Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical

The transmission of knowledge requires trust, which is a moral relation between teacher and student. This relation requires the suspension of democratic/individualistic suspicion against the idea of intellectual rank and authority. Ultimately this is for the sake of an end that is affirmable by the lights of democratic individualism: the intellectual independence of the student. But education cannot itself be a democratic enterprise if it is to sustain deference to the idea of truth, as it must.

In response to Crawford’s presentation on teaching and trust, I note how Crawford’s latest book has helped me teach history of Christian ethics. I also highlight two Polanyian themes relevant to the topic: dwelling in/breaking out and intellectual passions. I then discuss additional challenges to developing trust between teachers and students.

Matthew Crawford invites readers to consider how their contact with the real world has been imperiled by the notion that all experience is mediated by mental representations and how skilled activities providing bodily contact with the environment help recover us from this mistaken perspective. In this brief presentation, I ask whether in his critique of mediated experience by appeal to physical skills Crawford neglects to appreciate Polanyi’s emphasis on intellectual probes as instruments for contacting reality and whether his doing so inappropriately—and perhaps inadvertently—diminishes the all-important place of belief in Polanyi’s epistemology.

Matthew Crawford compares his program of convivial craft-work to Polanyi’s fiduciary program. He argues that both are good ways of grappling with reality, and that both can help persons to focus their attention in an age of distraction. Crawford criticizes the Enlightenment philosophers for an overemphasis on the representations of things at the expense of grappling with the real things. He argues that attention is a scarce resource, analogous to water. He sometimes uses language that can be interpreted as expressing a belief in group minds.

Despite the fact that none of William H. Poteat’s former students on the Yale Conference email list recall ever having heard Poteat mention the Buddha or Buddhism, this article argues for a hitherto unnoticed and striking correspondence of thought between William H. Poteat, the Buddha, and Ch’an (Zen). Both the Buddha and Poteat bear closer analogies to physicians than to metaphysicians and their thought can be compared to a kind of philosophical therapy. While the Buddha’s diagnosis pinpoints egoistic desire as the cause of human dissatisfaction with life, Poteat’s diagnosis is gnostic apocalypticism. Both physicians are moved to employ unusual pedagogical methods in order to effect a “cure,” which consists of a fundamental unity or nonduality of mind and body, a therapy requiring a practice.

Among the most arresting images in Personal Knowledge is “the second apple.” Through this metaphor Polanyi describes a fall of man comparable to the expulsion from paradise recounted in Genesis. But here, too, redemption is possible. It comes, says Polanyi, in the form of a maturation of perspective that he calls “balance of mind.” Under this heading Polanyi offers his conception of human fruition, a fruition requiring a loss of innocence that follows from not only departure from the original paradise but also the utter collapse of the allegedly autonomous citadel of critical reason that followed in its train. Interestingly, “balance of mind” has much in common with the Christian life, as understood by Polanyi. Thus, the encounter with “the second apple” is simultaneously both an advance and a return.