Entangled and Uncertain
Epistemology as a Route to Joy
Time for a brief philosophical excursion.
I shared my last post with my brother-in-law, who then shared back a beautiful article1 by Parker Palmer about how our epistemology, our ideas about how we can know things, creates barriers to building community in higher education.
Palmer’s argument is that the “objectivist” mode of knowing that dominates in higher education is “essentially anticommunal” and dooms efforts to inculcate a sense and practice of community among students. As Palmer puts it:
“I do not believe that epistemology is a bloodless abstraction; the way we know has powerful implications for the way we live. I argue that every epistemology tends to become an ethic, and that every way of knowing tends to become a way of living. I argue that the relation established between the knower and the known, between the student and the subject, tends to become the relation of the living person to the world itself. I argue that every mode of knowing contains its own moral trajectory, its own ethical direction and outcomes.”
The way of knowing that he proceeds to describe is exactly that subject-object mentality that I wrote about and that led me astray in thinking about the role of power in driving change in a community. It brought me to conclusions that ultimately led back to the very state that I wanted to change.
That’s not just a glitch in this one analysis. Palmer’s point is that it is built into any analysis, any strategy, any action based on that way of knowing. The way we think about the world leads us to live and act in such a way as to produce a world and an ethic aligned with it. In particular, when we see ourselves as separate from the phenomena we are analyzing, we tend to land on “solutions” that are less likely to rock our world. We never get to the root of the disorder and so allow injustice to continue to unfold.
If we want justice, we have to change our beliefs and practices around what it means to know and to come to know. But how?
It helps to remember that we are operating within an ecosystem. Epistemology in the world of ecology is an active field of investigation and debate, but I see at least two important characteristics of knowledge in an ecosystem that require us to change how we think about what we know, how we know it, and what that means for our actions.
The most important characteristic is one diametrically opposed to the subject-object thinking we are used to. It is sometimes described as relational, but I prefer the word entangled. It’s a stronger word that more clearly expresses the idea that we are inextricably part of the systems we are considering, that we are involved. We can never be separate from our analysis.
At minimum that means we must work to understand our part in the system’s results. It may be small or large, but it is never zero.
What may be less obvious is that, once we become engaged in changing the system, our involvement, our part, inevitably grows. There is reaction to the changes we make and we in turn are changed both by our own actions and by the system’s responses.
So what we knew in the beginning may no longer be the case; the analysis becomes ongoing. Which leads us to the second characteristic.
An ecosystem is a living, evolving entity, never the same today as it was yesterday. What we think we know must always be considered provisional, temporary, uncertain.
The obvious lesson is to center our knowing in iteration and learning, as I wrote last time in response to the need to expect the immune system. But it occurs to me now that there’s something a bit depressing about that formulation, focused as it is on resistance to change.
Over the last couple weeks I’ve been thinking about choreography and dance as a metaphor for our work in the world. The shift in the relationships between choreographer, dancer, and context over the last century seems somewhat parallel to the shift we’re discussing here, from dancers as pieces to be manipulated through the design of the dance for a designed space to collaborators and partners in the creation of art in environments that may not be fully in their control.
That has consequences for creators of dance. As dancer/choreographer Eiko Otake puts it:
If you are the choreographer who can do only what you prepared, then you get defeated when things are not the way you expect them to be. But if you come into the process as an experimentalist, the more different it is, the more exciting it is.2
What strikes me most is the way she orients herself to the challenge of uncertainty: excitement, rather than resignation, curiosity and joy rather than defeat.
I wonder how we can take that orientation into our work to create just systems.
Our social systems are unimaginably complex. Our efforts regularly face unexpected and unintended consequences that wreak havoc on our plans, sometimes because of active resistance. And of course we must acknowledge the suffering that results. It is part of why we want to change things in the first place.
But we want change not only because of what’s wrong with where we are but because of what’s deeply right about where we want to go, a joyful place where everyone can thrive. I’m a deep believer in the idea that the ends are inherent in the means and so I suspect that there must be joy in our means if joy is the place we want to end up.
How can we do that?
What if we think of our plans as openings to conversations? What if we adopt an orientation of curiosity and excitement toward the responses to the changes we make? What if we claim an epistemology that leads to an ethic and life grounded in joy? What would that look like?
Links & Thoughts
Post-Helene Interview with Dr. Laura Lengnick. I am indebted to Dr. Laura Lengnick, author of Resilient Agriculture, for much of what I’ve explored and written over the past few months. Not only did I learn a lot from the earlier interviews with her and from her book, but she helped me understand resilience science and sent me the links to the articles that led to my series on Adapting Resilience Science to Community Well-Being. The original interviews took place well before Helene, but the ideas there are clearly important and relevant for the ways we think about recovery. Fortunately, David Rayburn now has a third, post-Helene interview with Dr. Lengnick, including her thoughts on the idea of “bouncing forward” rather than “bouncing back” or “building back better.” You can find the first two interviews here and here. The Practicing Gospel podcast is focused on issues of interest to Christians on the left. These particular conversations do not get into any specifically Christian or religious topics.’
There is a crack, a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in. This is a wonderful interview with Francisco Sagasti, president of Peru from November 2020 to July 2021. He reflects on leading under uncertainty, why autocratic systems don’t work in the long run, navigating our transitional times, and the importance of getting involved in politics, while weaving in Francis Bacon and Leonard Cohen.
If you want to share thoughts on anything I’ve said here or have ideas about further questions or topics you’d like me to explore, please feel free to reply to the newsletter email or contact me here.
Parker J. Palmer (1987) Community, Conflict, and Ways of Knowing: Ways to Deepen Our Educational Agenda, Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 19:5, 20-25, DOI: 10.1080/00091383.1987.10570153, based on a talk given at the March 1987 American Association for Higher Education conference. You can find a non-paywalled version here.
Joyce Morgenroth, 2004. Speaking of Dance: Twelve Contemporary Choreographers on Their Craft. Routledge.