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With Esther Lightcap Meek || SLP522 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: We are made for communion with the real, and we're born into it, and that should be the philosophical paradigm.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: That should be the philosophical par why should it be Descartes?
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Why should it be knowledge as power?
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, you know, if you exalt knowledge as power, the knowledge goes away and it becomes all about power, which is what we've got.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: And we've got a world, an environment that's getting raped because we're not in communion with it.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus, including the subject of epistemology.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: What is epistemology?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm glad you asked because we have a world expert in that field, and uh she will tell us what is epistemology and why it matters today.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: Her name is Esther Latcat Meek, and she joins me on the line.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, Esther.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, it's so good to see you and be with you.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me on.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: How would you how would you uh describe uh who you are and what you do to our audience?
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm a very odd philosopher.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Some people have said I'm the merriest philosopher they know.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: But um I uh especially like to um do philosophy that's for us all because I think we're all philosophical, which involves um writing in such a way that it's for everybody too.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: So um does that get at what you think?
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think I am?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: I you know, I I uh am trained as a philosopher, taught as a philosopher, but I've got this conviction I've got to write for all of us.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I write philosophy books that I try to make accessible to everybody.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: You say all of us are philosophers.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: It it's kind of started for you at uh an early age.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: You're a thoughtful girl growing up.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: What were the sort of questions that uh gripped you early on?
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they gripped me when I was about 13.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I had grown up in a Bible-believing uh family and uh still am.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: And um uh uh I thought I knew all there was to know about God, but I I had questions about knowing.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I had a question, how do I know that God exists?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then I had this other question, which was how do I know that anything exists outside my mind?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I was, you know, do you know the old movie The Matrix?
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, right.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'm from the 1900s, I remember that.
• 2:24
  unknown: Yeah, right.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, so um I didn't tell anybody about those questions.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: I thought they were sin and uh too weird to um let people know.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: But I I felt like those were the most important things to have proof for, and had I had no proof.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I it was later when I was in high school that I uh read some of the work of Francis Schaeffer and realized that my questions weren't sin, they were philosophical, and that responses to them had shaped whole cultural epochs across the disciplines, which fired my imagination for the humanities and interdisciplinary studies.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: I still didn't know you could study philosophy.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: When I found that out, it took me 12 hours to change my life and go after studying philosophy because I felt like even though I was sure I wasn't smart enough, it was the most important thing and I was morally obligated.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I have never looked back from that moment.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, over when you look at my um the trajectory of my writing over the last uh it's been 21 years since the publication of of the first of some books, um, I was uh on a mission to respond to those two questions.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: So the first book was addresses whether we can know God.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then um uh the others developed my approach to knowing, which I've been able to work out and find a really healing approach.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then um having responsibly addressed my epistemological questions, now you know I've been able in recent years to um connect with reality, which has been my lifelong quest, and uh do some things with regard to that.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: So you've just described really a lot of what epistemology is about.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_02: You know, can I know the external world?
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: Can I can I connect with reality?
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: Can I connect with God?
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: How how do I know what I know?
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: Is that what epistemology is?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: Why what is epistemology and and why should people care about it?
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, it's about no so philosophy uh uh uh addresses the like these most fundamental matters uh in in our lives.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: One is knowing, one is reality, one is um uh who we are as human persons, and and one is um what is right and good.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: And um you can see you can consider the matter of God philosophically too, and that would permeate all of them.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they have these big long names, and epistemology is the name of study of knowledge, just from from from Greek.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's a Greek word, but um, how it is that we know whatever it is that we know, how does knowing work, that sort of thing.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things I think uh we may not realize is knowing is is like a a thread in a tapestry of our lives.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's through everything that we do.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: We're always involved in knowing.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: We're always involved with reality, we're all always involved with action, we're always acting out our humanness.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of why I felt morally obligated to study philosophy, because you can't not.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you have to, you are enacting it with every step that you take.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: So um, one philosopher quips that it's like somebody who woke up one morning and realized he'd been speaking prose all of his all of his life.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, philosophy's like that.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: You are a philosophical being as a human person, and um that's again why I think we need to talk have philosophical help, uh, as and and delight, um, just as uh whoever we are as human persons.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: A dog is not philosophical.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I mean, he doesn't look in the mirror in the morning and say, Who am I?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas we human persons do that all the time.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: And we do ask questions about knowing and about reality and what is right and good, you know, and God and and all those kinds of things.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: So so I try to access that.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: I've I've come up with some some cool ideas, I think, over the years that I I think are are really healing in this response.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not like I'm an expert on all the philosophers in the world and all the epistemologies in the world and all of that.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think of myself that way.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, in God's kindness, I've found responses to my own questions, which were desperate, and now that I share with others.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: You said in your story that having those questions about do I know God and how do I know that I know God and what about the external worlds, you you felt they might be sin.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: Is there a problem in the church?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_02: Is there a problem in the Western church where we fear uh opening up those sorts of questions?
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_02: If so, where does that come from?
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: I felt in my conservative evangelical tradition, rightly, that the Bible is the authority about God.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I was told was uh to know God, you believe the Bible.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: To me, that begged larger other other questions.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: And uh in particular, how how does knowing work at all?
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, and I did not feel that I was in a and I'm I'm sure of this, um I was not in a community that I felt welcomed those questions.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: That was one thing that was unique about Francis Schaeffer was that he did, and he taught some of us that you needed to to um be open to inquiry about those kinds of questions and deal with them in a respectful way with regard to people that was that were raising them, that were often young people like me at the time.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, and I do, you know, I but I look back on on the people I knew then, and I I look currently at the people I know in lots of um inside of of conservative churches and uh be and throughout culture who um have no idea of the philosophical.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: And uh that's part of our defective philosophical heritage in the modern West.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: The modern West and the ideas, the philosophical ideas that define it are anti-philosophical.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: So if you exalt the pragmatic and utility and you exalt information as we do, uh philosophy sounds l useless, and uh we don't talk of about our being philosophical beings.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so to the extent that it's in the church, it's in the church because it's in the culture.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And you'd think the church would be wiser about that, but you know, not necessarily.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why when I start talking to people, the first thing I do is try to um uh, you know, pin them up against the wall and say, look, you're a philosophical being, and you have been deprived of your philosophical birthright by the modern West, you know, because you've been taught that what you need to do is be um a nuts and bolts, pragmatic sort of a person, and that philosophy is useless.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: So now, on the other hand, I've got to say a lot of philosophy is useless because I mean, um i in a in a different sense of of the word, in that some it's I don't think it's made accessible as if this is for all of us, right?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's really that's really important.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's certainly I mean, I went into philosophy because of my questions, and that's what I've I've needed to work out.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_02: So everyone's a philosopher.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: Even those who say that philosophy is superseded by scientific questions and pragmatic questions and getting things done, um, you would say they have a philosophy.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Which is a philosophical statement.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's a philosophical statement, right?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_02: So that they haven't interrogated or or studied, yeah.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: You can't say that science is all there is b uh uh by doing a lab experiment.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: You just can't.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: There's gotta be more.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, to say that the only kind of truth is scientific truth um is not itself a scientific statement.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um if that statement is true, then it's false.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um because it it is a statement that is not itself scientific, and yet you're saying that it's true.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: And yet there are lots of people nowadays who make those sorts of claims.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um you know, you might think of something like the the the new atheism, which does seem like a kind of a repackaged logical positivism from a hundred years ago, um, in which you get people very anti-philosophical.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: And what's the genealogy of ideas in that?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: Is it is it simply that, well, science has proved such a very useful kind of mode in which to view the world, and therefore we kind of get the idea that because science is great, therefore it supersedes and pushes out everything else.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: What what else is going on in why we've become such pragmatists?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh I'm not the expert on this area that I should be, but that's what I write, and that is um when you look back to the inventors of modernity, um, the masters, quote unquote, we might use with kind of a double meaning.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, uh Descartes known as the um father of modern philosophy.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: We we still lawed uh Francis Bacon Knowledge is power.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um there was a um that's the 1600s and and uh there was a a a really uh push to jettison philosophy to um uh exalt power and um being as Descartes said masters and possessors of nature which means you've got to if you're gonna abuse something you need to dehumanize it first.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Just like in in the uh you know, the genocides, you've gotta belittle nature if you're gonna rape it, to use Galileo's word.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: So so uh there really was a rejection of philosophy, in particular metaphysics, and this is the area where I'm I'm a novice, uh starting to there's other people I can refer you to to do this, but but it's uh you know, science has proved its authority because that was the philosophical proposal that began it in modernity.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's not what science was before.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now there, you know, and uh y pragmatically, that's obviously there's lots of value that comes out of uh things that we've discovered, but it's but it's um it came at at a price, and it need not be that way, I would argue.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Science would be better if we hadn't done dumb things philosophically, including epistemologically.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_02: Even the title for you know what you would call a scientist kind of before the 16th century, you would call them a natural philosopher, a philosopher of the natural world.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_02: Interestingly, isn't it, that that you translate that into scientia, which just means knowledge, and now science is just equivalent to knowledge, apparently, and not this subspecies of of philosophy more generally, and a and a and a love of you know, that you can have a love of wisdom that studies the natural world.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um what a what a healthier place in which to do science than to simply think that, yeah, science equals knowledge.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, one word you dropped in there was love.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: You were saying love of wisdom, but um uh science, if if you've got a a great scientist, that is that is um ought to be a trajectory of love and delight, right?
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Which which are more fundamental philosophical things.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, my I I've said to my students, you want to, you know, you want to study with a scientist with a twinkle in their eye.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and the twinkle gets there not only for the student, but also for the thing that that they're ecstatic about, you know.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: And and now we're starting to get into how how knowing works.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so part of what goes on, Glenn, I think, is that we human persons um kind of have some default ways that we go about knowing that are human.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that in modernity, we have been taught to misdescribe what we're doing.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so one of the things that I've proposed uh my I see my work as kind of a philosophical therapy, an epistemological therapy, to relay the accents so people can do what they can see what they're actually doing when they know.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then that changes the ball game as far as what the ideal is, what like the paradigm of great knowing.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: And uh when you get that healed, that makes far richer, more wonderful sense of science, of business, of of counseling, you know, of of of lots of things like that that make it make it better than what the defective um misimpression does.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: So uh you you probably know Michael Polanyi, this uh scientist turned philosopher that I did my my um my pr philosophical work in and whose ideas about knowing I incorporate into my own.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, and he was a premier scientist, uh Hungarian came to uh to England, to Manchester, uh to save his life, you know, from in the uh early 1930s.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: But uh he said, if if uh the par the paradigm of knowing in in modernity is correct, no scientific discovery could ever happen.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: But it does.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's some fixture epistemology.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: So in other words, he he was trying to save science by uh saying, look, this is how how we actually go about knowing.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: I'd love to dig into that.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: So if you so so if you're doing therapy on us, there must be a kind of a the there's a disease that needs that needs healing for us.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_02: The disease is what is the disease?
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_02: Is the disease that we think that we come to know by being these objective external observers who just calmly and coolly collate the data and just get more and more information, and that's how we come to know.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: Is that is that sort of at the heart of the problem?
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yeah, and I call it therapy um because we uh body forth these presumptions implicitly.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so we somehow it's kind of in the water or in the air.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: I I I love multiple metaphors um of modernity, that's what makes us moderns, that we presume that knowledge is what you just said.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: But so, but we're all you know, we don't address that, we don't focus on that, but we just presume it, and it's almost like it's part of our our uh what we embody.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you're gonna fix a way of seeing the world that's bodied, you need to do something, you need to honor bodied knowledge, and then you need to address it in a way that uh is more like therapy than it would be uh argumentation.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, arguments are great um tools, but the change needs to come in the way that we body forth our knowing.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: So we don't come to know by being neutral observers who are outside the system.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, how do we come to know things?
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um this is now the here's the Michael Polanyi line.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, all knowing has a two-level structure from to, so we rely on clues to scrabble toward and integrate to a pattern that we then submit to as a token of reality.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: So if that's how knowing happens, uh and you just need to stop and think of the word clue, uh, you've got to accredit, and this was Polanyi's big argument in his Magnum opus, things that you can't put into words, half understandings, and you have to rely on them, which means you have to in you're involved in trust of what you half understand as you grope toward uh a half-hidden pattern.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then uh when the breakthrough of insight comes, uh you may have actively shaped it, but then you also have this sense of submitting to something that's come from beyond you that then opens up doorways of possibilities to the future.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what coming to know looks like.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: So how would a discovery come about?
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: And he he says in one of his books the paradigm example of knowing is knowledge of and approaching discovery.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's not explicit information.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: If he if he had spent his time with explicit information, he would not have been the discoverer that he was, right?
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: But you have to have some kind of sense of a hit half-hidden, glimmering, inviting pattern that woos you and pulls you toward it.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so, and then you've got this from to thing going on.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: So you have your eye on that, and then you start scrabbling toward it, you know, relying on clues and putting things together, da da da da da da da da.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's that is all his word was subsidiary, which uh means that you have to get inside of it with your focus on the pattern, indwelling was a Another word that he used.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: But you grope toward it and you welcome it to come.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then what happens is when it comes, when the pattern comes, it transforms everything in retrospect that you were groping toward.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: So when is a clue no longer a clue, but uh a part of the whole, um, it's when you solve the mystery.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: But at that point you don't need it anymore as a clue, right?
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: So in advance of it, you've got this half-understanding stuff going on.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then when you achieve the pattern, oh, well, so-and-so did it, or whatever, then all the things that you were groping through and indwelling become parts in the whole.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's a primacy to that whole, to that integrative pattern that is actually irreducible to all the things you were groping by means of toward it.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: What you're describing there, and what Paliani is describing there, seems to be like reality is not simply inert.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um it seems to be calling to us or something?
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like like is it appropriate to use those sorts of words?
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think so.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I, you know, I feel as if like I did my time studying Polanyi.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: And did I mention that my second question was, how do I know there's a a reality outside my mind?
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: So one of the things that Polanyi said, and this is what I did my dissertation on because this was like the water of life to me.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: Polanyi the discoverer would say, Oh, by the way, you know you've made contact with reality when you have a sense of the possibility of indeterminate future manifestations, which means a sense of future prospects, hints, more hints, more possibilities, uh that than you can name.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not confirmation so much as hope of confirmation.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: Which actually, you know, I think that makes sense of all all whole swaths of our of our lives.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: But to me, when I tr when I tried to so that gave me a hope of reality.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, it's like until in the last 10 years, I had never read anybody else that used the phrase contact with reality.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that was what I needed.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: That was what I longed for because I felt like I didn't have it, right?
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so here's this happy assurance.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: But then what it's what he crafts it as is this sense of this inexhaustive range of future possibilities, you know, things you cannot name, but it's just full and brimming with future possibilities.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, over the years, it has come to me, it has come to seem to me that reality's there first, and reality is wooing me, right?
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: And when it shows up, it kind of walks in and takes over.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: I tell a story in Longing to Know, my first book about um um seeing a copperhead snake, which is a a poisonous snake you don't want to be near.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: And and uh, you know, looking down and finding it at my feet, and my reality completely shifted at that point when I when I picked out the pattern and saw the copperhead, right?
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how I know it was real.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: I was running.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: So that's our common experience.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's our common experience.
• 25:55
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• 25:59
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• 26:11
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• 26:31
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• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: So a person who doesn't believe in an external reality, I guess you call him a solipsist.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, have have you met any solipsists in in in real life?
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_02: It and even if you haven't, like what would you say to such a person?
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's it's often said that you know you simply cannot convince somebody about the reality of the external world, you take it on faith and and away you go.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_02: Is is that the sort of thing you say, or how would you interact with such a person?
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well that that's a wonderful question.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: I feel as if uh if you look at Descartes' um thought experiment that led to him saying, I think therefore I am, it it it's kind of crafted as a solipsism, which is you know a certitude of one's own inex uh own existence uh as over against even one's own body.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, there's a a fundamental loneliness to the modern to the modern outlook and and a fundamental um rejection of external reality.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a it's um the it's the case that my odd questions were spawned in modernity, right?
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: So so they're not there is a not not particularly naturalness about about those questions.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh that's changed for me.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: But I also have to say, Glenn, that I feel as if my questions were a kind of solipsism.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: And and there are people who share odd questions like that.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I actually um in recent years have found uh some kind of a response to that, and um I'm writing it in my next book, which is um developing an idea I've gotten from other philosophers about the the philosophical formation that we all receive in the welcoming smile of mothers when we're infants, and obviously family also, and friends.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: So um that book is gonna be called maybe being seen.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: So uh what the baby walks uh uh you know drops into is the rapturous gaze of the loving mother, and and um is formed philosophically in the most fundamental way in that, which means then that the fundamental paradigm, and this is a philosophical matter, but the like the fundamental existential experience is not me in here world out there, but me in communion with a it in a welcome that was looking for me.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it's encounter, it's face-to-face, it's intimate, it's rapture, rapturous, and and uh it's epiphanic, meaning it's an epiphany.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, reality shows up and says, here you are, I've been looking for you.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then what happens also in that is I see myself being seen.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: And and there's a a a philosophical magic about that.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: I s and I think the friends um continue this philosophical formation through your life.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: So so uh a kind of noticing regard um is essential to my sense of my being here.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: So so I can work out some of those things in response to somebody who's not sure that anything exists outside their mind.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_02: That's very interesting, taking us back to the experience of an infant um in the arms of our mother, um, because it the the starting point then for the human person is one of dependence, is one of you know receiving from the outside.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um whereas if you start with Descartes in the oven as a thinker, right?
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_02: If you if you if you start with Rodin's thinker, you know, there there he is, you know, um contemplating things.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: If you start with Vitruvian Man as the as you're starting with somebody standing on their own two feet, um already full to some degree.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas if you just pay attention to what human beings are actually like, um, we start off as as empty and r requiring a greater reality from outside us the entire time.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so, yeah, no wonder a West that is very full of itself and very full of our own self-sufficiency becomes solipsistic in that way.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think too, it might be helpful to see that it's not uh a hundred percent receptive.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: What it is is communion, yeah, and that's what human persons are made for.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: We are made for communion with the real, and we're born into it, and that should be the philosophical paradigm.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: That should be the philosophical paradigm.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: Why should it be Descartes?
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: Why should it be knowledge as power?
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, you know, if you exalt knowledge as power, the knowledge goes away and it becomes all about power, which is what we've got.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: And we've got a world, uh, an environment that's getting raped because we're not in communion with it.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I I mean we have we have got to fix not only our account of knowing, but our regard for things.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's we've got to return to the the regard for the other that we learn in communion with the mother and with friends.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: We've got to return to that.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: So Pollyanni himself um was not a believer.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um there are other kind of people in in the realms of epistemology who um, for instance, from a from a Roman Catholic point of view, I I think there's there's one way of casting Descartes as the baddie.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um there's another way of casting Martin Luther as the baddie.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um in terms of here here is you know, here I stand, I can do no other.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and you know, you can you can take certain statements of that, and you know, I I'm my conscience is captive, um, and you know, he stand, you know, to go against cap conscience is not safe.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_02: Is that in one sense uh um part of the beginning of the inward turn um towards the self and not not to receive uh what Mother Church has been saying, for instance.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_02: This is what my my Roman Catholic um kind of friends would say.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_02: What would you say to that?
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, first of all, I would uh not want to weigh in on on uh I would not say that Polanyi was not a believer.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: I would say he didn't write religious works.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think he was incredibly attuned um and uh right in this respect that he understood that his ideas were needed by current Christianity, and he was right about that.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and then I would say I it I too see that my Catholic friends uh actually lay the blame for Descartes at the door of Protestantism because it was they they say Descartes got the ideas.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking of Fergus Kerr here, who who wrote this.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: But then uh they also, and I would agree with this, lay some blame at the feet of William of Occam, who was a a theologian, philosopher in the 1300s, right after Thomas Aquinas.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: And um he had a very um his agenda was so to exalt the absolute power of God that it really denuded creative reality.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because I mean he said, you know, I I I don't I can't rely on my perception because God could give me any perception he wanted.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: Oh right, yeah, and so uh, you know, you can trace Luther's uh scholarly heritage to to uh William of Occam.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: So there's that.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: But that's that's not my area of of expertise.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, uh what I have found is um in uh recent years I I have for the first time been explosed more exposed to uh philosophy, good philosophy in the in the in uh contemporary versions of medieval Christian tradition, which I think are wonderful and useful.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of that's cut coming into my work, but I don't feel um that it's exclusive exclusive to the Roman tradition.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, as you were describing some of Polanyi's work, I was thinking about faith-seeking understanding as sort of Anselm's understanding of of how knowledge works, you know, sort of put pulling at the thread, but you know, um yeah, b beginning with some presuppositions as as well, and and and um going on on that journey outward um seem seems to be a very faith-seeking understanding kind of a thing.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Polanyi loved the uh Augustinian primacy of faith thing.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: But here's how it comes to expression in Polanyi's work and in my own.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh let's talk about riding a bike.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, um uh you've got to rely on that bike.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to rely, in my case, the authoritative word of my father, who was yelling balance.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I I didn't even I couldn't even make that, you know.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: I was a baby skeptic, right?
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: But somehow I had to climb into what he was saying.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: I had to override my severe sense that I could not trust that bike to get on it, right?
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so when when you then fast forward to anybody, you know, keeping their balance on a bike and riding it, uh you that's a uh a tissue of trust.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you trust words, you trust the bike, and it you've got this palpable sense, it's called keeping your balance.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: And and so Polanyi defined commitment as uh as our a certain manner of disposing ourselves toward reality.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's what I'm doing with that bike.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: So knowing involves faith, right?
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's it's you've got to redefine, re-see what is going on in knowing to see that it's can it's fraught with trust.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's fraught with pledge.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I call it covenant epistemology.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: You pledge.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: You pledge yourself to the reality that you do not yet know to start to live life on its terms for it ever to be gracious enough to condescend to disclose itself to you.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_00: And you can hear some of the the you know intimate reciprocity in my language there, which is fully intentional on my part.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_02: How how does that help people in uh a modern secular age in which people don't feel like they've even begun to have the just the the the muscles to flex when it comes to faith?
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you there are there are plenty of people, um I think, and you know, speaking in a UK context, there are plenty of people who recognize that the secular story has run out, that um we're we're probably not the kind of the brains on sticks that we had imagined ourselves to be, but they can't just believe the Christian mumbo jumbo, right?
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_02: They they've they've read Tom Holland's Dominion and they recognize that we've come from Christian a Christian heritage, they look wistfully, perhaps, across at Christians like you or I, and they wish they could believe, but they're just that they're just not that kind of a people.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_02: They're secular people, they're rational people.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_02: Like what what do you say to such people?
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, first of all, you have to fix your subpar idea of rationality.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_00: And see what you're actually doing when you are engaged in rational behavior.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: I you know, I I feel like, Glenn, what you're raising is just the issue that I addressed in longing to know.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: And my experience, I had those questions, and what was started to be the solution for me is Michael Polanyi's alternative.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: Where he said, Look, what you think is scientific method is not how you know.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: Here's how knowing works.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: Here's how knowing, here's what you're actually doing when you know.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: And when when he points it out, you can't help but say, that is what I'm doing when I know, right?
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then you get that fixed.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, what I found was when I read Polanyi's work, I thought, well, this makes sense of my Christianity.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: And what I needed to see was that my Christian belief was not some weird thing called faith, as opposed to the binary of reason, which is a bill of goods that that modernity has sold us, but you've got to revamp what you think goes on in reason, which is knowing.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: So you see that there isn't a binary, but you need a positive alternative, and that's what Polanyi gave me.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: So you see, if you've got the binary and you want to reject faith, uh uh, then you've got just reason.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you if reason now just seems like this talking head on a stick, as you you referenced, and you want to go back to faith, the only way you can what you have to do is get rid of the binary.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can't just like salt in a bit of faith with your reason, the whole thing needs fixed.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not just faith and reason, it's you know, facts and values, it's public and private, it's objective and subject.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: I've got a whole, I call them Esther's Daisy of Dichotomies at the beginning of Loving to Know.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_00: The whole thing needs to be revamped.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: And the one way I know to revamp it for somebody is to teach them Polani's subsidiary focal integration.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's the only way.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then what happens is the whole modernist defective presumption is dispelled.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, not just bike riding.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: I I love baseball.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: There is no way you could be an outfielder or a third baseman or a pitcher on the defective modernist understanding of knowledge.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, why?
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_00: You would be paralyzed.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: You wouldn't Well, because you can't play that way.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's not okay, but baseball loves statistics, but but it's not a collection of information.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: It is this beautiful skill of artistry.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_00: And all knowing is skilled knowing.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's all artful knowing.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, you want to see beauty and and wisdom.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, look at a 35-year-old pitcher.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it just you you that's that's closer to to how knowing works.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what we humans are good at.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_02: Hmm.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_02: In some of my evangelism, what I try to do is yeah, show people that the dichotomy that they've lived with that it doesn't work.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_02: And so with the fact value um division, for instance, uh, I'll go into university campuses and we'll talk about human rights, and we'll like, okay, so on on what basis is there an inviolable worth and dignity to all human beings?
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_02: And very quickly people realize, oh, there's not an equation that gives me this.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_02: There's not a scientific, you know, experiment done under laboratory conditions that gives me this thing.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_02: I look into the face of somebody who is not economically valuable, and I think of them as having this inviolable worth and dignity, and and I I I value I I I simply see in them a value that goes beyond anything that can be justified.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: um economically or via their strength or abilities.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_02: And and then I get people to to think to themselves, well, like in your mind's eye, think of somebody who is not economically valuable and like imagine in your mind's eye that person as having as as being in the image of God.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I'll put in the image of God with a with a little eye.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_02: Now can I take you in your mind's eye to see a man on a cross and a Roman spear shoved up into his side and the Roman thought that this was a good picture of of what glory looks like because here is domination.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_02: But for 2,000 years Christians have been looking at that image and thinking no, this is this is a great image of glory because here is somebody who is not economically valuable, not valuable in any way, shape or form to anybody except that he's dying for the world.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_02: And Christians believe that that person is the image of God with a capital eye.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_02: And what I want the person to do is to recognize like if you have compassion on the weak and the poor and the marginalized, you're already exercising that thing that Christians are doing.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_02: And we just invite you to see that in the echo of the image with a capital eye, you are looking on images with a little eye and that is the original.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_02: And as soon as you see the original and you say yes that's the original you're basically saying Jesus is Lord.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_02: I can't I I try to I try to take them on that journey.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_02: Is that anything like like what you're describing?
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's not uh I that's lovely by the way.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's beautiful.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um I typically write to people that are are um the what well I talk about knowing.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know I I I stay um I don't I don't see myself as doing theology um per se and my job is is fixing people's idea of of knowing so that that's not typically a conversation I would I would pursue but that's fine.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know that's fine.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: But you know what I want to say is look you can't have you can't do science without value.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know you whatever like when you get down to your to the like the paradigm of knowing of all knowing all human knowing it involves value.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_00: You have to assign value to the clues or you never see the copperhead you just don't so so it is val value driven.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_00: And when I say value there I don't mean just morals I mean color pattern.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know for you to pick out a copperhead you've got to decide on what's foreground and what's marginal right or the pattern would never come.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_02: Well that's value right so so we navigate by value and that's about rationality so I'm I'm d that's kind of my is there a journey that you can take someone on in order to say okay this is how you come to know things therefore reality is very personlike wouldn't you say therefore all people are believers wouldn't you say therefore covenant is incredibly um it is kind of prior to you and your own individual you know i identity um kind of makes you think that's we live in a in a covenant uh in a covenantal reality ergo God like like is is there that kind of journey that you ever take people on?
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well I I'm pretty uh explicit that um I'm gonna just presume that scripture is an authoritative word of God.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so um but that's an epistemological claim but it's not one that I'm gonna I I don't see my role as defending that.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_00: Other people have done that very well.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know my my what I do is is contribute some ideas on knowing that I think go with that.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_00: But the account of knowing that I develop following Polanyi's subsidiary focal integration and developing it I augment it to uh you know I say um that the paradigm of best acts of knowing is the interpersonal covenantally constituted relationship best typified in the redemptive encounter where reality walks in and transforms you.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know that approach to knowing I think I argue this in loving to know means that all acts of knowing are the bear witness to a person like reality that is coming after you.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so you might say they bear apologetic witness of there being a person beyond right I mean it seems pretty I think it's pretty glaring if you're a Christian believer you're totally down with this.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_00: But the fact is anybody who has some kind of moment of insight are they're liable to call it an inspiration.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: Meaning they do have a sense of wonder that something has come from beyond or someone they what they all do.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_02: And the there's beautiful YouTube videos you can find of of scientists coming up with you know scientists coming you know making making breakthroughs in theories and their eureka moment just like brings them to tears and it's it's it's a religious moment, isn't it?
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_00: It becomes an act of worship.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_00: But it begs the larger question well what is reality?
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know and I you know I think reality is God and his stuff meaning the stuff he created you know but that means the stuff that he created kind of you know I liken it to uh walking into I I was gonna spend the night with a with a a former student who invited me uh to do that and she didn't get home before I arrived and I walked into her home and it it was so full of her character in all the way she had arranged it right so that's why I feel like this this world I've walked into a world that that's full of the the signature knick knacks of a really huge human person personal being and they're all just kind of bearing witness you know and I feel like knowing does that I do feel that knowing does that yeah and the and the more you know your friend the more you look at the knick knacks and think oh I know exactly why she bought that knick knack or that knick knack in the same way um you know if we're going to know this world get to know the God who made it.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah this young warman was the daughter of Nick Latts and actually still is in foreign service around the world and her room was full her house was full of stuff from the world.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was you know pretty neat.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah yeah we're all living in God's house.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Esther you've been so kind and uh so generous with your time um for people to really get a hold of this stuff what should they read next?
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_02: What can they watch or can they connect with you online?
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for asking that um I have a website EstherLightcatMeek.com and uh on the website uh you can find out about the books that I've written and what they're you know what the point of them is and then you can also find other resources so I have this um I call it a passive podcast page because I don't run a podcast like you do but I get invited like I am now onto that and then if you'll share your link with me then eventually it'll end up on my passive podcast.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that's called watch, listen and read.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so if there's things that that get done like this I like to post them there.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_00: So there's some resources to read around and um I I'm you can reach me through that you can subscribe to my monthly updates there.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's a good place to start and figure out what you're gonna read and go for it.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_02: Wonderful wonderful and you are a very merry philosopher and uh wonderful to engage with a joy to engage with so yeah I heartily recommend that.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_02: Esther Lightcat Meek thank you so much for joining us.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you great to know you hello and thank you so much for downloading this episode of the Speak Life podcast.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_01: It was great to have Esther Lightcat Meek on the show do subscribe to the Speak Life podcast on your podcast catcher of choice and then you will be the first to know whenever we release a new episode and why not check out our 321 course an introduction to who Jesus is the story of God, the world and ourselves it's uh something that you can do as a Christian be uh inspired and encouraged in your faith and it's also a great resource that you can share with your friends because it's available on in browser it's available as an app you can do it on computer or tablet or smartphone whatever works for you so just go to 321course.com and create an account it takes seconds to create an account and you will be in with access to all the videos in the course plus a chat community that you can take part in and lots of bonus content as well well thank you so much for listening and we will be back next week goodbye