WAYS OF KNOWING

I was raised in the shadow of logical positivism, which is a doggedly “rational” and empirical view of the world. My father’s intellectual hero was British philosopher Bertrand Russell, and when I declared a philosophy major in college (also reflecting my father’s influence), I fell under the tutelage of a department that was dominated by philosopher of the same ilk. I absorbed it, was imprinted by it, and clung to it tenaciously for decades. To me, phrases like “different ways of knowing” were just so much nonsense. The was one way of knowing, the observable, deductible, testable, scientific way, and I admitted no other.

Eventually, I somehow became a dean of a college of arts and sciences. Immediately after I started the job, I was visited by individually by the chairs of each of my 25 academic departments. As I was still relatively young for a dean, each of those chairs, mostly older than me, laid out the case for the legitimacy of their discipline, and its distinctive needs and ways of doing things. I resolved to listen carefully and to try to honor these differences, which were often very great. To recruit an outstanding new faculty member in a bench science like biology or chemistry entailed an investment of tens (often many tens) of thousands of dollars, both to make the job appealing to the best candidate and to enable that person to conduct research leading to the scholarly publications that are the stuff of tenure decisions in those fields. Artists required seemingly vast amounts of studio space, supplies, and a set of tenure criteria that non-artists can’t possibly understand. One of my most highly regarded colleagues in the Art Department was a sculptor whose sole medium was hay. Hay? It was a different world. A young anthropologist with a number of articles in reviewed journals was considered to be ready for tenure. However, a faculty member in English literature must have a book, no matter how many articles they’d published? Why? Because for some reason, only an entire book could represent a substantial intellectual contribution.

I resented having to divert so much money to the sciences, and some of the others I thought were just silly, or at least presumptuous. But I did my best to honor them all, because I knew that is what good deans do, and I wanted to be one of those. Still, when it was all over I was silently relieved to retreat to my own discipline and paradigm.

Youth can be misspent in many ways, and I misspent my share. Without diverting into all of those ways, I have to say that my failure to see beyond one way of knowing limited my personal and intellectual development to my detriment for so long that I may never fully recover. For me, this recognition first dawned with an experience that was essentially religious. It came on rather suddenly and in most unexpected circumstances, but it settled upon me with a certainty and insight that could only be called knowledge. From that experience I came to understand a unity of life that is powerful and may underlie what most religions intuitively try to grasp. As I opened my mind to it, that truth was repeatedly reaffirmed, no more so than a couple of years later during a near-death experience when the force of that unity communicated to me directly, and in so doing, kept me alive.

Perhaps needless to say, this discovery opened me to reconsidering the whole issus of what knowledge is and how it is acquired, which is sometimes in ways that simply don’t fall within the positivist paradigm. It’s really no more difficult to grasp than the fact that you can know that you feel love toward someone without having provide reproducible evidence to prove it. Indeed, self-knowledge is the most obvious example of knowledge that is not reproducible. I’m reminded of a man who was viewing the Pieta in St. Peter’s with his wife. She sighed and commented, “It’s just beautiful,” and the man, in all seriousness, responded “How do you know”? The better question might have been, why didn’t he know?

Yet when it comes to ways of knowing, we’ve barely scratched the surface. There are literally whole worlds of knowledge that almost certainly remain undiscovered. No less than a science than quantum physics tells us as much. But we will first have to discover how to listen.