I’m a pastor of a small church in Denver, CO and studied philosophy in my undergrad. I have to say Loving to know is one of the most beneficial books I’ve engaged with in a long time. It is deeply impacting my hopes for how our church can function to rehabilitate peoples epistemology in our church. So exciting! Very thankful for another wonderfully generous interview from John.
I love how listening to the conversations here I get suggested a book ( Love in the postmodern predicament: D.C Schindler) I read along, totally in love with the book and run into a name (Esther Lightcap Meek) on a quote, flip open my laptop and engage in an hour long recording of a conversation. Incredible, synchronous. 22 year old here.
I want to thank you for releasing all these dialogos, conversations, thoughts, brian storms, etc. Absolutely invaluable. I personally have a huge disconnect with people in general and your content as well as my own work give me a real good understanding on why that is. Really, a huge thanks to you and the guests you present. I have been getting into your different series and especially the elusive I is so so good and important. I wish more people would think about these topics and apply its implications to improve themselves and the world around them as a result. I also love how you are always so humble, many good thinkers and/or people that bring up good topics, become narcissistic & egocentric real fast.
19:15 “ faithfulness as this continuity of contact. Which is that I’m going to recognize that you are continually going to break into me from outside of any conception I have of you and continually call me to transform in response to that and I want to afford the same for you.” Wonderful. Iconic knowing is what I call that.
So thrilled to see this is happening! John, from the first day I encountered your work I thought..’this guy needs to talk to Meek and I want to be a fly on the wall’.
21:45 "subsidiary focal integration" is such an important idea. Truly has helped me probably as much as anything else. When you really get what that means...it brings so much with it. It's essentially that all reality is embodied. It must be integrated (lived) by your body. Rilke "the point is to live everything". It's a death knell to Cartesian dualism and the Divided Man.
What a beautiful, rich conversation. I don’t know why, but when you (John) were talking about the scientists “indwelling” the Mars rover, and you said “they anthropomorphized the rover, and technomorphized themselves,” I started to tear up. I just really love this about humans… that this is what we do, this is how we know, this is how we love. It’s so imaginative and playful. Please talk with Esther again! You bring out the best in each other. Really delightful and engaging.
Thanks so much for having Esther on John. I had never heard of her or her work until now and- subsequently- have been binging on some of her other presentations on YT. What a delightful, profound, caring thinker- a true blessing for those like me who are seeking a confluence between embodied intelligence, wisdom, love, and praxis. Much love to you both! ❤️
Unbelievably good conversation. There is a strong alignment in what Dr. Meek is talking about and what we are talking about on Grail Country as well, though my influences are quite different. Thoroughly enjoyed this.
Really beautiful conversation, loved hearing the appreciation you both have for each other and for others (Polanyi and Schindler ++). Can't wait to read more in these areas. I really resonated with Meek in saying that existential/epistemological questions have been with me from a very young age. My brother used to ask me why I bothered to ask the questions I do (pragmatically) and I said, "I can't help it, it's just how I think!" Listening to you and Meek talk and gleaning from your wisdom feels like coming home in a way.
the practical rituals that you both mention are excellent: ballet, tai chi, bike riding. I've gotten a bunch of this through yoga. We are so disconnected from our bodies.
11:00 reminds me of Peter Rollin’s pyrotheology and his “freedom from the libidinal pursuit of the Lack” (that which promises to make you whole and complete)
It's delightful to see two academics this excited about sharing their work. In my Buddhist circles, there's a tendency to see enthusiasm and cheerfulness as evidence of being (ghastly term!) "spiritually advanced." I have my doubts about that -- it reminds me too much of the way certain Cavinists took wealth as evidence of being among the elect -- but it does still sway me: it seems like walking in the right direction really ought to make you enthusiastic and cheerful.
“The key word as far as I’m concerned in Polanyi’s work to this discussion is the idea of the subsidiary. What you’ve got in any knowing is a two level from and to subsidiary focal integration to an irreducible pattern. That’s knowing. The defective modernist epistemology renders knowledge focal explicit bits.”
To have it go from "learning for the test, to learning for life" is huge!! It should certainly happen before undergrad level! I wish everyone a teacher like this- thank you for making these conversations available.
I am literally gardening whilst listening to this, I came inside just to comment this wow and I grow everything from seed to harvest and then some, it is an incredible process. I agree with what you are saying with presence. The Metaphysics of childhood notion touches on a few things and it makes sense in a way, I can visualize what you are saying but I don't quite have the words I feel it's worth contemplating though and possibly visualizing what you are giving a sense of and I have an example though for the body shifting to connect mind body from previous divorce , one cannot divorce the body without doing the exact same thing to the mind and when there's a dual divorce for lack of better words, it is dangerous in my lived experience. I can talk about it from an anorexics perspective. I am currently in remission , so integrated with recovery and life , and it is so incredibly difficult but It is different than being dead. So its at this stage a lived experience. I did ballet most my life as well as contemporary modern. I have been in many productions and eistedfords. I have also authored a book and am currently working on the next one. John inspired and in a weird way helped me to begin writing again actually and his work is helping me scape , in multiple ways. And it's incredible how a golden thread or throughline seems to have emerged and I am getting to know it and allowing new insights and working on and with multiple methods to get into flow state which is another incredible journey of discovery and participation and creation and perception and I even think a bit of life's joy and grace and peace as well. I don't know everything and I love that. What I do not know, I know in a way of which that the rest is metanoia and I have ,even though just a little, access to it. This conversation is tapping on interesting points in my brain and I can't wait to progress after this conversation. I feel slightly revived.
Dante weaves this epistemology into the strange and magnificent poem of his great work, now known as La Commedia. He saw it disappearing in front of his eyes, so write he did.
This clarified alot of muddled thoughts I had about contemplation and the connection to knowledge..or perhaps it made the information more "see-through" and clear :) Also the connection of this to imaginal transformation.. thanks both! I am inspired to look into polanyi's work now too :)
43:50 - 44:00 “how am I going to combat the defective epistemology that claims that all knowledge is information, by giving more information?” The bane of my intellectual existence.
Hi Esther. Have you seen Matthew Crawford's stuff? He is dealing with the importance of craft in our experience, from a philosophical perspective. Quite readable, more high end journalism than academese.
19:00 Certainty as a kind of closure of that categorical grasp. Yes. Peter Enns wrote a book called the Sin of Certainty where he walks through the New Testament word pistis and what it means (and doesn’t). John, I’d love you to do a series on faith. A lot of my friends and I have talked for hours on the profundity of Abraham and Isaac. It’s like Job. Deep calls to deep. Infinite manifestations. Wisdom.
57:00 Part of teaching your body and getting the true knowledge is "plain ol obedience". It's like you took the words right out of the Bible. I love 1 Corinthians. This is basically St. Paul talking about two kinds of knowing.
Great discussion but I would like to know more about the leap from Polanyi’s views on knowledge to a religious awakening and Christianity. It seems to me that there is something missing because understanding the problem with modernist epistemology does not ipso facto lead to a religious conversion.
Thanks so much for this John, I’ve got so much out of this conversation and intend to order/read Polanyi’s knowing and being asap! I wanted to ask and I hope this is a relevant question to the conversation, but in terms of the kind of affordances that emerge from the existential knowing that you’re both describing, could you say that what is afforded will always bear some kind of property that is indicative of the subsidiary it’s embedded in? So, in evolutionary theory organisms exhibit properties that are a record of past and present environments - for example, our appendix is indicative of the environment we dwelled within when we needed to eat grass. If this is the case biologically, then can we say the same can happen culturally? So that different philosophies or literary works can be indicative of the subsidiary or mental terrain those individuals were embedded in and contacting? So that when Esther says she had a Cartesian question as a child (“how do I know that there’s anything outside my mind’), it is in a sense showing the type of mental environment she was embedded within? And if this is the case, then what environments shapes and informs completely novel ideas? Thanks so much for everything you do, it’s genuinely helped me in more ways than I could convey.
That sentence around 6:50 is the best ever. What the fuck. Contact with reality has been made when you get the sense of the possibility of indeterminate future manifestations. I'm an excitable person too lol.
It's interesting how your glitch in reality sends you down continental and neo-platonists, but stops short of the likes of Averros, Avicenna, and Suhrawardy. You found the path to the seven cities! You have the rigor! Put the continent back into continental! ... Or maybe it's my calling to do so.
As Alan Watts would say reality is "donggggggg". To analyse and describe to someone the stages of meditation is not even taught in Buddhism. Sure they have the stages of meditation, forgot the word, donggggg is simpler. Why must the West restructure a structure that has no structure other than that was structured by those whom, I imagine, did not understand the Buddhas teachings? Instead control, seems to be the modern academic philosophy. Oh Dhyana. I only comment because I have lost my practise, so excuse my rudeness. When Western reality gets in the way one looks for leaders. A Lacian Real?
"You've got to get yourself into position for the vista to open up" Gave me chills. Thank you both!
I’m a pastor of a small church in Denver, CO and studied philosophy in my undergrad. I have to say Loving to know is one of the most beneficial books I’ve engaged with in a long time. It is deeply impacting my hopes for how our church can function to rehabilitate peoples epistemology in our church. So exciting! Very thankful for another wonderfully generous interview from John.
Thank you so much John for introducing Dr. Meeks to us!!! Blessings!!
20 year old here. Love to be learning, thank you for this enlightening conversation
21 year old here
wow!
I love how listening to the conversations here I get suggested a book ( Love in the postmodern predicament: D.C Schindler) I read along, totally in love with the book and run into a name (Esther Lightcap Meek) on a quote, flip open my laptop and engage in an hour long recording of a conversation. Incredible, synchronous. 22 year old here.
What a delightful lady. Added Longing To Know to my Kindle library immediately after finishing this.
I want to thank you for releasing all these dialogos, conversations, thoughts, brian storms, etc. Absolutely invaluable. I personally have a huge disconnect with people in general and your content as well as my own work give me a real good understanding on why that is. Really, a huge thanks to you and the guests you present. I have been getting into your different series and especially the elusive I is so so good and important. I wish more people would think about these topics and apply its implications to improve themselves and the world around them as a result. I also love how you are always so humble, many good thinkers and/or people that bring up good topics, become narcissistic & egocentric real fast.
19:15 “ faithfulness as this continuity of contact. Which is that I’m going to recognize that you are continually going to break into me from outside of any conception I have of you and continually call me to transform in response to that and I want to afford the same for you.”
Wonderful. Iconic knowing is what I call that.
So thrilled to see this is happening! John, from the first day I encountered your work I thought..’this guy needs to talk to Meek and I want to be a fly on the wall’.
Dream fulfilled.
Esther is refreshingly real! What a treat. 😄
John Vervaeke is a blessing of our time. Thank you for what you do
Thanks Esther and John!
Thanks Lee.
21:45 "subsidiary focal integration" is such an important idea. Truly has helped me probably as much as anything else. When you really get what that means...it brings so much with it.
It's essentially that all reality is embodied. It must be integrated (lived) by your body. Rilke "the point is to live everything". It's a death knell to Cartesian dualism and the Divided Man.
What a beautiful, rich conversation. I don’t know why, but when you (John) were talking about the scientists “indwelling” the Mars rover, and you said “they anthropomorphized the rover, and technomorphized themselves,” I started to tear up. I just really love this about humans… that this is what we do, this is how we know, this is how we love. It’s so imaginative and playful.
Please talk with Esther again! You bring out the best in each other. Really delightful and engaging.
Yes! Love this ❤️
Thanks so much for having Esther on John. I had never heard of her or her work until now and- subsequently- have been binging on some of her other presentations on YT.
What a delightful, profound, caring thinker- a true blessing for those like me who are seeking a confluence between embodied intelligence, wisdom, love, and praxis.
Much love to you both! ❤️
For a couple years, I have been one of the excited students learning for life, after years and years of learning for the test. So happy to be here!
Unbelievably good conversation. There is a strong alignment in what Dr. Meek is talking about and what we are talking about on Grail Country as well, though my influences are quite different. Thoroughly enjoyed this.
20:55 - 21:10 "They don't list facts. They list connections...and this does't exclude semantic meaning." Amen.
Wonderful, look forward to part two.
I'm looking forward to this!
My God so many thing connected for me on this one. Thank you for bring Esther on John.
Communion and lovers of the real❤
49:02 Skill knowledge= Wisdom. How philosopher's lost being lovers of skill knowledge has been a major contributor to our meaning crisis.
I now am reading Esthers manual. It's terrific!
Really beautiful conversation, loved hearing the appreciation you both have for each other and for others (Polanyi and Schindler ++). Can't wait to read more in these areas. I really resonated with Meek in saying that existential/epistemological questions have been with me from a very young age. My brother used to ask me why I bothered to ask the questions I do (pragmatically) and I said, "I can't help it, it's just how I think!" Listening to you and Meek talk and gleaning from your wisdom feels like coming home in a way.
Looking forward to part two.
the practical rituals that you both mention are excellent: ballet, tai chi, bike riding.
I've gotten a bunch of this through yoga. We are so disconnected from our bodies.
Chinese medicine as well…I cry every time I go for acupuncture/cupping. It’s like I’m actually acknowledging my body and it speaks back.
Excellent. Listened twice ❤️🙏
11:00 reminds me of Peter Rollin’s pyrotheology and his “freedom from the libidinal pursuit of the Lack” (that which promises to make you whole and complete)
I first heard of Esther Meek from Rob Bell. Don’t tell Paul.
Where's my estuary excommunication gavel... :)
It's delightful to see two academics this excited about sharing their work. In my Buddhist circles, there's a tendency to see enthusiasm and cheerfulness as evidence of being (ghastly term!) "spiritually advanced." I have my doubts about that -- it reminds me too much of the way certain Cavinists took wealth as evidence of being among the elect -- but it does still sway me: it seems like walking in the right direction really ought to make you enthusiastic and cheerful.
Wonderful combination
“The key word as far as I’m concerned in Polanyi’s work to this discussion is the idea of the subsidiary. What you’ve got in any knowing is a two level from and to subsidiary focal integration to an irreducible pattern. That’s knowing.
The defective modernist epistemology renders knowledge focal explicit bits.”
I'm looking forward to reading Esther's book on artistry. Thank you for the dialogue.
So delighted to see you two in dialogue!
Artistry is creating layers of meaning, some of which the 'other' is given space to fill in.
To have it go from "learning for the test, to learning for life" is huge!! It should certainly happen before undergrad level! I wish everyone a teacher like this- thank you for making these conversations available.
I am literally gardening whilst listening to this, I came inside just to comment this wow and I grow everything from seed to harvest and then some, it is an incredible process. I agree with what you are saying with presence. The Metaphysics of childhood notion touches on a few things and it makes sense in a way, I can visualize what you are saying but I don't quite have the words I feel it's worth contemplating though and possibly visualizing what you are giving a sense of and I have an example though for the body shifting to connect mind body from previous divorce , one cannot divorce the body without doing the exact same thing to the mind and when there's a dual divorce for lack of better words, it is dangerous in my lived experience. I can talk about it from an anorexics perspective. I am currently in remission , so integrated with recovery and life , and it is so incredibly difficult but It is different than being dead. So its at this stage a lived experience. I did ballet most my life as well as contemporary modern. I have been in many productions and eistedfords. I have also authored a book and am currently working on the next one. John inspired and in a weird way helped me to begin writing again actually and his work is helping me scape , in multiple ways. And it's incredible how a golden thread or throughline seems to have emerged and I am getting to know it and allowing new insights and working on and with multiple methods to get into flow state which is another incredible journey of discovery and participation and creation and perception and I even think a bit of life's joy and grace and peace as well. I don't know everything and I love that. What I do not know, I know in a way of which that the rest is metanoia and I have ,even though just a little, access to it. This conversation is tapping on interesting points in my brain and I can't wait to progress after this conversation. I feel slightly revived.
Dante weaves this epistemology into the strange and magnificent poem of his great work, now known as La Commedia. He saw it disappearing in front of his eyes, so write he did.
This clarified alot of muddled thoughts I had about contemplation and the connection to knowledge..or perhaps it made the information more "see-through" and clear :) Also the connection of this to imaginal transformation.. thanks both! I am inspired to look into polanyi's work now too :)
Woah, a conversation with Esther Meek? Sweet!
43:50 - 44:00 “how am I going to combat the defective epistemology that claims that all knowledge is information, by giving more information?”
The bane of my intellectual existence.
Hi Esther. Have you seen Matthew Crawford's stuff? He is dealing with the importance of craft in our experience, from a philosophical perspective. Quite readable, more high end journalism than academese.
19:00 Certainty as a kind of closure of that categorical grasp.
Yes. Peter Enns wrote a book called the Sin of Certainty where he walks through the New Testament word pistis and what it means (and doesn’t).
John, I’d love you to do a series on faith. A lot of my friends and I have talked for hours on the profundity of Abraham and Isaac. It’s like Job. Deep calls to deep. Infinite manifestations. Wisdom.
57:00 Part of teaching your body and getting the true knowledge is "plain ol obedience". It's like you took the words right out of the Bible. I love 1 Corinthians. This is basically St. Paul talking about two kinds of knowing.
Great discussion but I would like to know more about the leap from Polanyi’s views on knowledge to a religious awakening and Christianity. It seems to me that there is something missing because understanding the problem with modernist epistemology does not ipso facto lead to a religious conversion.
Thanks so much for this John, I’ve got so much out of this conversation and intend to order/read Polanyi’s knowing and being asap! I wanted to ask and I hope this is a relevant question to the conversation, but in terms of the kind of affordances that emerge from the existential knowing that you’re both describing, could you say that what is afforded will always bear some kind of property that is indicative of the subsidiary it’s embedded in?
So, in evolutionary theory organisms exhibit properties that are a record of past and present environments - for example, our appendix is indicative of the environment we dwelled within when we needed to eat grass. If this is the case biologically, then can we say the same can happen culturally? So that different philosophies or literary works can be indicative of the subsidiary or mental terrain those individuals were embedded in and contacting?
So that when Esther says she had a Cartesian question as a child (“how do I know that there’s anything outside my mind’), it is in a sense showing the type of mental environment she was embedded within? And if this is the case, then what environments shapes and informs completely novel ideas?
Thanks so much for everything you do, it’s genuinely helped me in more ways than I could convey.
Francis Schaeffer started the transformation and saved so many of us from deadly sunglasses.
Francis Schaeffer started the transformation and saved many of us from deadly sunglasses.
That sentence around 6:50 is the best ever. What the fuck. Contact with reality has been made when you get the sense of the possibility of indeterminate future manifestations. I'm an excitable person too lol.
Yo you guys were fantastic seriously. Thank you very much for putting this out here. What a dream!
36:00 ish D:
It's interesting how your glitch in reality sends you down continental and neo-platonists, but stops short of the likes of Averros, Avicenna, and Suhrawardy. You found the path to the seven cities! You have the rigor! Put the continent back into continental!
... Or maybe it's my calling to do so.
As Alan Watts would say reality is "donggggggg". To analyse and describe to someone the stages of meditation is not even taught in Buddhism. Sure they have the stages of meditation, forgot the word, donggggg is simpler. Why must the West restructure a structure that has no structure other than that was structured by those whom, I imagine, did not understand the Buddhas teachings? Instead control, seems to be the modern academic philosophy. Oh Dhyana. I only comment because I have lost my practise, so excuse my rudeness. When Western reality gets in the way one looks for leaders. A Lacian Real?
If you sit like buddha, you are buddha