The Study of Man (Routledge Revivals)

The Lindsay Memorial Lectures 1958

Michael Polanyi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134513260
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was an eminent theorist across the fields of philosophy, physical chemistry and economics. Elected to the Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his contributions to research in the social sciences, and his theories on positivism and knowledge, are of critical academic importance. The three lectures included in this comprehensive volume, first published in 1959, argue for Polanyi's principle of 'tacit knowing' as a fundamental component of knowledge. They were intended to accompany Polanyi's earlier work, Personal Knowledge, and as a tribute to the philosophical and educational work of Lord A. D. Lindsay.

Lecture Two

The Calling of Man

I CLOSED my last lecture with a far-reaching promise. I said that the acknowledgment of understanding as a valid form of knowledge will allow us to study all human experience by essentially the same method. I actually sketched out a path which would lead smoothly from the exact sciences to the study of man, and even further, to a confrontation with man, engaged in responsible decisions under a firmament of universal obligations.

This is a stimulating programme; but whatever its merits, it is clearly too vast to be carried out here convincingly. I must limit myself therefore to an illustration of its more salient features. These will become apparent in the form of certain problems which we meet when trying to pursue this programme. We shall see in particular a cluster of difficulties arising around the conception of responsibility.

I have said that the shaping of knowledge by the knower can lay claim to universal validity by submitting to a strict sense of responsibility. But though this doctrine may satisfy us when applied to the domain of natural science, it meets with increasing difficulties when we pass on to the study of man acting responsibly within the bounds of his human obligations. Such studies seem to involve us in responsibilities which go far beyond those previously envisaged in recognizing the claims of a personal knowledge. For here we have to understand actions relating primarily to moral, possibly civic, or even religious obligations, and in doing so we shall exercise a judgment which is based in its turn on our own moral, civic or religious beliefs.

But can we accredit an understanding shaped by our moral and civic responsibilities? We know how such responsibilities shade into political obligations, and how these in their turn form part of the established institutional framework, or else are merely the expression of political partisanship. Are we to subscribe then to a theory of knowledge which allows the shaping of knowledge to depend on such ephemeral and parochial impulses? Surely, a judgment determined by the outcome of a struggle for power and profit cannot be accepted as authentic; at some point the acceptance of moral responsibility for the shaping of our knowledge of man will inevitably turn into an acceptance of bias, prejudice and corruption. Personal knowledge, as established by a responsible decision of the knower, degenerates here into a mere caricature of itself.

I think this shows that our conception of personal knowledge had not yet been sufficiently consolidated. We must lay down the foundations once more, in such terms that we can develop from them a conception of human responsibility not liable to be misconstrued as subservience to politics or business.

This task will appear, on reflection, to form part of a greater problem. If we are to vindicate human responsibility against the compulsions exercised by man’s social setting, we shall have to establish first the existence of a human mind capable of making decisions of its own within a human body controlled by the laws of physics and chemistry. We shall have to think also of the fact that the human person which we are trying to consolidate has come into being by evolution from an inanimate universe. And, on the other hand, we shall have to face the paradox that man’s decisions are regarded as reflecting the highest degree of personal judgment precisely to the extent to which they appear most rational and in this sense most impersonal. Though we may not be able to explore all these great questions here, we shall have so to shape our conception of man’s dignity and obligations that these problems should not find us quite unprepared.

But before we try to build up this argument, let us go over once more and reinforce the ground on which it is to be based. The theory of Personal Knowledge offers an interpretation of meaning. It says that no meaningful knowledge can be acquired, except by an act of comprehension which consists in merging our awareness of a set of particulars into our focal awareness of their joint significance. Such an act is necessarily personal, for it assimilates the particulars in question to our bodily equipment; we are aware of them only in terms of the things we are focally observing.

We can speak then of two kinds of knowledge. To know something in the usual sense is to be focally aware of it. To be aware of something subsidiarily means that we are not aware of it in itself, but as a clue or an instrument pointing beyond itself. Such awareness may vary over all grades of consciousness, and in consequence of this the particulars of a comprehensive entity may be unspecifiable in two different senses of the term. The clues offered by processes within our body, of which we become aware in terms of things perceived outside, may be completely unconscious. An extreme case of this is our awareness of the processes taking place in our eyes when we look at something: we are aware of these only in terms of the things observed by virtue of them. In other cases we are vaguely conscious of the particulars functioning as clues. We may instantly recognize a familiar writing or voice, or a person’s gait, or a well-cooked omelette, while being unable to tell—except quite vaguely—by what particulars we recognize these things. The same is true of the recognition of pathological symptoms, of the diagnosis of diseases and the identification of specimens. In all these instances we learn to comprehend an entity without ever getting to know, or to know clearly, the particulars that constitute it. Here we have things composed of particulars that are un-specifiable because they are unknown.

But a particular pointing beyond itself may be fully visible or audible and yet be unspecifiable in the sense that if attention is directed on it focally—so that it is now known in itself—it ceases to function as a clue or a sign and loses its meaning as such. I have mentioned that by repeating a word a number of times you can reduce it to a mere sound without meaning. Similarly, our awareness of a pattern can be dissolved by concentrating our attention on its separate details in turn. Dismemberment of a comprehensive entity produces incomprehension of it and in this sense the entity is logically unspecifiable in terms of its particulars. Both kinds of unspecifiabilities, the stronger one, due to our ignorance of the subsidiary particulars, and the weaker one, due to the purely functional meaning of such particulars, will play their part in my argument.

I shall proceed now approximately as follows. First, I shall show that the two levels of personal knowledge, that of a comprehensive entity and that of its particulars (in terms of which the entity is unspecifiable), represent two distinct levels of reality; and second, that there obtains between two such levels a peculiar logical relationship, derived from the distinction between subsidiary and focal awareness. Once I have established this relationship for the example of two comparatively low levels of reality, I shall proceed to erect on top of these a consecutively rising set of levels, right up to that of responsible human personhood. Within this framework it will appear possible for man to exercise a responsible choice, even though he admittedly remains rooted in lower forms of existence in which there is no room for such choices. These acts of choice will be characterized by comparing them to acts of discovery. They will be seen to exert personal initiative to the utmost by the act of submitting to the demands of their own self-set ideals. To acknowledge the reality of their freedom will appear then as equivalent to an acknowledgment of these ideals as valid. This will consolidate responsible choice in the status ascribed to it by the conception of Personal Knowledge.

The two levels of reality which I shall first contemplate, will both lie in the domain of the inanimate. The upper level will be composed of machines. Every kind of machine, from typewriters to motor-cars and from telephones to pendulum clocks are to be comprised here; and each of these kinds of machines will be represented by hundreds of different types, each type being present in many thousands of individual samples. As to the lower level, it will consist of the parts of machines seen in themselves as mere inanimate objects, their function as parts of a machine being entirely disregarded.

Let me show first that the upper of these two levels is in fact unspecifiable in terms of the lower. Take a watch to pieces and examine, however carefully, its separate parts in turn, and you will never come across the principles by which a watch keeps time. This may sound trivial, but is actually of decisive significance. For the study of inanimate objects constitutes the science of physics and chemistry and the study of machines forms the sciences of engineering, and we may now conclude, therefore, quite generally, that the subject-matter of engineering cannot be specified in terms of physics and chemistry. Let loose an army of physicists and chemists to analyse and describe in utmost detail an object which you want to identify as a machine, and you will find that their results can never tell you whether the object is a machine and if so, what purpose it serves and how.

The reason for this is, of course, quite simple. Textbooks of physics and chemistry do not deal with the purposes served by machines. But the science of engineering speaks at length of these purposes, such as communication, locomotion, heating, lighting, spinning, weaving and hundreds of other manufactures. Hence engineering can deal also with the way in which these purposes are achieved by the aid of machines, while physics and chemistry can form no conception of them.

But lest you may still feel that these observations are too obvious to merit serious attention, I shall recast them to make their true scope more fully apparent. Assume, for the sake of argument, that we possess a complete atomic theory of inanimate matter. We can then envisage the operations of a Universal Mind in the sense of Laplace. The initial positions and velocities of all the atoms of the world being given for one moment of time, and all the forces acting between the atoms being known, the Laplacean Mind could compute all future configurations of all atoms throughout the world, and from this result we could read off the exact physical and chemical typography of the world at any future point of time. But we now know that there is a great and varied class of objects which cannot be identified, and still less understood, by establishing their complete physical and chemical topography, for they are constructed with a view to a purpose which physics and chemistry cannot define. So it follows that the Laplacean Mind would be subject to the same limitation: it could not identify any machine nor tell us how it works. Indeed, the Laplacean Mind could identify no object or process, the meaning of which consists in serving a purpose. It would ignore therefore the existence not only of machines but also of any kind of tools, foodstuffs, houses, roads and any written records or spoken messages.

We can broaden this generalization even further by recalling that, according to the theory of Personal Knowledge, all meaning lies in the comprehension of a set of particulars in terms of a coherent entity—a comprehension which is a personal act that can never be replaced by a formal operation. Hence it follows that a Laplacean Universal Mind would know little that means anything. For though it could admittedly advance from its knowledge of atomic configurations —by aid of the kinetic theory of matter—to some physical and chemical facts, it could never attain any knowledge of such truly meaningful objects as living beings and the things essentially related to the interests of living beings. The mathematical monster which was thought capable of reading off the future of all human endeavours from the atomic configuration of a primordially incandescent universe, appears actually restricted to a range of predictions that are of negligible interest to man. We shall find this conclusion confirmed by examining more closely the peculiar logical relation between the elements of two successive levels of reality.^*

Let us go back again then to machines and define the logical relation between the two levels of knowledge that apply respectively to machines as organized wholes and to their parts as mere inanimate bodies. Machines are constructed of parts which jointly serve a given purpose by operating according to certain principles. The operational principles of machines are known to the science of engineering and unknown to physics and chemistry. But admittedly, when operational principles describe the parts of machines as organs p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Lecture I. Understanding Ourselves
• Lecture II. The Calling of Man
• Lecture III. Understanding History
• Bibliographical Note