Abstract
Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), a scientist and philosopher, shows that Enlightenment standards for knowledge hold distortions that can have destructive effects. He admired the Enlightenment’s political ideals, but its critical rationalism brought a "scientism" that justifies only facts based on physics and considers meaning and human values to be illusory. Polanyi's post-critical philosophy revises Enlightenment standards to more accurately reflect the limits of knowledge and how science actually proceeds. He critiques (1) the viability of complete objectivity, (2) the adequacy of Cartesian explicit analysis to simple self-evident truths, (3) the concomitant reductive analysis of reality to smallest physical components, and (4) reductive dichotomies between mind and matter, and fact and value. He opposes and balances these with conceptions of (1) personal knowledge, (2) tacit knowing, (3) emergent being, and (4) discovery and indwelling. Polanyi shows that science moves toward truth and better contact with reality by using the same tools of practical reason that produce understanding in traditions open to dialogue and discovery. Values—not just physical facts—can be real discoveries about the world. Post-critical epistemology thus provides a non-skeptical fallibilism that opens new possibilities for understanding. Polanyi hoped it would both combat nihilism and renew hope in human progress.
The ideas of the Enlightenment bred scientism and romanticism in a multitude of connected forms. The revival of the liberal tradition can be assured only if we can establish it on a new, conscious understanding of its foundations, on grounds which will withstand modern self-doubt coupled with perfectionism.
—Michael Polanyi (TD 83, 86, 87.)
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Notes
- 1.
To economize, references to Polanyi’s work to Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1958) will be noted with PK; The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), with TD; references to “The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory” [Minerva 1(1962): 54-74] with RS, and references to Marjorie Grene (ed.) Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael Polanyi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), with KB.
- 2.
For more on Polanyi’s life, see William Scott and Martin Moleski, Michael Polanyi, Scientist and Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
- 3.
[1967] in R.T. Allen (ed.) Society, Economics & Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2017) 107–118.
- 4.
Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1968) 119.
- 5.
“A person speaks with universal intent when convinced of the truth of what she or he says. ‘I speak not of established universality, but of a universal intent, for the scientist cannot know whether his claims will be accepted’ (TD 18)” (Quoted from Walter Gulick, ed., Recovering Truths: A Comprehensive Anthology of Michael Polanyi’s Writings, Glossary, 17, available with permission at polanyisociety.org).
- 6.
Compare here Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion that rational thinking can only take place in the context of a coherent tradition of inquiry in his After Virtue (Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame Press, 1984). Also note that MacIntyre studied at Manchester University while Polanyi taught there.
- 7.
See Charles Lowney, “Rethinking the Machine Metaphor since Descartes: The Irreducibility of Bodies, Minds and Meanings” Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 31, no. 3 (2011): 179–192.
- 8.
There are different sorts and strengths of emergentist theory. Since downward constraints can be construed as downward causes, Polanyi’s emergentism falls somewhere between a weak and a strong emergentism (as characterized by Mark Bedau in Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science, M. Bedau and P. Humphreys, eds., Cambridge: MIT Press 2008, 157–161). It does not violate the laws of physics, but it also does not affirm the causal closure of physics. Some friends of physicalism, such as Tihamér Margitay, thus believe Polanyi’s emergentism was too strong and blame some of its faults on too strongly associating the structure of tacit knowing with the structure of emergent being [“From Epistemology to Ontology: Polanyi’s Arguments for the Layered Ontology” in Tihamér Margitay, ed., Knowing and Being: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Michael Polanyi (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 128–140]. I reply to Tihamer’s concerns in “From Epistemology to Ontology to Epistemontology” [Tradition and Discovery 40 no. 1 (Fall 2013) 17–31].
- 9.
For the importance of this notion see, Phil Mullins, “Comprehension and the ‘Comprehensive Entity’: Polanyi’s Theory of Tacit Knowing and Its Metaphysical Implications” Tradition and Discovery 33 no. 3 (2006–2007): 26–43.
- 10.
Marjorie Grene, a strong advocate of Polanyi’s work, sees in the end a greater advantage to Merleau-Ponty’s approach to emergent pluralism. While Polanyi’s emergentism is more hierarchized, Merleau-Ponty’s is more “centrifugal.” [See Grene’s “Merleau-Ponty and the Revival of Ontology” Review of Metaphysics 29 no. 4 (June 1976): 605–62.] In contrast, I attempt to show how Polanyi’s approach, while less philosophically nuanced, might be the more useful and necessary (Lowney, ed., 2017, op. cit., 159, 179–180). Further discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of these two pluralisms can also be found in Lowney, “Robust Realism: Pluralist or Emergent” in Charles W. Lowney II, ed., Charles Taylor, Michael Polanyi and the Critique of Modernity: Pluralist and Emergentist Directions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 235–270.
- 11.
See Lowney, ed., 2017, op. cit., 162.
- 12.
Polanyi’s move here is similar to C.S. Peirce’s notion of triadic semantic structures; see Polanyi’s “Sense Giving and Sense Reading” in KB, 181–210. For more on Peirce and Polanyi see Phil Mullins, “Peirce’s Abduction and Polanyi’s Tacit Knowing” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 16 no. 3 (2002): 198–22; and also Mullins, “Comprehension and the ‘Comprehensive Entity,’” op. cit.
- 13.
Polanyi’s notion of dwelling in technical clues anticipates Andy Clark’s “extended mind” in Clark’s Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008).
- 14.
One can relate these “transcendentals” to telic goals that draw us forward to new possibilities for being. See TD 88–92 and also D.M. Yeager’s “Taylor and Polanyi on Moral Sources and Social Systems” for a discussion of the significance of Polanyi’s transcendentals in a socio-political context (in Lowney, ed., 2017, op. cit., 189–214). On how concepts and platonic ideas such as Beauty are formed, see my “The Tacit in Frege” [Polanyiana 17 no. 1–2 (2008): 19–37]. For more on the difference between teleological notions and Polanyi’s conception of telic, see Richard Gelwick’s “Michael Polanyi’s Daring Epistemology and the Hunger for Teleology” [Zygon 40 no. 1 (2005): 63–76]. Part of Gelwick’s interest here is to show how it is illegitimate to use Polanyi’s notion of “telic fields” in a theological argument for intelligent design.
- 15.
In “From Science to Morality: A Polanyian Perspective on the Letter and the Spirit of the Law” [Tradition and Discovery 36 no. 1 (Fall 2009): 42–54] and in “Morality: Emergentist Ethics and Virtue For Itself” [TAD 36 no. 3 (Summer 2010): 52–65], I show how different moral theories—deontological, utilitarian, virtue, and sentiment based—each catch part of a moral reality that is better understood as emergent rather than pre-existent or rooted in some totally other dimension. Even purportedly simple moral “intuitions” have their tacit subsidiary support in lived experience. See also Lowney, ed., 2017, op. cit. chapters 8 “Overcoming the Scientistic Imaginary” (143–168) and 9 “On Emergent Ethics, Becoming Authentic, and Finding Common Ground” (169–187).
- 16.
MacIntyre, 1984, op. cit. For more on how Aristotelian philosophy connects with Polanyi’s philosophy, see my “From Science to Morality: A Polanyian Perspective on the Letter and the Spirit of the Law” [Tradition and Discovery 36 no. 1 (Fall 2009): 42–54], which links together tacit knowing and phronesis ; or my “Authenticity and the Reconciliation of Modernity,” which connects Aristotle and Polanyi in understanding the development of telic goal/ideals (2017, op. cit., 71–92). Also see D. Hoinski and R. Polansky, “The Modern Aristotle: Michael Polanyi’s Search for Truth against Nihilism” in A. Greenstine and R. Johnson, eds., Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017): 180–201.
- 17.
See Lowney, “Morality: Emergentist Ethics” op. cit. and Lowney “From Morality to Spirituality: Society, Religion and Transformation” Tradition and Discovery 37 no. 1 (Fall 2010): 19–38.
- 18.
See Taylor’s A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) and Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). For more on authenticity as an emergent value, see my “Authenticity and the Reconciliation of Modernity” (2017, op. cit., 71–92).
- 19.
See D.M. Yeager, 2017, op. cit.
- 20.
See Richard T. Allen, Beyond Liberalism: The Political Thought of F.A. Hayek and Michael Polanyi (Rutgers, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2016) or Struan Jacobs and Phil Mullins, “Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi in Correspondence” in History of European Ideas 42 no. 1 (2016): 107–130.
- 21.
See my chapter 12, “Robust Moral Realism: Pluralist or Emergent?” in Lowney ed., 2017, op. cit., 235–270.
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Lowney, C.W. (2020). Michael Polanyi: A Scientist Against Scientism. In: Callahan, G., McIntyre, K.B. (eds) Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_10
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