Last Polanyi Excerpt

I promise. From pages 80 and 81 of The Tacit Dimension, in the section called "A Society of Explorers":

My account of scientific discovery describes an existential choice. We start the pursuit of discovery by pouring ourselves into the subsidiary elements of a problem and we continue to spill ourselves into further clues as we advance further, so that we arrive at discovery fully committed to it as an aspect of reality. These choices create in us a new existence, which challenges others to transform themselves in its image. To this extent, then, "existence precedes essence," That is, it comes before the truth that we establish and make our own.

But does this show us that "man is his own beginning, author of all his values"? If originality in science is taken as an example of existential choice, these claims of Nietzsche's and Sartre's existentialism appear ill-conceived. The most daring innovations of science spring from a vast range of information which the scientist accepts unchallenged as a background to his problem. Even when he is led to modify the standards of scientific merit, current standards will be the basis of this reform. Science as a whole, as mediated by thousands of fellow scientists he has never heard about, he accepts unchallenged.

His quest transforms him by compelling him to make a sequence of choices. Does this mean that he is existentially choosing himself? In a sense it does; he does seek intellectual growth. But he does not sit back and choose at his pleasure a new existence. He strains his imagination to the utmost to find a path that might lead to a superior life of the mind. All his existential choices are made in response to a potential discovery; they consist in sensing and following a gradient of understanding which will lead to the expansion of his mental existence. Every step is an effort to meet an immediate necessity; his freedom is continuous service.

A few brief comments. Perhaps it's because I'm still laboring under the weight of classic existentialism (or at least writers who are heavily indebted to existentialists), but that "To this extent" at the end of the first paragraph strikes me as a pretty tepid acknowledgement of how easily his epistemology can be folded into what I commonly take to be existentialism, since the metaphysical implications of these ideas really aren't all that different from those of Sartre or Camus. Perhaps this is a polarized way of looking at it, but this still strikes me as fundamentally materialist view of the universe. And for all I know, he's right. But while it's a valid expansion of what might loosely be termed an 'existential epistemology', although an infinitely more carefully reasoned approach than those of traditional existentialists, I wonder whether the real break from existentialism (and perhaps any idea that inclines towards values as strictly human creations) requires some sort of return to (or incorporation of) essentialism. But I'm over my head.

The other monkey swinging in the trees at the back of my mind has to do with his later inclusion of artists and writers of all stripes in that society of explorers. It's certainly gratifying to a writer to hear that his work is as valid as a scientists, and it's certainly true that totalitarian governments repress groups that might challenge their dogma. But it's also true that totalitarian governments are fairly skillful at setting up organizations - scientific, artistic and otherwise - that are essentially propaganda machines. I'm not sure they have to be government agencies. Look at Tarkovsky's first film, "The Steamroller and the Violin". And those scenes of MASSOLIT in Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. And the character Jaromil in Kundera's Life is Elsewhere. All are examples of how easily the artistic temperament can be corrupted and drafted into the service of totalitarianism. Nabokov's character Krug, the philosopher in Bend Sinister, is a pretty stirring portrait of an heroic intellectual defiance of totalitarianism, even if it isn't his best novel. Although, unlike Master and Margarita, it was written in a free society.

Anyway, Polanyi's Tacit Dimension is a great book, an extremely lucid work of philosophy that unfortunately hasn't been referenced much in the public debate currently raging over evolution. At least I haven't seen it.