Polanyi’s Revolutionary Imaginary

Abstract

In this chapter, Fennell looks at the social imaginaries that Taylor examines in Modern Social Imaginaries and A Secular Age. He offers an alternative imaginary built up from Polanyi’s understanding of sense-reading. Polanyi’s self-reflexive vision is grounded, but not foundational; it also re-introduces a role for faith in the discovery of knowledge. Fennell presents Polanyi’s wider vision of anthropogenesis as one that supports a free society open to discovering truths about reality. This vision also provides a means for religious thinking to be revitalized. Fennell acknowledges, with Taylor, that one cannot go back to the social and religious imaginaries of the past with their outmoded hierarchies, but he directs us forward toward responsible re-enchantment.

I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers . It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.

—Thomas Nagel , The Last Word, 130

[W]hat I am interested in is how our sense of things, our cosmic imaginary, in other words, our whole background understanding and feel of the world has been transformed.

—Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 325