I am currently in a doctoral program, studying semiotics—cultural symbols—which requires a great deal of reading. Probably the greatest benefit of an education is the wise guide (teacher) who can give a curated tour of the best there is in any given subject, and such is the case with this program. Dr. Leonard Sweet has opened the door to an entire world of scholars and theologians who look beneath the surface of things and reveal mysteries. Now I would like to open that world to you.
Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy
I hope I understood this book. I loved reading it, and even though I had to look up a lot of words, and acquaint myself with Laplace, positivism (Comte) and objectivism (which I didn’t know had been founded by Ayn Rand, though Atlas Shrugged certainly subscribes to it), and I had to read more slowly than usual to make sure I was following Polanyi’s philosophical parsing, and had to keep reminding myself that the Marxism Polanyi was writing about was not Marx’s theories but the totalitarian states that resulted from them, I loved this book.
Conviviality
The chapter on Conviviality, the four coefficients of human organization, the way we trust experts and authorities to tell us the truth—no one person can known more than just a small part—the revolt that happens when too much change is coerced even though some coercion is necessary in community (p 223), moral inversion, the cult of innovation, the fundamental difference between science and technology, of discovery versus invention … this one chapter was an entire book for me.
Logic of Affirmation
I thought the chapter on the Logic of Affirmation was prophetic in thinking about Artificial Intelligence, and had echoes of Primal Intelligence in it in terms of human intuition and imagination. But I was also reminded of how hard it is to communicate, even when all factors are optimum, because each person’s tacit knowledge interprets the symbology of language and the meaning of words in a particular way.
Devolution of Critical Thinking
Pages 265-266 were enormous in understanding the devolution of age of critical thinking from the “incandescence” fueled by Christian faith to the nihilism lurking just outside the door of positivism and objectivism. At the end of the chapter, I found at least part of the answer to my question of how we can create space for continuing to explore theological Truth which must be inexhaustible, for God is infinite and eternal. It is found in “dogmatic orthodoxy” (p 268). Now, the challenge is in deciding what is dogma and what is doctrine.
That is what we are seeing in the doctrinal wars of the church down through the centuries and continuing to today.
Polanyi said that inventions will only last for a while until a new, better invention shows up, or until whatever need the invention met goes away (like buggy whips). But scientific discovery lasts forever because it is a discovery of truth, which never gets old. An art, then, like an invention, is very much a part of its time and context.
There is a kind of very delicate gold beadwork and scrollwork that ancient Persians worked into their jewelry that I’d heard had been lost to antiquity. But I was talking with a jeweler a couple of years ago whose family had been making and selling jewelry for centuries in Jerusalem. Their shop, with the home above, has a well in it that purportedly was first dug two thousand years ago. Anyway, he said he is learning this very technique from his father so that it will not die away, because so much of jewelry making is now machine-made or machine-augmented.
But what about arts and crafts for which there is little appetite or need left for? Like buggy whips or barrel hoops? I guess, if the desire arises, it will be reinvented?
Respecting an Authority
When Polanyi speaks of submitting to authority, I think he means a particular kind of authority. You and I submit to the authority of a doctor because we respect the doctor’s expertise, we trust the doctor. We submit to this kind of authority often, it is a matter of trust and respect. We keep our own agency of course, it is our free choice, we are not indentured. But we gain much when we are willing to not only receive all this authority has to teach us, but also to give the authority pleasure in seeing our growth.
This is how I understand freely submitting one unto the other, as unto Christ. In this way, we all write into each other’s stories, as well as writing our own story, because it is an active choice to do this.
God writes the metanarrative, even when we are not aware of it. Yet also, somehow, we are actively involved in the writing of our story. Jesus gives us a remarkable amount of agency and voice in our stories. Every morning he asks “if you would …” and we respond by choosing to pick up our cross.
Critique of Doubt
The chapter on the Critique of Doubt left me with questions. Agnostic doubt allows for continued inquiry, and perhaps also humility in not insisting on asserting true or false. Those assertions must certainly be made, and the risk of being wrong taken, but there can also be room to continue to question. But I did not understand why a Christian who reaches her spiritual endpoint (which is to know God, right?) would cease to be a Christian (p 280). This is the only question that I could not find an answer for. However, the ensuing pages brought to mind Carl Sagan’s Contact in which a theologian is discussing the reality of God with an astrophysicist. She demands proof of God. So he asks her if she loves her father. “Of course!” she replies. “Okay, prove it.”
Commitment
The chapter on Commitment created all the reasoning that would take me to the end of the book. Commitment is what Professor Leonard Sweet would call “standing under,” I think, and what Augustine advised his friend to do in trying to grasp faith—you have to believe to see.
Two important truths arise, both on page 312:
- “We may firmly believe what we might conceivably doubt; and may hold to be true what might conceivably be false.” That’s the open hands of humility, knowing we have chosen to remain in the stable circle of held beliefs in order to make sense of reality, and to interpret new data.
- “… into every act of knowing there enters a tacit and passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and that this coefficient is no mere imperfection, but a necessary component of all knowledge.”
One of the thunderbolts in this chapter was Polanyi’s statement that “the freedom of the subjective person to do as he pleases is overruled by the freedom of the responsible person to act as he must” (p 309). My mind immediately leapt to Paul’s treatise on that very phenomenon in Romans 6:1-4, which begins with
“What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may increase? By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we were buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life.”
Romans 6:1-4 NRSVUE
Wow, right?
When we believe we have been buried with Christ in death, and raised to new life in him, we must believe to our core that we are truly, unalterable, irreversibly transformed (transfigured, as Professor Sweet would say). We believe in the inherent rightness of some things, like love.
The Ephemerality of “Now”
I think Polanyi was quite kind to the agnostic, and applauded that there should be room for the agnostic to continue to question and learn. But also, yes, at some point the agnostic has to take the risk of landing somewhere, otherwise they simply distance themselves from really knowing anything.
In the western form of thought, there seems to be no continuum of growth, where our knowledge can evolve. Instead, “now” seems to be the endpoint of eternity.
I have really changed my feelings about “now.”
“Now” is all we really have, it is the only true reality, and also “now” soon becomes the past and the future becomes now. We need to be a lot less exercised about what we think and feel right now because we will keep growing, evolving, learning, and refining. Embrace now without clinging to it, live fully into now and savor every moment, for soon a new now will arrive, and the old now will be then.
Logic of Achievement
The chapter on The Logic of Achievement segued us into understanding, really, the whole complexity of human community as it affects discovery. from “I-It” to “I-Thou,” and how that influences our sense of self and other (p 346).
The last two chapters, I think, brought us back to the beginning. Intuitive and creative thought can only thrive in a free society. Only human beings were able to develop signs and symbols that could record and convey ideas, which made it possible for our intelligence to grow. We are still growing. It takes all of us to know and share the truth, and to continue to find meaning.
Nihilism results when we lose the sense of our humanness, and ignore the truth of tacit (subjective) knowledge. In the end, when we aver truth, we are really saying we accept on faith what we have been told, and we discover more Truth through that lens. That is the fiduciary relationship we have with everyone who has influenced us, and that is the heuristic pursuit of Truth we continue to engage in.
Tacit Knowledge Formed by Culture
I am a product of Polanyi’s impact on western thought, because I find I agree with him on every point I think I understood. As I read, I thought about all the science fiction writers who incorporated these concepts into their writing. I asked Gemini at least a half dozen times if this author or that had been influenced by Polanyi. Only one came back “yes”—Ursula Le Guin, a big favorite of mine. As I read, scripture would also come to mind, corroborating what I think I understood Polanyi to be saying. That is my own tacit knowledge at work, as well as my commitment to the Bible to help me find meaning.
Polanyi only once that I could tell gave a nod to something more than human reasoning or faith as a component of understanding (and potential discovery): “Divine service can mean nothing to a person lacking the skill of religious knowing” (p 282). Maybe he was just talking about the human context of tacit knowledge, yet 1 Corinthians 2 leapt to mind.
Polanyi said he was convinced he had been called upon, despite the hazards, to search for the truth and state his findings (p 299). I feel like a similar call has been laid upon me as well in a much smaller, narrower way, which is to say, the truth about God’s call upon women, and Jesus’s restoration of women to be ezer kenegdo to ha ‘adam.
Where do you see yourself in the discovery of Truth?
