Two Types of Knowing: Pt II

Spanish Words and an Epistemology of Love:

The Spanish words "conocer" and "saber" are both translated into English as "to know."  However, they don't mean the same thing.  Saber means to have knowledge about something, whereas conocer means to have relationship with a person.  I know (saber) which cupboard the plates are in but I know (conocer) Jim who owns the house, the cupboard, and the plates.

This speaks to the previous post of Lewis' reflections.  In short, there is a kind of knowledge that comes from study, and there is another kind of knowledge that comes from love.  It is this second kind of knowledge that NT Wright refers to as an 'Epistemology of Love.'  Whereby we are learning about things from the inside, as it were, instead of from without.

Two Types of Knowing

“Meditation in a Toolshed"

  C. S. Lewis 

I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

But this is only a very simple example of the difference between looking at and looking along. A young man meets a girl. The whole world looks different when he sees her. Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember all his life, and ten minutes casual chat with her is more precious than all the favours that all other women in the world could grant. lie is, as they say, “in love”. Now comes a scientist and describes this young man's experience from the outside. For him it is all an affair of the young man's genes and a recognised biological stimulus. That is the difference between looking along the sexual impulse and looking at it.

When you have got into the habit of making this distinction you will find examples of it all day long. The mathematician sits thinking, and to him it seems that he is contemplating timeless and spaceless truths about quantity. But the cerebral physiologist, if he could look inside the mathematician's head, would find nothing timeless and spaceless there - only tiny movements in the grey matter. The savage dances in ecstasy at midnight before Nyonga and feels with every muscle that his dance is helping to bring the new green crops and the spring rain and the babies. The anthropologist, observing that savage, records that he is performing a fertility ritual of the type so- and-so. The girl cries over her broken doll and feels that she has lost a real friend; the psychologist says that her nascent maternal instinct has been temporarily lavished on a bit of shaped and coloured wax.

As soon as you have grasped this simple distinction, it raises a question. You get one experience of a thing when you look along it and another when you look at it. Which is the “true” or “valid” experience? Which tells you most about the thing? And you can hardly ask that question without noticing that for the last fifty years or so everyone has been taking the answer for granted. It has been assumed without discussion that if you want the true account of religion you must go, not to religious people, but to anthropologists; that if you want the true account of sexual love you must  go, not to lovers, but to psychologists; that if you  want to understand some “ideology” (such as  medieval chivalry or the nineteenth-century idea of  a “gentleman”), you must listen not to those who lived inside it, but to sociologists.

The people who look at things have had it all  their own way; the people who look along things  have simply been brow-beaten. It has even come  to be taken for granted that the external account of  a thing somehow refutes or “debunks” the account  given from inside. “All these moral ideals which  look so transcendental and beautiful from inside”,  says the wiseacre, “are really only a mass of biological instincts and inherited taboos.” And no  one plays the game the other way round by  replying, “If you will only step inside, the things that look to you like instincts and taboos will suddenly reveal their real and transcendental nature.”

That, in fact, is the whole basis of the specifically “modern” type of thought. And is it not, you will ask, a very sensible basis? For, after all, we are often deceived by things from the inside. For example, the girl who looks so wonderful while we're in love, may really be a very plain, stupid, and disagreeable person. The savage's dance to Nyonga does not really cause the crops to grow. Having been so often deceived by looking along, are we not well advised to trust only to looking at?   in fact to discount all these inside experiences?

Well, no. There are two fatal objections to discounting them all. And the first is this. You discount them in order to think more accurately.  But you can't think at all - and therefore, of course, can't think accurately - if you have nothing to think about. A physiologist, for example, can study pain and find out that it “is” (whatever is means) such and such neural events. But the word pain would have no meaning for him unless he had “been inside” by actually suffering. If he had never looked along pain he simply wouldn't know what he was looking at. The very subject for his inquiries from outside exists for him only because he has, at least once, been inside.

This case is not likely to occur, because every man has felt pain. But it is perfectly easy to go on all your life giving explanations of religion, love, morality, honour, and the like, without having been inside any of them. And if you do that, you are simply playing with counters. You go on explaining a thing without knowing what it is. That is why a great deal of contemporary thought is, strictly speaking, thought about nothing - all the apparatus of thought busily working in a vacuum.

The other objection is this: let us go back to the toolshed. I might have discounted what I saw when looking along the beam (i.e., the leaves moving and the sun) on the ground that it was “really only a strip of dusty light in a dark shed”. That is, I might have set up as “true” my “side vision” of the beam. But then that side vision is itself an instance of the activity we call seeing.  And this new instance could also be looked at from outside. I could allow a scientist to tell me that what seemed to be a beam of light in a shed was “really only an agitation of my own optic nerves”.  And that would be just as good (or as bad) a bit of debunking as the previous one. The picture of the beam in the toolshed would now have to be discounted just as the previous picture of the trees and the sun had been discounted. And then, where are you?

In other words, you can step outside one experience only by stepping inside another.  Therefore, if all inside experiences are misleading, we are always misled. The cerebral physiologist may say, if he chooses, that the mathematician's thought is “only” tiny physical movements of the grey matter. But then what about the cerebral physiologist's own thought at that very moment? A second physiologist, looking at it, could pronounce it also to be only tiny physical movements in the first physiologist's skull. Where is the rot to end?

The answer is that we must never allow the rot to begin. We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better than looking along. One must look both along and at everything. In particular cases we shall find reason for regarding the one or the other vision as inferior. Thus the inside vision of rational thinking must be truer than the outside vision which sees only movements of the grey matter; for if the outside vision were the correct one all thought (including this thought itself) would be valueless, and this is self-contradictory. You cannot have a proof that no proofs matter. On the other hand, the inside vision of the savage's dance to Nyonga may be found deceptive because we find reason to believe that crops and babies are not really affected by it.  In fact, we must take each case on its merits. But we must start with no prejudice for or against either kind of looking. We do not know in advance whether the lover or the psychologist is giving the more correct account of love, or whether both accounts are equally correct in different ways, or whether both are equally wrong. We just have to find out. But the period of brow-beating has got to end.

Reclaiming Ambiguity

Certainty is the intellectual heritage of Modernity...

...and with it comes an attendant fear of mystery.

Our culture, however, is growing ever fonder of mystery, is embracing ambiguity, and is growing increasingly apprehensive about certainty. As Christians raised in a modern Church attempting to reach a modern world, we look at our culture's growing mistrust of certitude, and we are either frightened or disgusted. We fear the erosion of truth, or we are disgusted by the obvious attempt at self-justification for a hedonistic lifestyle...

But I would ask that we suspend judgment for a moment.

I do not think Christianity should be equated to certitude. There are a few things about which we must be certain (Paul argues this in 1 Corinthians 15 about the physical resurrection of Jesus) but there are many things about which we should be ambiguous! In our attempts to be Biblical we have made claims for certainty, but in fact, we must acknowledge that where the Bible is ambiguous, it is unbiblical to be unambiguous!

Apologetics

My Pastor Says...

A couple of Pastor Mike quotes that have meant a lot to me over the years. These words may not seem like much at first, but they have worked wonders in my life:

"Don't major on the minors."

Sometimes we can confuse speaking truly, with emphasizing the correct truth. It is the difference between wisdom and knowledge. Knowing what is true is good, but understanding when that truth is applicable is better. A hammer is a good tool, but it isn't very useful for ripping plywood. All truths are true, and so each truth is a useful tool, but we must decide when to use it. And just as a carpenter's speed square is more important than his 1/8" chisel, some truths are more necessary than others.

We should emphasize the more important truths.

When we greatly emphasize something that scripture teaches as true, but does not emphasize, then we are not being true to scripture.

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"I don't know!"

I can't tell you what a breathe of fresh air this was! The first time I heard my pastor answer someone's question this way I thought, "you can do that!?" I thought being a christian meant you knew everything! How wonderful it was to recover mystery and humility in a single moment!

Exploring a Narrative Epistemology

SVS 2011 Plenary #3: James K. A. Smith from Society of Vineyard Scholars on Vimeo.

I heard a story once of a dancer who was asked what her dance 'meant,' what was the meaning she was trying to convey through her dancing on stage. She responded, "If I could say it in words, then I wouldn't have had to dance it."

The Irreducibility of the Communal Narrative pt I

Last week I attended the Society of Vineyard Scholars second annual conference.  It was wonderful!

One of the many things I heard there that got caught in the gray matter on its way through my head was this:

James K. A. Smith made the explicit point that there are forms of knowledge that are not reducible to the level of deductive discourse; specifically, stories.  A story is not simply a collection of facts, the narrative framework itself is a part of the knowledge gained by learning the story. When we understand someone's personal story, or the story of how a particular event unfolded in someone's life, or even the story of a historical period or people, we are gaining knowledge that can only be gained by learning the story.

We know this implicitly, but have been blinded to it by centuries of cultural adherence to enlightenment dogma.*  We become friends with people, not by reading their medical history, or genealogical tree (although those bits of data aren't irrelevant), but by hearing the story of how they became who they are, and where that trajectory is taking them.  The same with organizations; we don't want to simply read their financial statements, and get bullet points of their goals, we need to know who they are and that requires their story.  The facts aren't unimportant, quite the opposite, rather the facts are the bricks the story gives larger form to; building a wall, or a house, or a shed, or a silo, or a bank, or a school, or a...

...the larger building gives significance to the individual bricks that they don't have in isolation; so to, the story gives significance (knowledge and meaning) to the facts that they simply don't have as isolated bits of data.  This is what James K. A. Smith called the 'irreducibility of narrative knowledge.'  In our next post, we will extrapolate from Smith to what I am calling the 'irreducibility of the communal narrative.'

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*This ties in interestingly with the 'Ubuntu' post.  After Smith's lecture my friend Harvey, who is from Malawi, said to me something along the lines of, "that is great, but if he would have just talked to someone from Africa he would have known all of this already."  He essentially seemed to be faulting the entire Western, rational, Enlightenment project as flawed from the very beginning!  (Harvey, if you are reading this you can correct me!)  I suppose I must agree that some of the flaws within Western culture are directly linked to our fundamentally individualistic epistemology.

Epistemology of Love

"Love is a way of knowing that transcends the objective/subjective divide."

A Hermeneutic of Suspicion versus an Epistemology of Love

A Hermeneutic of Suspicion::

Our culture defaults to suspicion. This is even more prevalent amongst younger generations. I admit to it, my first instinct is to ask, 'where's the catch?'

'What are you selling?'

'Yeah, right!?!'

Even people I trust, even about things that I already adhere to. My primary mode of thinking is suspicion.

Look for the angles, watch for the hoax.

Who's the sucker? If you don't know who the sucker is...
...then you're the sucker!

We doubt as a matter of reflex.

The suspicious approach is our default mode of understanding and interpreting the world around us; this leads to an attempt at a self-centered epistemology, a 'pick and choose' hermeneutic that attempts to divorce thoughts from their context. We take what we hear, or read, or see, and we spin it to fit our own grid. We fail to come at anything with an attempt to understand it on it's own terms because nothing is to be trusted on its own terms! And so, we fail to understand.

This is what has been called the 'wikipedia-zation' of knowledge. It leads ultimately to a failure to critique sources of information, and their authority, because we have become the source of all authority. We assume that we can know the truth on our own, in fact, that this is the only way it can be known.

Because there is no authority that we will accept, ultimately we will accept any authority, because we cannot function without authority.*

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Here is where this gets practical:

According to recent studies, 80 percent of this countries population believe that "an individual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independent of any churches or synagogues."

Here is where it gets problematic:

Epistemology is a communal activity; we cannot come to any knowledge of truth, or approach to knowledge of truth, apart from our relationships with people. If we think otherwise we are deluding ourselves, and ignorant of our tutors (those who influence us). We wear lenses in all that we understand, and those lenses come from other people.

This plays into spirituality in amazing ways. The DaVinci Code was a wonderful example of people grasping at anything to bolster their already held beliefs. On both sides. People antagonistic to Christianity looked to Dan Brown's novel to define their understanding of Church history (a work of fiction, based upon an admitted hoax... but an attractive one.) Christians were quick to respond with protest and outrage.

Rarely did people ask the deeper questions about what really happened, why people were so intrigued by such a presentation of history, or how we can even know! Much less actually enter into dialogue or relationship with each other...

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An Epistemology of Love ::

So what would a different way of knowing and understanding look like?

To whet your appetite here is an interview that references NT Wright's epistemology of love.

More to come...

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*We take almost the entire realm of our own knowledge of the universe on the authority of others, from atoms, to Beijing, to fidelity, to the 'Catcher in the Rye.' ...I've never actually seen a possum, I can choose to believe it is an elaborate hoax, foisted upon me by those with nothing to gain, or I can simply take it upon the authority of other people that such a creature does indeed exist.

Whatever do you mean?

"...the true view of the Gospel will be that which explains the course of events in the first century and the second century, rather than that which seems to have spiritual and imaginative value for the twentieth century."

How do you communicate gestalt?

I have been having a conversation with an individual that has brought me to this place…

I believe that much of what we are communicating to each other could fall in the category of, “I would agree, but I don’t know that I would choose to use those words…”

Having said that I do believe that there are some differences in what we are stating to each other, exceeding a divergence at the simple, semantic level. I believe those differences are, and are derived from, differences at a level that encompass an entire perspective; gestalt. I have found myself at the point in the conversation where I believe it necessary to define the terms we are using to say what we say, which leads to more definitions, ad nauseum…

If these differences truly result from the simple fact that my friend and I are the proverbial blind men examining different parts of the elephant (as opposed to a legitimate incoherence that could be solved by a discussion of the facts at hand), then how are we to come to a meeting of the minds?