From science to epistemology
Michael Polanyi, (born as Miháli Pollacsek), was born in Budapest on 11 March 1891 and died as a British citizen on 22 February 1976 in Northampton. He was a polymath with expertise in Medicine, Physical Chemistry, Economics, Political Theory, and Philosophy.
A broad and intensive education from the very start of his life determined Michael Polanyi's multifaceted scientific career. His parents were secular Jews, and after his father's death in 1905, his mother established a salon that was frequented by the intelligentsia and artists of vibrant Budapest.
In the wake of his elder brother Karl (later a famous economist), he became involved with the Galileo Circle, a scientific student community that discussed social, economic, and political issues.
After finishing his medical studies at the University of Budapest, he became more interested in continuing in chemistry and profited from the opportunity to spend a year at the Hochschule in Karlsruhe. His professor there shared some of Polanyi's papers with Albert Einstein, who was very positive about the content. This first contact was followed by a twenty-year correspondence with the famous scientist. While serving in the army during WWI, he finished his first pathbreaking article in thermodynamics during sick leave, published in the Proceedings of the German Physical Society. When Polanyi was invited in 1921 to present his theory about the adsorption of gases at a special meeting where Einstein was invited, his unconventional method was heavily attacked for showing a "total disregard for the scientifically established structure of matter."
It was the time that Polanyi's outsider position came to the surface in a confronting way. But he stuck to his conviction and nine years later was proved right. This experience taught the young scientist that he could stand alone outside the scientific community without distrusting or ignoring the discipline.
Two weeks after taking a position in Berlin at the Institute of Fiber Chemistry, he made an important discovery, again outside the routine, delivering a breakthrough in X-ray analysis that became the new method. He spent three years in the institute working on X-rays and crystals before moving on to his real passion, studying reaction kinetics at the Institute of Physical Chemistry. In the 1920s, Berlin was the world centre of scientific avant-garde and knowledge development. Polanyi later described his participation in the weekly Physics Colloquium, having informal discussions surrounded by the brightest physicists, such as Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Max von Laue, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner, as the most glorious intellectual memory of his life.
These discussions were in stark contrast to the threat of repression when the Nazis came to power in the new decade. Initially hesitating to leave Germany, he later gratefully accepted an offer from the University of Manchester to take a Chair of Physical Chemistry.
Just before and during the years of war, Polanyi resisted the tendencies to conflate pure science and the applied sciences, with the Soviet Union as a negative example, and made a plea in Britain to not follow that track and let science follow the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
In 1944, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and a year later, he gave his Riddle Lectures at the University of Durham. In these lectures, he chose a more philosophical angle. He initiated some of the ideas that would later grow into a comprehensive new theory about knowledge by including implicit components as its fundament.
Manchester University created a separate position to make sure Polanyi would not move to the USA, where there existed a substantial interest in the original scientist. Avoiding discussions with the Philosophy department, they offered him a Chair of Social Studies to further develop his theories. Some colleagues saw with dismay how he moved away from science to dedicate himself entirely to the epistemological adventure. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin was very negative about this step:"... here is a great scientist giving up the Nobel to write mediocre works of philosophy."
But Polanyi was already convinced that he had found his true vocation and that his laboratory years were essential as a fundament: "...an experience in science is by far the most important basic ground for developing philosophic ideas."
Theories of an outsider
Polanyi entered the discipline of philosophy as an outsider, and again, this was in many ways an advantage like his previous multidisciplinary excursions. But he also felt a lacking overview when preparing his Gifford Lectures for 1951/52 in Aberdeen, where the blueprint of his theory about tacit knowledge was exposed for the first time. In 1950, he met the philosopher Marjorie Glicksman Grene in Chicago, who (in Polanyi's acknowledgements) "seemed to have guessed my whole purpose, and ever since she has never ceased to help its pursuit." So, Grene not only provided him with a crash course in philosophy, but she also remained his critical sparring partner during the writing of his magnum opus, Personal Knowledge, Towards a post-critical Philosophy. Polanyi must have owed a large part of the referential solidity and authority in the field to this assistance, which he acknowledges on the first page of the book.
The ideas and determination of the almost ten-year writing project were completely Polanyi's. His main purpose was to liberate the modern world from its belief in objectivism and reintroduce, for the first time since the teachings of church father Augustine had lost their influence, a post-critical alternative based on belief, commitment, intuition, guessing, and imagination.
Polanyi had grown gradually to this new conviction. Looking at Polanyi’s publications until the 1950s, outside the field of science, we can conclude that he had followed and commented with intelligent social commitment on political and economic processes for decades. On top of that, as a European Jew, he knew too well the dark side of technological progress that was detached from humanistic embeddings.
He knew the world of scientific discoveries from the inside and had seen the fallacy of positivist belief in detached observations and neutral descriptions if scientific breakthroughs were made. While Albert Einstein's discovery of relativity was regarded as an illustration of such a positivistic conception of science in his day, Polanyi considered it the opposite, which he underpinned in chapter 1.3 of Personal Knowledge, Relativity.
He opposed objectivism, an attitude which requires a specific functioning mindless knower, by a fiduciary framework consisting of embedded beliefs within a like-minded community. Conditional is that these beliefs are continuously reconsidered in the course of exploration and exegesis.
The findings of Gestalt psychology inspired the first steps in developing a new view of knowledge. Though Polanyi stresses the differences in his writings between the Gestalt theory and his own approach, he admits that this was an essential opening to his concepts of the way knowledge is experienced. An important lead was the concept of the Gestalt theory, which is akin to the theory Polanyi developed later: the process of 'integrating our awareness of particulars without being able to identify these particulars.'
Max Wertheimer, the founder of the Gestalt theory, served as a research psychologist during the First World War in Berlin, close to Einstein's house. Wertheimer became friends with the scientist and profited from learning more about the Gestalt-like method applied by Einstein when he developed his theory of relativity. It is fascinating to see how several roots of the theory of tacit knowledge dated from the beginning of the century, with Berlin as a meeting point.
Though Polanyi did not take part in any philosophical discourse and was eagerly catching up after WOII to get an understanding of the discipline, his ideas were not growing in a vacuum either. Gilbert Ryle was a British philosopher who worked out a similar concept that resisted Cartesian dualism based on the separation of body and mind. Ryle's focus on the difference between 'knowing how' and 'knowing that' (the German Können and Wissen) were considered of the same structure by Polanyi, who concluded, however, that both types were always present in the total process of knowing.
What separated Polanyi from most of his contemporary scientists and thinkers was his conviction that modern mechanistic objectivism had to be replaced by a restored trust in belief. Or as he puts it: 'All knowing depends on a fiduciary framework.' He deliberately conceived a theory beyond the critical tradition as inherited from Kant, based on the Confessions of Augustine; nisi crederitis non intelligetis, 'you will not understand, unless you believe.'
Marjorie Grene later summarised this step they both made as "a kind of lay Augustinianism in which we recognize that our reasoning always rests on an attempt to clarify and to improve, something we already believe, but believe, of course, in such a way that we recognize that we might be mistaken."
Consequently, Grene and Polanyi shared the view that the modernist concept of truth was something that we can only know and prove, leaving behind all we know but cannot prove, excluding matters of beauty, morality, justice etc.
It is precisely in this latter area that Polanyi wanted to offer an alternative to objectivism. The recent war destructions influenced his conviction that truth claims of scientism had moral and political repercussions. The philosopher Eric Voegelin, also a refugee for the Nazis, drew a similar conclusion. "Scientism seeks to reduce all knowledge to what can be empirically verified. Historically, the murder of God is not followed by the superhuman but by the murder of man."
It is significant that, somehow, after both world wars Polanyi endured, he oriented his own existence to the Christian faith. In 1919, he converted to Catholicism, as he stated, inspired by reading Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor and Tolstoy's Confession.
In 1947, he was invited to participate in the discussion group The Moot, around the Scottish missionary and ecumenical pioneer J.A. Oldham. He filled the void after the untimely death of his compatriot, the sociologist Karl Mannheim, with whom he had been a member of the Galileo Circle. (see above). Mannheim was an important founder of the sociology of knowledge, and since his dissertation, 'Structural Analysis of Epistemology', he had kept an interest in researching the interconnection of the disciplines. The Moot was a mixture of renowned scholars, clergy and artists (like T.S. Eliot); their agenda included the position of Christianity in the post-war social restoration. Polanyi did not share himself automatically in the category of Catholics because his views were in many ways leaning towards Protestantism or independently philosophical, but for that reason even more appreciated by Oldham.
After accepting the Chair of Social Studies from the University of Manchester for this purpose, he dedicated most of his time to elaborating his theory of tacit knowing, which included an important role for faith or trust.
As he summarises in his chapter The Justification of Personal Knowledge, the invitation to dogmatism was a 'corollary to the greatly increased critical powers of man.'
His description of modern science's failure to maintain high moral standards is relevant even today. The alternative he suggested with meticulous substantiation in his magnum opus, Personal Knowledge, is the proposition to 'restore to us once more the power for the deliberate holding of unproven beliefs.'
Throughout his life, Polanyi remained tacit about his private religious convictions in the circles of philosophers because, like Marjorie Grene, many were hostile to religion.
Two years after the appearance of Personal Knowledge (1958), the dedicated consultant and sparring partner Grene discovered Maurice Merleau Ponty's work, which was a revelation for her. She saw the 1945 publication of Phénoménologie de la perception as a complementary enrichment to Polanyi's theories to form her own synthesis of both in The Knower and the Known (1966). In his article "The Structure of Consciousness," Polanyi admitted that parts of Merleau Ponty's theory had been foreshadowing his own, such as the experience of the body as an existential act, not based on observation or thought. However, despite his agreement with profound observations of that theory about the consequences of bodily perceptions, he saw his own ideas going a step further in addressing the Cartesian dilemma (supposed separation of body and mind) by 'acknowledging two mutually exclusive ways of being aware of our body', which was fundamental for developing his theory about tacit knowledge.
Polanyi's Tacit Dimension
Michael Polanyi baptised the two mutually excluding ways of awareness focal and subsidiary awareness. When we perceive the world from the proximity of our body, we either consciously pay attention to something or subconsciously register particular elements that we cannot report but that all contribute to perceiving a whole.
If, for example, you were swindled by a person who spoke intensely to you, the focus of your attention was most probably all the time on the meaning of the words. If later the police ask you to identify that person out of hundreds of pictures, you will see immediately which is the right one. But you cannot tell how you recognise the person because the particulars of the face (and maybe at a later confrontation voice as well) have not consciously entered your mind. Subsidiary awareness played a crucial role in getting the result. Polanyi speaks of subsception to subliminal stimuli, a process we can not control.
The process as a whole is what Polanyi called "Tacit knowing."
We can know more than we can tell.
These observations led Polanyi to a conclusion about the essence of human learning and discovery. As mentioned above, he saw a kinship with the Gestalt theory, but he considered the role of perception in that theory primordial.
The essential difference with his theory is that subsidiary awareness is not random in its functioning but, as he formulated it, has a bearing on the result. An active shaping of experience is taking place in the pursuit of knowledge, and this shaping or integrating is, according to Polanyi, the tacit power by which all knowledge is discovered and held to be true.
In the theory of tacit knowing, there is always a direction, hence the use of the verb. If we consider a skill (knowing how to) as knowledge, we enter the field of practitioners. We rely ‘on our awareness of a combination of muscular acts to attend to the performance of a skill.[....] attending from these elementary movements to the achievement of their joint purpose.’ In this functional structure of tacit knowing, we are usually unable to specify the elementary acts.
Certainly, if we consider higher crafts, such as surgery or playing a musical instrument. The complexity of the elementary movements presupposes, in those cases, a complete reliance on automatism. In this context, Polanyi defines reliance as a personal commitment involved in all acts of intelligence by which we integrate some things subsidiarily to the centre of our focal attention.
The so-called phenomenal structure of tacit knowing means an awareness of the proximal term (such as the muscular acts mentioned earlier) from which we are attending the appearance of a second term. The combined working of both structures reveals what we call meaning. Even though we know the meaning of something, it is possible that we are not able to specify its particulars. There is a distance between both that we can bridge with the help of a tool. Using the tool transposes meaningless (at least unspecifiable) feelings into meaningful ones, which are then at some distance from the original feelings. This is the semantic aspect of tacit knowing.
Here, Polanyi gets to the core of his theory: “All meaning tends to be displaced away from ourselves, and that is, in fact, my justification for using the terms ‘proximal’ and ‘distal’ to describe the first and second terms of tacit knowing." The terminology was borrowed from the anatomy and structure description of plants, meaning closer or more distant from the body axis or trunk. But in this case, the oriëntation in perception even goes from indefinite processes inside the body to attending qualities from things outside. By using a probe or any other sentient extension of our body, we can incorporate the thing outside as if it is interior (or as if our body extends outwards) and dwell in it. This interiorisation is a learning process, a practice, that creates new tacit particulars on the proximal side as a reference.
If we focus on the particulars, separating them from their relation and subsidiary role, we destroy our understanding of the whole. That process is, however, reversible, and we can interiorise the isolated particulars once more through concentration on the entity. This is a common process in learning a piece of music, and after isolating some technical details, we pay full attention to the ‘music’ as an undividable whole. This does not bring back the spontaneous original meaning we experienced when we were sight-reading. Explicit re-integration does not replace the tacit counterpart.
At this point, it is interesting to read what Polanyi remarked about rules and skills in chapter 4 of Personal Knowledge:
- The aim of a skilful performance is achieved by the observance of a set of rules which are [during the performance, JB] not known as such to the person following them.
- Rules of an art can be useful but they do not determine the practice of an art. They are maxims that can serve as a guide to an art only if they can be integrated into the practical knowledge of the art. They can not replace this knowledge.
- Efforts to distil the rules out of the art will not bring art in an alternative shape.
Rules are, of course, necessary if we want to mark the boundaries that determine form in any field of study. However, that attitude approaches the world by its tendency to give priority to the tangible and visible elements. It does not clarify the entity of relations. Not by looking at things but by dwelling in them, we understand their joint meaning. It is illustrated by the way a painter looks at his or her subject. To rely on a theory for understanding nature is to interiorise it. It could be a definition of Monteverdi’s conclusion after going the path of nature when discovering how imitation works in music drama. Or, as Polanyi states: “...its true knowledge lies in our ability to use it.”
Just like Monteverdi, Polanyi also stumbled on a problem that Plato addressed in relation to discovery. He quotes the paradox of the Meno: ‘..to search for a solution of a problem is an absurdity; for either you know what you are looking for and then there is no problem; or you do not know what you are looking for, and then you cannot expect to find something.’
Polanyi introduced a third way of looking at this nod. He formulated the intimation that many searchers have when they are at the beginning of a research process and called this a hunch, an idea based on feeling for which there is no proof.
He quotes Einstein, who spoke of ‘ ein intuitives Heranfühlen an die Tatsache.’ Sensing the presence of a hidden reality to which undefined clues are pointing.
By committing oneself to such a conviction, one takes responsibility for pursuing this hidden truth. Holding that position implies a temporarily solitary existence.
This isolation counts mostly for those in the avant-garde of scientific or artistic discovery. A large part of the arts and sciences are learned tacitly, preceded practically by apprenticeship with a master, and embedded in tradition. Tradition presupposes the existence of a community that holds its achievements high as the fruits of collective personal knowledge.
Rotating the pyramid clockwise illustrates Polanyi's view of knowledge as a process in all its aspects.
Inside the pyramid, we can imagine a complex mixture of neurological activities (with feelings suggested by colours) and the gradual integration of memory (suggested by the shape of the pyramid).
The pyramid represents a holon that stands for the processes of knowing within one individual.
At the fundament, experience feeds all knowledge. The top of the pyramid is a point of convergence where all knowledge unites in one. But there is no endpoint to knowledge due to an endless new feed of experience in life.