Philosophers of Consciousness

Polanyi, Lonergan, Voegelin, Ricoeur, Girard, Kierkegaard

Eugene Webb

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295805276
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Philosophers of Consciousness is both an expository study of the thought of the six figures it focuses on and an original exploration of the themes they address. In addition, as Eugene Webb states, "it does not hesitate to probe the more problematic areas of the thought of each thinker and to suggest what to some of their advocates will probably seem rather bold and controversial interpreations of their ideas." The book reveals some deep differences that set the six off against one another in what is basically a clash between the intellectual emphasis of Lonergan and the more existential approaches of the other thinkers in this study. Readers of Kierkegaard may find much of Webb's interpretation surprising and perhaps disturbing.

CHAPTER 1

Michael Polanyi

Consciousness
as Focal and Subsidiary Awareness

OF THE FOUR thinkers to be studied in this book, Michael Polanyi is the only one, with the possible exception of Eric Voegelin, to offer anything especially colorful in the way of biographical background. Even in Polanyi’s case, it must be said, the color lies less in his own life than in that of his family: the Polanyis came out of Hungary in the early part of this century to dwell in diverse milieux and to play prominent, if very different, roles in each of them. Peter Drucker, who was a close friend of Polanyi’s elder brother, Karl, wrote about the family recently in his memoir, Adventures of a Bystander. He says their father “was born between 1825 and 1830 in a small Jewish settlement in the Hungarian mountains” and that after participating in the Hungarian revolt against the Habsburgs in 1848 he “escaped to Switzerland where he studied engineering and became a stern Calvinist” (p. 127). There, says Drucker, he married an anarchist Russian countess who had also fled to Switzerland in the aftermath of a bomb plot (for which she had built the bomb in the chemistry laboratory of the Czar’s School for Daughters of the Nobility). In the 1920s the eldest of the Polanyi brothers, Otto, became a major industrialist in Italy, where he changed his name to Otto Pol.¹ He also became a Marxist and a financial backer of the socialist newspaper Avanti, of which Mussolini was the editor. Later Otto became disillusioned with Marxism and converted to a nationalistic political ideology of class unity based on a corporate state. This was, of course, the ideology that later became known as fascism. Otto evidently played a major role in converting Mussolini to it also. Subsequently, however, he became disillusioned with both fascism and Mussolini and ended, says Drucker, “a broken, bitter old man” (p. 129). The next brother in age, Adolph, emigrated to Brazil, where he sought “an interracial society in which whites, blacks, and Indians would meld to create a new civilization, modern yet tribal, free yet not individualist” (p. 129).

After Otto and Adolph came their sister, Mousie, who around 1900 at the age of nineteen became a leader in the Hungarian folk movement.² This had an artistic side (Bartok and Dohnanyi) as well as a political and social vision: of a life centered in the communal village. Mousie Polanyi edited a magazine of this movement and through this organ helped to define and direct it. One of her followers was Josip Broz, later Marshal Tito, whose ideas about the self-governing village community and the self-governing factory community were not Marxist, says Drucker, but based on Mousie Polanyi’s movement of “rural sociology” (pp. 130–31).

Karl Polanyi, who eventually became a professor of economic history at Bennington and Columbia, was between Mousie and Michael in age. When Drucker first met him in Vienna in the depressed period after World War I, he was editing the Austrian Economist and living in poverty while giving most of his income to the relief of Hungarian refugees. Karl is now best known for his study of the social and cultural effects of the rise of capitalistic market economies in The Great Transformation, which he wrote after emigrating to the United States shortly before World War II. Its central argument was that the significant factor in that development was the extension of the market system and its impersonal law of supply and demand from goods and capital, where it could function appropriately, to land and especially labor, with the effect that people came to be considered commodities with a purely economic value. To counteract this dehumanizing tendency, Karl advocated redistribution of wealth and reciprocity of commitments and obligations according to social and political rather than economic norms. He hoped to find some precedent in history for such a system, an illustration of a possible alternative and a proof of its viability, but although he spent the remainder of his life searching for it, he could never find an example that stood up to careful scrutiny. He believed nonetheless that the logical and inevitable end of capitalism would lie in fascist tyranny unless his alternative could be realized. The driving force of his life was his need to keep trying against all frustrations to oppose this impending tragic destiny. “If there was one article of faith,” says Drucker, “to which all the Polanyis subscribed—from Karl’s father on—it was that the ‘laissez-faire’ Liberals of the nineteenth-century Manchester School were wrong in their assertion that the market is the only alternative to serfdom. Indeed the market creed of the Manchester Liberals may be called the hereditary enemy of the House of Polanyi” (p. 138). “But the more Karl delved into prehistory, primitive economics, and classical antiquity,” he goes on to say, “the more proof did he find for the hated and despised market creed of Ricardo and Bentham, and also of Karl’s contemporary bogeymen, Ludwig von Mises and Frederick Hayek of the Austrian School” (p. 138).

Michael Polanyi, too, suggests Drucker, was looking for an alternative in the form of what he calls, rather strangely in the light of Polanyi’s actual writings, “Michael’s stoic desire-free individual” (p. 138). “At first,” Drucker says, “like all the Polanyis, he was concerned with society and social processes. He looked to science to find the way out between a bourgeois capitalism that denied community and a Marxist socialism that denied freedom and the person. But very soon he gave up on society and became instead a humanist philosopher, opposed alike to the positivism and rationalism of the traditional ‘Liberal’ and to the anti-human collectivism of the Socialists and Marxists. Human existence for Michael Polanyi is existence as an isolated individual; and the individual is grounded in values and ethic, rather than in logic and reason” (pp. 131–32).

This last comment would probably have bewildered Polanyi, since his writings, besides having important political and social implications, were devoted primarily and with passionate intensity to an effort to understand and clarify the workings of genuine intelligence and thereby to open a clearer path for the life of reason. It was this above all else that he looked to for a solution to the problems that in his and his father’s generations had become insistently conscious among the various Polanyis. Far, however, from giving up on society, he held that only in cooperation with others in the development of understanding and in responsible action can the full development of human personhood take place.³ Nor is it clear what in Polanyi’s writings Drucker could have taken as advocacy of the ideal of a completely “desire-free” individual, since he argues against the idea of the totally detached scientist and in favor of the necessary role of intellectual passion in inquiry (Study of Man, pp. 36–37).

It is worth mentioning this background of political and cultural concern, because it makes clear what might otherwise be easy to overlook as a result of the emphasis of the present study on theoretical issues having to do with consciousness and cognition. In fact, the practical, ethical, and political implications of such issues have been of central importance to each of the thinkers to be studied. Voegelin is of course well known as a political philosopher, and he was himself very closely involved during his Vienna years in the intellectual circles of Karl’s two “bogeymen,” Hayek and Mises. Despite his largely unwarranted reputation as a “conservative” thinker, moreover, Voegelin also differed from these political economists in the same way Drucker indicated that Michael did. Despite his distrust of coercion, even for commendable ends, on the part of a centralized state, Voegelin would have been as opposed as any Polanyi to an ideology of “laissez-faireism.” The fundamental principle of such a creed in practical terms is the centering of all genuine value in the egoistic desires of economic agents, a principle Voegelin explicitly criticized in his study of Helvetius, where he pointed out the parallel of Helvetius’s concept of “amour de soi” to what Augustine called the “amor sui” in opposition to what he considered the true center of the soul’s life in the “amor Dei.”⁴

Paul Ricoeur has also been interested in political issues as an author of political essays and a member of the editorial board of the left-Catholic periodical, Esprit, and was himself involved actively in the political events in France in the late 1960s as rector of the University of Paris at Nanterre.⁵ René Girard, Ricoeur’s younger compatriot, has not been especially involved in politics, perhaps in part because he has made his academic career outside France, but the political and social implications of some of his ideas have attracted a great deal of attention among contemporary French thinkers, including economists, political scientists, and sociologists.⁶

Bernard Lonergan, who spent his entire career as a Jesuit professor of theology, would seem the least likely of these figures to be directly concerned with political and economic issues, but as recent studies of his thought have shown, Lonergan’s writings embody a highly developed philosophy of history, and his own major scholarly efforts of the last decade before his death in 1984 were directed toward completing a book on economic theory which he began in the 1930s.⁷

The apparent paradox that thinkers whose writings have emphasized what might seem rather abstract theory should also have been intensely concerned with culture, society, politics, and economics is easily resolvable. It is an expression of their common belief in Plato’s principle that social and political order flows from and depends on right order within the individual: that intelligent and appropriate action in the world depends upon adequate understanding of both oneself and one’s situation within the comprehensive framework of reality.

To return, however, to Michael Polanyi, his own career was that of a scientist who eventually turned to reflection on the cognitive process he had experienced in the practice of science. His scientific work was distinguished, and it has been said that he was at one time considered as a possible candidate for a Nobel Prize in either physics or chemistry.⁸ His work extended into both disciplines. In 1923 he was elected to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut fur Physikalische Chemie and was made a life member in 1929, though he resigned that in 1933 when he left to take up permanent residence in England and become professor of physical chemistry at Victoria University in Manchester. In 1944 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.

From his own description of it, it seems that Polanyi’s interest in philosophical reflection on science and cognition in general developed in large part out of his dissatisfaction with the currently prevalent account, which was that of positivism. This had been represented in the Vienna of his youth by Ernst Mach and later in England by the influence of figures from Moritz Schlick’s “Vienna Circle.” To make clear the issues involved it will be helpful to consider briefly what the positivism was with which Polanyi would have been most familiar.

Although the term “positivism” derives from Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, the central European positivist tradition was more strongly influenced by the earlier British philosophers John Locke and David Hume. The history of this development is well told by David F. Lindenfeld in his Transformation of Positivism: Alexius Meinong and European Thought, 1880–1920. From the British empiricists, says Lindenfeld, came three central assumptions: (1) the atomistic model of both mental contents and corresponding reality, (2) the analytic approach to knowledge, and (3) the introspective criterion, the idea that all real knowledge comes from inner perception of mental contents. With reference to the atomistic model, he says that it was Locke who established the idea of the mind as consisting “primarily of a number of distinct, nugget-like experiences called ‘ideas’ or ‘presentations’” (p. 17). Coupled with this in Locke’s conception was a corpuscular theory of physical reality and a tendency to assume that the “ideas” and the corpuscular physical units were basically alike both in structure and in their constancy over time.

Closely related to the atomistic model was the analytic approach, the belief “that the best way to describe a complex topic, say the human mind or the properties of gross physical bodies, was to break it down into its simpler conceptual elements or ‘parts’ and describe these separately” (p. 22). The natural result of this approach was, of course, “a tendency to reductionism—that is, to derive all ideas from a single homogeneous type” (p. 19). A reality that could be truly known only in terms of atomistically conceived elements could never, without intellectual inconsistency, be conceived of as involving comprehensive systems with a unity, totality, and integrity of their own.

The special contribution of Ernst Mach, who succeeded to Franz Brentano’s chair at the University of Vienna, was to revive and clarify these principles as derived from the British Empiricists. “Mach’s role in the transformation of positivistic thinking,” says Lindenfeld, “may be summarized as follows: he succeeded in bringing positivism back into line with the empiricist tradition by stressing the atomistic model and the analytical approach which Comte and Spencer had both spurned. Unlike John Stuart Mill and Brentano, Mach interpreted these notions reductionistically: the homogeneity of elements is one of the most striking features of his thought. Like Mill and unlike Brentano, however, Mach did not value the introspective criterion so highly” (p. 85).

The advantage the analytic approach to knowledge seemed to offer was precision, the reduction Descartes had advocated of all supposed knowledge to “clear and distinct ideas” known with immediate, intuitive certainty. The opposite of this would be the “holistic” approach represented in the earlier Germanic tradition by such figures as Goethe and Hegel, and by such later figures as Freud or Wolfgang Koehler—the idea that to try to understand a part without consideration of the whole is to distort it. Polanyi is himself clearly in the line of such holistic thinkers as against the atomistically analytic, and, as we shall see, he has been criticized by analytic thinkers for lack of precision as a result.

Polanyi had several objections against positivism as a philosophy of science. One was that in attending analytically to the elements of a system, positivism failed to appreciate the synthetic relations that united them on a higher, more comprehensive level. Another was that although positivism had some real value as a critique of false assumptions, it lacked fecundity of its own: it could clear some cobwebs, but could not itself lead to genuine knowledge. Applied consistently, he said, a positivistic theory of science would not only fail to guide a real process of discovery, but would actively inhibit it.

Polanyi began expressing these criticisms as early as 1946 in Science, Faith, and Society. “The positivist movement was undoubtedly justified and successful,” he wrote, “in pressing for the purification of science from tautologies and unwarranted implications, but the great discoveries resulting from this process cannot be credited to any purely analytical operation. What happened was that scientific intuition made use of the positivist critique for reshaping its creative assumptions concerning the nature of things” (p. 88). The true creativity and discovery in science, however, come not from positivist methodology but from the scientist’s fundamental belief that reality was objectively knowable even if the process by which it was known could not be rendered fully explicit. The purgative value of positivism, Polanyi recognized, derives from its heritage of skepticism regarding what cannot be known explicitly. But his own reflections on the method of ac...