Dear Reader,
Thanks for checking out the latest installment of Conversant, a newsletter about building a poetic life. This time, I’m sharing a more-academic-than-usual essay about poetry and personal knowledge—a niche topic, perhaps, but something I ponder often, and, more importantly, something that relates to all our personal knowledge more generally.
Because the essay runs at about 2,500 words, I’ve chosen to split it in two parts. If you enjoy what you find below, stay tuned for part two in a couple weeks. If not, no worries. I have some lighter fare planned for this Spring 😊
Cheers,
Cameron
What sort of act is the act of writing a poem?
Answers to this question could take on any number of shapes. To begin with, we might conceive of the “poetry-act” along classical transcendental lines. Perhaps poetry concerns itself chiefly with goodness, and should be understood in moral terms. Or perhaps it is primarily a matter of beauty, fit for aesthetic judgments. Finally, a poem might also be evaluated in terms of the rational cogency of its contents, when seen as an act ordered toward truth. Still other answers abound…
This essay investigates the relationship of poetics and personal knowledge. Drawing primarily on the work of philosopher Esther Lightcap Meek, I propose that both the acts of writing and reading poetry may be fruitfully understood epistemologically—that is, as acts of coming to know.
The argument takes shape in three parts. First, I provide a contextualized overview of Meek’s account of knowing, noting its key debts to the work of Michael Polanyi. Second, I attempt to relate Meek’s insights about the process of coming-to-know to the process a poet might undergo when writing a poem. And third, with the aid of poet Scott Cairns, I suggest a few ways this recasting might also illuminate the act of reading poetry as one oriented toward, among other things, personal knowledge.
Meek’s project begins from the premise that modern Western philosophical approaches to knowledge have been dominated, and sometimes crippled, by Cartesian skepticism. Descartes famously doubted the validity of his sensory experiences to such an extreme extent that all he thought could be certain of was his thinking mind. Subsequent philosophers, from Hume to Kant and beyond, have tended to divorce human knowledge-claims from the objective world as a consequence, if such a world can even be spoken of. For Kant, the best we can do is postulate a necessary “noumenal” totality beneath all appearances and sense perception, of which humans can finally know nothing (Kenny 620-621). The puzzle is an ancient one: if we can’t be certain of anything beyond the “sense data” of our individual minds, how can we claim to know anything?
In Longing to Know, Meek attempts to restore an epistemic relationship between knowing subjects and known objects by recasting what counts as genuine human knowledge in the first place (Meek 30). She defines knowledge as “the responsible human struggle to rely on clues to focus on a coherent pattern and submit to its reality” (13). Elucidating this definition clause by clause will prepare us to transpose her thought to the realm of poetics.
Knowing is the responsible human struggle…
As a “responsible human struggle,” knowledge for Meek is both act and process—or perpetual act. Meek wishes to distance herself from the notion that knowledge is a thing to be obtained, some cognitive collection of justifiable propositions one has extracted from reality. Instead, true knowledge, in her view, is always coming-to-know, a process of pattern-making that relies equally on the senses as reason.
Michael Polanyi—the 20th-century Hungarian–British chemist and philosopher whose work undergirds much of Meek’s thought—writes in his landmark Personal Knowledge of the “heuristics” of problem solving, i.e., the struggle of coming to know. Regardless of the field of knowledge, humans must proceed by means of trial and error toward novel discoveries (Polanyi 20). This is a struggle because one is always working with a limited collection of particulars which do not (yet) amount to coherent whole or “focal pattern” (Meek 57). To achieve some such pattern, one must rely on clues.
…to rely on clues to focus on a coherent pattern…
When Meek speaks of “clues,” she has in mind Polanyi’s notion of tacit knowledge, or the idea that all knowing relies on unspoken, peripheral assumptions—or “subsidiaries”—which help form patterns of thought and action. She writes: “On the way to achieving a pattern, before we ever reach it … we begin to rely subsidiarily on the particulars that previously we were simply looking at. We must struggle past looking at them to get inside them in a way that defies verbal expression” (Meek 84). We will come to an example to illustrate this idea in a moment.
For now, it’s key to note that Meek is once again differentiating herself from the rationalist/scientific view that all knowledge, for it to be genuine knowledge, must be articulable in propositional language or proven via empirical test. She is not opposed to verbalizing beliefs or assumptions, of course; rather, Meek wants us to see that the process of coming to know requires a kind of intuitive trust in certain particular facts to achieve a larger picture of the world (86).
So when she speaks of focusing on a “coherent pattern,” she means that a knower has come into contact with some aspect of reality, which is the telos of every knowing venture. The knower has integrated those disparate particulars into a harmonious whole, connecting the dots of experience into a hitherto unknown constellation of meaning (Meek 17). This is the “ah-ha!” moment, the insight, the eureka we crave when faced with questions or confusion. Polanyi describes the phenomenon, rather poetically, as gaining “a foothold at another shore of reality” (Polanyi 123). But what might this look like in practice?
…and submit to its reality.
Meek puts forward learning to ride a bicycle as a paradigmatic act of coming-to-know. Initially, everything about the act feels precarious: the rotation of the pedals in tandem with turning the handlebars, the seeming impossibility of staying balanced, etc. With time, however, these particulars, or “clues,” become subsidiary, allowing the rider to balance, pedal, and steer almost without thinking—to indwell a new pattern. The same could be said of learning to play an instrument or solving a complex mathematical problem.
“Coming to know,” she writes in A Little Manual for Knowing, “proves to be a process of moving from looking at to looking from in order to see transformatively beyond” (Meek 52). The master pianist does not look “at” individual notes or scales when performing, though of course she does know them. Rather, her focus is the integration of all the particularities into that harmonious pattern we call music.
Such integration characterizes all forms of knowing, for Meek. Hence the subtitle of her book Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People. This speaks to the book’s intended audience, no doubt. But it also makes a subtler claim about Meek’s epistemology writ large, suggesting at once that ordinary knowledge is indeed knowledge, and that knowledge is in this sense ordinary.
To be continued…
Works Cited
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet” in The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings. Edited by Lawrence Buell. Modern Library, 2006.
Johnson, Dru. Scripture’s Knowing: A Companion to Biblical Epistemology. Cascade Books, 2015.
Kenny, Anthony. A New History of Western Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2008
Meek, Esther Lightcap. A Little Manual for Knowing. Cascade Books, 2014.
__________________. Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People. Brazos Press, 2003.
Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. The University of Chicago Press. 1962.