I’ve understood episteme, techne, and metis for awhile, and the vital importance of each, but I’ve been missing this understanding of gnosis. I now think I’ve been bouncing off the implication that’s bundled into the idea of gnosis: that knowledge of spiritual mysteries is universal, or won’t be overturned later, or is “correct”. But I think that’s a wrong way to look at things.
For example, consider “life philosophies”. People put a ton of energy thinking about existentialism and what to do about the fact that we’re all going to die. The important thing people get from it isn’t some sort of episteme; nor techne; nor metis. They process it, learn to cope, learn how their values interact with the world—and the big insights here feel spiritual.
Likewise, with love. People develop philosophies around love that are clearly not built on the other 3 kinds of knowledge: they often contain things like “my heart yearns for that kind of thing”. The statement “my heart yearns for that kind of thing” is episteme, the decisionless following of the heart is techne, the fact that you should follow your heart is metis, but finding that your heart yearns for the thing is gnosis. It was a spiritual mystery what your heart yearned for, and you figured it out, and to find one of these feels just as spiritual as they say.
I can sort of see how meditation can give rise to these, cutting yourself off from synthetic logical direction and just allowing natural internal annealing to propagate all sorts of updates about your deep values and how to cope with the nature of reality. I can sort of see why people go to “find themselves spiritually” by traveling, letting new values come out and the standard constraints get loosened, and the resulting depth growing spiritual knowledge. I can sort of see why drugs, dancing, and sexuality were often used in pagan religious ceremonies meant to cause a revealing of the spirit and an estuary where deep values intermingled.
But all these spiritual insights are about how your mind wants to work, not about episteme-like “correct” universal knowledge. It’s not universal, even if they look similar from mind to mind. They definitely get overturned later, at least in the limited sense that GR overturned Newton. And “correctness” doesn’t really apply to them, because they’re about the map being more like the map wants, not about map v reality.
This is the first time that I feel like I’ve actually seen someone use the four knowledge terms (“episteme”, “techne”, “metic” and “gnosis”) in a way that felt like it created a coherent picture. I got used to thinking about “metis” as distinct from other types of knowledge, but this has also helped me place where “techne”, “episteme” and “gnosis” fall.
I’ve understood episteme, techne, and metis for awhile, and the vital importance of each, but I’ve been missing this understanding of gnosis. I now think I’ve been bouncing off the implication that’s bundled into the idea of gnosis: that knowledge of spiritual mysteries is universal, or won’t be overturned later, or is “correct”. But I think that’s a wrong way to look at things.
For example, consider “life philosophies”. People put a ton of energy thinking about existentialism and what to do about the fact that we’re all going to die. The important thing people get from it isn’t some sort of episteme; nor techne; nor metis. They process it, learn to cope, learn how their values interact with the world—and the big insights here feel spiritual.
Likewise, with love. People develop philosophies around love that are clearly not built on the other 3 kinds of knowledge: they often contain things like “my heart yearns for that kind of thing”. The statement “my heart yearns for that kind of thing” is episteme, the decisionless following of the heart is techne, the fact that you should follow your heart is metis, but finding that your heart yearns for the thing is gnosis. It was a spiritual mystery what your heart yearned for, and you figured it out, and to find one of these feels just as spiritual as they say.
I can sort of see how meditation can give rise to these, cutting yourself off from synthetic logical direction and just allowing natural internal annealing to propagate all sorts of updates about your deep values and how to cope with the nature of reality. I can sort of see why people go to “find themselves spiritually” by traveling, letting new values come out and the standard constraints get loosened, and the resulting depth growing spiritual knowledge. I can sort of see why drugs, dancing, and sexuality were often used in pagan religious ceremonies meant to cause a revealing of the spirit and an estuary where deep values intermingled.
But all these spiritual insights are about how your mind wants to work, not about episteme-like “correct” universal knowledge. It’s not universal, even if they look similar from mind to mind. They definitely get overturned later, at least in the limited sense that GR overturned Newton. And “correctness” doesn’t really apply to them, because they’re about the map being more like the map wants, not about map v reality.
This is the first time that I feel like I’ve actually seen someone use the four knowledge terms (“episteme”, “techne”, “metic” and “gnosis”) in a way that felt like it created a coherent picture. I got used to thinking about “metis” as distinct from other types of knowledge, but this has also helped me place where “techne”, “episteme” and “gnosis” fall.