“[A]t the heart of Polanyi’s conception of knowing is his affirmation of a reality external to the knower, a reality that reveals itself unexpectedly in what Polanyi termed ‘indefinite future manifestations.’ This reality consists in both tangible and intangible elements; yet, as we saw, the intangibles are, in some respects, more real than the tangibles. The claim that intangible reality is more real, more meaningful, than tangible reality flies in the face of the materialistic reductionism that prevailed in the mid-twentieth century. An objectivist framework insisting that all knowledge must be explicitly verifiable is necessarily prejudiced in favor of a reductionist account of reality. This is clearly reflected in the analytical model of science best exemplified in Descartes’ Discourse on Method, which seeks to break all objects of inquiry into their most fundamental parts. With the tools provided by an atomistic conception of the universe, reductionism became an approach to reality that views all things as reducible to physical properties. It claims to be capable of understanding all phenomena in terms of material forces.
“Such a view of knowledge makes it impossible to make credible truth claims about such things as morality, aesthetics, or religion. These are necessarily relegated to the realm of purely subjective knowledge, but because knowledge per se must be explicit and verifiable, ‘subjective knowledge’ is really an oxymoron. Subjective knowledge, in the world of objectivism, is more properly identified as a private feeling without any truth content whatsoever. As we have seen, Polany’s goal in formulating a new account of knowing was to reintroduce the possibility of making meaningful truth claims about nonphysical reality. For Polanyi, the horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism resulted directly from a critical framework that precludes at the outset any possibility of making meaningful moral claims. Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowing opens the door to the very ideals that had been banished by a false view of knowledge. In the absence of those ideals, the world had been violently shaken. But moral ideals, while central to human existence, are not the only ones Polanyi’s account of knowledge admits. His anti-reductionist theory of reality allows us to reconsider the very nature of nature and man’s place in it. In order to provide an alternative to reductionist accounts of reality, Polanyi worked long at developing an ontology according to which the fundamental laws of matter were given their due, but did not account for all of reality.
“Modern reductionism has its roots in the new science of the early modern period. The mechanical philosophy of Galileo tended to describe all reality in terms of matter in motion. This view found most extreme form in the materialistic reductionism suggested by the nineteenth-century French philosopher Pierre Simon Laplace. According to Laplace, a mind that could know at one time ‘all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the entities which compose it . . . would embrace in the same formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom: nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes.” Theoretically the future and the past are perfectly predictable, if all reality can be reduced to matter acted upon by physical forces. Clearly, the notion of free will finds itself orphaned by such a conception — as does any meaningful conception of moral responsibility. Polanyi warns of the far-reaching effects of a reductionist conception of reality, for it is a harbinger of disorder for all intellectual pursuits. It is a ‘menace to all cultural values, including those of science, by an acceptance of a conception of man derived from a Laplacean ideal of knowledge and by the conduct of human affairs in the light of such a conception.’”
— from Mark T. Mitchell, Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing (ISI Books, 2006)
This post was originally published on 3/16/25.
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