Artful Knowing, part I

What is Artful Knowing? Well. . .

Instead of accumulating information, or internalizing the learning of others, it is the work of learning for oneself. It is the end of the process of learning, and the beginning. As with language, we must get comfortable with the vocabulary and the grammatical structures before we can get to work making and interpreting meaning. Basic learning is that way. We must learn the fretboard on the bass, or the keyboard on the piano. We must come to know the nature of scales—the relationship of tones—before we can make music. We must learn the use of a brush, or a hammer and chisel, or other tools, before we can make visual art. We must learn the game of basketball, and its rules, and its practices, before we can join in a team effort to play well.

So everything has a grammar—a set of rules and expectations and coding norms—to learn. But the real learning begins once that grammar is internalized and operative. How can one use the tools at one’s disposal, the basic skills developed, to create something uniquely one’s own—and to interact well with others to create even greater beauties? Artful knowing makes knowledge OURS rather than a rote cataloguing of the knowledge of others we have studied. Artful knowing makes our work meaningful, to ourselves and to others. It pervades the mind of the maker and disrupts and stimulates the minds of the sharers in that making (whether audience, or teammate, or fellow thinker). Robert Pirsig’s description of the craftsman at work in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance remains the best short account of artful knowing I’ve come across:

The craftsman isn’t ever following a single line of instruction. He’s making decisions

as he goes along. For that reason he will be absorbed and attentive to what he’s doing

even though he doesn’t deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are

in a kind of harmony. He isn’t following any set of written instructions because the

nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously

change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing

together until his mind’s at rest at the same time the material’s right. (148).

Deweese responds to Phaedrus here with “Sounds like art.” Of course it does. Even precision machinists and architects and engineers are artists when they are working at the edge of their understanding—when they are in a “flow” situation (both challenged and capable). And these situations are not as rare—or do not have to be as rare—as we think in a mundane, repetitive workplace.

Of course our workplaces, and schools, are built on assumptions about knowledge and the practice of knowledge that are restrictive and even counterproductive. Creativity is the exception, not the rule, and it is always threatening to the status quo. Artful knowing is, for the most part, discouraged. Those who ask “Why do we do things this way? Why don’t we try this other way?” are met with blockades and outright ugliness. Anything that threatens the system in place, and the stakeholders of that system, is tamped down or even destroyed. Even science has this problem—consider the work Kuhn did on paradigm change and scientific revolutions. New truth is always seen as heresy first.

The academic world is similar in its conservative approach to learning and knowing. “Back to basics” is the cry, and lecture and memorization remain central to the process. What about teaching the work of artful knowing? Making it conscious, and valuable, and an end worth aiming for?

How does one do so? By focusing on processes rather than simply products. A great free-throw shooter did not begin that way. She learned some fundamentals of shooting, and developed a constructive practice regimen, and found ways to focus her attention on the task at hand. Only with attention to the process, and much practice, did her free throw shooting become “automatic.” As Quintilian says in the Institutes of Oratory, extemporary speaking is the crowning achievement of the rhetor. It comes only after long practice, and it is limited to some degree by the talent of the speaker. The work of making speech look effortless takes much much effort. Much more complex than free throw shooting, of course.

Artful knowing thus emerges from attention and energy and patient application. It also emerges from reflection and extension. One must listen to the music of others, and notice the good ideas of others, and put these things to work in their own practice. Great artists, and writers, and musicians, and athletes employ artful knowing all the time. Salespeople, and teachers, and managers, and mechanics can also do so.

Why Stories Matter (and they really do!)

In Western Culture, we have forgotten the importance of stories. Throughout history (and there is a story in history, too), human beings have made sense of the world and themselves using stories. From master narratives about the origin of the world and our place in it to parables and instructive tales to family hi-stories, we have used narrative to organize and place a value on the complex world of experience. Stories have always been slippery things. How do we know what is true and what is “made up”? People tell stories that are false for many reasons, some of them helpful and some completely predatory. Myths can be used to control people’s minds and turned to the advantage of those in power. So during the Enlightenment, thinkers tried to push stories out of the picture entirely. They became novelties and curiosities at best—children’s tales—and were discredited as a source of knowledge. Unless a story could be verified by empirical evidence, it was unnecessary and probably misleading.

The problem with this approach, embodied in what most people consider “science,” is that the meaning-making function of stories was lost. “Objective” thinking was the goal of science and rational people. Stories, and poems, and unsubstantiated claims about reality had no place in the world of intellect. Of course, there can be no change without “what if” and “as if.” How can we imagine a better world, and better relationships, without stories of how things might/ought to be? Science purported to put knowledge on a factual and empirical base—or it was understood by the multitude to be doing such. In fact, science is made of stories too—stories of origin, stories of evolution, stories of human nature and social interaction. These stories are called ”theories” and are subjected to testing which might disprove them. They can never be proven, but the assumption is true until proven false. A big assumption indeed. Who could PROVE without a doubt that there are not Gods creating natural disasters and altering people’s lives for better or worse? These earlier stories were dismissed as silly, but they had their benefits as well—respect for the earth, respect for forces beyond our understanding, and more. Western Culture has enshrined the stories of science without understanding that they ARE stories. As a result, education has been re-created to focus on the skills and theories of a scientific technostructure, and real thinking about the nature of knowledge itself has been rare and academic in nature. Stories—history, philosophy, literature—have been relegated to the domain of “general education” to prepare for the real understanding of the world. They have not been given the central place in the curriculum that they deserve.

At the most basic level, we think in stories. Mark Turner’s The Literary Mind makes a convincing case that at the simplest level thinking is storying. Some have complained that his approach is too literary, and that may be true. But imagining—connecting potential causes and their likely effects, envisioning alternative courses of action, even tracking prey—all require the ability to create a meaningful story about the world around us. Poor stories fail to help us. Good, well-considered stories can save our lives. Knowing how to separate good stories from attractive, but dangerous ones, is a central human skill that cannot be taught in math and science classes. Most of the time, stories are assumed rather than considered. Neil Postman said that every subject should be taught within its own history. Not as a set of facts and theories and approaches without context, but as a developing area of knowledge with a history of its own. He was right.

In “Education by Poetry,” a monologue given at Amherst College, Robert Frost insisted that in order to understand the world we must understand the uses and limits of metaphors better. Metaphors, in Turner’s book, are projections of one story onto another domain entirely: “Life is like a game of golf” or “the world is like a machine.” Stories can operate on two levels: one immediate, and relevant to the context at hand, and one “projectible” and useful for understanding other domains. The story of picking up and throwing a ball is simple, and may not have wide use in other domains. The story of automated production and its “benefits,” however, may be projected onto many domains—sometimes with devastating results. Efficiency is good, up to a point. But human relationships and needs are not efficient in many cases, and bad stories can create bad work and unhappy lives. In the advertisement current now, “Bigger is better.” But is bigger better when you are overweight? When you have cancerous tumors? Of course not. Stupid and unconsidered projections of stories can be dangerous—even deadly. Frost challenges us to think about these issues, and to build them into our educational practices.

Metaphors, Models, Stories, Poems. Let’s talk about them here on “Expanding Minds.”

The Mind of Culture . . . and How to “Read” It

As far as I know, Edmund Burke was the first author to suggest in clear terms that cultures have minds of their own. In Reflections on the Revolution in France he differentiated between individual and cultural reason, and predicted that the immediate workings of individual reason in France would disrupt the long-term workings of cultural reason and lead to cultural madness. He was, of course, correct. The reign of terror proved his ideas decisively.

Like individuals, cultures can be reasonable, and guided by rational thinking. The efforts to help the poor, to create an equitable system of justice, and to eliminate or weaken social and sexual prejudices are evidence of that. But also like individuals, cultures have deeply-embedded habits and assumptions that cannot readily be altered. No amount of rationally-mandated legislation can change those habits. Prohibition in the U.S. was a great example. By creating rational legislation to prohibit the making and use of alcohol, the U.S. government made it all the more attractive and enabled the black market to flourish—and crime to grow rapidly. Marijuana is a similar story. Outlawing this substance has created a criminal underworld of vast proportions, enabled the drug dealers to create new markets with other drugs, and overburdened our prison system.

So part of the job of humanists is to read, interpret, and alter the mind of the culture. Not to order it to change (good luck), but to provide it with alternative visions of what it might be, what it could be, what it should be. Not an easy task. But we all use the internet, and as Merlin Donald has shown, we live in a cultural space that has expanded exponentially over the years. We have all kinds of information, and knowledge, and even wisdom, at our fingertips. But we also have the cultural “id” to contend with, and we often do not know where to begin to work in such a vast informational landscape. The idea of “information literacy” is feeble because it assumes that purposes and approaches already exist for students. They need only learn how to determine what information is “valid” and “ethical” in some very watered-down sense. . . Who directs the attention of a culture which is mad with possibilities? Why not just watch the “news” and wait for the latest developments? Because we are all part of the cultural mind, and we can all help to shape it over time. Especially when we have an understanding of it, and our own agenda and purposes. When these ideas are shared, they become all the more powerful. Ask Hitler.

Our cultural mind is in crisis at present. We live in a world that is overloaded with inputs and information. We work in our small corners and overhear the great workings of the cultural mind from a distance. Those workings are often akin to a pathological mind. Rather than being dynamically balanced, the cultural mind is on runaway—what Gregory Bateson called a schismogenic system. The evidence lies everywhere—in celebrity obsessions and superficial modes of communication, in the lack of meaningful knowledge people have of the advances of science and their meanings, in the “symbolic overload” that Neil Postman writes about. People yearn for meaning, for connection, for sacred spaces and places, but they are hard to find in our cultural milieu.

We should read, and write, and practice, with the aim of “entering the conversation” about important things. We too are part of the mind of our culture.

What is an idea?

We often hear that someone “has good ideas” or is “an idea person.” Ideas are valued as agents of change and progress, yet our means of measuring success only work with physical quantities. Ideas cannot be measured. Especially ideas that do not issue in new physical things or processes that can be measured. Some great ideas can be proven to be physically false—“all men are created equal” had no physical, historical evidence whatsoever to call on. Yet it changed the course of a country. We are so preoccupied as a culture with quantities, and measurement, and things, that we allow ideas to fade into the background without much notice. Terry Deacon calls this to attention in his book Incomplete Nature by beginning with the idea of absence—the mathematical notion of zero—and showing how absence and incompleteness drive our thinking processes. So in a sense, we don’t think enough about thinking, which creates all measurable new technologies and business models and artworks and . . . you get the point.
Only products and solutions are valuable in this culture. Once you have written a book, it may reach people—possibly. Once you have patented and created a working model of a new idea, it may be seen as worthy. We give lots of money to science research because it often issues in physical devices that may do some good in the culture. Of course it also issues in dangerous, even evil, devices for use in war. But the humanities are not well-funded because they deal with ideas, not things. Funny. Since ideas always come before things. William Carlos Williams said “no ideas but in things”—and was wrong. If that were the case, we would run out of things to think about pretty damned quick. Airplanes, and skyscrapers, and atomic bombs, and satellites would not exist. All of these were ideas first. “What if . . .” someone said, and imagined something that was not present in the physical world.
In much the same way, our lives are shaped by ideas. What if I became a doctor? What if I left my spouse and went on a long trip to explore new places? What if I call in sick today and lounge and read? What ifs become I wants over time, and the absent thing—a profession, a future hope, an unshaped need, becomes something to aim for—it becomes a sense of incompleteness that can drive us toward a new course of action. Ideas exist in the world of imagination—they are, as Gregory Bateson claimed—“no things.” Yet they are essential to everything we do and everything we are. Perhaps we should pay more attention to the cultivation of ideas, to creative thinking, to developing our capacities to do these no-things well?
Rhetoric, according to Kenneth Burke, is “symbolic action.” It plants seeds of ideas in the minds of readers or listeners that may grow and develop into motives. While it may not stir immediate response, it creates “frames of mind” that may generate the sense of incompleteness that creates physical action in the world. Speaking, Writing, and Reading are not machine processes. They are dances of interpretation and experience. Our experience is felt directly at the best of times, but usually it is contained within a web of “pre-existing codes of decision” that have been shaped by our families, our educations, and our professions. Why do we teach students to write five paragraph themes? Because it doesn’t require the difficulty of generating meaningful ideas. And generating ideas is difficult. Much easier to live within the field of ideas already presented to us—the ideology of our times and our culture. Innovation becomes the work of a select few, and most innovation involves the making of new machines or the production of entertainment for the bored population in need of stimulation. Art is the business of making new ideas real, too. But it does not produce labor-saving devices or artificial hearts or other immediate gratifications. Art, music, history, philosophy, literature—are all fields of ideas. At their best they create new and valuable ideas while preserving the best ideas that humans have produced over time. They also caution us against the dangers of bad ideas. This was Arnold’s view of the academy in the nineteenth century. “Culture” for him was great and striving ideas. Where has culture gone now?
The yoked imagination is the limited ideation of business, or the bending of all ideas toward mechanical progress, or the negation of ideas that threaten existing structures. We can imagine, but only within the field of what is accepted as “possibly real.” Who determines that? The bosses of the world, and the institutional systems of the world, and the physical demands of the infrastructure of the world that we created with ideas in the first place. Like Plato, we create ideas (for him, writings) and tell those that follow how dangerous ideas are. Hmm.
The dance of mind—being the animals we are, with language to boot. Our extended mind can impoverish us unless we know how to use it well. Discipline and purpose and what they mean. Not control, but direction. Not end-definition, but commitment to processes. Zen is correct here: follow your practice. And choose your practice well. Not to get something in particular, but to have the joy of making over time.

Point of Entry

At this moment, you are a mind reading and interpreting this text. Other activities have been set aside, and your complete attention is focused on the work of experiencing this text. You are “expanding your mind” by reading this—engaging different ideas and a different mind that has engaged other minds and brought them to bear in this moment of interaction. We expand our minds in many ways, many of them highly pleasurable—at least in the long run. We learn to play a musical instrument, despite the initial struggles. We play a team sport and join in the effort of a team to create winning conditions. We join our coworkers to develop a project or presentation and experience the satisfaction of overcoming frictions in order to create something memorable. We create art, or poetry, or a personal journal, or an email to a friend. We read novels, and listen to people, and watch movies. In every case, we are expanding our own range of experiences, our own awareness of our own—and human—possibilities. So “expanding the mind” is second nature to us all.

Why, then, is “expanding the mind” often treated as a hippie term, or a mystical term, or, in the elegant words of John Sperling, the CEO of the Apollo Group, which owns the gigantic educational factory called the University of Phoenix, “bullshit”? Because learning, and asking questions, and relating to others, makes people less likely to spend all their time buying goods and services. People who love to learn, who love to relate to the world and to other people, are rarely good “consumers.” And western culture has attempted to convince us that we are all consumers—buyers—users—first and foremost.

This text center will explore the idea of “expanding our minds,” expose the falsehood of the criticisms of the idea, and offer some strategies for working on the criticisms, and around them, in order to improve the quality of our lives.

I hope you’ll join me.

Chapter 1

Knowledge is never discovered. It is made. Always.

Meaning is a mental construct. Bateson divided the universe into Pleroma and Creatura, and the division explains many of our epistemic struggles. The fact-mongers deny the importance of interpretation. Those who focus on interpretation find themselves denying the physical realities that surround them (deconstruction). Both camps are wrong. Physical realities determine our lives in many important ways. But interpretation and meaning-making are the essential human activities. In fact, they are the activities of all creatura.

The complication comes from the interconnectedness of physical and conceptual systems. The two can be closely aligned, totally misaligned, or connected in a host of interesting ways. Fictions may have no direct bearing on physical systems in existence, but they may still make statements that are true of physical systems. They may also generate states of mind that lead to physical activities which DO have a direct bearing on physical systems in existence. Thus the imagination of a culture can believe a new order into being.

For instance, the body is a physical system. A natural habitat is a physical system. A house is a physical system. All of these physical systems are nested, in that the body exists within a house, which exists within a habitat, which exists within the broader ecosystem, which exists within regional physical systems, and so on.

In like fashion, conceptual systems are nested and interconnected. One person’s worldview is related to, but not the same as, his or her family’s worldview. One person’s beliefs and values are connected to friends, and books, and movies, and family, and social norms, and so on.

Physical and conceptual systems are related in two ways. Creatura is, literally, MADE OF Pleroma. In other words, minds and meanings are emergent qualities of physical systems. On the other hand, data and information are not physical, because they are made of what Bateson called “difference” (and more importantly they are not made at all except when there is a mind to interpret them). Nonetheless, data and information are vital to the management of physical systems. If creatures did not recognize seasonal changes, they would be unprepared and perish. If we did not recognize that we were getting dangerously cold or hot, we would also perish. Of course, this is the problem for us now. We are doing things to the earth that will destroy it—and us—but do not realize yet how hot the water is getting. As Al Gore and others remind us, frogs in lukewarm water may not recognize the problem of gradually increasing temperature until they are boiled alive.

“Knowledge” has many forms, but the most important knowledge has to do with our relationships with the many systems—both physical and conceptual—that we live within and that live within us. This is not mysticism. It is pure science taken to a new level—the level of rhetoric, of meaning, of spirit.

No. Pleroma is physical system. Creatura is mental system. Interpretation and Knowledge are higher levels in the nested structure.

Information flows in all physical systems, yet it is not physical. It is recognized as a meaning-bearing pattern, which requires a meaning-making or meaning-recognizing creature.

KNOWLEDGE IS NOT SIMPLY CATALOGUING AND CONNECTING DATA INTO PRE_EXISTING STRUCTURES. This is the failure of the academy and the sciences. KNOWLEDGE IS NOT SIMPLY PERSONAL AND EMOTIVE. This is the failure of the humanities. KNOWLEDGE IS INTERPRETATION THAT MAKES RELATIONSHIPS BETTER, MORE INTERESTING, MORE FUNCTIONAL. Patterns of meaning matter because they enable life, make life better, more pleasurable, more meaningful. In short, the VALUE of a pattern of meaning or an interpretation or a choice is determined by its QUALITY (which is where Pirsig and I agree).

EXPERIENCE is the matrix of our existence, as illustrated by Damasio. Humans with brain losses have no memory, no long-term vision, no sense of who they are. They simply live in the moment and experience it. This is the primary moment. But our memories, our systems of understanding, our ability to interpret and make meaning, enrich our experience tremendously. They enable us to avoid past mistakes. To find food. To recognize potential dangers in our environment. To treasure that which no longer exists, and learn from it. To hope. To dream. To build and to destroy.

KNOWLEDGE should always begin with these understandings. What good is knowledge that is unconnected from life, from the making of meaning, from the physical systems in which we live? “Pure research” can still maintain this contact, and does when at its best. And in the humanities we desperately need scholars and poets who can help the broader “public” understand why we do what we do and why it can (yes, really) be meaningful and significant for them.

We need to have a knowledge interface that meets the broader public and opens doors of understanding, and helps to generate a vetting system that eliminates unending triviality from the world of scholarly work. What are the qualities of good scholarship in a world ruled by the Internet? They are very different from the medieval qualities once sought. Can someone ever master everything written about an important topic? Should one? Can we write provisionally and yet maintain real authority? Can we make meaning without simply becoming solipsistic? Is the value of scholarship that it fills an intellectual niche that has to date been unfilled? Or that it makes meaning and generates new questions and new ideas of value not only for a handful of specialists but for all those who seek to interpret literature, and life, better and more richly?