rely on like seeing like the rover and being the rover. That’s great. Well, so I feel as if, here’s what I, here’s what, here’s my new term, metaphysics of childhood. I made that up. And I’m suggesting that there’s kind of a natural, and when I mean, obviously the baby isn’t doing metaphysics, but there’s a natural inclination to be joyous in the real. And I feel as if that’s our deepest default as far as knowing goes. And then along comes grade school and we’re kind of talked out of it. And then we’re told that that’s illegitimate. Yet we, because it’s, and you might’ve said something in that meaning thing that goes with it. It’s philosophically presumed in anything that we do. So that no matter how rigid we try to be in our linearity, we’re still relying on it. We rely on it to deny it. And so I find that in my epistemological therapy, I just need to get people back to what they’re truthfully doing in connection with the real. Does that make sense? It does. I mean, I’m sorry, I almost interrupted you because I was, yes, because that’s the deep, in order to do the theorizing, the scientists have to develop the skills. But in order to develop the skills, they have to get this perspectival knowing with that sense of presence. And in order to get that sense of presence, they have to do this mutual indwelling identification thing. It’s a relationship of dependence that’s clearly indicated in that. I think that’s the fundamental point we’re making. And that’s why we were able to get these papers published. And I think that’s right. Polanyi was a discoverer. That was his job. To me, that’s like being a professional baseball player where you’re so good, they actually give you an error if you miss. That’s how it seems to me. It was his job to discover things. Right? That means going from zero to 60 with regard to not knowing, to knowing. And there’s no linear way that that would account for that. I agree. So you’ve mentioned this a couple of times. And I want to sort of step back. You’ve invoked epistemological therapy and how you might now supplement it with ontological or metaphysical therapy. But what do you exactly mean? I take it there’s a practice that you’re pointing to. What does that practice look like? And why do people come to you for it? Thank you for asking that. So I believe that Polanyi said, I think this is the main claim that he was making according to Marjorie Green, no knowledge is wholly focal and explicit information transferable. And so that means a whole pile of our knowledge isn’t. And it isn’t articulable. And I would like to suggest that any epistemological default is probably not focal. And it probably is bodied. If I’m going to combat the defective epistemology that claims that knowledge is information, how am I going to do that by giving more information? So I have tried, I’ve got to be subversive in a way that makes your body feel it. And I guess I say this in longing to know it’s as if my body had become Cartesian, which means my body was an object. Which I think is part of the problem that we have in maybe more Protestant traditions. We’ve got this mind body divorce. So obviously the mind is the religious part, if anything is, it can’t be your body. And so then your body is this meaningless object. So I really think we body our philosophical orientation. And so it’s going to take something more like a change of your body. And that’s going to mean using words, not as information, but more maximic, as Pallani said, to get bodies to shift to feel it. So that’s why I call it therapy. It’s just saying, look, I’m denying that knowledge is merely information. So I can’t give you more information or I would be being inconsistent with what I’m saying. So I’ve got to do something that’s more like therapy to redraw the playing field that you actually body forth. How am I doing? That’s great. Don’t misread my silence. I was savoring that. I mean, you’re no doubt aware about the emphasis in 4E cognitive science on embodiment, embeddedness, and active extended. I just would add the word subsidiary. I mean, I just think so the word subsidiary helps us get what embodiment ought to be and what we ought to do with it. Yeah, I don’t know if I’m disagreeing with you about that. I was just saying that the emphasis on the fact that we’re knowing through our body and we just don’t, it’s not like, Evan Thompson, in fact, wrote the famous article on the body body problem. There’s the body we have as an object that we know and then there’s the body that we know through. And part of what we’re what we struggle with, right, philosophically is what’s the relationship between the body we know about as an object and the body we know through as you’re saying. This is why it’s so weird to go get a physical with the doctor. For him, you’re plumbing. Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, I’ve had good doctors that took the time to try and, but I’ve had doctors that did treat me like plugged up plumbing that had to be alleviated in some fashion. So no, I think what people often talked about with bedside manners was more than just polite consideration. It was ability to have that kind of gnosis that like trying to know the person rather than just the object. So, but what I’m trying to get at is, I assume that you’re talking to somebody when you’re doing this epistemological therapy and you’re being subversive like Socrates or Wittgenstein in the sense that you’re not trying to, or maybe Kierkegaard, you’re not trying to go like, yeah, I’m not just going to give you more propositions. I’m going to throw out proposition, or maybe Jesus of Nazareth would resonate with you even more. I’m going to give you something that looks like a narrative about this son who leaves his dad and comes back. It looks like an everyday story. And then when you try to think about it, it just blows up your mind. It just explodes. So you want to know what I’m actually saying to people? Well, if it’s not in future. I start with, let’s talk about riding a bike. So I spend a long time talking about bike riding. And, you know, I tell the story of the way my father taught me to ride, you know, and, you know, the plan, what it takes for you to ride a bike is you’ve got to subsidiarily and dwell it, and that sense of keeping your balance on a bike, which is absolutely essential to bike riding, is not articulable. But it’s palpable. It’s not mystical. It’s not subjective. It’s trainable, but it’s from knowledge, just like, you know, driving any skill. I mean, Pilate said it’s all, you know, it’s all skill knowledge. It’s like you have this artful subsidiary bodied in dwelling. That’s what keeping your balance is. And so then, and, you know, what I think modernist epistemology is would be me stopping to look down at my foot on the pedal, which would be disastrous, right? So I get people talking about their skills. I get them to name their most common skill and then start to apply the subsidiary focal integration in longing to know I’ve got three sectors of clues, the directions, the situation, and the body, you know. I get them to name all those things. Here’s another fun thing I do. I think, I think this is telling. I tell everybody, pick up a pencil, a piece of paper, and write a sentence. So like a five-word sentence. I make them write it. And then I say, now, take your pencil and put it in the other hand and write the same sentence. And they’re all really upset, you know. And then I say, now, just reward yourself and put it back in the correct hand, write the sentence again, and say, oh, praise God for subsidiary focal integration, because you have artfully learned to indwell and implement and paper so that you can do philosophy while you’re, you know, doing all this stuff with your hands, you know. So first of all, I’ll relate. I’ve been using the bike riding thing in my lectures for many years. But what I do is I do it from the perspective of a dad trying to teach his son how to ride a bike. So, right, he’s riding a bike. Here’s, here’s my entire genetic legacy. And I’m putting it on like, and what it, how it occurred to me was, I’m saying these things to him. I’m saying like, keep your balance, look up, not too much. Like, and I realized this is totally useless, right? Which is what I thought when my father was yelling balance, you know, I’m a baby skeptic. It’s like, what does that even mean? So what happens when, like, when they’re confronted with that kind of a poria, when they’re confronted with the gap between, you know, verbalizable, propositional, and this, and this, that they can’t, like, well, like, so you’re basically kind of shocking them. I mean, you’re doing it with respect, I get that. But you’re trying to, like, notice, you’re trying to get them to notice, like, what do they do? And what are you hoping they do when they confront that gap? Well, that’s where when I start talking about my experience with Sarah Stravinsky in ballet class when I was 33, and say what a teacher has to do, especially if they’re teaching a body, is not only utter the information, but then utter sentences that make a body feel what they’re supposed to do. And so, you know, in ballet work, you’ve got this, you know, you begin with bar work, you know, and in your arms supposed to be out like this on the other side. And what happens is everybody’s so busy thinking about their feet that their arm kind of goes up like this, and the teacher goes, oh, and fixes all their arms. Well, one day she said, pretend a drop of water falls on your shoulder and rolls down your arm, it does not come off at the elbow, it comes off at the third finger. And all of us went, yeah, that was a maximic sentence that made the body feel. And so I think to be a great writer, you know, you’ve both got to give the argument, but you’ve got to somehow use your language in a way to make a body feel what it is to feel. Does that make sense? It does. I teach Tai Chi. Yeah, there you go. This is what I call this the, like the imaginal augmentation of perception. It’s imagination for, this is the slogan I use with my students, because they come in also with this, you know, almost Calvinistic notion of what the imagination is. And I’m saying, no, no, you’re not forming mental picture in your head. What I want you to do is I want you to stand, and I want you to feel as if you’re the bottom parts of your leg are sinking into mud. And then from your knees to your stomach, this is like flowing water. And then from above is like, and then what they do is like, oh, and then I’ll say, okay, now put your arm out here. Now hold your arm how you would hold it if, right, right, let it be bent, but how it would feel if there was water flowing through your arm and going out. Yeah. Not just passively there, but you’re not moving. So what do you like? And they go, oh, Nick Winkleman talks about this in the language of coaching. And I’ve talked to him about this use of enacted analogy, right? Right. And so that people get to this place where they can translate between your propositional utterance and then enacting, right, a certain, like a certain way of being present to go back to our, right. And what’s key for me is notice, but that, that, that, well, that’s what I call perspectival knowing that state of presence is you’ve got to get them into that before you can give them the skills. If I, if I just show the, if I just show, if I just show the punch and they haven’t come to inhabit their mind and body the right way, they can mechanically reproduce it. But what they don’t have is they don’t have the virtuosity of the use of the skill. They have the skill, but they don’t have the virtuosity of it. So, yeah. So that, that, that I totally get what you’re talking about. So virtual high five. Yeah. Virtual high five. This leads, this leads me to something because, I mean, this is also, you know, an explicit, you’re not, you’re not being duplicitous. This is an explicit goal of the book, right? Like this, this, this way of using, right, the imaginal, not the imaginary, but the imaginal to augment people’s ability to inhabit, re-inhabit and, and to get a sense of presence that tells them how to create and curate their skills, right? I take it that you’re making an argument that there’s something like that with respect to coming into a relationship with God or ultimate reality or that, that, right? That it’s that kind of thing that you, right? And, you know, and, and the classical, as you said, the classical, you know, Christian metaphysics was, you know, you, you get the repeated, you can’t do this unless you’re going through the transform transformative practices. Don’t just read this. You have to do all this stuff and you have all this, all this stuff happening, right? And like even in Plato, like the Parmenides is such a hard dialogue, but you realize that what he’s trying to get you to do is don’t think of the forms as things. You can’t think of the form as forms like you do, like you do physical objects. As long as you’re doing that, you’re fundamentally getting it wrong. And even saying to yourself, they’re not things is not doing what I’m saying to you. Right. So that was, sorry, that was kind of sort of a little bit scattered, but what I’m trying to get at is I see, it seems to me there’s a connection between the practice you’re doing here in existential therapy and also the way you’re trying to lead people into relationship with God and longing to know. Is that, is that fair to see that connection? Well, the plan of the book is let’s look at how knowing works. I mean, our problem is, a lot of our problem with knowing God turns out to be a problem with knowing. That’s, that’s what I was talking about. That was me, the baby Cartesian, right? And so let’s redo knowing and then revisit the question of knowing God. So that, that’s just what the agenda of the book is. And, you know, there’s lots of ways that I think you could articulate the kind of embodiment, you know, that you and I have been talking about right now, but one is just plain old obedience. So, so, you know, obedience has to do with kind of making your body do things, you know, and there, and there’s a sense of which that’s, you know, at one point I say in the book, it’s lived truth, you know, it’s like part of the genius of Pallani’s epistemology is you’ve got to get yourself in the right position for the Vista to open up. Right. So that’s what the kind of the, the maybe bodied reorientation would be all about. And obedience is, is, is, you know, one way to, to see it. So, well, it does, but I was more in the book than that. I, and actually I just read it because I read it to record it for, but, you know, that was last week. I don’t have a very long memory. Lucky listeners, because your enthusiasm will come through in your reading. And that’s, that, that thing was, I kept breaking down and crying, you know, it’s just, there’s these stories in there that just undo me, you know, so they’d have to pause, you know, while I cried and then start again. But anyway, no, no, I just, I just want to pick up on that, but I’m trying to get maybe a more specific connection. I see what you’re doing in existential therapy, right? Right. You’re doing, you’re saying you’re getting therapy. Is that what you mean? What did I say? You said existential therapy. I meant epistemological therapy. I’m sorry. But cause I was leaping ahead of my thinking, because what I see you doing is getting people to make not just a propositional term, but an existential term, right? They’re, they’re reorienting in a fundamental way. And I take it that that, that, that is a species or right of a larger genius that includes that, that what, you know, what the Christian tradition calls metanoia, which is not just changing beliefs, but it is this metanoia. It’s a new, it’s a beyond way of noticing that you didn’t have before. Right. And cause I’m, cause there’s, you, you didn’t quite finish the autobiography because you told me how you fell out of belief. All right. But I didn’t like fell out of belief. Well, oh, so I don’t know. Yeah, no, I, I mean, I love Jesus, you know, I, and I get the better it gets, you know, I mean, to me, what I’m doing right now is just of a piece with my exuberant love, with love for God. But, but I think what I, I did was get out of modernist epistemology. So what’s the church, because you like, I got a sense that there was something that you found dissatisfactory though. You talked about that at the beginning, you were brought up in this and you were finding that it wasn’t like, what was the lack that initially drove you into this exploration? I, well, first of all, because I, I have dealt with a lot of self-doubt, the lack was me. I was sure it was me that the problem was me. And, and then, so it was kind of enlightening to realize that the problem was philosophical. And then, you know, it’s really been over the years that it dawned on me that the problem with the church had a lot to do with defective modernist epistemology. And, and, you know, I, in Longing to Know, I tell the story of Michael. Well, that Michael story and that class in which I had him was, and I say this in Longing to Know, I do remember this from last week, but, but that, that I presumed that, you know, here I’m coming back, it’s the first time ever that I ever get to teach this. I’m like 48. I’ve been raising my babies, you know, my mind has gone to mush. And I’d come back and I think, well, you know, what am I going to have to say to young people? Because, you know, they don’t have the problems I do, because the milieu has moved on. That’s what I thought. So I was shocked when, you know, Michael and others in this class of cream of the crop students were just like, oh, this is what I need. And then I realized that if somebody’s going to ask you to consider Jesus or Christianity, and you’re, and you, you know, it’s like, you have to decide on questions about truth and reality. You can’t just say, oh, you know, truth and reality don’t matter if somebody’s presenting Jesus to you. So I realized that even though maybe I felt like I was outdated, you know, I wasn’t because people considering Christianity have got to deal with those things. So I found myself in God’s kindness through my Pallanian training, somehow still in vogue. I had very similar. I just think it’s so what, what he did just needs to be spread. And you asked me what my mission in life is. I really feel like this is the message that God has given to me to share. And I think it can have influence and impact life by life. And my job is to steward that. So I try to find as many ways as I can to get the message out to other people. Well, there that that answered my question very well. That’s what I wanted to understand. I wanted to understand what the shift is and what the shift was for you. And I had something analogous into that when I, when I started talking about meaning and the meaning crisis to students and their eyes opened up and they really wanted to talk and they really wanted to learn how to practice and they would, they went from learning for the test to learning for their life. And you can see that trends that that transition. And so I think I have a sense of what you’re talking about. I really, how, how could, where should people start if they want to get more familiar with your work? Should they start with Longing to Know? Should they start with, I realize, like I realized I bought them in order of publication, but as I was reading this, I was going, oh, this actually comes before this, right? Yeah. What would you recommend? Well, for years now at Geneva College, where I got hired because of Longing to Know, I taught this course in which I got to teach my stuff and the two texts were Longing to Know and then Loving to Know. And we would romp through Longing to Know, not so much for the religious part of it, but for in my work, it’s the most drawn out getting on board with Pallani’s subsidiary integration, which, you know, the thing is, as you know, if you’re fixing people’s epistemology, you also have to fix how they read because they’ve been in this reading information sort of thing. And so then, you know, you to get to class, and this is the other thing I would say is if people can read Longing to Know, then Loving to Know, but somehow hear me, like invite me to speak or look at YouTube or something like that, they might get a sense of kind of what it feels like. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. So I find that even places that teach my work, when I show up, stuff happens. So I’d say Longing to Know and then Loving to Know. And what I find is in both of those books, the transformation is kind of gradual. There just comes this place where there’s the switch. And at the end of that course, I made everybody do a covenant epistemology project, which was they had to identify and undertake an act of coming to know and then show how it displays all the features of knowing that covenant epistemology commends. So I like starting with Longing to Know just for that presentation of subsidiary folklife. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you start talking about love. Like I said, it’s, you know, I talk about the daisy, you know, the stuff like rationality and science is privileged in the middle of the daisy, but then the marginalized things are on the pedal. So faith is on the pedal, emotions on the pedal, you know, arts on the pedal, those kinds of things. And so people, and Little Manual tries to start with love. But, you know, I kind of pity the engineers. It’s like, go read chapter four first. Do you know what I’m saying? So I think getting on board with subsidiary focal integration and seeing, look, this is good for seeing how baseball works, you know, and all those kinds of things. But then going into talk about this kind of more interpersonal encounter-esque, I’ve got a boober chapter I saw on your shelf in the video you had, I, Thou, there. I’ve done a video series with Zevi Slavin and Gaisen Stock on on Boober, comparing the mystical aspects of Boober and the dialogical aspects of Boober. And how do they talk to each other? And what about Boober’s own conversion and what was going on there? Very much, yes. Do you know the name James Loader? I don’t think so. I’ve got two Loader chapters. Well, he was a psychologist, educator, theologian at Princeton. Very, very interdisciplinary and dense. So the book I engage with is called The Transforming Moment. And it’s an account of convictional knowing, which would be the, you know, the Holy Spirit showing up and convicting, you know, being present and convicting you. So I have two Loader chapters in Loving to Know. Well, I’m gonna have to get Loving to Know, that’s clear. Yeah, well, maybe you could come back and we could and have a part two in which we could expand on a covenant epistemology. I’m just getting a sense of it. I don’t have Loving to Know yet, but I can get it and reflect on it. But I would like to give people as we come towards the end, that are guests, you know, the final word, so to speak, what would you like to say sort of at the end of our conversation today? Well, I would, I guess I’d recur to the fact that what we’re here for is communion with the real and what we’re called to be as lovers of the real. I mean, that’s just to die for. Yeah. Yes. Yes. I mean, I totally, I totally. That’s what we’re supposed to be about. You know, so go and do that. So if you want, Esther, if there’s any links you want me to put into the description, let me know. But my website, if you would share my website, I’m happy to share your website. Happy, happy to do that. And if you’re good, and we’ve already got the video recommendation of the two books, Longing to Know and Loving to Know. So, but like I say, so many further links you want, and I’ll make sure that they get in there. And like I said, I’ve extended the invitation. I mean, it’d be great if you could come back and we could talk again. I’d be invited again. Thank you. And I’m so glad to make your acquaintance. Me too. Take good care. Thank you, John.