Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical

This brief essay introduces five articles that (1) explore the relationship between the philosophy of Michael Polanyi and several other philosophers and that (2) suggest ways that Polanyi’s post-critical thought might be enriched by their philosophical insights.

In this article, I sketch the major points of intersection between the work of Michael Polanyi and Susanne Langer. The concepts of articulation and symbolization make up the organizing frame of the article. Langer’s semiotic approach to mind and knowing in all their forms intersects in fruitful and challenging ways with Polanyi’s approach that is based on the analogy of skills and the model of perception. Rather than being alternatives to one another, or incompatible in essential ways, they enrich one another with respect to“pushing meaning up and down,” to art, religion, the emergence of mind, and the limits of language. Their focal concern with types of meanings hold their intellectual projects together in a vital and illuminating tension.

This article is intended to advance a comprehensive understanding of knowing and meaning that is sensitive to biological and psychological evidence as well as to ethical and religious concerns. It proceeds by integrating Michael Polanyi’s theories of the evolutionary emergence of centered beings, tacit knowing, and the from-[via]-to structure of consciousness with a revised version of Susanne Langer’s theory of symbolization. The revision stresses the importance of signals in all human and other animal attunement to reality and argues for dividing Langer’s notion of presentational symbolism into a component shared by the more developed animals and one unique to humans. It details autonomic, receptor, learned tacit, and conceptual contributions to personal meaning.

This response affirms the content of the previous two articles but is focused on highlighting some features of Polanyi’s and Langer’s philosophies they do not emphasize. The rise of knowledge and trajectory of meaning Polanyi and Langer describe may be seen as incorporating a complex, innovative process of acknowledgment – of tradition, social norms, previous experience, and personal commitments of which one may not even be aware – for which one is responsible.

Looking at the moral law from Polanyi’s post-critical epistemology and emergent ontology reveals two interconnected roles for the letter of the law and two ways in which it can oppose the spirit of the law. For the moral student the law is a procedural method, for the moral virtuoso the law is an incomplete explicit expression of a tacit way of being. The two are connected in that procedural rules and practices set the basis for understanding and experiencing an emergent reality. This reality is embodied in the exemplars of a moraltradition and expressed in its principles and maxims.

This memorial essay surveys the achievements of Marjorie Grene as a historian of philosophy and a philosopher of biology. It analyzes the way in which Grene’s account of persons and knowledge developes in relation to her work in succession on the thought of Michael Polanyi, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the ecological psychology of James J. and Eleanor Gibson.