Michael Polanyi (2005 [1958/1962]) Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Routledge, London.
Summary of Preface
Michael Polanyi [aka “the other Polanyi”] states that his book is “primarily an enquiry into the nature and justification of scientific knowledge” (iv). He rejects the “ideal of scientific detachment” which has had a “destructive influence,” particularly in certain sciences, and seeks to “establish an alternative ideal of knowledge, quite generally.” “Personal knowledge,” the title of the book, might seem contradictory, as aiming at both the particular and subjective, and the objective and universal; but this will be resolved by “modifying the conception of knowing.”
He will build off Gestalt psychology, despite the fact that scientists “have run away from the philosophic implications of gestalt.”
Skilful knowing and doing is performed by subordinating a set of particulars, as clues or tools, to the shaping of a skilful achievement, whether practical or theoretical. We may then be said to become ‘subsidiarily aware’ of these particulars within our ‘focal awareness’ of the coherent entity that we achieve. Clues and tools are things used as such and not observed in themselves. They are made to function as extensions of our bodily equipment and this involves a certain change of our own being. Acts of comprehension are to this extent irreversible, and also non-critical. For we cannot possess any fixed framework within which the re-shaping of our hitherto fixed framework could be critically tested.
The “personal knowledge” gained through such participation with the world is not merely “subjective,” it is both personal and objective:
Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act claiming universal validity. Such knowing is indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a hidden reality; a contact that is defined as the condition for anticipating an indeterminate range of yet unknown (and perhaps yet inconceivable) true implications.
In addition to cut-off subjectivity, P also wants to challenge the idea of abstract, detached objectivity:
into every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and that this coefficient is no mere imperfection but a vital component of his knowledge. (v)
Part One: The Art of Knowing
Summary of Chapter 1: Objectivity
Polanyi starts off by asking, what is the lesson of the Copernican revolution? The standard answer is that the lesson is basically that we (humans) are not the center of the universe, and need to understand our actual, puny place in it.
What precisely does this mean? In a full ‘main feature’ film, recapitulating faithfully the complete history of the universe, the rise of human beings from the first beginnings of man to the achievements of the twentieth century would flash by in a single second. Alternatively, if we decided to examine the universe objectively in the sense of paying equal attention to portions of equal mass, this would result in a lifelong preoccupation with interstellar dust, relieved only at brief intervals by a survey of incandescent masses of hydrogen—not in a thousand million lifetimes would the turn come to give man even a second’s notice.
However, P replies, it is impossible for us to actually think this way, and nobody, even scientists and philosophers, actually does so.
For, as human beings, we must inevitably see the universe from a centre lying within ourselves and speak about it in terms of a human language shaped by the exigencies of human intercourse. Any attempt rigorously to eliminate our human perspective from our picture of the world must lead to absurdity.
The actual lesson of the Copernican revolution was that Copernicus sought “intellectual satisfaction” over the self-importance of the previous model; he “gave preference to man’s delight in abstract theory, at the price of rejecting the evidence of our senses.” His system is every bit as anthropocentric as the Ptolemaic one, “the difference being merely that it preferred to satisfy a different human affection.”
If we call Copernicus’s conclusions more “objective” this means we think objectivity means privileging theory over sensory experience; “So that, the theory being placed like a screen between our senses and the things of which our senses otherwise would have gained a more immediate impression, we would rely increasingly on theoretical guidance for the interpretation of our experience, and would correspondingly reduce the status of our raw impressions to that of dubious and possibly misleading appearances” (3).
P lists three “sound reasons for thus considering theoretical knowledge as more objective than immediate experience”:
1. “A theory is something other than myself.” P gives the example of a map. “A theory on which I rely is therefore objective knowledge in so far as it is not I, but the theory, which is proved right or wrong when I use such knowledge.” [And thus, can be corrected and built on over time, fine-tuned through collective effort, unlike (or at least moreso than) immediate individual perception.]
2. A theory has its own structure and so “cannot be led astray by my personal illusions.”
3. “Since the formal affirmations of a theory are unaffected by the state of the person accepting it, theories may be constructed without regard to one’s normal approach to experience.” Unlike the Ptolemaic, the Copernican model holds true from any perspective in the universe.
Thus, when we claim greater objectivity for the Copernican theory, we do imply that its excellence is, not a matter of personal taste on our part, but an inherent quality deserving universal acceptance by rational creatures. We abandon the cruder anthropocentrism of our senses—but only in favour of a more ambitious anthropocentrism of our reason. In doing so, we claim the capacity to formulate ideas which command respect in their own right, by their very rationality, and which have in this sense an objective standing.
Copernicus’s theory then led on to many further discoveries which were made possible by it.
The intellectual satisfaction which the heliocentric system originally provided, and which gained acceptance for it, proved to be the token of a deeper significance unknown to its originator. Unknown but not entirely unsuspected; for those who whole-heartedly embraced the Copernican system at an early stage committed themselves thereby to the expectation of an indefinite range of possible future confirmations of the theory, and this expectation was essential to their belief in the superior rationality and objective validity of the system. (4)
A “theory which we acclaim as rational in itself is thereby accredited with prophetic powers” in that we expect it to lead to further discoveries and confirmations. This, and not the smallness of humanity, is the real lesson of the Copernican revolution:
It inspires us, on the contrary, with the hope of overcoming the appalling disabilities of our bodily existence, even to the point of conceiving a rational idea of the universe which can authoritatively speak for itself. It is not a counsel of self-effacement, but the very reverse—a call to the Pygmalion in the mind of man.
Polanyi now traces two lineages of scientific and philosophical thought beginning with the ancient Greeks. Copernicus is in the first, Pythagorean lineage, which finds the truth of reality in numbers, and thus stands for the fundamentality of theory over observation. After Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo are also in this lineage, which tends towards the mystical and rapturous. The Pythagoreans and their Renaissance successors are mistaken, but they are definitely on to something, in Polanyi’s estimation, in the way they express and value an emotional attachment to knowledge.
The other, less mystical and more materialist line, is the older Ionian one, the atomist Democritus being the avatar. The dominance of this line in European science led to the emergence of the mechanistic worldview, which separated pure mathematics, as an abstract realm, from empirical, and thus more “real,” reality. This leads ultimately to 19th Century positivism, embodied in the perspective of Ernst Mach:
Scientific theory, according to Mach, is merely a convenient summary of experience. Its purpose is to save time and trouble in recording observations. It is the most economical adaptation of thought to facts, and just as external to the facts as a map, a timetable, or a telephone directory; indeed, this conception of scientific theory would include a timetable or a telephone directory among scientific theories. (8)
The mechanistic worldview, in turn, was replaced by relativity; P makes a big deal about Einstein not responding to the Michelson-Morley experiment, the point of which is that he was inspired not by empirical problems (as in the standard account which Polanyi is challenging), but by his own reflections and reason. After the acceptance of relativism as the dominant worldview, later experiments by Miller which supported the theory of aether were ignored, not on empirical but theoretical grounds. (Polanyi’s point here is not that Miller was correct and should therefore have been listened to; he is instead pointing out that he was ignored because his findings conflicted with what had become established theory, scientists being more interested in verification of laws than discovery.)
[At this point his argument is very reminiscent of Kuhn (not to mention Foucault), and there is a complicated relationship between Polanyi and Kuhn. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions came out in the same year as the revised version of this book. Kuhn cites Polanyi, and Polanyi expressed support for Kuhn’s position, but there is a more recent literature teasing out the similarities and differences between Polanyi’s and Kuhn’s (more “relativistic”) arguments.]
By virtue of the triumph of relativity over the previous mechanistic worldview,
modern physics has demonstrated the power of the human mind to discover and exhibit a rationality which governs nature, before ever approaching the field of experience in which previously discovered mathematical harmonies were to be revealed as empirical facts.
Thus relativity has restored, up to a point, the blend of geometry and physics which Pythagorean thought had first naïvely taken for granted. (15)
Polanyi seems to have two main points to make in this chapter: 1) fight against the separation of theory and observation into separate realms, with observation seen as more real and primary, and theory/reason as existing only in the mind, not also in nature; and 2) emphasize the value of a sense of wonder and beauty in science (particularly its theoretical side), which had been dismissed by the empiricists as “mystical.”
We cannot truly account for our acceptance of such theories without endorsing our acknowledgement of a beauty that exhilarates and a profundity that entrances us. Yet the prevailing conception of science, based on the disjunction of subjectivity and objectivity, seeks—and must seek at all costs—to eliminate from science such passionate, personal, human appraisals of theories, or at least to minimize their function to that of a negligible by-play. (16)
This is the myth of “objectivity" as mere empiricism: “This conception, stemming from a craving rooted in the very depths of our culture, would be shattered if the intuition of rationality in nature had to be acknowledged as a justifiable and indeed essential part of scientific theory.”
P castigates the use of “simplicity,” “symmetry,” and “economy” as euphemisms for “rationality.” He promises to elucidate his theory of personal knowledge as a corrective to all this nonsense.
We shall find Personal Knowledge manifested in the appreciation of probability and of order in the exact sciences, and see it at work even more extensively in the way the descriptive sciences rely on skills and connoisseurship. At all these points the act of knowing includes an appraisal; and this personal coefficient, which shapes all factual knowledge, bridges in doing so the disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity. It implies the claim that man can transcend his own subjectivity by striving passionately to fulfil his personal obligations to universal standards. (17)
