Aug 5, 2026 · 3 min · 1 segments
From a longer discussion of Esther's book, The Mother's Smile found here: https://youtu.be/SCwA9iGdGx0?si=EmtFXxMLa-n33gB8
Esther MeekGuest
It's helpful to use Polanyi's lingo because he identifies something that nobody else does, and that's the subsidiary.
And then the thing about the subsidiaries, these are things you rely on, and they're not statements.
Th- there is a physics formula for keeping your balance on your bike, but that has ...
Mm-hmm.
And your body can actually figure it out without ever having been told the physics formula.
Somehow you've gotta climb into and attend from these clues, and it's your body that figures out things that can't be put into words.
Or if they can be put into words, it's different from your actually embodying them.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
You can train your, your felt body sense of balance, you know? Uh, y- you, uh, any kind of vocal coaching or piano.
I mean, the musical, a- any kind of musical effort, [laughs] any kind of athletic effort.
Uh, just hand- handwriting, reading, [laughs] all of it, you know? You've got ...
Like if I'm reading text, Read.ai meeting notes, right? Uh, I'm subsidarily in dwelling, he uses that word, clues that, uh, then open up to a pattern, and it's the pattern that makes sense of the clues, which means some ...
You're involved in half groping or scrabbling toward something that's not yet known, which is how a discoverer discovers, discovers anything.
Yeah.
Because the thing he said too is if you revert to focus on, you know, if I look at the M, how the, like, the font, and the E and the T, you know, you know, I am no longer reading.
In other words, it's a destructive reversion to focus on what ought to be subsidiary.
Mm-hmm.
But you have to remember that that is what modernity made the paradigm of knowledge, and that's the whole thing that's blinding modernity to reality.
Yeah.
It's only as you subsidarily indwell the bike that the world opens to you in bike paths.
