We should bear clearly in mind that there are vastly distinct forms of knowledge, and we should take care not to collapse them, accidentally or by habit, into the something we treat as ‘the same’ in thought and conversation.

There is, for example, something like ‘operational knowledge’; a form that allows us to manipulate the »structure of something, in thought or experiment, according to the models presently popular or on the near horizon. Such knowledge tells us nothing of the nature of things, or even ‘the truth’, but rather, is a sketch-like method that inclines itself to generalizations that match observations and experimental results.

But experiment works hard to evict both the specific and that which Owen Barfield calls ‘the participated’; that is, the role of someone actually involved in a relationship with the subjects and circumstances. Yet this is nearly all of any person’s actual experience and way of being in the world.

Scientific ‘knowledge’ is not really knowledge of the phenomenon from within relation with it, but rather, the historically accumulated results of repeated attempts to collapse some aspect of phenomenal experience into a model. But no one experiences models. These are thought-forms. And having captured something general, the specifics must necessarily be dismissed.

So, for example, while modern medicine has relatively efficacious methods for ‘seeing’ and ‘responding to’ disease, it is practically helpless in the imperative to understand the individual and their unique vulnerabilities, histories, strengths, and peculiarities. Thus it is that many treatments harm or kill patients for the simple reason that »there has never been a general patient. There cannot be. There is no such thing. But medicine, in general… is the produce of generalization.

Except in thought and model.

Now, there are other forms of knowledge that are true but non-experimental. The bald fact of a kiss, the direct experience of eating a peach, or interacting intimately with another life form or a living place… these are first-hand, participated experiences of knowing. They are not like science; they depend upon, rather than strive to evict intimacy. They are absolutely specific, and whatever degree to which they might be viewed as experimental… the share little or nothing with such a view… except, again, in thought or model.

To know who something is… requires we become involved, personally. And in this process, the what(s), who(s) and how(s) are, unlike in experiment, emergent from how and how deeply we participate in relation… and for what purposes. The purpose of analysis is, most often, the absence of participation in the world of actual relation… a world of inifinite specificities… an intentional absence… that takes us out of embodied ‘real’ knowledge, into the strange disembodied world of analysis, mechanics, components, and function.