Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical

Michael Polanyi and Karl Popper offer contrasting accounts of social tradition. Popper is steeped in the heritage of the Enlightenment, while Polanyi interweaves religious and diverse secular strands of thought. Explaining the liberal tradition, Polanyi features tacit knowledge of rules, standards, applications and interpretations being transmitted by “craftsmen” to “apprentices.” Each generation adopts the liberal tradition on “faith,” commits to creatively developing its art of knowledge-in-practice, and is drawn to the spiritual reality of ideal ends. Of particular interest to Popper is the rationality of social traditions. Likened by him to scientific theories, Popper’s traditions are criticizable and improvable, assisting agents to understand, and act in, the world as stable and predictable. Polanyi’s is the more informative rendering of tradition. Polanyi delves deeply into important areas where Popper only scratches their surface: the tacit dimension, transmission by way of apprenticeship, the meaning of tradition for those who participate in it, and the extent of its authority over them.

Embodiment is a crucial feature of Polanyi’s tacit knowing. In the following, I synthesize ideas from Polanyi, Johnson and Lakoff, and Merleau-Ponty to further illuminate the embodied dimensions of tacit knowing. I appropriate two widespread embodied structures, image schemas and metaphor, into a Polanyian framework for embodied knowing. I also briefly indicate some important ways in which Polanyi departs from these three thinkers.

I here introduce a set of essays on William H. Poteat by quoting in full a 1968 letter from Poteat to Marjorie Grene. Poteat articulates reasons he cannot collaborate with Grene in editing the volume of Polanyi essays that was eventually published as Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael Polanyi in 1969.

Fascinated by Tradition and Discovery’s appreciation for Bill Poteat (35:2), I express my gratitude for his brilliant Socratic teaching and graceful mentoring; explore his evocative thought that carried further and integrated Polanyi’s tacit dimension, Merleau-Ponty’s mindbody, Wittgenstein’s linguistic meaning, and Buber’s I and Thou—all except Buber discussed in Tradition and Discovery—and look as well at his other central concerns with imagination, the dialogical, and the differences between spoken and written meaning; engage Bill in some Poteatian meditations interrogating his comments on Creed, Eucharist, Resurrection, Being, God; and leave the reader where Bill left me with responsibility to speak forth in the first person what I am finding through mindbodily reflections on and from the tacit dimension.

My essay offers a personal reflection on Poteat as both a beloved teacher and philosopher. I suggest that Poteat’s teaching and writing had to do most radically with describing an alternative ontology to the ones that have haunted both modern and postmodern thought. Poteat’s ontology leads him to a profound embrace of the Incarnation and its liturgical celebration in the eucharist.

In Polanyian Meditations: In Search of a Post-Critical Logic, Poteat draws upon Polanyi to explicate what he calls an “oral/aural logic,” which he thinks informs Polanyi’s thought and which is different from the conventional “visual logic” of the Western philosophical tradition, and then argues that this oral/aural logic is implied in the Hebraic understanding of reality. This idea is a key to understanding the genesis of the modern worldview, which can be conceptualized as involving certain elements of the Hebraic worldview distorted byan excessively visual orientation.

These comments reflect upon my doctoral study with William Poteat as a nontraditional student between 1986-92 and also upon the academy and colleageality vis a vis Poteat and “Poteatians.”

These short remarks are a belated expression of thanks for the gift in my life that was Poteat. When Poteat died, I was spending time at a Trappist monastery, and never got word until after the funeral. I greatly regretted not being there. While I had the opportunity to tell Poteat during his lifetime how much he meant to me and the wonderful gift he gave to me, after his death, I never got or took the opportunity to tell that to others. This is my very belated attempt so to do.

This essay summarizes representative work in treatments of wisdom in Psychology and the neurosciences. It concludes with suggestions for how this work might cohere with and be enriched by engaging the work of Michael Polanyi.

In Search of Memory, Eric Kandel’s excellent account of the rise of neuroscience, in which his own research has a prominent place, is reviewed with special attention given to its relation to Michael Polanyi’s philosophy. It is found that Polanyi’s epistemological theory, although established on quite different grounds, accords well with Kandel’ s description of how the brain operates. In particular, Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowing seems to be both enriched and validated by Kandel’s account of how memory functions.