Subsidiary Awareness and PKM Concerns

I read an interesting quote recently from author Barbara Dee Bennett Baumgarten in her book Visual Art as Theology:

"While you attend to the particulars focally, the particulars cannot function subsidiarily, causing the integration of the particulars to be destroyed." (p. 12)

I believe that this has tremendous impact on understanding many of the frustrations of PKM (personal knowledge management) practitioners, but can also offer a meaningful way forward as we think about how we contact, work with, understand, and share knowledge.

Subsidiary Awareness

Baumgarten uses the incredibly helpful and down-to-earth example of riding a bicycle. If you want to take it a step simpler, let’s describe the process of walking. How does walking happen? Can you describe it? Could you do it in such a way that someone who has never walked but is capable of doing so could suddenly do it?

Chances are, if you attempted to understand and articulate the firing of every muscle from your toes to your neck, you would fall on your face walking across your bedroom. Furthermore, an instruction manual for walking would run into the hundreds of pages, and would in all likelihood grant no insight to the reader on how to orchestrate their legs in such a way that they fall forward without hitting the ground.

Working from the ideas of scientist turned philosopher Michael Polanyi, Baumgarten describes this quandary as attempting to become aware of the subsidiary concerns of knowledge- the means of knowing objects, or the focus.

We walk with our muscles. We think with our minds. We know how to cut onions by manipulating a knife. The subsidiary and focal concerns are separate, and we do not have access to the subsidiary means of knowing things. We learn through doing, and the knowledge is integrated into our persons in a way that is surely there yet is nearly impossible to extract. We cannot fully know how we know something - trying to explain it can lead to frustration or alarm. Yet we surely know it.

Personal Knowledge Management as an Honest Effort to do Just That

Personal knowledge management is, as I see it, often an exercise in trying to do just that. We often believe if we write enough notes or the right notes or have the right structure, we can have a perfect insight into not only the subject matter we're trying to understand, but the mechanism of our thoughts.

When we read something and are interested in it, we're thinking about the thing we read. When we ask ourselves "Why was this interesting to me? Hmm..." and then try to write about that, we're peeling back one layer of meaning and trying to focus on the tool of the thing that tickled our fancy in the first place- a passing thought in our own minds.

On the one hand, we need to do this in order to put our thoughts into words. It's just that words are messy- they may get close to the narrative structure of our brains, but our brains they are not. No PKM system is capable of fully externalizing our thoughts, and for practitioners that go in with that mindset, frustration and burnout seem to be the frequent outcomes.

Did you catch that word integrated in the previous section? We often think of knowledge as a sort of head-thing which stays up there and we rattle around for some words when we want that head-stuff to get out and be in the world. Yet, even in the world of ideas, we are still an impossibly tangled amalgam of experiences, history, culture, language, family, genetic eccentricities, and what we ate for dinner. It may be that a thought finally clicked for you about your field of study after a particularly tasty meal. You will never be able to communicate the content of that cross-pollinated insight. It may make a good article, but the same integration is not possible for the reader, and is still only scratched on the surface in your own PKM.

So what are we doing, then?

The question is worth asking here- why bother with Personal Knowledge Management at all, then? I would argue, twofold, that it sharpens and clarifies our own thinking as well as serves others with unexpected insight. In turn,

Much has been said about the capacity of PKM to sharpen and clarify our own thinking. But why might that be? Well, simply put, we're getting new embodied experience in the wrestling match between our gray-matter thoughts and the words that come out of us. There will always be slippage between the two, but as we write and take notes and make connections and try to understand it through our own words we're writing and reading, the clutch is slowly being let out on the connection. There is real understanding to be gained in the process of writing these notes.

But to what end? When we write and share it, we are serving others with unexpected insight. Because you are you, no one else will be able to share the insight that you have gleaned from your various fields of study, your hobbies, your interests, your family, your culture, etc. You have infinite worth as a person and your thoughts will always be valuable. It may take some time to learn how to articulate them, to learn the extent and the conflicts and the current understanding in a field you're trying to enter and contribute to, but that's something you learn in time and in your body as well. The only thing to do is jump in, get dirty, and start learning how to think, write, and share.