Calling all artists! (And that means you.)
Join us for a day with philosopher Esther Meek. Plus, an excerpt from her new book.
Hi Three Things readers,
We’d like to invite you to a workshop with the most cheerful, joyous philosopher you’re ever likely to meet.
Join us for a day (well, three hours) with Esther Meek for an interactive taste of her new book, Doorway to Artistry: Attuning Your Philosophy to Enhance Your Creativity.
Below you’ll find details on the workshop, followed by an excerpt from the book, which doubles as an introduction to Esther.
Doorway to Artistry: A Day with Esther Meek
Sunday, September 17, 2023
1p-4p CST / 2p-5p EST / 7p-10p UK
Session 1: Creativity Needs Philosophy
Our prevailing ways of thinking skew our everyday life and work and spirituality and artistry. This first session will offer a philosophical reorientation with respect to who we are, what reality is, and how it is we are involved with the real, particularly in our artistry.
Session 2: What is Real?
In the second session, we’ll unpack the time-honored account of the real that is our heritage in Christian philosophy. The real is—are you ready for this simplicity?—Things! Things in their astonishing existence, coherent and lively unity, and their welcoming self-showing (beauty), self-giving (goodness) and self-saying (truth).
Session 3: Welcoming the Real
Because the real is always welcoming us, our process in artistry is to reciprocate the real’s hospitable welcome. In the third session, we’ll learn how to do this. Then, to wrap up, we feast! As human persons, we are called to be lovers of the real, in festal communion with the real. This is what our artistry is all about.
The cost of the workshop is included in the membership of Three Things paid subscribers.
You are a philosopher and you are an artist.
You are already philosophical—you only need to have been born. You are already artful: you already put things together creatively to produce new things. You are both of these things, even if you have never made a profession of either of them, even if you didn’t already realize you are.
How can you or I be something, at the heart of who we are, and not have realized it? This suggests that there might be a problem—something longstanding, engrained, but askew. Indeed, there is: there is a prevailing mindset, an implicit everyday outlook that most of us inherit just by being born into what we call the modern age. Living from an implicit outlook is natural to human persons; but you want it to be healthy and authentic, not skewed.
The implicit mindset of the modern age discredits both philosophy and artistry. That can’t be good if you are to thrive as a philosophically attuned, abundantly artful person. We need a healing alternative. We need to restore the philosophy and artistry that lie at the core of who we are as human persons.
Philosophy—at least the philosophy I have in mind—isn’t abstract and theoretical and distant. It is concretely felt. It concerns our simplest involvement with the world.
Philosophy concerns the most fundamental and shaping ideas of any person and any endeavor. What is the meaning of human existence? What is really real, and how is it that I go about knowing it? You don’t need to have studied philosophy to be living out responses to these in every step you take. You don’t even need to be aware that you are. It’s more like you wear them. To be human is to be philosophical; philosophy concerns who we are at the core.
Philosophy—at least the philosophy I have in mind—isn’t abstract and theoretical and distant. It is concretely felt. It concerns our simplest involvement with the world. So philosophizing here, close to us, pays off here, close to us, in everything. Its simple profundity is meant for us, and it is meant for wonder and perennial joy. It is meant for what I call astonished belonging to the world. It is meant for shalom.
I am a philosopher. I share my philosophy because I believe that it offers the philosophical healing and restoration that artistry needs. I offer it to attune your philosophy to enhance your artistry. In my book Doorway to Artistry, I invite you to the philosophical awareness, the philosophical life, the philosophical birthright that is already yours.
It may be that you are a practicing artist. You make art. Perhaps you are stuck in issues that block your creativity, and you sense that they might have a philosophical dimension. You are already primed to know that artistry and philosophy interpenetrate.
It may also be that you can’t bring yourself to see yourself this way. I maintain that, nevertheless, there is artistry in your life, a creative producing that matters deeply to you.
No matter who you are, you are a knower and you are engaged with the real. When I speak of the real, I mean simply everything that exists. Both knowing and the real matter deeply for artistry. I hope to offer you a hospitable welcome into both.
Welcome supplies the philosophical key to understand ourselves and our involvement with the world. I want to say philosophically that the lively real is hospitably welcoming us. And we respond in kind in our artistry and discovery.
Imagine my welcoming you, a thoughtfully artful person, to an event in my home. You and I have met out in the streets of our lives. We have begun a conversation and an acquaintance. We find we both care about making sense of life, and our involvement with it. We care about matters that lie at the heart of who we are as human persons. We especially are attuned to beauty, creativity, to art and artistry, but always desire to understand them more deeply. We’d like to pursue the conversation.
As a next overture, I extend an invitation to you, along with some others, to a gathering in my home. I am holding a workshop to pursue these deep matters we care about. I envision probing conversation, as well as hands-on activity, within this gesture of celebrative hospitality.
Throughout Doorway to Artistry, I designate rooms in my home into which I invite you for conversations especially suited to each. But more is going on than organization of ideas. Moving together through these room-set conversations, we also trace the artistic process as an act of responding to the real, reciprocating the real’s welcome.
Our room conversations trace the vector of our involvement with the real. On the Threshold we consider who we are, where we come from, and the real’s welcome before us. Hearthside, we begin within the welcome. In the study we encounter the lively, welcoming real. On another day in the study we attend to “the everyday jewels of the real”—Things.
In the garden, we find how beauty puts our whole venture together. In the workshop, we enact our process of artful discovery. On the veranda, we listen to artists speaking of artistry, comparing their thought to our approach. Finally, we feast: we celebrate the crowning of our venture, and we take our leave.
As part of welcoming you, I tell you my philosophical story that shapes this venture.
I was born into a family replete with musicians, who were already making exquisite music and offering it to others. I was surrounded by voice and keyboard mastery. I came to feel about myself that, by contrast, nobody wanted to hear me sing or play, when they could hear my relatives.—An unnecessary, unsupported conclusion about their motives and about myself, I confess.
“—And so you became a philosopher!” a friend once quipped. There is definitely something to that! But now that I look back, even if I had had the perseverance to study music and practice, I would still have needed to philosophize.
I was just thirteen when I ran up against the modernist mindset—though it took some years to figure out what it was. Once I realized that my questions were philosophical, and that it was possible to study philosophy, it took only a few hours to decide that I should pursue this quest—even for a lifetime.
At thirteen, I became a skeptic, it seems: I found myself doubting that I actually could know the world outside my mind, or that I could actually know that God exists. I was too embarrassed to tell anyone else of these crazy questions, but there it was: I had no proof, it seemed, for the most fundamental things in life. Deep down, I longed for the real, but felt I was cut off from it. This was the beginning of a lifelong quest for the real.
I came to realize that the skewed mindset of the modern age pervades and plays out for most people and their projects. It wasn’t just me who wrestled with these strange questions. So my quest might help others. BA, MA, and PhD ensued. But I also had to address my own personal philosophical concerns. It’s taken some decades to reorient to a fresh philosophical approach.
My life quest could be expressed as: can we make contact with reality? Early on in my quest, a key moment was discovering the work of premier scientific discoverer-turned-philosopher, twentieth-century Hungarian- turned-Englishman, Michael Polanyi. Polanyi actually voiced this question. (Few philosophers do!) And he answered: yes. In addition to offering an innovative account of how knowing actually works, he promised: in discovery, we know we have made contact with reality by our “unspecifiable sense of an inexhaustive range of indeterminate future manifestations.”
My life quest could be expressed as: can we make contact with reality?
This provocative claim of his fell on my shriveled skeptic soul like water on dry ground.
Polanyi wrote that new knowledge “speaks of something real, and to attribute reality to something is to express the belief that its presence will yet show up in an indefinite number of unpredictable ways.” We meet here with a new definition of reality, he writes: “Real is that which is expected to reveal itself indeterminately in the future. Hence, an explicit statement can bear on reality only by virtue of the tacit coefficient associated with it. This conception of reality and of the tacit knowing of reality underlies all my writings.”
Think through those words. First, contact: yes, in our knowing we do connect with the real beyond our head. Unspecifiable: you can’t put into words the sense of the larger real you experience in the contact; a more profoundly coherent real. Sense means bodily felt. An inexhaustive range: you sense all sorts of possibilities and prospects. Indeterminate: you can’t pin down what exactly you sense. However, this is no lack, but rather a brimming fullness, far more than you can say, not less. Future: the contact seems to open a door to vistas that will only come to fruition in the future. Manifestations: this hints at reality’s initiative to show up and show itself.
Although I devoted my PhD dissertation to this rich and assuring notion of contact with reality, it has taken decades for me to trust it, and to appease my adolescent doubts. Polanyi the discoverer’s account of knowing helped me work out a responsible account of my own. I adopted and augmented it into my own proposal of “covenant epistemology.” I share this with you in our workshop conversation, connecting it with the artistic process.
Polanyi-anchored covenant epistemology reoriented me toward the real. The real is personlike, I argued. So we love in order to know. Best practices of knowing invite the real. After attaining this outlook, I have finally felt able to pursue the real itself.
Another key moment in my philosophical story was encountering the work of philosopher D. C. Schindler. I was astounded by the uncanny resonance between his proficient work and my own humble efforts to date. This opened to me a doorway to the real.
Doorway to Artistry is this next stage of my journey. It presents both a vision of the real, as well as what now appears a well-suited account of how we come to it in discovery and artistry. As I sensed from the beginning, that intoxicating “unspecifiable sense of an inexhaustive range of indeterminate manifestations” holds a key to the real. Indeterminate future manifestations open up the heart and character of the real. Small wonder that they signal having made contact with reality.
You, like me, long for the real. Inviting the real is what it is well that we do in our knowing and artistry. But it turns out that this is our response to a real that is inviting us first. It is the nature of the real to invite us, to welcome us, to be at home beyond where we have been at home. Hospitable welcome expresses the fundamental structure of the real. Reality is richer and more lively than our reigning modernist presumptions dictate.
You, like me, long for the real. Inviting the real is what it is well that we do in our knowing and artistry.
Welcome is what we experience at the outset of any venture of ours toward the real. Our venture of artful discovery is our reciprocation. Concrete but endlessly rich, this motif of personal invitation to come through a doorway, to a kind of surprising belonging beyond, expresses the heart dynamic of the real itself, and of our relatedness to it.
Knowing—artful discovery—is how we relate to the real. Discovery, knowing, understanding—are all more intimate and creative a relatedness to the real than our inherited presumptions allow us to believe and experience. And the goal is festal communion with the real.
We're stoked to welcome Esther back to The Row House in March!