Michael Polanyi (1891-1976): Introduction to an Unfinished Revolution

This year, 2008, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the publication
of Michael Polanyi’s magnum opus, Personal Knowledge:
Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy,¹ provides the occasion not only
for the celebration of this ground-breaking philosophical work and
an extensive corpus of related works by Polanyi—some ten books,
one hundred, thirty-three published essays, plus an additional hundred
or so unpublished writings²—but also for the celebration of a
great man. Michael Polanyi was arguably one of the most important
prophetic voices—if not the most important prophetic voice—of the
twentieth century. Certainly deserving of close ranking with him
would be, to my thinking, such outstanding figures as Michael
Oakeshott, Eric Voegelin, and Bertrand de Jouvenal. (I note that,
with the present symposium, The Political Science Reviewer has
organized a symposium in recognition of each one of these individuals.)

It is difficult to imagine anyone who, throughout his or her adult
years, was more directly immersed than was Michael Polanyi in the
major cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. At the onset of
World War I, this twenty-three-year-old native of Budapest volunteered
to serve in the trenches as a medical officer for the Austro-
Hungarian army. Four years later, he witnessed the punitive consequences
of being on the losing side: dismemberment of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire and, within a year, the takeover and demolishing
of the newly-formed Hungarian republic by a Communist regime.
After a subsequent series of abortive revolts, a year later—in 1919—
the Communist government was overthrown and replaced by a still
more oppressive regime, headed by Nicolas Horthy, who—even
before he allied himself with Hitler—launched a program to exterminate
Jews, among other minorities. Polanyi fled to Germany. This
virtual dictatorship would continue until it was, by the enigmatic
logic of alliance between despots, overthrown by Hitler in 1944.

After the Communist revolution in Russia and, subsequently,
Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, Michael Polanyi—himself a nonobserving
Jew who, in 1919 (shortly after Horthy came to power and
just before fleeing to Germany), had converted to Christianity—lost
members of his own family to both the Soviet gulag and the Nazi
Holocaust. Seeing his closest Jewish colleagues and friends dismissed
from their jobs as a result of German anti-Semitic legislation,
in 1933 he escaped with his family to England. From there he
witnessed, until the end of the Second World War, what he perceived
as a continuation of forces that threatened the very existence
of Western civilization in Europe. And even after the victory of
Allied forces, he witnessed the global expansion of Communism,
once again engulfing his homeland.

As difficult as it is to imagine this interminable sequence of
horrendous events that characterized most of his adulthood, it is
perhaps not much less difficult to imagine the intellectually almostidyllic
first two decades of Polanyi’s life. It was a rarefied environment
not unlike that captured in the dramatic trilogy The Coast of
Utopia—Tom Stoppard’s portrayal of fin de siècle conversations
among a group of Russian intelligentsia.³ It was, indeed, an intellectually
stimulating atmosphere in which Michael grew up. His unusually
talented and energetic mother, Cecile, channeled most of her
energy for thirty years—beginning ten years before Michael’s birth—
into her weekly literary salons, frequented by some of the most
renown luminaries of the time. (Budapest was then the center of
European avant-garde intellectual ferment, as Paris would become
later.) Polanyi’s earliest memories, well before he himself was old
enough to become a participant, were of his eavesdropping on these
lively discussions. A great many of them were prompted by Cecile’s
fascination with current socialist and anarchist thought. These
discussions could, not inaptly, be characterized as a mix, on the one
hand, of “modernity’s” demand for doctrinal clarity and certainty as
the only perceived alternative to doubt and, on the other hand, of
“post-modernity’s” contentment with relativistic subjectivism, against
which Michael—long before he would assign these terms any
epistemological significance—soon found himself in revolt, even as
his older brother, Karl, had already found his ideological grounding
in them. Among the essayists that follow, Dale Cannon will provide
an in-depth exploration of these concepts and of the term that
Polanyi would adopt to characterize his alternative approach: “postcritical.”

Straight out of his “model school” gymnasium, Polanyi undertook
training to become a physician. By the time he received his
medical degree in 1914, he had already decided that his preference
was for a career of research in physical chemistry. Indeed, in 1913,
at the age of 22, he had already enrolled for a year of study in this
advanced field and, although subsequently he took up a brief private
medical practice, all the while he had already begun to write learned
papers in physical chemistry. In 1914 and 1915, during his military
service, he carried on correspondence with Albert Einstein. The
paper that finally emerged from his episodic research during the war
was accepted by the University of Budapest in 1916 for him to
develop further toward a Ph.D. thesis, which he would successfully
defend two years later.

In 1916 Polanyi was furloughed to receive medical treatment for
a serious illness. Subsequently he was assigned to serve in a military
hospital away from the front, during which time he managed to
continue his scientific research and writing—as well as to engage
often in lively and worldly discourse, reminiscent of his mother’s
salon sessions, with a group of nine other intellectuals that included
Bela Balazs, Karl Mannheim, and George Lukács. Throughout this
entire period, up until his official retirement from active military
duty in August 1917 (a year before Germany conceded the defeat of
the Central Powers), he continued to prepare and establish himself
as a physical chemist.

Polanyi’s flight from Hungary to Germany in 1919 marked the
beginning of a distinguished thirty-year, full-time career in that
rapidly emerging field of science. Still, throughout his career,
Polanyi felt impelled to speak out and to publish occasional essays on
politics and economics. Indeed, his first published non-scientific
essay had already appeared in 1917, in which he attempted—with
considerable depth of insight—to account for the severe disruptions
he had witnessed and to suggest some remedies based on his
developing theories of political and economic freedom. In two of the
essays that follow, Walter Gulick and Mark Mitchell will address this
important facet of his thinking.

During his long career, the more-than-two-hundred publications
reporting the results of his scientific research considerably
outnumbered all that he would eventually publish as a political and
economic theoretician and philosopher, and they would gain for him
a more extensive recognition among his colleagues. But it eventually
became apparent to him that the mounting threats to world order
demanded that he give them more of his attention. At the same time,
it was becoming increasingly clear to him that—as important as it
was to deal with the political and economic manifestations of these
problems—the problems were, at a more fundamental level, broadly
cultural and civilizational, and, as such, they called for a considerable
depth of philosophical investigation and understanding. Their resolution,
to his thinking, required no less than an understanding of the
evolution of Western civilization in the modern period—more
specifically, a challenge to modern man’s misplaced devotion to a
fundamental misconception of what constitutes scientific inquiry
and, more broadly, truly responsible, creative, and rational thinking.
His years of experience in actually doing science, not simply theorizing
about it, had equipped him well to challenge such misconceptions.
And it would later become evident that his plunge afresh into
philosophy, despite his having received none of the formal training
that “professional,” or academic, philosophers consider the sine qua
non of their credentialing—rather than preventing his attainment of
true philosophic insight—instead, freed him from the kind of paradigmatic
blinders that, to this day, seem to distract many in the
philosophical profession from even recognizing the more important
questions, much less addressing them.

In 1948, after about five years of diverting a rapidly increasing
amount of his attention to these more pressing issues, at the age of
fifty-seven, this eminent scientist decided, to the dismay of many of
his colleagues who were convinced he was but a short step away from
receiving a Nobel Prize, to devote himself full-time to philosophy—
primarily to that field within philosophical inquiry known as “epistemology,”
that is, the exploration of how we come to know that
which we can properly claim to know. Polanyi was convinced that,
apart from sheer human moral perversity, it was essentially a false
epistemology that lay at the roots of the massively destructive
movements and events of the twentieth century. He took up his new
career with a firm sense of obligation and purpose. Isaiah Berlin,
however, probably expressed the sentiments of a good number of
Michael’s colleagues when he exclaimed, “These Hungarians are
strange . . . here is a great scientist giving up the Nobel to write
mediocre works of philosophy!”⁴

Polanyi was encouraged, in part, by an invitation extended in
1947 to present his social and economic thinking in 1949 in a series
of Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen University in Scotland. He immediately
perceived the invitation as an opportunity to provide fuller
definition to his philosophical thought, and twice he successfully
pleaded for delaying, the delivery of the series, finally rescheduling
the first segment (of ten lectures) for delivery in May of 1951 and the
second segment (of ten) for delivery in November 1952. When the
time arrived, he felt that he had indeed worked out the fundamental
and revolutionary principles of his epistemology, which would eventually
form the core structure of his anticipated major work, Personal
Knowledge.

Although he was pleased with the reception he received for the
first series, he was disappointed with the response to the second
series, in which he felt he had developed more fully the revolutionary
nature of his philosophy, but which appeared to have been unappreciated.
In my only direct conversation with Polanyi many years later,
in 1970, during most of a day he generously devoted to me in Oxford,
he indicated—as he had to others—his disappointment at having
gained appreciation from very few of his own academic compatriots
for what he was attempting (probably not surprising if one considers
the narrow focus of British philosophy on logical positivism, à la A.
J. Ayer, at the time), as well as his gratification for the considerably
better reception his views had received on American campuses, at
least outside of the departments of philosophy (the latter apparently
being only slightly less rigid in their orthodoxies than in England).

During the several years following his Gifford Lectures, Polanyi
devoted himself primarily to the further development and refinement
of his thoughts in a number of presentations he made through
distinguished lectureships at major universities in the United States—
these finally, in 1958, taking the form of his signature work, Personal
Knowledge. Key concepts of his epistemology would receive still
further reworking in subsequent publications, such as The Tacit
Dimension, originally published by Doubleday in 1966 (to be reissued
by the University of Chicago Press in 2009).

The major concepts of Polanyi’s epistemology—(1) the idea that
all knowledge is either tacit or tacitly-based; (2) the understanding
of discovery in terms of a process of proceeding along a heuristic
gradient guided by tacit intimations; (3) his challenge to C. P. Snow’s
long—and still—reigning bifurcation of the academic disciplines
between the “hard” sciences and the humanities (ironic, since the
latter, along with the social “sciences,” have long aspired to emulate
the former in their methodologies) in favor of an ordering of these
various modes of knowing along an integrated and holistic continuum,
based upon a far more sophisticated and perceptive understanding
of the scientific endeavor; (4) a new and far more dynamic
definition of reality that avoids the old dualisms and is based on an
object’s or an idea’s potential for revealing itself in “indeterminate
future manifestations”; (5) a trusting reliance upon the human
capacity both to accept with humility the inevitability of error and,
eventually, cooperatively to succeed in accessing truth; (6) his full
assignment of the status of knowledge even to that which we may
never be able fully to articulate or explicitly prove—all of these are
insights that, truly and without exaggeration, represent a “Copernican
revolution” in both philosophic thought and what have become
our more common-place understandings. As some of the essayists in
this symposium suggest, (1) Polanyi’s response to modernism is his
“post-critical” epistemology, that is, his “personal,” or fiducial, and
tacitly-based epistemology, and (2) his answer to post-modernism is
essentially his related ontology of realism—proposals that, when
openly considered, would seem to be as persuasive as they are,
admittedly, revolutionary.

Why then, we must ask, have these ideas been so little understood,
if even known, particularly among those to whom they are
principally addressed—the philosophers? Indeed, why, when the
name “Michael Polanyi” is mentioned among academics, particularly
academic philosophers, is the response, more likely than not,
“Michael Who?” Phil Mullins, in his symposium review of Harry
Prosch’s introductory book on Polanyi, indicates that Prosch in 1986,
nearly three decades after the publication of Personal Knowledge,
lamented that “philosophers . . . have either ignored or discounted”
the importance of Polanyi, leaving him to a few “sociologists, economists,
psychologists, scientists, and theologians.”⁵ Now, a full five
decades after Personal Knowledge appeared, the situation has not
essentially changed. In an attempt to explain this, some have suggested
that Polanyi’s philosophical writings are difficult to understanding.
I find merit in this explanation, but only in regard to those
who have not been previously exposed to philosophy. I generally
advise these people to make their first approach to Polanyi through
any of the fine introductory secondary sources, of which there has
been a rich provision during the past three decades—the first
introduction to Polanyi’s thought appearing just a year after his death
in 1976. Professor Mullins has supplied us with the first comparative
and in-depth review of six of these excellent introductory works for
the novitiate to choose among.

However, the most alarming lack of conversance, misunderstanding,
and—often—resistance to Polanyi’s insights come not
from those who are new to philosophy but from those who have made
philosophy their profession. Here, I submit, we encounter the alltoo-
human reaction to the challenge of experiencing what Thomas
Kuhn calls a “paradigm shift,” and what Polanyi refers to as a
“breaking out.” The person who is confronted with the task of
considering a “whole new way'”of seeing or conceptualizing things
is inclined to evaluate the new paradigm, or set of concepts, through
the lens of his or her previously held conceptual, or schematic,
assumptions—which is precisely what is being questioned! What is
instead required is a suspension of the old and an indwelling, as free
as possible of the prior ordering principles, of the new. The very
process of our mental development from infancy onward, Polanyi
reminds us, requires “phases of self-destruction” in regard to old
assumptions. Using as his model for mental development that
process with which he was most intimately acquainted, scientific
discovery, Polanyi suggests that “the construction of a framework”
(whether the original one that the infant must construct, or the
reconstruction of an already-formed, but inadequate, one)

must occasionally operate by demolishing a hitherto accepted
structure, or parts of it, in order to establish an even more rigorous
and comprehensive one in its place. Scientific discovery, which
leads from one such framework to its successor, bursts the bounds
of disciplined thought in an intense if transient moment of
heuristic vision. And while it is thus breaking out, the mind is for
the moment directly experiencing its content rather than controlling
it by the use of any pre-established modes of interpretation
. . . .⁶

This “breaking out” experience is not for the faint-hearted. And
this is especially true when the paradigmatic change or conceptual
revolution being called for is of the dimensions—as I have described
Polanyi’s epistemology relative to that of the modernists and postmodernists—
of a “Copernican revolution.” In his review of Drusilla
Scott’s book, Mullins quotes the author to show how fully aware she
was of the enormity of Polanyi’s challenge to conventional wisdom:
“Polanyi is advocating such a U-turn in accepted ways of thinking
that the experience of reading him can be disorienting.”⁷

Whatever criticisms we may be justified in making of modernity,
we can be glad that we are inheritors of that part of its legacy that has
freed us from censorship by autocratic and established institutions,
whether secular or religious. Copernicus was not a beneficiary of
modernity. He could only share surreptitiously his tract,
Commentariolus (1512), in which he was so bold as to challenge the
centuries-old, indeed theologically doctrinalized, Ptolemaic and
geocentric view of the universe. For fear of his life, he resisted for
thirty-one years the public dissemination of his revolutionary, heliocentric
thesis until finally a student persuaded him to publish this in
his De Revolutionibus, in 1543. Conveniently for him, he died (of
natural causes) on the day it was issued, although advocacy of
heliocentrism was promptly forbidden by the Catholic Church, and
again banned in 1632 when Galileo offered telescopic evidence to
support heliocentrism.

By then, the emerging scientific community, for the most part
(Tycho Brahe being a notable exception), had come to a private
consensus on the merits of the heliocentric view. Still, as late as the
end of the seventeenth century, Johannes Kepler’s introduction to
the Copernican system occurred only because his professor at
Tübingen University, Michael Maestlin, selected him and a few
other students from the rest, to confidentially share with them the
Copernican view. With the rest of his students, Professor Maestlin,
like his other colleagues, continued to teach the Ptolemaic system.
The price Kepler would later pay for his enlightenment was excommunication
by the authorities of his own Lutheran church, and the
placing of a papal ban upon his teaching this view. However, Kepler
lived long enough to benefit from the emerging pressures of modernity
and its erosion of ecclesiastical authority sufficient to permit the
publication of his heliocentric astronomy, Epitome astronomiae
Copernicanae, in 1621—the first astronomy textbook based on the
Copernican model.

More than a century would elapse between when Copernicus
wrote his first tract challenging Ptolemaic geocentrism and when
academicians could first share this revolutionary paradigm openly
with their students!

Today in the Western world, we do not have to cope with the
official censorship and suppression of intellectual expression that
characterized much of the world prior to the full emergence of
modernity. However, as John Stuart Mill warned us, unofficial
censorship, the self-censorship of social conformity—which, indeed,
Alexis de Tocqueville perceived as more prevalent and more
destructive of free expression in American than in any other society
that he knew—can be even more subtle and insidious, and more
pervasive and universally stultifying, than any form of official (governmental
or ecclesiastical) suppression. Only these considerations,
it seems to me, enable us to approach an understanding of how
professional and academic associations have been so successful—
even in the midst of a society that is rightfully proud of its First
Amendment protections and of its universities that laud the principle
of academic freedom—in ignoring and resisting the most
prophetic voices among them.

The Polanyi Society was founded in 1972—with the publication
of its journal, Tradition & Discovery,⁸ starting about a year later—
partly to encourage scholarship in Polanyian thought, but also to
introduce to others what members considered an important and
constructive correction to long-established perspectives that no
longer served what Polanyi saw as humanity’s highest moral aspiration
and purpose: namely, to open, broaden, and integrate our
understanding and, thereby, to bring us into closer appreciation of,
and oneness with, that which is transcendent and, not inappropriately,
perceived as “holy.”

A number of intellectual associations that have formed around
some of the kindred prophetic figures of the twentieth century, to
which I’ve referred, appear to agree that progress in such a high
endeavor has been—probably necessarily—slow. If the full century
(indeed, more) that was required for the revolutionary views of
Copernicus to finally be admitted to a fair and open hearing in
academic discourse is to be taken as instructive, then we can take
heart in the hope that, since the initial publication of Polanyi’s
Personal Knowledge is now fifty years in the past, perhaps we have
come almost halfway. Regardless, it is clear that the revolution
initiated by Polanyi’s insights is still an unfinished one. Further, it is
important to recall that Michael Polanyi was the first to recognize—
indeed, he constantly insisted—that his post-critical philosophy,
itself, must not be regarded as finished. He provided many hints, in
his writings and conversations, of how we might continue from
where he left off. But, just as his epistemology was grounded in a
willingness to trust one’s own intimations, his personal relations with
those whom he mentored were grounded in his fiducial assurance to
them that they—in their own pioneering pursuits—would be guided
by tacit intimations even beyond his own. Therefore, he urged all
who entered into conversation with him to develop their thoughts
still further by challenging his own conclusions, as well as by
deepening their understanding of the implications of his insights
through applying them.

Diane Yeager, Paul Lewis, and Tony Clark have taken the
occasion of this symposium to do precisely that. Professor Yeager,
recognizing that the examination of human judging (in contrast to
what some have identified as other mental activities) has been
largely neglected, has taken up the daunting task of remedying this
neglect by considering judgment in the context of Polanyi’s postcritical
reflections. Similarly, Professor Lewis, concerned—as was
Polanyi—with the processes of moral reasoning and the moral self,
takes it a step further by exploring the pedagogical implications of
these. Professor Clark then ventures to explore the implications of
Polanyi’s epistemology for Christian theology and worship, a task
that Polanyi himself felt somewhat ill-equipped to pursue very far.
I find that the reflections offered by the seven individuals who have
converged for this symposium represent some of the most interesting
and exciting work going on among Polanyian scholars—indeed,
as exciting as the challenges that continue to emerge and confront us.

Walter B. Mead
President, Polanyi Society

NOTES

1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958; rev. ed. New
   York: Harper & Row/Torchbook, 1962.
2. Available for research in the Michael Polanyi Archive Collection
   at the University of Chicago Regenstein Library.
3. Initially staged at the National Theater, London, 2002.
4. Quoted in an excellent, and the only comprehensive, biography
   of Michael Polanyi: William T. Scott and Martin X. Moleski, S.J.,
   Michael Polanyi: Scientist and Philosopher (Oxford University Press,
   2005), 208.
5. Harry Prosch, Michael Polanyi: A Critical Exposition (Albany,
   NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), 6.
6. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 196.
7. Drusilla Scott, Everyman Revived: The Common Sense of
   Michael Polanyi, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), ii.
8. Online copies of Tradition & Discovery, published three
   times a year, are available, along with other information about the
   Society and its activities at http://www.missouriwestern.edu/orgs/
   polanyi/. To participate in an ongoing philosophical discussion, you
   are welcome to join the Polanyi Electronic Discussion List by going
   to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/polanyi_list/join.