Abided Knowing

How much needs to be said about ‘knowing that you are knowing’? Very much. If it is not that case that we know static pieces of datum or have known things called knowledge, then how is it that we know? Polanyi gives a diachronic answer to this that refuses to accept a synchronic view of epistemology. So there is no such thing as a ‘justified true belief’, but a sense that we are tracking the real (not to be confused with ‘truth-tracking’ views of epistemology).

Continue reading ‘Knowing ‘that you are knowing’’

The discussion so far has centered on acts of physical survival (e.g. starvation and bleeding). But there are other ways in which we can affirm some type of somatic epistemology. My body has a qualitative disposition that I call ‘no’. It is the full somatic disposition my body takes on very rare occasions; e.g. violently wrongful observations, prescience of impending fatal events, etc. My body, without coaching or advice, will go into a full set position that could be described as, “This is so wrong that I reject it with my whole being.”

Continue reading ‘Somatic Epistemology: Taking Body Seriously’

Observations such as, “The body knows how to protect itself,” are what I would like to flesh out here. When I went to Guatemala to pick up one of my children whom we adopted, she was malnourished. I will not go into the details, but one of the observations our pediatrician made was that the head and organ systems ‘get’ nourished first in a situation of resource scarcity. So that a normal child can be malnourished for months and not have it permanently affect cognition and their major systems. It is one of the reasons that our daughter had no muscle tone in her extremities, but a rather enlarged torso. To this, our pediatrician commented, “The body knows how to protect itself.”

But what kind of epistemological claim is this? I would be tempted to dismiss this as an issue of anthropomorphism (except that it’s exactly the matter at stake). Maybe personification better fits such a claim, but there is a way in which our bodies know exactly what to do, even when we are clueless or hapless. I’ve already given some example rife in medical research (e.g. fetal development and blood clotting), but are there other ways in which our bodies express an epistemology? Continue reading ‘What does the body ‘know’?’

Nietzsche claims that Christianity has developed a view of despising the body. I think this is a superficial charge of Platonism in the church and I would agree that it needs to be corrected wherever it is found. So this post is a partial effort at rebuffing or being corrected by Nietzsche’s critique. But the focus on the body as the person is still of interest to Christianity. Specifically, is there some way in which Christians should affirm that ‘the body knows’ (i.e. there is such a thing as somatic epistemology)? This question remains crucial for sacramental theology. The immanence of such a question turns on whether we know ‘through’ our body or whether our body itself knows and thus, we know.

I am still waiting to read Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (Andy Clark), but from skimming it, I believe he goes the same route as Polanyi. Whenever we pick up a tool, be it a pencil or jackhammer, we become cyborgic, extending ourselves through that tool. For Polanyi, and many phenomenologists, knowing is a function of the body, not a function through the body per se. Continue reading ‘The Knowing Body’

Below is an excerpt from an essay I wrote for a Nietzsche seminar. In the essay, I tried my hand at creating a narrative that made multiple connections to specifics realities and yet rendered some sense of the richness of reality and the dilapidation of strict causal frameworks. I am still trying to work out the details, but here are some of my thoughts as to why narrative works better at describing and analyzing than does deconstructive analysis (derided as ‘Alexandrian’ by Nietzsche): Continue reading ‘The Working Parts of Narrative via Nietzsche’