Responses...#1

I figured the best way to share what I've been thinking is to post what I've already written as responses to the book that have gotten me thinking (does that make sense?). They might not make perfect sense, unless you've read the books, but I tend to develop my own thought process rather than simply regurgitate the book, especially in the later responses, so they should be OK. This one is my response to Polanyi's Tacit Dimension.

It is fitting that this work evoked from me the response that it did. As I read the Tacit Knowing lecture, the foundation of Longing to Know, I was enlightened to a more foundational application of the process of tacit knowing. The lecture, as one would expect, clearly supported the points of Longing to Know: clues, focus, patterns, submission, integration, and confidence. However, the language used by Polanyi was much more visceral; not simpler or even more applicable, but more foundational. Now, don’t misunderstand me, Dr. Meek wrote Longing to Know to a much different and broader audience than Polanyi wrote Tacit Knowing to, and it does its intended job of introducing the non-philosopher to the process of tacit knowing very well (I don’t think I would have been able to get past the first paragraph of Polanyi without having read Meek first). But there was something about how Polanyi himself explained his theory that made it much more profound to me. Dr. Meek went about explaining the process largely by using events and instances that we encounter in our lives; for example, the snake in the woods, and especially the comforting and congealing analogies to her relationship with her auto mechanic. Polanyi, probably because of his background and intended audience, however, explained the process through biological processes; muscle twitches, undetectable by the person himself, in order to gain the cessation of a loud noise, even the way our eyes see things. This aspect of tacit knowing does not in any way contradict or redirect Dr. Meek, rather it expounds on it. It roots tacit knowing in a deeper way to all people as a process on the most basic, autonomous level. We are designed for this process. This is what I believe Polanyi meant by saying that his is a “novel idea of human knowledge from which a harmonious view of thought and existence, rooted in the universe….” (Tacit Dimension, pg. 4).
As I read Longing to Know for the first time, I charged out head-long looking for clues and determining patterns. It was exhausting. My mission slowly evolved from one of action to one of awareness as I began to get the sense of a responsibility on the part of the knower which I couldn’t really verbalize at the time. After reading Tacit Knowing, I see that responsibility as simply allowing the process to take place without interfering. It is important to know how we know, as it serves to change our motive and method in life, but it is equally important to understand that the process of tacit knowing is not ours to manipulate. Manipulation is interference and it changes that which we are coming to know. It changes the whole of which the parts attend to. There is almost a danger in writings such as Tacit Knowing and Longing to Know for this very reason.
Overall, I felt that this reading expounded on Longing to Know as it caused me to come away from it with a better understanding of, and greater appreciation for, the term “the lived feel of the thing.” To have an understanding, a gut feeling of what this process is about is far more important than understanding every aspect of it. Polanyi himself stated that, “It brings home to us that it is not by looking at things, but by dwelling in them, that we understand their joint meaning.” (Tacit Dimension, pg. 18)

Ok, so what's this rabbit thing all about?

My introduction to epistemology was through a wonderful book called Longing to Know by Dr. Esther L. Meek. I read it while in an intro to Philosophy class taught by none other than the author herself (She's a wonderful woman. I'm blessed to know her.) I read it a second time this past January in another philosophy class, again under the guidance of Dr. Meek. The good Dr. "borrows" her epistemology from Michael Polanyi and his theory of tacit knowing, massages it a little, and lays it out in layman's terms. The very basic jist of it is that as knowers, we gather clues from the world around us, look through them to see a pattern that they attend to, then connect to the world by integating to the pattern. Again, very basic rundown. As I readread the book the second time, I remembered an event in my life that illustrates this process. I shared the illlustration with Dr. Meek, she liked it, and as our class read more works such as Michael Polanyi's The Tacit Dimension, and John Frame's The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, I began to develop a theory of sorts about knowing and how it as a process and we as participants relate, interact, and respond to God. So, here's the thing with the rabbit, the example I shared with Dr. Meek.

As a new recruit in the Armed Forces, I was quite suprised to see how much down time I had while in boot camp. Notice I didn’t call it “free” time, for it was anything but that. The majority of this time was spent standing staute still, board straight, and silent in rigid confines of platoon formation. Fortunately, my place in the ranks was in the middle of the third row of the ranks, so I at least had something to stare at, even if it was the back of the soldier in front of me. As I stood there oone afternoon, I found that the two sides of my brain found a happy union in an activity that was both useful in the scope of my being a soldier, and liberating in the excercise of my creative ability. This activity was pattern recognition. As I stood there, gazing into the splotches and splashes of drab earth tones on the uniform of the soldier in front of me, I began to make pictures and recognize shapes and give them names, much, I would imagine, like ancient astronomers saw pictures and form constellations in the stars. It was not long before this activity began to produce notable results. I could look at various soldiers, fix on a shape on their blouse or field jacket, and be able to predict the placement of another shape based on the location of the first. One of these was more recognizable than the others: I called it the rabbit.
Some years later, long after I had graduated from boot camp, after I had finished my service in the military, I was reunited with the rabbit on a most unanticipated occassion. I, along with a group of my friends, were engaged in one of our most enjoyed pastimes, the game of paintball. There we were, about 15 grown men, decked out in camoflauge, running around the woods with guns that shot gelatenous balls of paint, looking to get the other guy before he got us. It was wonderful. In this particualr event, I found myself crawling along the forest floor, as low as I could get to the ground, in order to avoid detection by the other team while making a stealthy manuever into enemy territory. I had stopped for a moment to wait for a stiff breeze to blow, or for a volley of gun fire to break out somewhere in the distance in order to mask the sound of my movement, and used the time to reassess my current course of movement. I slowly lifted my head to a level above the forrest floor where I could see through the tops of the reeds I was using for concealment, and scanned the woods in front of me. All seemed clear. I was confident in my plan of attack until, about 30 feet in the distance, I happened to see a familiar shape. The Rabbit. I was astonished. I pulled my focus back from the rabbit and saw the uniformed opponent that it rested on. I pulled my focus back further and saw the two, then three, then four other players that were accompanying him. In a matter of moments, the world around me changed from a quiet patch of woods near a quaint stream to a tactical kill zone. Seeing the immediate danger that lay before me, I was forced to change my strategy. The Rabbit in the bushes warned me of the danger of the woods.

So that's were I am right know. I've seen the rabbit (actually, I've seen many rabbits), I'm aware of the danger of the woods, and I'm contemplating my next move: The "now what" about knowing. What does my knowledge require of me?