Reading and Talking Polanyi

I recently finished reading a book about the brilliant thinker Michael Polanyi.  The book named for him, written by Mark T. Mitchell for the Library of Modern Thinkers series, was a great introduction to his life and works.  And when I completed it I realized I should have read it before attempting Polanyi's works themselves, particularly Personal Knowledge, with which I got bogged down and gave up, not because I thought it a boring book; my brain just couldn't keep up!

First of all, Mitchell gave a thorough overview of Polanyi's background which traced his interdisciplinary roots.  His studies included medicine, economics, politics, and physical chemistry, all of which later culminated in his turn toward philosophy.  Polanyi scholars today struggle to categorize this great mind because of his diverse areas of scholarship.  But I think this is one of the things that fascinates me about Polanyi.  His inability to be neatly labeled seems to indicate a defiance of the modern scientific thinking of which he was so critical.  It also points toward a greatly integrated mind; one that aimed at a holistic understanding of life and truth.

Here are some of my favorite thoughts of Polanyi's (carefully selected and presented by Mitchell):

"[O]bjectivism has totally falsified our conception of truth, by exalting what we can know and prove, while covering up with ambiguous utterances all we can know and cannot prove . . ." (37)

"No human mind can function without accepting authority, custom, and tradition; it must rely on them for the mere use of a language." (64)

"I declare myself committed to the belief in an external reality gradually accessible to knowing, and I regard all true understanding as an intimation of such a reality which, being real, may yet reveal itself to our deepened understanding in an indefinite range of unexpected manifestations." (83)

"Any attempt to eliminate our human perspective from our picture of the world must lead to absurdity." (96)

A few themes, as I hope are evident from these quotations, are as follows:

• a rejection of scientific objectivism in favor of a concept of "tacit knowledge"
• the underlying necessity of belief in all learning and knowing
• the belief in an external reality that can be truly, but not exhaustively, known
• a refutation of the "view from nowhere" concept (to use Thomas Nagel's phrase)