Metis | Kaelan

The ancient Greeks distinguished two kinds of knowing. Techne was formal, explicit, teachable — the knowledge in textbooks. Metis was practical, contextual, embodied — the knowledge in hands. Odysseus was famed for his metis: cunning, adaptability, knowing what to do when the situation didn’t match the manual.

James C. Scott revived the term in Seeing Like a State. Metis is the peasant farmer’s understanding of local soil, local weather, local pests — knowledge accumulated over generations, tuned to specific conditions, impossible to transfer to a spreadsheet. It’s what’s lost when experts impose universal solutions on particular places.

Metis resists formalization because it’s relational. The knowledge isn’t about things in isolation but about how things interact in context. The master gardener knows these tomatoes in this soil in this microclimate. Change any variable and the knowledge partially expires. Transfer to a different garden and it needs recalibration.

This is why tacit knowledge frustrates management. You can’t extract metis from practitioners, encode it in procedures, and hand it to newcomers. The knowledge exists in the doing, learned through exposure, refined through feedback. Attempts to make it explicit typically capture the husk while missing the kernel.

Modern institutions undervalue metis because it’s illegible. It can’t be standardized, measured, or controlled from a distance. high modernism systematically destroys metis: replacing apprenticeship with certification, local adaptation with best practices, judgment with protocols.

The corrective isn’t to reject formal knowledge — techne has its place. It’s to recognize the limits of what can be known abstractly. Some problems yield to analysis; others yield only to practitioners embedded in particulars. Wisdom is knowing when you need a formula and when you need a local guide.