This is the second of the four aspects I noted above. Meaning and meaningfulness, then, is tied to integration. Polanyi himself designated these four aspects. Fourth, the experience of integration compels a sense that we have made contact with reality, a connection with something objectively real that is fraught with possibilities that extend beyond the ones we can name. You can’t simultaneously focus on a word and find it meaningful. Unrecognized letters and words on a page are devoid of meaning. Reading, of course, is such a great example of this. Third, the integrative pattern ascribes fresh meaning to the clues. Coming to identify one’s calling, for example, can change the way your life in your past now appears to you. Secondly, the pattern makes the clues it integrates appear differently from what they did before. Yes, there is a physics formula for balancing on a bike I as a bike rider only know that formula as I enact it in the pattern. One just is the fact that we know the subsidiaries as such only from within the pattern. Polanyi noted various aspects of this phenomenon. You are engaged in subsidiary focal integration this minute as you read and ponder with me. Skilled performances, such as reading or bike riding or driving a car, are superb examples. You can identify subsidiary focal integration in any act of coming to know. The pattern make transformative sense of whatever disparate pieces we had been trying to understand, as it integrates them as parts of this fresh pattern. We are all familiar with the delightful experience of an aha moment, a moment of insight. Integration is a creative, active, shaping of a pattern, or the receptive, often sudden, seeing of a pattern.
![lord of the flies aha moment lord of the flies aha moment](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kHLaeFLm8qI/UkkNJqfREuI/AAAAAAAAMvM/U1Bw0BddbzY/s1600/lordoftheflies3.jpg)
All knowing displays this two-level, from-to structure, with integration connecting the levels. Covenant epistemology brings us to the doorstep of communion with the real.Īs I said, Polanyi shows us that all knowing involves integration from clues on which we rely to a Gestalt-like pattern that makes sense of the clues. In another post I will talk about covenant epistemology-further proposals about knowing that I developed out of reflecting on Polanyi’s account of knowing.
![lord of the flies aha moment lord of the flies aha moment](https://1stfaith.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Jenns-closet-its-time-to-fly-3-600x600.png)
Specifically, I will make some more comments about the implications of Polanyi’s account of knowing. I concede that it is quite a leap for the reader to make, to move from the alien terminology of “subsidiary focal integration” to epiphanic encounter and communion with the real! In this essay and the next, I want to fill in the intermediate steps, and draw you more deeply into the feel of the thing. I noted that I think that the movement toward the good life is one of integration. In the last post, I considered what is meant by “the good life.” I claimed that the good life is a matter of epiphanic encounter and communion with reality. And I suggested that a critical key to personal integration would be embracing an integrative epistemology. I presented premier scientist/philosopher Michael Polanyi’s innovative account of knowing as subsidiary focal integration. Imagining knowledge to be impersonal, explicit, transferable, factoids of information, data points, masks its own presumption and results in fragmentation. I have suggested that the view that modernity holds of what knowledge is has actually been a critical source of the fragmentation we sense in the modern West.
![lord of the flies aha moment lord of the flies aha moment](https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/disp/68382f45320599.582c9f8025714.jpg)
So far I have claimed that, especially in this era of fragmentation, we seek some way to integrate our lives.