Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to the memory of my friend, Dr. (and Rev.) Russell Louden who, in the wake of the publication of Longing to Know, was one of a handful of readers who walked into my life and told me what I knew that I didn’t know I knew (which is why we need a nuanced epistemology of knowing on the way!). Russell artlessly lived covenant epistemology. A couple weeks before he died of cancer in August of 2008, I told him that I had realized that he was this book. He lived semper transformanda, continually, joyously, indwelling and disseminating the vision of God. He was always present in the present. Russell thought everybody needed to know knowing in order to know God—and vice versa. To know Russell was to be known by him, loved into joy and wholeness. I have seen this in the countenances of his congregation, Emmanuel Presbyterian Church in Wildwood, Missouri (Russell called them his Emmanuelites!) even as I have known it in my own life and work.

Dr. Robert Frazier, my friend and colleague in philosophy at Geneva College, is the one with whom I am currently blessed to know. He is my first reader, whose insightful comments and assuring assessment helps birth my work. He invests countless hours in this ministration, yet acts continually as if it is the thing he most delights to do. There is no decent gauge for the value of this personal and professional gift.

I am grateful to Geneva College for continuous support for my summers of writing. Specifically, I thank Dr. David Guthrie, former Academic Dean, for his undying passion to start a project with and for the faculty at Geneva. I am grateful to have the opportunity to teach this book at Geneva, engaging continually with eager (and unsuspecting!) students in these conversations. The Christian Understanding of Life classes, over the years, have shaped me and the conversation that is this book. Special thanks to the students in Fall 2009, who first read a complete version of the manuscript, helpfully reflecting it back to me. Special thanks back over the years to the Covenant Theological Seminary class, Epistemology, Spring 2002, in which Dr. Mike Williams and I and class members began to forge the idea of covenant epistemology. I also thank others who read and offered comments, great ideas, and text corrections, including Starr Meek, Andrew Colbert, and Dr. R. J. Snell. Thank you to Mary Speckhard and Garrett Sipes, who helped prepare the manuscript for publication. Thanks to Dr. Robin Parry of Cascade Books for his editorial work, counsel, and encouragement. And thanks to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Westminster Seminary in Southern California, and Erskine Seminary, for inviting me to present on covenant epistemology. These special opportunities inspired my ongoing work.

Finally, deep thanks to readers of Longing to Know—students, professionals, amateurs (i.e., lovers) extraordinary knowers all—who have entered and continued with me in conversation. May this book contribute to widening and deepening that stream.

Introduction

This is a book about how we know. Knowing is something we all do all the time. Most of us think we are pretty good at knowing throughout our experience. So it asks a lot of the reader to accept that a tome on this subject is worth reading.

Further, this book claims that something has infected our knowing that thwarts it, yet it is something people generally do not recognize. So to prove its value, the book first has to convince you of the reality of the need. To do this it must move upstream in a strong current of a certain popular savvy about knowing.

Quite possibly to reduce the appeal even further, some would say this discussion has to be philosophical. How we know what we know is a philosophical question, and the topic is called epistemology. This book represents my own creative epistemological proposal.

I am one of those odd people who think that epistemology is almost the most important and practical thing everybody needs to consider. This calling compels me always to try to acquaint everybody with philosophy, and to talk about these hard-to-express matters in a way that invites everybody to indwell and be shaped by them. On the other hand, I have every confidence that plenty of ordinary people are odd, if I am, in feeling that epistemology matters. Even if we haven’t known that it is epistemology, we have realized many times that something related to knowing is gumming up the works of our lives. Because we haven’t known what it is nor had the tools to begin to cope with it, the problems have continued to plague us. Epistemology is important to all of us.

Professional, in-house, philosophy inadvertently locks up its treasures rather than winsomely adapting them for the rest of us. The onus placed on guild language means that philosophers seeking to speak with the uninitiated have to revoke the guild. So be it; while I respect the value of formal philosophical exchange, I feel no lockstep loyalty to guild language. If all people actually live responses to philosophical questions such as how we know, then philosophical proposals should be expressed for ordinary people as their audience.

But then, for people with no previous philosophical awareness raising, which, sadly, is the vast majority in the United States, tackling a popular philosophy book like Loving to Know means exercising courage to enter into some discussions in which they feel the discomfort of half-understanding. Hospitably welcoming beginning philosophy students is something I love to do. But I repeatedly tell them: You have to learn to be okay with half-understanding. Thicken your skin! Hear my encouragement! Philosophy is difficult, and it isn’t that you lack the capacity or the need to study it. It tackles life’s most fundamental orientations, the commitments that shape our very language and rationality; so, of course, it is difficult. But it is also deeply valuable and practical. It has widespread personal and cultural impact. I once thought proficiency in the discipline would eliminate my own half-understanding; instead, I learned to thicken my skin. And once you get acquainted with my epistemological proposals, you will see why I am confident that half-understanding is nevertheless productive.

I believe that the separation between guild and street in philosophy is itself, in part, a result of the very problem this book labors to identify and heal. To write a guild-approved epistemology is to perpetuate the problem rather than offer the subverting cure. So I take an approach that invites in the uninitiated as its primary audience. And though we have philosophical discussions in this book, and though I believe them to be expert philosophy critically valuable for the guild, the conversation stays ordinary: kitchen table philosophy.

Professional philosophers may well find this disappointing. I hope they will see that the book’s approach reflects its epistemological proposal. It should not be seen as sub-par so much as creatively subversive. But to see that involves personal investment, formation, in this epistemology. Consonant with the epistemology it commends, this book offers a case that is intrinsically practical. So, again on the other hand, I am confident that for this very reason this book offers philosophers, and scholars generally, a critical contribution to the professional conversation and to academic training.

This book proposes that we take as a paradigm, of all acts of knowing, the unfolding, covenantally constituted, interpersonal relationship. The book itself is the journal of my own unfolding coming to know, my search for the face that will not go away. I have tried to reflect both of these things in the structure of the book itself: it unfolds, conversation by conversation, foray by foray. I do this both for integrity’s sake, to prompt readers’ feel of the thing, and to invite you into the conversation.

So I have taken some creative liberties with the expected timeless linearity of books and arguments. Most noticeably, I characterize my engagement of others’ work as successive conversations. Conversations are interpersonal exchanges typified by deep, indwelling listening, and then by a response in which the thoughtful participant creatively melds insights gleaned with others previously acquired. And by conversation I do not mean noncommittal, information-passing chit-chat; I have in mind conversations in which the participants assume the posture of mutual submission with a loved and trusted friend whom each invites to speak into their lives.

My argument unfolds conversation by conversation, the way a group of close friends on a lengthy walking tour venture might walk for awhile next to this one or that one of the group. Then, as those hikers might take stock together around a campfire at the end of the day’s journey, so at chapters’ ends I interweave the gleanings of each fresh conversation with the ones before.

I see my personal understanding as a growing string of such conversations. I have moved from one to the next to mature my lived orientation to life. Loving to Know, in a significant way, just is my intellectual autobiography. I want to model the actual practice of it as the coming to know that this epistemology commends. And while these particular conversants may not be the most acclaimed philosophers or theologians, and they may not be widely known, in presenting my own learning with them, I am intentionally modeling the delightful particularity of any thoughtful person’s being on the way to knowing. I am showing, as Ludwig Wittgenstein said memorably, how to go on. Indeed, this being on the way with friends is the essence of my epistemological proposal.

In addition to the main conversations, I have invented textures, and interwoven them with the text. A texture is an excursus, a foray; it goes at the matter from a different direction, or from it to venture in a fresh direction. I want there to be interweaving, but not so tightly as to create a homogeneously smooth product. Like handmade paper or a roughly woven tapestry, the gritty pieces add earthy reality to the thing. Both of these strategies are meant to subvert the very defective approach to knowing that this epistemic proposal hopes to challenge and heal.¹ The textures also offer sabbathlike, rhythmical interludes to break the intensity of sustained argument. Long journeys require rests and side excursions.

Adding to the variegated nature of this odd book on epistemology is the fact that its culminating chapter is an epistemological etiquette that compends concrete ways that we, in our efforts to know, invite the real. As text, the etiquette is distinctive because it is at once a meditation and a catechesis to form aspiring covenantal knowers.

So readers will do well to pattern their reading of the book on the book’s own structure. It perhaps may be best read episodically over a period of time. It is, of course, best read in conjunction with the reader’s own coming to know, and in concert with the reader’s own friends in learning. I have supplied questions for discussion of each chapter and texture.

Readers of my former book, Longing to Know, will find Loving to Know different and similar. This book represents the further development of my covenant epistemology, promised in a footnote in that one. It takes the epistemic proposal that drives Longing to Know and advances it into the personal—the interpersoned, as I will call it. Knowing works the way I have described it in that book because its telltale features are fraught with the interpersoned.

Plus, the focus of this book is different: written for people considering Christianity and struggling with questions about knowing, Longing to Know addressed the specific question, Can we know God?, by talking about how we know anything at all. I argued that knowing God is like knowing your auto mechanic: it is an ordinary act of knowing (distinct for its life-transforming impact!). Knowing knowing makes better sense of knowing God, along with knowing anything at all.

Loving to Know, by contrast, is written for anybody wanting think more deeply about knowing—for whatever reason, from living well and Christian discipleship, to professional excellence, and academic and philosophical scholarship. I try to speak in a way that welcomes all and excludes none. I am hoping that you will sense that this conversation is with you, along with others.

Longing to Know applied a general approach to knowing to a very specific question. Many readers also saw that the general approach to knowing applies in every corner of their lives—that is part of the way the very specific question is dealt with. This book expounds the general approach to knowing in its further developed version, suggests the wide range of its applications and implications, and shapes the reader to pursue implementing it wherever knowing happens.

Longing to Know has its own contrived structure; Loving to Know has a different one. And where the first book’s chapters were short—bathroom reading, as I thought of them at the time—this book’s chapters are the length of a seminar reading assignment. Taken as a whole, Loving to Know constitutes the bulk of a single course’s reading list. In fact, it is my text in my course, Christian Understanding of Life.

Playing off the driving analogy of the last book, that knowing God is like knowing your auto mechanic, I argue that knowing your auto mechanic is like knowing God. I want to say that the kind of transformative interpersoned, face-to-face encounter and communion that all of us experience in the richest moments of our lives affords us the best paradigm of all knowing. For Christian believers, it is knowing Christ in communion that best captures the dynamism of knowing well in every corner of our lives and pursuits. I tap into a biblical theological vision; but for the best theological reasons, along with other sorts of reasons, I insist that covenant epistemology describes knowing for, and is commendably employed by, both people who know God and people who don’t see themselves that way.

One spring I inherited the care of a wild bird from one of my students. Bandit, a cedar waxwing, fallen from his nest, had been rescued by my student and his family. Soon after, a well-meaning housesitter had clipped his wings. At the point that Bandit took up with me, his one wing looked virtually non-existent, and he could not fly. He looked simply horrible.

His former family, I noted in the exchange, would pick him up in their cupped hands to carry him around, and playfully called his fluttering struggle break-dancing. Early in my time with Bandit, I did the same. I was quickly smitten with this bird; in fact, the love began when that student first told me of Bandit, before that student or I realized that I should inherit him.

I attended carefully to that little bird. In so doing, I figured out what he loved and what he hated. I discovered that he wanted always to see my face (waxwings are group birds; I was Bandit’s group!). I learned, through close proximity, that he abhorred loud machine noises. I discovered that he ate, not seeds, but fruit (80 percent) and bugs (20 percent). Never was he so happy as when I made fruit salad! And I figured out that he was happiest to be carried around on a stick, rather than in my cupped hands. All I needed to do to recover him from wherever he happened to be was to stick out the stick, and he hopped on to it jauntily, with no break-dancing. I figured out that, if you are a bird, having your flying feathers touched or petted is definitely not a good thing. It would be like bending the wings of a jet, or cutting the veins of a human. I learned what he was saying in the rich variety of his chirps. I lived life on his terms, scavenging my neighborhood for wild berries, throwing a diaper over my shoulder so I could keep him near. A few people thought I was crazy. But I was also somehow finding myself reflected in his gaze, and actually understanding God better.

Over that summer on the stick, and on my shoulder, Bandit regrew his rich chestnut feathers (I fell in love with the color brown), including his crest, and the signature yellow tips and red wax drop that gives the species its name. One day in September, after twenty minutes on my shoulder as I sat on my deck, when I was not expecting it, Bandit took off and flew, straight and true, to the woods behind my house. Not only Bandit had changed; I had changed as well. It had been a mutual healing.

That is covenant knowing; thus it offers a concrete example of what I want to describe and recommend in this book. You may think that you need no book guidance to know a wild bird. Why you do is the question with which this book begins.

1. Some great works of fiction are stories of journeys toward a great quest, into which particular adventures and story-telling is embedded. J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia are well-known recent ones; Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad are ancient ones. Another that comes to mind is Richard Adams’ Watership Down. Rabbit legend stories such as Rowsby Woof and the Fairy Wog-Dog interweave with the larger narrative. Loving to Know mirrors this time-honored episodic unfolding. Its distinction is that it does so as epistemology, and as essential to epistemology.

• part one

On the Way

• 1

The Need for Epistemological Therapy

Our Defective Default in Knowing

Epistemology is a word that many people have never heard, find intimidating. Many think that epistemology must be a field of study that is inscrutable, impractical, and not relevant to real life. Many people think the subject would be way over their heads, and painful to engage. This widespread perception has some truth to it: the formal philosophical study of epistemology has often deserved these epithets. But epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. It concerns knowing, and knowing is something that we all do all the time. It is neither optional nor avoidable. And we spend life seeking to know well. Growing grapes and making wine involves knowing. Working with computers involves knowing. Cancer research involves knowing. Seeking God involves knowing. Artistry of any sort involves knowing. Marketing involves knowing. Counseling involves knowing. Athletics involves knowing.

Knowing, like any semi-automatic aptitude, can be misdirected, or, with practice, can become a fine-tuned skill. A person aspiring to be an expert runner, or simply physically fit, can benefit from being coached how to breathe. Such coaching may feel odd, difficult, unnecessary, and for a time even unnatural. But the result will be better breathing and running. Similarly, what I am doing in this book is coaching readers to replace faulty habits of knowing with healthy ones.

In this book I want to talk about how we know what we know—epistemology—in such a way that everybody who reads it will benefit from it in every area of life that involves knowing—which is every area of life.

Everyone, in their knowing, is making some assumptions, probably not even consciously, about what knowing is. When my children were younger, we read a series of books about Amelia Bedelia, an enthusiastic, well-intended house servant, who always managed to misunderstand the directions she had been given.¹ The misunderstanding always had to do with the oddities of our English language. For example, once Amelia Bedelia was sent to prune the bushes. What she did was to stick prunes all over the bushes, when what she was supposed to have done was to cut back their branches. Just as Amelia Bedelia’s doing the task involved a tacit assumption about what the task was, so knowing involves tacit assumption about what knowing is.

Whereas most of us get it right about pruning the bushes, I want to argue that most of us get it wrong about what knowing is. And while sticking prunes on the bushes isn’t perhaps the end of the world, getting it wrong about knowing—as a culture, over centuries, and as individual participants in that culture—turns out to be damaging to ourselves, our world, and our knowing in any endeavor. So while it may be a bit uncomfortable at first, exposing what is defective in our ideas about what knowing is, and reworking it, will make a great difference, and also become more natural, as we go.

²

I am passionate about the importance of this book on epistemology. It endeavors to correct a defective outlook we all have without even knowing we have it, and one that issues in damage in all corners of our lives. My sister has a disease so rare that doctors don’t even know what its symptoms are. This means that my sister can have something wrong, in just about any bodily process, and nobody recognizes it as the disease it is. This describes aptly the situation in epistemology: unhealth crops up in every discipline, and often is not even recognized. Healing this disease will have widespread positive impact—perhaps even cultural change.

Education guru Parker Palmer underscores the critical importance of epistemology to all of life.

What is the nature of the knower? What is the nature of the known? And what is the nature of the relation between the two? These questions belong to a discipline called epistemology. It is an abstract and sometimes even esoteric inquiry into the dynamics of knowing. Its six-syllable name does not leap to our lips in normal conversation, and its insights appear remote from daily life . . . But now I understand that the patterns of epistemology can help us decipher the patterns of our lives. Its images of the knower, the known, and their relationship are formative in the way an educated person not only thinks but acts. The shape of our knowledge becomes the shape of our living; the relation of the knower to the known becomes the relation of the living self to the larger world.

³

In his work, Palmer argues that the single key to the rehabilitation of pedagogy is challenging and replacing the reigning epistemological vision that has produced damaging practical effects for education, for persons, and for the world. As we talk about epistemology, we will come to understand this.

So this is a book for people who may never have heard of epistemology but who are involved in knowing all the time. It is also a book for people like me who have studied epistemology professionally for decades. I offer the proposals of this book as both common-sensically therapeutic, but also as philosophically worthwhile, a philosophical conversation that I hope many will enter and forward. But of the two groups, I put the ordinary knowers first—because we are all, after all, ordinary knowers.

Our Subcutaneous Epistemological Layer,

and Our Default Mode

In this book I want to offer a fresh, transformative understanding of what knowing is. But before I talk about this, we need first to see how what we think knowing is adversely impacts what we are doing in knowing, and why all this matters so very much. So in this opening chapter we start with that.

Our outlook on what knowing is shapes all our knowing, whether we are aware of it or not. We can be operating, without knowing it, from defective or disordered presumptions about knowing. To make the point graphically, we all have acquired a subcutaneous epistemological layer—something operating from under the skin of our knowing. I also think of it as a default mode or setting—a way we (to compare ourselves to a computer) are preset to function. This default needs to be reset. I want to help us identify that subcutaneous layer, to expose that default mode to the light of day. Epistemological therapy is what I call my personal effort to help people reform their default epistemological settings in a way that brings health, hope, and productivity.

I do not mean to insinuate that a person could adopt an epistemological stance the way he/she might select a ripe tomato. Epistemological commitments are so much a part of us that they are more like our body, portions of which we may view objectively only with the help of a mirror, a video camera, or another person or group. And when we stop and look at our body or our epistemic commitments, it feels awkward; it bears little resemblance to our lived bodily experience. Usually we simply live out of an implicitly held epistemological vision. So scrutinizing and reforming our epistemological vision involves an allusive, complex, and possibly invasive process, rather than a calculating or arbitrary choice. But we do need to begin by identifying the commitments of which we haven’t been conscious, bringing them to the surface for a time, so that we can assess and adjust them. The ultimate goal is not to put an end to tacitly indwelling epistemic commitments, but to reform them, and then indwell them with intentionality and virtuosity. In fact, this book argues that knowing is more about transformation than it is about information. What I expect and intent is for this book itself itself to be the therapy that reshapes your epistemological stance as you read.

Since knowing is integral to everything humans do, our epistemic default impacts how we live and everything we do. It can adversely impact every kind of work. It impacts education, for example: since teachers teach knowledge, faulty and hidden assumptions can shape the process. Teaching is just one practice which stands to be made more effective and intentional if we do some epistemological therapy. Business, engineering, and library cataloguing are a few others. Others are theological studies, and living as a Christian. Any area where knowing is involved is adversely impacted by the default that we don’t name and reform. It is both responsible and advantageous to uncover that subcutaneous epistemological layer and diagnose its health.

I believe that the source of the defective default setting is the Western tradition of ideas and culture.⁴ We acquire this default epistemic setting, we may say, with our mother’s milk, because it is embedded in the Western cultural tradition. The legacy of the Western philosophical tradition continues to issue to children and grown-ups a default setting concerning knowledge.

This defective default epistemic setting we inherit actually goes against the grain of our humanness. What I will propose in this book as a replacement will restore us to the grain of our humanness. So there is a second sense in which I do not mean to insinuate that we can choose an epistemic outlook as we would choose a ripe tomato. For one outlook rather than another can align more favorably, healthfully, productively, with who we are as humans. Perhaps we may say that there is a deeper, truer, default.

The default we have inherited is a distortion that leads us to think that knowing is something other than what it is. The default means that even when we are going about knowing humanly, what we have been trained to see blinds us to what we are actually doing, which is actually working. It leads us to deemphasize the most important parts of the knowing event, rather than cultivate them. All this will become clearer as the book unfolds.

So what is this acquired epistemic default, and in what way is it defective? What do most people think that knowledge is?⁵ For starters, when we think of knowledge, we tend to picture it as information, facts, statements, and proofs. Knowledge consists exclusively of statements, pieces of information, facts. The best (and only) specimens of knowledge are those adequately justified by other statements that offer rational support, reasons, for the claim in question. Knowledge is statements and proofs. Knowledge is facts. I sometimes use the word, factoids, for its slight connotation of disconnected bits whose meaning isn’t particularly connected to the grand scheme of things. This is how we tend to picture what knowledge is.

People just assume that knowledge is information. To suggest that this is an epistemic outlook that could be revised can sound ridiculous to novice ears. Having a stance about knowledge being about information is like having an opinion about breathing. That’s why this book is going to be a tough sell. You will have to make a decision in the half-dark about buying it.

A Daisy of Dichotomies

Knowledge, thought of in this way, involves some sharp distinctions. This feature of our default setting becomes apparent when we start to think about what people generally contrast knowledge to. I am about to list a series of dichotomies. If you are visual, like I am, you can sketch the daisy as we go. For every pair, the first one goes on the yellow middle, and the second is a white petal. Put knowledge and its associates at the center of the daisy, and cast all their counterparts to the outside as petals, and you have it. I mean this as a diagnostic tool that helps us get a sense of our epistemic default.

Here’s how people generally think of knowledge:

Knowledge gets contrasted to belief.

Knowledge is identified with facts; facts stand over against opinions and interpretation, as well as against values and morals.

Knowledge and facts are identified with reason; reason is opposed to faith, also to emotion.

Knowledge, facts, and reason are identified with theory; theory, everyone thinks, is distinct from application, and distinct from action.

Knowledge, facts, reason, and theory are epitomized by science; people oppose science to art, to imagination, and they oppose it to religion, and also to authority.

Knowledge, facts, reason, theory, and science are objective; anything subjective should be set to the side, a contaminant to be minimized.

Knowledge, facts, reason, theory, science, and the objective get aligned with the neutral public sphere; all outside of this isn’t knowledge, and should be kept private. Public is what we can agree on and discuss; private is and should be different from person to person.

Knowledge, facts, reason, theory, science, objectivity, and the neutral public sphere align with mind; mind is divorced from body. Also, mind is, when you get right down to it, divorced from the world, from reality.

Knowledge, facts, reason, theory, science, objectivity, the neutral public sphere, and mind align with the way things are (reality), to be distinguished from the way things appear (appearance).

Let’s add one more that I feel is frequently implicitly countenanced by both genders:

Knowledge, facts, reason, theory, science, objectivity, the neutral public sphere, and mind are male; male is set over against female.

Let’s think about some possible implications of this daisy of dichotomies, these binary oppositions,⁶ in our default mode. Whatever is on the petals is not in the sphere of knowledge: belief, opinion, values, morals, faith, religion, emotion, art, body, practical application, imagination, authority, femaleness. These are sizeable, critical, portions of who we are! Where on the daisy, for example, does exercise go, or other body care? Or indifference to them, for that matter? That’s on a petal. It has nothing to do with knowledge, according to a subtly operating default mode.

What’s in the center of the daisy, we think, is what matters most. It has value; the petals, by contrast, appear to have less value, and also to threaten the purity of the center. We can think of the center as a core, which we peel away the petals to attain.

Is knowledge to be had only in the absence of emotion? Of passion? Might we not expect, then, that learners should be disengaged, bored? What happens to childlike wonder? If knowledge is to be found in science, what is going on in literary fiction—in stories? Something that isn’t knowledge, our default can imply.

If knowledge is facts and identified with theory, over against application, if knowledge is information, where would something called wisdom be located? What would it be? Could it be that this deeply engrained default setting has led to the assessment of twenty-first-century young people as note sensitive and melody deaf?

⁷

Many people think of interpretation as something that must be kept out of the fact picture as much as possible. Interpretation stands in the way of facts. We see training in interpretation as important for getting beyond bias to facts. If interpretation were to be part of knowledge, knowledge would no longer be knowledge, people think. Nowadays it is widely held that everybody has a perspective. But what is generally concluded is that this means there is no untainted knowledge. This is the dichotomous epistemic default at work.

Do we tend to associate some of the petals with one other? Since art is not knowledge, is it therefore female? Similarly, is religion effeminate? Also, since art is not knowledge, in the academic world do the humanities take a second seat to the sciences? And what about athletes? Can they be expected to be intelligent? Is emotion appearance and not reality? Is religion emotional? Is it a matter of appearance and not reality? Are emotion and religion private and not to be admitted to the public domain, unlike science? You can see that this is a default setting dominant in our culture.

It is commonplace for men and women both to think that men are more rational, and women are more emotional, despite a plethora of evidence that points in the opposite direction, if it points at all. Men, as a result, can think it unmanly to cry; women, as a result, can think it unwomanly or unattractive (and we presume that women are to attract—body, not mind) to be expert mathematicians. We all feel the pressure of stereotypes shaped by a defective epistemic default.

The default setting affects our common view of various disciplines of academic study, to take one instance. Hard sciences, as we valuatively term them, continue to dominate our ideal of knowledge. Life science and the social sciences struggle to vindicate themselves as science by playing up their similarity to hard sciences. Theology, in some quarters, attempts this also. So does education. Art, by contrast to the other disciplines, resists and flaunts its difference from the ideal; it has never succumbed to the temptation to turn itself into a science. Classes across the curriculum often display pedagogy and student expectation shaped by the unquestioned conviction that knowledge is about information.

Then there is the very live question whether the daisy has any middle at all. Is truth, knowledge, even to be had? No facts, just opinions? No public, just private? No reality, just appearance? Or are there just the disparate petals, scattered to the four winds, fought over by selfish people wanting to top the pile of power? Small wonder that the western mind’s default setting inclines people to a more skeptical version: knowledge isn’t possible; or if it is, it is merely the function of our cranial activity, or the individual knower’s personal fabrication. But this default inclination gains no ground toward resolving the disconnects. On the contrary, it continues to concede those very disconnects.

Where would the default mode I am sketching incline people who are not believers to locate Christianity, or other religious stances? If they locate it on the petal, would they not, therefore, hear Christian witness to the gospel as requiring them to jettison their minds? Where do Christians themselves locate Christianity? Is it reason or is it faith? Is theology, reason, and my relationship with Jesus, faith? And then, how do Christians perceive what they do at church? Is the sermon and Bible study the main event at church? Is this because it is about information? Is revelation perceived as divine information?

Among Christian believers, as well as in the West in general, I think that the mind-body distinction is especially severe. We tend to hear the word, spiritual, and associate it immediately with immaterial. We don’t know what to do with our bodies, because we also associate the immaterial with what alone is of value. But everybody in general is inclined to think of their body as an object, something that we have, rather than are. The real me we can think, is not my body. And we can have little feel of our body’s felt involvement in knowing. Yes, we are growing by leaps and bounds in probing the brain’s involvement in knowing; but that research treats the body as an object, not as a lived knower. We fear that the brain research, coupled with the invention of ever smarter robots, implies that there is no mind.

Again, many Christians espouse a specific, powerful, version of the dichotomy. There is absolute truth, or there is no truth. Absolute truth consists of a complete set of rational propositions about everything. Absolute truth’s only alternative is relativism, subjectivism, or skepticism, Christians often think. Many Christians are convinced that if you do not believe in absolute truth, you cannot be a Christian. These Christians do not see their own subcutaneous epistemic layer, and nevertheless have equated it with Christianity.

⁸

Taking a look at the entire daisy, don’t you come off feeling . . . fragmented? Which part of it is the real you? Which part of it is the real world—the center or the petals? But how can my emotions and my body not matter? And what does all this mean about my ability to connect with the world? Am I not divorced from it? Divorced from myself? Divorced from others? Divorced from God?

I have raised several matters here; I hope that they have prompted you to think of other places in life where our hidden presumptions about knowing come into play and make things problematic. The point of the daisy exercise is to draw attention to the existence of people’s subcutaneous epistemological layer, to suggest its widespread impact, and to suggest that it is operating actively but unhealthily. Even if you do not fully agree with the way I have sketched the default mode here, the exercise effectively draws attention to the fact that people have a subcutaneous epistemological layer—hidden yet influential presumptions about what knowledge is. And this default setting, on examination, slices whole portions of our humanness from what is deemed knowledge. Unaware of these operative dichotomies, we nevertheless remain tormented by their implications. They actually impede us from following through on positive, human, healthy, effective approaches to knowing.

Deadening the Longing to Know:

Boredom, Hopelessness, Betrayal

This default setting has generated a few common and predictable responses to the prospect of knowing, things that deaden what I believe should be a very human longing to know. One response is boredom. If we think that knowledge is information, on the one hand, we rightly deem that it is readily available and plenteous, delivered instantly via our internet. But on the other hand, it has been ingrained in us that we should keep our emotions, our selves, out of the information, as you would strive to keep contaminants out of a water supply. Small wonder that people are bored, when personal commitment and passion are subjective items we must check at the door. Small wonder that we are bored, when we presume that information is ever only dispassionately derived or held to be true. Dispassionately gleaned information, dispassionately conveyed and dispassionately apprehended, spells boredom. It suggests that knowledge has little to do with what is meaningful in life.

Another response to the prospect of knowing is hopelessness. People can think that knowledge, to be knowledge, would be information and facts, statements and proofs, but such knowledge can’t really be had. We can’t really know anything at all. To say it another way, whatever we think we know is really just opinion—petal, not daisy center. The receding hope of certainty, it has been said, lives on as disillusionment, in our skepticism. It is widely held that there is no way things really are, that truth is (only) relative to an individual’s perspective, or socially constructed; that what is knowledge is integrally connected to who is in power. Nor is it socially acceptable or morally acceptable to deny this. This approach may be held in the name of honesty or tolerance, but it offers the holder little hope of future success, let alone a lively interest, in knowing.

These newer perspectives about knowledge as societally constructed, perspectival or power-shaped are not totally mistaken. But our proclivity to dichotomies leads us to think it is all or nothing. As all, these perspectives engender hopelessness. Skepticism is a hopelessness unsuited to humanness and to the abundant world in which we live.

But the newer perspectives suggest that something is really wrong with the western default setting. Important things are being disparaged or dismissed: the legitimate and critical involvement of knowers, their perspectives, their passions, their communities, and their clout, in knowledge. Also, as knowledge itself has been exalted, other more important things have been marginalized damagingly: people, relationships, justice, environmental care, to name a few very large matters.

People and relationships matter deeply; this prompts a third factor that deadens a longing to know: betrayal. Who can care about truth when trust has been violated? The more pressing and painful matter is not, what is true, but, whom can I trust to care for me? It is my belief that the premier importance of trust and betrayal actually reveals more about the contours of human knowing than the default setting has allowed us to acknowledge. What if, at its heart, knowing is about trust?

Known, and Knower, as Impersonal

Epistemology, and knowing of any sort, involves the knower, the known, and the knowing. This is language we will use a lot in this book. If people working from such a default mode unthinkingly cast knowledge as factoids, information, statements and proofs, how does this also shape how they implicitly see reality? The default mode generally casts reality as impersonal, mindless, soulless, impassive, facts or states of affairs. The world is impersonal. There’s nobody home, we might say. If the facts are soulless, the world is soulless, too. Or maybe reality simply isn’t there. Whether that is worse or better than seeing it as impersonal is debatable.

The legacy of modern science is that many people think of the truly true, the really real, either as mathematical equations or as inert, random, chaos. Equations are the bare-boned structure of the universe. But most people also regard mathematical equations as about as impersonal and lifeless as it gets: dead, disembodied, to most of us inscrutable,

hieroglyphics scrawled across a blackboard in the highest seats of learning. Actually, some think that the equations aren’t really there; the equations are just convenient summaries of how things appear. But if equations are dead, or if they are merely useful summaries, why have scientists been so excited about discovering them?—we might well ask. Or is it rather that our default mode has predisposed us to this actually unwarranted supposition?

If nobody has been home in the world outside of us, often there has been nobody allowed to be at home within us as knowers, either. Our default mode casts sense perception as a passive registering of the world, and our knowledge judgments as involving us as minimally as possible in a linear aligning of this data. We have been summoned to objectivity—meaning that we are expected not to inject personal bias into this procedure. The more like computers we can be, the better will be the results of our efforts to register the world. The known we see as passive and impersonal; the knower we would cast as passive and minimally personal also. Like my little digital camera, we simply record what we see. And we record it by looking at it, and what we think we see is disparate and uninterpreted data. In our knowing of it we need to stick as closely to disparate and uninterpreted data as we are able, lest we contaminate it.

We have already noted an uneasy ambivalence in the default. What if the daisy really has no center? Yes that’s what knowledge is, but it can’t be had. The meaningless data are just what I make of them, and I may connect the dots however I choose. It’s less like a camera and more like a random scribble drawing I make up. As over against seeing the knower as nobly passive; people can also incline to the opposite extreme of thinking that the knower creates reality. The knower becomes all. Knowing is no longer about accessing the world but about formulating constructs. Rhetoric and interpretation come to replace epistemology. And realism, the belief that in knowing we connect with a world that is objectively there, independent of my knowing it, falls by the wayside. We can see in this a kind of self-absorption about knowing: it’s all about me. Or we can read a hopelessness in this outlook.

But whether the knower is passive, or active, in this default mode, whether the knowing is merely descriptive or excessively creative, the known—reality—has remained passive and impersonal, or nonexistent. The known is at best ours to bend to our purposes, as opposed to respecting it. It is brutish grist to our utilitarian mill; or we just mill away without it.

Perhaps we think of reality as impersonal because we think of knowing as impersonal. Perhaps the fault lies with our almost precritical commitment to knowing, itself, as impersonal and detached. The paradigm of knowing has shaped our fundamental sense of what it is we are knowing. I think this is correct. If so, the point of entry for us, if we want to address this lackluster situation is to take heed first to our responsibility as knowers; we may well find that it reshapes how we perceive the reality we aspire to know. This is why I write a book on epistemology.

Deadening, Not Just the Longing,

but the Knowing: Cluelessness

One more very important thing: if people generally think that knowledge is factoids, strung together like popcorn and cranberries for a Christmas tree, this might account for the diagnosis I mentioned earlier of people today being note sensitive and melody deaf. If knowledge is information, what is wisdom or understanding? And how might one attain it? How might one arrive at anything profound or new or transformative? We may not simply be bored, hopeless, or betrayed; we may also be clueless. And I am suggesting that our preconceived notion of what knowledge is may be a big part of the problem. Could it be, if we had a different understanding of what knowledge is that we might be better at it? Perhaps it is not just the longing that needs rekindling, but the knowing itself.

Consider the following example. Businesses and corporations often produce technical manuals of their procedures. Entry into the company requires reading the manual. But the question is: is the manual all there is to the kind of knowledge that drives that business? Does it even resemble knowledge? Businesses run into real problems, as their executives retire, finding people qualified to replace them. Why is this, if everyone has to read the manual? They also run into problems finding people who reliably produce new and good ideas. Could this be because people presume you follow an explicit procedure to come up with a new idea? Revising one’s epistemology, then, holds the prospect of very concretely impacting the bottom line.

I must qualify the generality of my claims about this diagnostic daisy in two respects. One is that in many quarters its compartmentalizing reductivism has, in fact, been explicitly and helpfully challenged. While widely influential philosophical ideas have distorted our default mode, in the last centuries there have also been powerful philosophical challenges and alternatives to the distortion.⁹ In fact, a philosophical distortion could only be countered, not by deserting philosophy (which I think is impossible anyway), but by doing excellent philosophy. In addition to philosophy, such disciplines as education and psychotherapy contain theorists whose work challenges the still prevailing default mode.¹⁰ I see my own effort in this book as one such challenge, one that is philosophical, but also interdisciplinary.

But secondly, I believe that most people actually live and know well in at least some arenas of their lives. Healthy and effective knowing is hampered, but nevertheless occurs, though our default blinds us to the fact that our best capacities for engaging the world do not actually conform to the epistemic paradigm we believe we hold. People can do knowing well and yet, when you ask them what they are doing, the way they describe it reflects the default and fails to accredit what they are doing well. Both of these qualifications to my diagnosis actually underscore it as well as the therapy this book offers.

Diagnosis: Western Philosophy

and Its Cultural Fallout

Where did these destructive dichotomies come from? One answer is that they came from Greek philosophy, starting with Plato, the father of western philosophy.

¹¹

I am a philosopher, and I passionately believe that all great philosophers are worth exploring. In fact, in line with what I feel to be our God-given obligation and privilege to image God in earth-development and care, we are to cull and steward the truth which abounds in a broken world of which God is nevertheless Lord. We have much to learn from great philosophers. Its also important to understand powerful philosophical errors, both in the original and in subsequent adaptations of thought, which have shaped whole cultures, as well as our own outlook, without our knowing it. I want to be clear that the problem that this book diagnoses and labors to address is not the original claims of great philosophers in the Western tradition, but rather the philosophical and cultural fallout that continues to distort the outlook of ordinary people, our own inherited, operative, defective default. Often the defect has resulted not from the original philosophers, but more from the students of the philosophers, or from the distorted popularization of their ideas.¹² Finally, where defective philosophical ideas thwart our understanding, the answer can never be to avoid philosophy. This is impossible. The answer is to draw widely on the understanding of others to do excellent philosophy.

We can trace the dichotomies of our defective default to the Platonic tradition. Most real was the unified, eternal, unchanging, non-material, rational dimension of reality; and this dimension is also the standard of goodness and beauty. Less real—and sharply distinguished from the rational—was the tangible, the material. Matter was ever changing, not unified, not rational, and inferior in goodness and beauty. Of course, any sort of religion and salvation involved seeking the former and fleeing (or moving beyond) the latter. Platonism’s influence on Christians’ understanding of Christianity, down through the centuries even to the present, is marked. Case in point: we confess the resurrection of the body, but our default tends to expect a disembodied immortality of the soul. Christians continue to struggle to value anything material—despite professing the doctrines that God created the world and that Jesus became flesh.

We can trace the modern exacerbation of the dichotomous default to Descartes, the father of modern philosophy. A Christian, Descartes nevertheless sowed seeds of atheism as, in search of certainty in knowledge, he exalted the individual I—the disembodied mind—to the supreme position in knowing. This is the philosopher whose thought I most associate with my own early defective default mode. Descartes took the already extant penchant in western philosophy, inherited from Plato, to divide reality into the intelligible and the sensible, that is, that which is known by the intellect or reason, and that which is apprehended via the senses. Descartes then drew the lines even more starkly: mind and body. Mind is unextended thought; body is unminded physical extension. The knower must, as such, be in the unextended thought category. That puts the known—even if it is the knower’s hands capably dipping pen in ink and inscribing powerful philosophical proposals on parchment—in the category of unminded extension. Descartes, a mathematician, was trying to make all of knowledge as certain as he perceived mathematical knowledge to be.¹³ But in the process, all that was outside the individual mind was/is mindless, only worth measuring. Measurement gets old. My point is that as a result of this outlook, we tend to think of the world, the real, as mindless—like nobody is home.

Also, consider the chasm Descartes’ radical separation causes between knower and known. Mind is intrinsically interesting and meaningful; the world is intrinsically neither. It compels us to ask how we ever thought that such a knower could access such a known, let alone why we would want to. Small wonder that many here among the flotsam and jetsam of modern philosophy, both in professional philosophy as well as on the streets, have concluded that we can’t. (I also think, small wonder some people struggle with eating disorders or other body abuse.)

Philosophers from the 1800s to this day have been blowing the whistle on Descartes’ cogito, as it is called. Some really wonderful philosophical forays have transpired as a result. However, the default mode is still operative—I have only to think of the eighteen-year-olds that show up in my classroom in the fall. Also, it is widely documented that the disease of philosophical modernism, as it is often called, has especially infected the Protestant evangelical church in the global North.¹⁴ The fact that Protestant Christians since the nineteenth century have avoided the study of philosophy (often in the name of spirituality) has especially rendered us vulnerable to this chronic condition.

I need look no further than myself to document the default setting. This is the story of my own mental furniture. I remember asking the question of myself, with great anxiety, as a middle-schooler: how can I be sure that there is a material world outside my mind? Nor has my own lived experience of my body even been something I could name, until recently. It was only within the last decade that I have felt that my body and mind reconnected in a conversion from Cartesianism. Also, growing up as a Protestant Christian, I presumed the dichotomies, and thus struggled, as many people considering Christianity do, to figure out whether my faith is rational or not, certain or not, and which of these is in fact preferable. I struggled with the effects of the default that still characterizes Christian churches: is theology, or even Scripture, propositions, over against my personal relationship with God, which is—what? And if this is a struggle for people in the church, how can we expect it to be anything other for people outside it?

These are hard words; I hope they are a wake-up call. Philosophy is for everybody, because everybody practices it. We can live out a philosophical stance in ignorance. Or we can steward the cleanup, and live out a healthy philosophical stance with responsible intentionality. The payoff is better living, better knowing, better teaching, and, for those alive to the ultimate personal of reality, better enjoyment of God.

Diagnosis: Certainty

Another way we can recognize the power of our default epistemological orientation is to identify a few common fundamental commitments: certainty, objectivism, the ocular metaphor, and substantivalism. Let us start with certainty.

In our knowing, we westerners have generally aspired to the ideal of certainty. Knowledge, to be knowledge, must be true, accurately representing the way things are, and it must not prove to be mistaken—or else we could not consider it knowledge. The justification that we insist on and strive to uncover is one that will insure against defective products. To this end, we have gradually restricted the domain and the character of knowledge. We have restricted the domain of knowledge to the visually apprehended. We have restricted its character to the articulable and exhaustively justified. Knowledge must be restricted to propositions—statements and proofs. We have excluded other forms of awareness. We have excluded the apparently defective personal contribution of the knower and the apparently defective mysteriously uncategorizable of the known. Like Lake Woebegone’s 5 & 10—if they don’t have it, you probably didn’t need it anyway—knowledge is limited to what keeps within these stipulations.

Why have we sought certainty? One might respond that it simply seems obvious. Certainty is epistemic purity. But I suggest that a possible motivation for this commitment to the certainty of propositions can be the less laudable one of avoiding personal responsibility, avoiding risk of failure, in knowing. If we must be perfectly certain of something to accept it, then we ourselves need take no risks, nor need we be held personally responsible for our lack of commitment. Certainty conveniently opens the back door to escape to irresponsibility.

It always strikes me, by contrast, how un-American our stipulation of risk-free knowing is. We Americans like risks, don’t we? We like risk in our snowboarding, our bike riding, our rollercoasters, in our Survivor challenges. Why not in our epistemology? But another thing that strikes me is that, in actual fact, there is plenty of risk in our knowing—too much for comfort. Anyone facing medical or financial choices knows this, not to mention cultivating and maintaining relationships. Why, then, do we not acknowledge this in our epistemology? On the other hand, relativism and skepticism, apparent opposites of certainty, also sidestep personal epistemic responsibility. Relativism and skepticism are forms of Certainty, or bust. So they continue to concede certainty, and thus can involve a kind of irresponsibility.

There is a far more laudable motivation for commitment to certainty, which, I believe, stems from a particular conception of truth and reality, one that I believe is unnecessary and unwarranted. We have tended since the time of Plato to think that truth to be truth had to be unchanging. We have added the stipulations,