Loving to Know with philosopher Esther Lightcap Meek
Esther Lightcap Meek is Professor of Philosophy emerita at Geneva College, in Western Pennsylvania. She is the author of numerous books, such as Longing to Know and Loving to Know. Loving to Know is the subject of this episode.
This episode (#79) explores the intricate relationships between knowledge, information, reality, and love with guest Esther Lightcap Meek. Building on the ideas of Michael Polanyi, Esther and Andrea delve into the concept of ‘subsidiary focal integration’ and its implications for how we understand reality. The conversation addresses the limitations of viewing knowledge merely as information, the importance of bodily cognition, and how love and communion with the real are fundamental to genuine knowing. It shows how philosophy can be understood as therapeutic, a dynamic process that connects us deeply with ourselves, each other, and the world.
To skip research ramble go to 26:33
00:00 Introduction to the Concept of Reality and Information
01:46 The Role of Subsidiary Focal Integration
03:36 Exploring Covenant Epistemology
04:54 Understanding Bodily Cognition
06:44 Introducing Esther Lightcap Meek
08:50 The Journey of a Philosopher
10:46 The Importance of Subsidiary Focal Integration
13:02 Practical Applications and Everyday Philosophy
16:40 The Role of Philosophy in Real Life
26:31 A Conversation with Esther Lightcap Meek
49:34 Integrative Knowledge and Liberation
50:25 Epistemological Therapy and Embodied Cognition
52:37 The Role of Subsidiary Focal Integration
54:58 Daisy of Dichotomies and Modernity
57:54 The Interpersonal Nature of Knowledge
01:11:20 Covenant Epistemology in Education
01:18:35 AI, Tools, and the Real
01:29:14 The Role of Love in Knowing
A professional philosopher, author and speaker, Esther offers her own distinctive, down-to-earth, approach to the philosophical matters that ground and permeate our lives: humanness, meaning, reality, knowing. The book Andrea and Esther discuss here is Loving to Know.
Link here to Esther’s work and books: https://www.estherlightcapmeek.com
Way-making resonance linking to past episodes: Knowledge is inherently unformalizable. Information is formalizable, a communicative way into knowing. Information tries to formalize knowledge (and rightly so); information is a way we represent so as to communicate and (at best) expand what can be known, though taking information (and its representations) as formalized knowledge (taking the focal as all) leads towards atrophy and away from intimacy with what the real. The real is dynamic focal interrelation with the tacit or subsidiary, what we hold and what holds us, without beginning or end. Intimacy with the real is knowing in which direction the sun will rise, feeling the grass under bare feet, listening to others, feeling the from-to and beyond of all that manifests.
Transcript of introduction ( by Andrea Hiott )
Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. Today’s conversation is likely going to be the last we publish this year. I hope it’s been a good 2025 for you. I can’t believe it’s already over. Even so, there’s still so much to do, but I really want to get this episode to you before the year’s end, as a gift for the holiday. Today’s conversation explores information and knowing, what the difference is between those, and their relation with control and communion or what today’s guest calls ‘covenant epistemology’. This conversation also touches on some things I’m trying to get at in all these conversations and in all the other work I’m doing relative to what is really meant by ‘holding paradox’ or ‘bodily movement as already being cognitive, but not cognitive in the way you think’.
This exploration is coming at those ideas in a different way, which I hope will be helpful, through the ideas of philosopher Esther Lightcap Meek, who is the guest today. Because her work is building on the work of Michael Polanyi, this episode is a lot about Polanyi too. Meeting both these minds was a treat this year, as I had not yet read Polanyi or Meek and was recently introduced to them by Hanne de Jaeger and Karen Wong. So thanks to both of them for recommending this work to me a few months back. It was also a bit of a conincidence to find that much of Esther’s work is inspired by the work of Parker Palmer, who I talked to earlier in the year. Hopefully you’ve listened to that one. Anyway, the basic idea that I’m trying to express is: We know through our bodies before we know through what we think of as our mind, as our thinking. What we call cognition is actually ongoing bodily action of making way through all we encounter, and that means mind and thinking are deeply connected to this from-to-beyond (to put it in the terms of Esther and Polanyi) process of bodily encountering.
All this stuff we call mind, which is the awareness of ourselves and our experience that we call ‘thinking’ and ‘memory’ or that which we notice as others and call their mind—the part we often identify with completely—is the tip edge of a process that connects us with more than we can tell, with our bodily knowing, with the source of anything we’ve called cognition till now, which is how we make our way through the world in all the many layers and spaces of experience, both those we are aware of and remember and think about and those we don’t. The part we call our thinking is the tip edge layering of the knowing (and loving, and being loved) that we are actually embedded within, extending, and an extension of—all this deep and endless communion and action of which and with which we are the conversational path.
And which is not only our bodies, but also everything the body is encountering, co-creating and being created by and with. Polanyi’s work, which I’m just discovering, is really helpful towards getting a grip on some of this from a non-cognitive science perspective, because he talks about this process through something that he, and then Esther Lightcap Meek, who is extending his work in a really beautiful way that we will talk about, describes it as subsidiary focal integration. Meek is coming to it through Christian studies. Outside of these studies, you may heard this most often discussed via tacit knowledge. That is the knowledge we have and know we have but cannot put into focal or information/representational terms. Meek discusses this via Indeterminate Future Manifestations (IFMs).
Photo by Benjamin Elliott on Unsplash
All this taken together as process also is giving of the rhythm of some of what I am trying to express via this dialectic of coming to know through and as our bodily movements. It’s like we’re always bringing some of this subsidiary or tacit-ness into our focal awareness, which also changes what is subsidiary or what’s holding us or what is all that we sense and know but that we have not put into representational format. And yet it is what is this dynamic ongoing encountering, and then also that which changes what can become focal and lead to tacit shifts so on and so forth. So we’re sort of co-creating all the possibilities for cognition, including emotion.
‘Love is the ability of the ongoing and unending to relate to itself.’ Andrea
As I understand it though, again, and this would be controversial depending from where you are defining terms, when I talk about cognition, I’m talking about something that is held by love, love being the ability of the ongoing and unending to relate to itself, and through these layers of communication.
So there’s already way too much to unpack in there, to really do it justice, I need to read Polanyi more. I need to talk to Esther more and all that will come, I just want to try to introduce a little bit here now, and I’m only gonna focus on the book Loving To Know by Esther. She’s got so much teaching experience and knowledge in this field. My intro to her is from Loving to Know. That is the one I read before I talked to her, and that’s the one that we will discuss here. But she’s also written quite a lot of other books like Longing to Know or The Mother’s Smile is her most recent. but this one is about loving to know we can think about what I just said through, through that title, even that knowing, the way we’re often taught when we go to school is about learning things like two plus two equals four, or it’s about information processing. We hear that a lot and it makes us think of our minds as computers processing information, but all of that is actually the communicative representational-influenced surface, literally, of a deeper knowing connecting us with what is endless.
It’s the tip edge of this ongoing action embodied ecological action or bodily and ecological, and this whole thinking/discursive part of our relationship with ourselves that we often take for granted as ourselves is really just the tip of the iceberg. Esther doesn’t actually put it like that, but this is what I’m drawing from it. She puts it in terms of covenant epistemology. And that orients a definition of knowledge as apprehension, bodily apprehension. So rather than the tip of the iceberg, this information comprehension part is being what we think of as knowledge, it’s this apprehending. So you can hopefully see how that connects relative to the bodily encountering.
As Esther says, knowing your timetables is great, but information, not knowledge. It’s the surface. It’s a surface of a much deeper bodily knowing Esther talks about it is as ‘wearing’, you know, you wear what you learn, you learn stuff so you can wear it. I understand what she means by that, but I almost think that it’s not even that you’re just wearing it, it’s really becoming sort of part of your way of encountering. But she gets to that idea, too. Wearing is the way we begin it.
So I think we basically mean the same thing there. So if we understand loving as this bodily being in the world. In the way that, for example, Parker and I discussed, then we can also understand Esther’s thesis here, which is that instead of knowing so we can love, we are actually already loving and loved and it is only through that, that we come to have knowing of anything at all.
Love is already holding you if you have knowledge of yourself.
I would add. We are love and that’s the only way we ever can know. That’s the only way we ever can develop something like thinking or mind or the stuff that we identify with as if it’s everything, so this is not cognition the way we think, it is the feeling of being alive itself, without sweetness or sentiment, but also with it.
Esther talks about when she was a kid that she worried she could never know anything outside of her head that, she was aware of her thoughts, but how did she know there was anything else or anything real? And as she talks about here, it wasn’t something she felt she could talk about in her community. She’d become aware of this sort of the tip of the iceberg as I’m expressing it here, of what we call mind, and she didn’t know how to connect that to the real.
And like so many of us, it was isolating her. It felt like she was trapped there, as if that’s everything, how does she know there’s a real world? How does she connect to it? It’s like you’re stuck in this little box or something. And then eventually she found different scholars to help, one of them, a primary one, being Polanyi, Michael Polanyi, and something that he said changed things for her, something he wrote, something about the way he articulated the focal-subsidiary integration (as she puts it) was what she needed; it sort of popped her out of that, and it helped her understand that even to get to that place of awareness of self and knowing that you’ve been being held or known by something bigger, so to speak. I’m kind of adding my words here, of course, but it’s how I am coming into what she talks about it as from-to and beyond, which also comes from Polanyi, or her reading of it.
So, for you to even be able to be asking these questions, there’s already something you know, some knowing, that’s deeper than this tip edge thinking that you’re experiencing. And this starts to get at this whole holding paradox idea and it’s portal resonance. It’s quite hard to put into words, which is why I’ve had these 79 conversations about it from different points of view and perspectives, it’s a process of coming to know. More of yourself as yourself, and also becoming aware of what you think of as self and body, as even beyond what you might be delineating it as.
So Esther Lightcap Meek expresses this in her book by showing us that knowing is this transformative encounter and it is this long before it realizes itself, long before the ‘you’ of thinking realizes it, so now we get to this idea that philosophy is something like epistemological therapy in a way. It’s a verb of healing or of opening or noticing those portals and those places where we are already connected and with focus we can begin ‘to wear’ or align into differently as we make way.
And this is helping us with this feeling of being trapped in our heads or identifying with our thoughts. We’re not our thoughts, but we often assume that we are. And how do we become aware of that? How does that not become an illness? Or if it isn’t, if it has become somehow, uh destructive. How do we notice it and, and heal it?
That’s part of this, and it’s where the idea of dichotomy comes into her work and connects also to what we often talk about here because we often have this thinking self and we see it as in contrast or, you know, blocked off from everything else. The mind versus the body. Or us versus them, or even me versus myself in some sort of strange way knowledge can become sort of formalized.
We think it’s formalized or codified and made into something that’s absolute and unchanging and blocked off in this little box. But actually in the way I’ve been trying to discuss knowledge is this ongoing changing in dynamism, just like our bodies, just like everything we encounter that’s not formalisable in any absolute or static sense, even if we represent it as information (this is my addition here). It doesn’t mean that our knowing is not, consistent and regular and real and findable in all of that—it is— but you can’t just formalize it into something that will always hold in some representational form (which is part of the idea in this hippocampal paper).
Philosophy is a verb and knowledge is not formal but it is consistent and real. Information is formalizable information is the representational, communicative language and all this other stuff, images, and so on that we create. It’s very important, but it’s really only the tip edge of what we’re thinking of as knowledge. That’s the paradox to hold even as it cannot be held by any one position.
And it’s also where Meek challenges this modern tradition that treats knowledge as objective facts. So it’s not that there isn’t something objective. Of course there is, but there’s not this sharp division between knowing that as, as the subject and what is known, it’s, it is still an ongoing creation.
And that’s this connection between the bodily movement. And our knowing, of that bodily movement and this kind of layering as expressed in this practice, and how it can be therapeutic to realize that and feel back into ourselves, which is always possible. But until we realize it and have ways to help one another do it, we don’t do it.
No doubt, this can be hard. We wanna feel back into that connection we have with all that we encounter and with our emotions and with the love that is us and that is holding us, and it’s not sentimental, but is literally just how we come into this world, and how this world is continuing It’s because our bodies have this loving relationship to themselves, which by the way isn’t always easy and pretty and nice, but, because the world has that possibility within it, we can know that we are here and that opens a whole lot of other possibility.
So that’s the research ramble, or what comes to mind right now as I want to introduce the philosopher Esther Lightcap Meek, who is, as I said, the author of Loving To Know, which is the book we talk about here, but also longing to know and. A little Manual for Knowing and The Mother’s Smile and many others, which, uh, she and I will hopefully talk about more in the future.
And again, it’s a lot about Michael Ponlanyi’s work. Polanyi was a Hungarian British scientist and then philosopher, mostly working in the early 19 hundreds, passed away probably before most of us were born. Or, or maybe in the seventies. He, I think 1976, he passed away. So his work is about threading his focal subsidiary integration or what you might have heard as tacit knowledge.
And what does he mean and what does, how does that relate to all this? All this? Well, the quick answer is that it has a lot to do with what we talk about when we talk about participatory sense-making or ecological psychology, or perspectival realism, all these other things that we bring up here because it’s about bodily relation at different levels and knowing as this ongoing, immediate action.
Which is oriented in many different ways, and which, depending on from where you assess it is going to look different, even as it’s one continuous process, or not one continuous process, but even as it’s continuous process. Polanyi discusses this as a process of knowing, Where we can understand it as a relation of what’s focal, which is sort of what our awareness is focused on.
Maybe think of it as like the spotlight, if you can leave behind the way that’s used in neuroscience for a minute. What’s in the spotlight, and then all that’s being experienced. That’s not in that. Area of focus, but that actually makes that point of focus possible, so to speak. And so it’s like you’re walking through the city and your body’s aware of and encountering so much more than your actual thinking mind is aware of—how you always know more than you can tell.
It’s again, that tip of the iceberg sort of thing, and we can also understand this when we look at how we come to do things like ride bikes or play a sport or do some sort of craft, and there would be all kind of psychology and neuroscience relative to that. Which I know a lot of you are thinking of now, but just let me just stick here with Esther’s view and, and Polanyi first we might have to focus on what the body’s encountering, like when we’re learning to read or ride a bike. But then we indwell that, or we wear that, as Esther might say, or it just becomes part of our body’s way of aligning with our encounter, as I might say. And we don’t have to focus on it anymore, and yet it’s holding whatever we’re focusing on, if that makes sense and it’s, and there’s a constant interchange between all of this, between what we’re focusing on and that subsidiary process. But if we focus too hard on the details. If we sort of try to break it up and make it into a dichotomy, then we do something that’s actually representational and that can be positive for a while.
That’s where the information comes from. But if we mistake that representation with the actual process, then we’re more prone to have something destructive or, or even something that’s hurting us, an illness. So this is that unhealthy state that is assumed in this dichotomous stance, which Esther talks about, she talks about a daisy of dichotomies and how we, we kind of get away from the center by, by creating these oppositional ideas and then sort of believing in them.
So we think loving and knowing, for example, are, are not connected or mind and body are not connected, but in fact they’re co-creating one another and believing that they’re separate, does something, Painful frankly, to, uh, our experience. because you’re loved and that love is what your body is doing but to live in the focal is to disconnect from that base of ongoing care, or to try to do so.So, she is saying that instead of knowing to love, we’re loving so that we can know. So, so maybe you can feel the kind of rigidity of the current age in a way. And how we do take these representational separations, this information, as if it’s everything or even our thinking is everything divorced from our body, and there’s a rigidity in that that maybe needs some therapy in the way that Esther is offering here. Part of that is treating information a little bit differently, and knowledge not not as something that’s information that’s collected and controlled, but rather something that’s dynamic and bodily and our way of becoming aware of the real, being able to handle more of the real together, and that’s a connection rather than a disconnection. So information is not knowledge, even if it can be a way to help us know.
There is the real and it’s that sort of knowing that her work is trying to open us back into, at least as I feel it, because that is the knowing that is us and is connecting us to what is real and, and the reason we are real. It’s this most human act of embodied subsidiary-focal integration— it is genuine knowing, as she presents it, human knowing of and as the real.
So, if we think about cognition in this subsidiary focal dynamic, then it’s not a voice in our heads. It’s not processing information. It’s an embodied ecological layered fractal of from-to in many directions, a layering relational action that we’re just beginning to understand. And that is much, much deeper than our actual thinking right now. than what we’re aware of, than what we can be aware of but not of what we know.
We’re already in touch with reality. We’re always in touch with it. The very fact that we can think about it means there’s something there that we already know. The question is whether we can trust this and whether we can find our way back into being what Meek calls lovers of the real, whether we can care for ourselves, is how I would put it, can you care for yourself for your own self, your body, and all that you don’t yet know about yourself? Can we see one another that way? Can we help each other find the energy and the time and the chance to remember this and feel into this in our individual lives, but also the way we exist socially and, and otherwise?
Finding Polanyi in this, what feels to me like dialectical layering of focal and subsidiary is what gave Esther a way to understand that she’d always been in contact with the real, with reality that is beyond thinking. She wasn’t stuck in her head. And she talks about that a bit here. She writes about it a lot. So the problem wasn’t insufficient proof, but it was that she was mis describing her own reality, because that’s what we’re taught to do.
She says some really profound things about that, about the way modernity teaches us to misdescribe our own reality, and this is part of being. In communion with the real or loving to know because we’re born in it and of it we are love. Otherwise, we couldn’t know we are here.
It’s that iceberg that could only rise above the water due to the fact that it’s in the water and is the water.
One term that Esther uses is indeterminate future manifestations. And basically this is this idea that you already feel something in the future that you don’t yet know. You can’t put words on, it’s not information yet, but somehow you sense it. And this is actually knowing, a glimpse at the depth of the reservoir of dynamism. This focal subsidiary integration is showing us that happens, it’s also what helps us understand that we’re already grounded in reality or something bigger than what we understand with our thinking mind, especially than the information that we have.
This also reminded me of something that Lisa Maroski and I talked about in one of the previous episodes because she said something to me about how You can’t question if you don’t already know.
I found that echoing a lot in this Polanyi and in Esther’s work, this sort of seeming contradiction that for us to know how to question anything, we must already know some part of it and be in relation with it, this indeterminate future manifestion that Esther discusses whereby we sense what we have not yet put into reprsentations (as I see it). Maybe that sounds confusing, but that’s that holding paradox that sort of forces us to break open these old categories and just sit with this feeling, even if it’s, we can’t quite understand it. Seeing information as different from knowledge, but also a way into knowledge that we could use to deepen communion and stewardship. And it’s a little bit disruptive and even frustrating, but it’s part of realizing that we’re not closed systems or boxes and that what is us is in constant shift in dynamics, but it’s also always connected. There’s no other, there’s no outsider, insider, beginning or into all of this. And care is the way we come into more of this movement as knowing we know it.
As Esther says here, you can think of the difference in life and performance that we see in a story like, Seabiscuit. I don’t know if you remember that story about the horse that was treated terribly. And then this one caretaker saw the horse differently and the horse of course, sort of blossomed. Esther brings that story up a little bit here because just to show the difference between trying to control something, trying to make life become something, and caring for it, and being in a covenant relationship with it in communion and the potentials that open. Once we shift that orientation, the way the intru, the way the caretaker of the horse shifted, the relation between human and horse.
Another, image she brings up a lot is those Magic Eye moments where you look at something (these stereograms) and you can’t, and you suddenly see a pattern pop out. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen those, basically the idea is that, you know, we’re always close to revelation if we just dare to shift our orientation a bit, and if we allow ourselves to fill into the care that is holding us, which is really scary to do, I know that. But it is. It is possible. Just let it be possible. It’s the hardest thing thing sometimes, but it’s also a real place and it’s flow and grace and all those words we use to try to talk about it.
This resonates with this podcast with way making withholding paradox because it’s referring to this philosophical skill or, or action of being able to, of holding seemingly contradictory ideas in mind at once. And in so doing, not trying to resolve them, but instead feeling into the expansion that’s, that is there, and that is connecting us to what feels like it’s beyond us. So we’re learning a way to hold what seems in irreconcilable, we’re doing that by connecting with something like care or love that’s holding us. And that’s not sentimental or easy, but that is there. It really is there. So you can think of this via all kinds of dichotomies, absence, presence, control, covenant isolation, membership, and of course mindbody.
But basically what Esther and Polanyi are doing is opening this conversational path. With you and yourself, with you and them, with you and me, with you and others, so that we can move beyond what we’ve maybe, tried to codify or make a little bit too rigid by taking representational, communicative symbols or ideas as the actual kind of continuous process.
That means that knowing is less about information, as Meek shows, and more about transformation, it’s less about comprehension and more about ongoing apprehension. So that rhymes with a lot of what we’ve talked about here and. you know, knowledge is knowing philosophy as a verb, active relational process, participatory, and this epistemological therapy that Meek offers is hoping to kind of, you know, dispel some of the presumptions that might keep us from that communion.
So you’re already in touch with reality. That might be the main idea here. You’re already beyond the self you identify with as you’re thinking. And bodies are already cognitive way before they can think or imagine there’s a mind to them. Don’t worry if that sounds kind of wild. And don’t worry if it sounds completely obvious. Either way, it’s good.
I hope you enjoy this conversation with Esther Lightcap Meek, she is just a joy as you’ll hear. There’s also just a lot of good cheer and laughter.
A few little notes. I should say that there, we were of course doing this in a video call and sometimes we were communicating with our bodies like she’s nodding and stuff, and you might not be able to tell that in the audio. Sometimes there’s like an affirmation that isn’t auditory, but I think now that I’ve said that, you’ll notice. Yeah, also there was some internet trouble and there might be a few little moments where there are some cuts, but hopefully it’ll just flow right along.
Thanks for being here. Thanks for listening this year. Thanks for whatever way you might’ve supported this, even if it’s just by having a good thought about it. I really appreciate it. It’s not easy to make time and do all this or to listen to all this hahah, but um, it’s really worth it and thanks for giving me a chance to do it, and I just send you a lot of love and whatever you might need today, I hope you, you get it, you feel it, and that you give it, which is even better.
Michael Polanyi and Subsidiary-Focal Integration
Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was a Hungarian-British polymath who transitioned from chemistry to philosophy and developed an influential account of how human knowledge actually works in practice. Central to his epistemology is the distinction between focal and subsidiary knowledge, which appears prominently in his major works Personal Knowledge (1958) and The Tacit Dimension (1966).
Polanyi argued that when we know something, our attention operates on two levels simultaneously. Focal knowledge is what we are directly aware of—the object of our explicit attention. Subsidiary knowledge consists of the things we are aware from but not aware of—the background particulars, bodily sensations, skills, and contextual elements that enable us to grasp the focal object but remain on the periphery of consciousness.
His famous example involves hammering a nail: we focus on driving the nail, while our awareness of the hammer’s handle, the pressure in our palm, and the coordination of our movements remains subsidiary. These subsidiary elements function as clues that shape our focal awareness without themselves becoming the object of attention. If we shift our focus to the subsidiary particulars themselves—analyzing exactly how we’re gripping the hammer—the integrated skill often breaks down.
This framework led Polanyi to his broader concept of tacit knowledge—”we know more than we can tell.” Much of human expertise, from scientific discovery to riding a bicycle, depends on subsidiary awareness that resists full articulation. This challenged the prevailing assumption that all genuine knowledge must be explicit, formalized, and impersonal, and had profound implications for understanding science, skill acquisition, and the transmission of knowledge across generations.
Here are some quotes from his work:
“The act of tacit knowing thus implies the claim that its result is an aspect of reality which, as such, may yet reveal its truth in an inexhaustible range of unknown and perhaps still unthinkable ways.”
“To claim that we can know the unexpected may appear self-contradictory. It would indeed be self-contradictory if knowing included a capacity to specify completely what we know. But if all knowledge is fundamentally tacit, as it is if it rests on our subsidiary awareness of particulars in terms of a comprehensive entity, then our knowledge may include far more than we can tell. The true meaning of the heliocentric system was discovered only by Newton, but it was anticipated 140 years earlier by Copernicus. We can account for this capacity of ours to know more than we can tell if we believe in the presence of an external reality with which we can establish contact. This I do. I declare myself committed to the belief in an external reality gradually accessible to knowing, and I regard all true understanding as an intimation of such a reality which, being real, may yet reveal itself to our deepened understanding in an indefinite range of unexpected manifestations.'“
“…the relation of a set of particulars to a comprehensive entity. The essential feature throughout is the fact that particulars can be noticed in two different ways. We can be aware of them uncomprehendingly, i.e., in themselves, or understandingly, in their participation fo a comprehensive entity. In the first case we focus our attention on the isolated particulars; in the second, our attention is directed beyond them to the entity to which they contribute. In the first case therefore we may say that we are aware of the particulars focal!J; in the second, that we notice them subsidiarity in terms of their participation in a whole.”
“It accredits man’s capacity to acquire knowledge even though he cannot specify the grounds of his knowing, and it accepts the fact that his knowing is exercised within an accidentally given framework that is largely unspecifiable. These two acceptances are correlated within the effort of integration which achieves knowing. For this effort subsidiarily relies, on the one hand, on stimuli coming from outside, from all parts of our body and from tools or instruments assimilated to our body, and on the other hand, on a wide range of linguistic pointers which bring to bear our pre-conceptions-based on past experiences-on the interpretation of our subject matter. The structure of knowing, revealed by the limits of specifiability, thus fuses our subsidiary awareness of the particulars belonging to our subject matter with the cultural background of our knowing. I To this extent knowing is an indwelling: that is, a utilization I of a framework for unfolding our understanding in accordance with the indications and standards imposed by the framework. But any particular indwelling is a particular form of mental existence. If an act of knowing affects our choice between alternative frameworks, or modifies the framework in which we dwell, it involves a change in our way of being. But since such existential choices are included in an act of knowing, they can be exercised competently, with universal intent. Nor do similar existential changes, undergone passively, impair the rationality of our personal judgment. They merely affect our calling. For while they, modify our opportunities for seeking the truth, they still leave us free to reach our own conclusions within the limits granted by these opportunities. All thought is incarnate; it lives by the body l- and by the favour of society. But it is not thought unless it strives for truth, a striving which leaves it free to act on its own responsibility, with universal intent. We have found that our subsidiary awareness of the particulars of a comprehensive entity is fused, in our knowing of the entity, with our subsidiary awareness of our own bodily and cultural being…”
Michael Polanyi - Knowing and Being_ Essays by Michael Polanyi (1959–1968) (1969, University of Chicago Press)