Michael Polanyi on Science, Revolution, and the origins of his theory of 'Tacit Knowing'

I'm a little worn out by all the Kierkegaard, so I thought I'd take a short break with an article in First Things, which led to a book by Michael Polanyi, called "The Tacit Dimensioin", which I found at my local library. The author includes this anecdote at the beginning of the book:

I first met questions of philosophy when I came up against the Soviet ideology under Stalin which denied justification to the pursuit of science. I remember a conversation I had with Bukharin in Moscow in 1935. Though he was heading toward his fall and execution three years later, he aqs still a leading theortician of the Communist party. When I asked him about the pursuit of pure science in Soviet Russia, he said that pure science was a morbid symptom of a class society; under socialism the conception of science pursued for its own sake would dispapear, for the interests of scientists would spontaeously turn to problems of the current Five-Year Plan.

I was struck by the fact that this denial of the very existence of independent scientfic thought came from a socialist theory which derived its tremendous persuasive power from its claim to scientific certainty. The scientific outlook appeared to have produced a mechanical conception of man and history in which there was no place for science itself. This conception denied altogether any intrinsic power to thought and thus denied also any ground for claiming freedom of thought. I saw also that this self-immolation of the mind was actuated by powerful moral motives. The mechanical course of history was to bring universal justice. Scientific skepticism would trust only material necessity for achieving universal brotherhood. Skepticism and utopianism had thus fused into a new skeptical fanaticism.

It seemed to me then that our whole civilization was pervaded by the dissnance of an extreme critical lucidity and an intense moral consicence, and that this combination had generated both our tight-lipped modern revolutions and the tormented self-doubt of modern man outside revolutionary movements. So I resolved to inquire into the roots of this condition.

My search has led me to a novel idea of human knowledge from which a harmonious view of thought and existence, rooted in the universe, seems to emerge.

I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.

Wonderful stuff, and like the best anecdotes, really on the level of parable. The last sentence - and in fact the nutshell version of his entire epistomology - sounds a lot like Nabokov's famous reply to the question of whether or not he believed in G_d:

To be quite candid - and what I am going to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill: I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.

My own favorite version is both simpler and less profound: The more you know, the more you know you don't know.

But it's easier to remember.