Polanyi on Morality

Polanyi makes good on his promise to answer the question of "whether intellectual powers, grounded in tacit knowing and descended from evolutionary emergence, can exercise the kind of responsible judgment which we must claim if we are to attribute a moral sense to man." Can, in fact, his "rebuttal of exactitude as the ideal of science open the way toward a theory re-establishing the justification of moral standards?" Forgive me for the length of the following passage, but I've put a moratorium on buying books for a while and I’d like to come back to it. This excerpt comes after Polanyi's discussion of the importance mutually imposed authority in public opinion, especially in science, but with perhaps even greater pressure in literary and artistic circles. I wonder about his characterization of the scientific community as undogmatic, as it seems to me that such luminaries as Dawkins and Wilson are about as reflexively dogmatic within their specialties as Torquemada was, albeit without the rack and thumbscrews. And perhaps rightfully so.

In our society, ideas about morality are also actively cultivated by different circles of mutual appreciation, which are deeply divided against each other; and in politics these circles are deliberately organized as rivals.

But we need not go into all these variations; they are transcended by a test which proves that all such groups effectively foster the intrinsic power of thought. For these circles, these professional associations - some perhaps no more than coteries of mutual admiration - are feared and hated by modern totalitarian rulers. They are feared because in them man lives in though - in though over which the rulers have no power. They are feared more than are scientific associations, because the truth of literature and poetry, of history and political thought, of philosophy, morality, and legal principles, is more vital than the truth of science. This is why the independent cultivation of such truth has proved an intolerable menace to modern tyranny.

I have now roughly generalized the principles underlying the pursuit of science to include the cultivation of man's other ideals. The result shows how closely the growth of thought intrinsically limits our self-determination everywhere. Whether his calling lies in literature or art, or in moral and social reform, even the most revolutionary mind must choose as his calling a small area of responsibility, for the transformation of which he will rely on the surrounding world as its premises. Perfectionism, which would transform the whole of thought and the entire society, is a program of destruction, ending up at best in a world of pretense. The existentialist contempt for all values not chosen by ourselves, condemning them as bad faith, is likewise either empty or destructive.

There is another way of dealing with the claim to absolute self-determination and the demands of perfectionism. I could reject these inordinate endeavors by referring to the logic by which successive levels of reality are related to each other. All our higher principles must rely for their working on a lower level of reality and this necessarily sets limits to their scope, yet does not make them reducible to the terms of the lower level. This argument confutes the current cultural movement which questions the intrinsic powers of our ideals. There is not one higher principle of our minds that is not in danger of being falsely explained away by psychological or sociological analysis, by historical determinism, by mechanical models or computers; but this battle cannot be joined here on this wide front.

Nevertheless, must say a word on these lines about the principal ideal of man which is at the core of his involvement in a combination of extreme skepticism and perfectionism, for I have specifically promised to find a place for moral principles safe from self-destruction by a claim to boundless self-determination. Take the demand for social and moral perfection and recognize the presence of successive levels of reality. Society, as an organization of power and profit, forms one level, while its moral principles lie on a level above it. The higher level is rooted in the lower one: moral progress can be achieved only within the medium of a society operating by the exercise of power and aiming at material advantages. We must accept the fact that any moral advances must be tainted by this social mechanism which alone can bring them about. To attempt to enforce absolute morality in society is therefore to indulge in fantasies that will only lead to untamed violence.

After re-reading this a number of times, especially the exception taken to ‘boundless self-determination’, I can see why so many theologians (Torrance and Lonergan, anyway) are quick to adopt these ideas. Although it seems to me that a lot of work remains in reconciling ‘emergence’ with anything that hints of divine creation.

My question: can G_d be discovered, much as Polanyi here so eloquently contends that Reality is discovered? He doesn’t say, and it isn’t his job to say, but I wonder whether within ‘tacit knowing’ there isn’t room for Maritain’s notion of the ‘intuition of being’. I'm suspect Thomism is the last place he wanted to end up, but somehow that's where these arguments always return to.