In the twentieth century, the Cartesian ideal of certain knowledge based on unshakeable foundations collapsed, but the dust has not yet settled. This long-standing model of how true philosophy and science proceeds combined with a materialist ontology and reached deeply into Western culture. Accordingly, much of Modern thinking, with its skeptical, analytic, and reductionist tendencies, moved to banish mythological or “enchanted” thinking in favor of scientifically verifiable facts.
Philosophers today recognize that the Cartesian picture brought a false ideal of reasoning that, for better and worse, guided the development of thought and action for well over three centuries. The question for us now is whether or not we can, with a better understanding of epistemology, repair the excesses of Cartesianism and find a way to move forward toward new or rejuvenated moral sources of meaning. The challenge is to find “responsible enchantment ,” if it is still available, and to recognize when outmoded habits of thinking are surreptitiously undermining what should be viable moral sources. For instance, the very mention of “if it is still available” in the preceding sentence betrays the Modern tendency in the secular age to imagine a vast, meaningless, and merely material universe as the default ontology, even though an ontology untainted by reductionist epistemology provides the possibility of emergent entities and real meanings.
The thesis of this book is that the ideas of Charles Taylor and Michael Polanyi together can show the errors of the past, how those errors can be amended, and how we can move forward responsibly to explore new imaginaries that can provide us with meaningful and enriched ways of being and being together in a new modernity.
Imaginaries and Epistemologies
Charles Taylor’s work, in books such as Sources of Self (1989) and A Secular Age (2007), put the Modern way of thinking into question. Taylor presents a historical dialogue between religious thinkers, political actors, and philosophical positions that lends great nuance to understanding the relationship between personal and political identity, scientific and secular assumptions, and philosophical and religious thought and feeling. Taylor shows many benefits in the development of the secular age we inhabit, but he also points out how Modern epistemology can erroneously lead us to denigrate moral sources that could be developed and available to persons in the twenty-first century.
A large part of Taylor’s endeavor is to understand the “imaginaries ” of the past and of current times. Social and cosmic imaginaries help shape our understanding of what is possible and where we fit in together. An imaginary reaches deeper and wider than a theory; it can mediate our experience of the world by embedding a picture of how the world works. A social imaginary is thus, in a sense, a shared starting place for theories, but, in another sense, it is also theory-laden. When we live with theories long enough, their conceptions become tacitly and unconsciously held, and much of the picture they comprise is felt as an intuition rather than explicitly thought at a level that can be rationally challenged. What is “natural” for us to accept as viable candidates for how the world works and how we should live together is thus shaped not only by our experience and practices, but also by an epistemological conception of what counts as legitimate knowledge and what, in contrast, is a suspect contention or a tenuous hope.
Taylor shows us how, when ideas change over the course of time, some imaginaries lose their credibility and new imaginaries are made possible. Polanyi would agree. He saw how analytic and materialist assumptions came to dominate the background of how many of us think. He saw these critical and reductionist ideas flower theoretically in the early twentieth century with the advance of logical positivism in the philosophy of science. By the middle of the century, this brand of thinking had spread into many other fields of knowledge and seemed to reach its apex. But this was also the time of a rising tide of dissatisfaction with the old epistemology; revolutionary voices became stronger, and the thought of Michael Polanyi and Charles Taylor began to explicitly intersect.
Twentieth Century Revolutionaries
Polanyi was a scientist born into a Hungarian-Jewish family in Budapest. During World War I, he served in the Austro-Hungarian army as a physician. In 1919, after the retreat of the Red Army, Polanyi emigrated to Germany. In 1926, he came to head an eminent research laboratory at what is currently known as the Max Planck Society in Munich. 1 In order to survive the ascent of Hitler, in 1933 Polanyi accepted a Chair in Physical Chemistry at the University of Manchester and emigrated to England. Polanyi studied, wrote on, and discussed social, economic, and political philosophy with eminent scholars of the time, and in the 1940s he turned his attention to the roots of thought in epistemology.
As a scientist, Polanyi saw the shortcomings of the analytic and reductionist approach that motivated the Vienna positivist school. He saw in the actual practice of science, and in the mechanics of human perception, an alternative that involved tacit knowing , interpretive frameworks , and personal judgment. Correlatively, he established an ontology in which living beings emerge from basic matter, but are not fully reducible to those subsidiary conditions . He carefully worked out an account of how mind stands in relation to matter, and how responsible, committed human investigation should proceed. Polanyi showed how personal judgment was not eliminable, even in the sciences. He began to lay out his epistemology and his notion of a stratified structure of being in his Gifford Lectures in 1951–1952. These were developed and published as Personal Knowledge in 1958. A short introduction to his ideas can be found in his The Tacit Dimension (1966; reprinted by the University of Chicago Press in 2009), and another good introduction to Polanyi’s thought can be found in Science, Faith and Society (1964).
In the 1960s, Polanyi, Marjorie Grene , and Edward Pols organized a series of conferences under the aegis of the Study Group on the Foundations of Cultural Unity and then the Study Group on the Unity of Knowledge . 2 It was clear by then that the old notion of a unity of knowledge by means of a reduction to physics needed to be overhauled—both in the interest of presenting a plausible picture of knowledge and to avert detrimental impacts on culture, the human sciences, and political systems. In the preface to The Anatomy of Knowledge, a selection of essays from the 1965 and 1966 conferences, 3 Polanyi, Grene, and Pols write:
Since the 17th century the kind of knowledge afforded by mathematical physics has come more and more to furnish mankind with an ideal for all knowledge… [This ideal] is fundamentally mistaken, the result has been to debase the conception of man entertained by the psychological and social sciences and at the same time to isolate science from the humanistic core of history and criticism…Although these views have been developing since the Copernican Revolution, they have gained power to shake the foundations of our culture only in the last hundred years. (1969, ix)
The authors go on to provide a statement of purpose:
Convinced that there is an unsuspected convergence of ideas separately developed in various field, we propose a meeting of a number of persons who actively oppose in their work the scientism, and the related methodological and ontological oversimplifications, which in one or another form are ascendant in every field of scholarly and creative endeavor. (x)
This statement is a manifesto of revolution against the dominant Modern conceptions that had infiltrated academic and cultural understanding. Old notions of reduction to absolute foundations and a purely objective knowledge were being discredited, and new notions of how we know and what constitutes good grounds were being developed and applied. Charles Taylor was invited to attend the first meeting of the Study Group in 1965, and was an active participant in ten of the eleven meetings that followed until the Group’s last official meeting in 1970 (Interpretations of Life and Mind, 1971, xvi). 4
Michael Polanyi’s post-critical philosophy of tacit knowing and emergent being was part of the revolution in thought that helped depose that dominant Modern picture. Charles Taylor, approaching from the continental traditions of Hegel and Heidegger , was among the revolutionaries. Wrapped within Taylor’s analysis of intellectual history is a philosophy of knowing and being that seeks to correct the epistemological errors of modernity that block constructive dialogue. He sees how theoretical knowledge is grounded in experience, but also how no fact of experience is simply raw data. Taylor comes with the neo-Hegelian and hermeneutic understanding that individual theses are properly understood in light of a synthesis, which is often in the background and tacit.
The Pull of the Past
Polanyi and Taylor’s philosophies are part of a greater shift in understanding surrounding how knowing works. What seemed revolutionary in the 1960s might seem common sense to many today, but the revolution has not been won. La lotta continua, as Taylor would say. 5 The scientistic reductionism that would abolish human meaning and morality has been repudiated from both within the analytic tradition, e.g., with Wittgenstein and W.V. Quine , and from without, e.g., with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty . But the Modern picture still flourishes underground in many influential ways. This is partially because the picture was not entirely wrong, and partially because habits of thinking, formed through centuries, still have not been replaced with plausible alternatives that can match the power of the old Modern modes. The Study Group’s worry in the 1960s is still a concern today: “There have been counter-movements…but they do not appear to be equipped for overthrowing and replacing [the current scientific outlook]” (Anatomy, ix).
This impotence and our recidivism are due partly to a failure of imagination—a failure to build up to new imaginaries with the power to replace the imaginaries generated from the old Modern picture of knowing. It seems that after the revolution we are left with either the post-analytic desert landscape of a Quine, who can provide no meaning with any fullness, or the postmodern plethora of Nietzschean wills to power.
Rather than fall to either extreme, the strategy of an enlightened analytic philosophy and phenomenology has been to take bits of current experience and local ideas and to attempt to analyze and develop conceptions that are, purportedly, severable from their long history or a much wider context. Another popular strategy is to integrate scientific discoveries with philosophic ideas in order to make the result more plausible to Modern sensibilities. In this way, we tend to proceed as if we could have an objective account by forgetting about the past and starting from what is conceptually near at hand right now, or by mimicking a popular conception of how science proceeds in an “experimental ” philosophy . We tend to forget that there is a tacit background to these ideas that have been formed over the course of cultural and intellectual history.
Proceeding piecemeal by phenomenological analysis, analyzing current moral intuitions, or looking at actual human behavior and physiology can produce much insight in philosophy. But an approach like Taylor’s that takes a broader history of ideas into account can do a better job of providing us with a coherent perspective on how those insights might fit together into some broader imaginative understanding...