Longing to Know: what this book is about

In my recently released book, Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People (Brazos Press, 2003), I develop and recommend a proposal concerning how people know and what knowing is all about.

Questions concerning how we know what we know and what counts as knowledge are the subject matter of one of the major divisions of Western philosophy, epistemology (episteme is Greek for knowledge). The other branches of philosophy intertwine inevitably with questions of knowing: questions concerning what is real (metaphysics), and questions concerning what is good value (axiology, ethics).

How we answer these is profoundly important to all of life. Our thinking and actions reveal our personal response to these major questions, whether we are aware of this or not. But we can only live and act responsibly and with intentionality if we scrutinize, assess, and shape our personal philosophical responses.

Giving thought to our personal philosophical responses, in particular, to how we know what we know, yields very positive results. If we understand what we do better, we can do it better. We can capitalize on knowing how we know.

For these reasons, it is critical that we explore life philosophically. It is my particular passion to unleash the study and value of philosophy to ordinary people, an effort to which few philosophers have aspired, and of those who have, few have been successful. Philosophy is difficult because it involves us in attempting to examine the root assumptions in light of which we live—a bit like trying to look at your back.

The effort is worth it. In Longing to Know I help people recognize what it is that they do when they know, learn, and discover. Readers learn to identify these key features of every act of knowing:

• We actively struggle to integrate clues into a coherent pattern.
• We rely on the clues to focus on the pattern.
• We rely on clues from the world, our body, and normative guides.
• We can specify and put into words only some of the clues on which we rely, and this only at the time we are not relying on them,
• We assess and submit to the pattern in light of its profundity (it transforms our world, our body and our words) and possibility (it unlocks and engages a 3-dimensional world).

This model of how we know, which I have adopted and adapted from the work of twentieth-century philosopher of science, Michael Polanyi, offers a positive third alternative to two “default modes” that we in the Western philosophical tradition find within ourselves as we think about knowledge.

In default mode #1, we typically think of knowledge as restrict to verbalized statements and their justification (or proof). While statements are obviously and helpfully central to knowledge, we have damaged ourselves and our culture by mistakenly thinking that statements and proof is all there is to knowledge. In doing this, we have allowed key skills in human knowing to atrophy. And we have rightly moved from this position in many cases to default mode #2, in which we typically think that knowledge isn’t possible, or that truth can only be private.

The beauty of the third alternative that I propose in Longing to Know is that it restores human knowing, restores us to ourselves and to the world, by identifying key features of knowing that operate even when we are deluded about what we are doing when we know. People who read this book discover, not something that feels totally new and alien, but something they recognize that they have been doing all along. It can transform our perspective, restore hope and delight in the adventure, and unleash us to do what we do more intentionally and effectively.

Our lives are a tapestry of acts of knowing. You can’t turn around without being involved in one, at least one, maybe more. So what I say about how we know applies profitably to any area of knowledge: science, business, art, pedagogy, counseling, gardening, parenting, and religion. What is more, it helpfully reunites disciplines that we have perceived to stand in opposition to one another, such as science and art. In Longing to Know, I unpack the implications of this model for knowing God: I say that knowing God is like knowing your auto mechanic.

Understanding human knowing as I describe it in the bulleted points above leads to several helpful implications and applications. On the next page I list some of the maxims I have devised on the basis of this approach. Because it offers such concrete direction, we can take this model of knowing and apply it profitably in any sphere of knowing. People quickly learn to apply it to their own experience and begin the lifelong delightful adventure of cultivating their skill in knowing.

I grow increasingly convinced of the importance of the message of Longing to Know, for individuals, professional enterprises and inquiry of all kinds, and for our culture.

Please consider how your skill group might benefit from exploring the philosophy of knowledge for ordinary people. Longing to Know and I can help. Learn more elsewhere on the LTK website.

Meek’s Maxims

Knowing is from-to.

• At the time you rely on the "clue," you can’t call it a clue.
• We know more than we can tell (Michael Polanyi said this).
• Knowing often involves an Oh I See It moment.
• Knowing is integration, not deduction.
• Coming to know happens _____-backwards. (Okay, you can't quote me on this!)
• Conclusion before premises.
• To know we have to shape a pattern. To shape a pattern we have to assign significance to the pieces.
• Integration transforms the clues: the world looks different; the words mean different; I feel different.

Knowing is vectoring through space and time, moving from ourselves into the world and into the future.

• Coming to know is like laying out for a Frisbee.
• "Faith" = laying out. (Knowing God is like knowing your auto mechanic.)
• They make documentaries of Lewis and Clark’s trip to the West Coast, not of my trip to the West Coast.
• Knowing is like snowboarding (name your skill).
• Learn to love responsible risk.
• Cultivate your sense of adventure.

Patterns unlock/engage the world.

• Knowing is like a covenant (e.g., marriage); it takes two; it's interpersonal, a dance.
• Knowing requires a personal ethic of respect, humility, patience, commitment, faithfulness.
• Expect reality to knock your socks off.
• Expect to find yourself no longer the knower but the known.
• Sense the possibilities! (the IFM effect: "indeterminate future manifestations").
• Statements can be 2-dimensional; the world is 3-dimensional.

Knowledge is incarnational.

• Cultivate a felt sense of the real.
• Action is lived truth.
• You are a beachhead— a body rooted in the world.
• All truth is somebody's truth—NOT in the postmodern sense.

We need to be guided to see what is there.

• Recognize the role of authoritative guides properly play in knowing.
• Choose wise guides.
• Climb into the words.
• Orient and navigate between your guides they way a bat uses its sonar.
• You aren't the ultimate arbiter of truth; you are a responsible steward.