The Weekly Sage hopes to regularly bring brief profiles of key contributors to thought and faith before a Christian audience for historical education and awareness of valuable resources.

Michael Polanyi

• “I have spoken of our craving for understanding, and have mentioned the intellectual passion which impels us towards making ever closer contact with reality. These passions are powerful forces pursuing high hopes. Indeed, if the shaping of knowledge is achieved by pouring ourselves into new forms of existence, the acquisition of knowledge should be found to be motivated by the deepest forces of our being….Discovery, invention – these words have connotations which recall what I have said before about understanding as a search for a hidden reality. One can discover only something that was already there, ready to be discovered. The invention of machines and the like does produce something that was not there before; but actually, it is only the knowledge of the invention that is new, its possibility was not there before. This is no mere play with words, nor is it meant to derogate from the status of discovery and invention as creative acts of the mind. I am merely referring to the important fact that you cannot discover or invent anything unless you are convinced it is there, ready to be found. The recognition of this hidden presence is half the battle”[1]
• “Motion studies, which tend to paralyze a skill, will improve it when followed by practice. The meticulous dismembering of a text, which can kill its appreciation, can also supply material for a much deeper understanding of it. In these cases, the detailing of particulars, which by itself would destroy meaning, serves as a guide to their subsequent integration and thus establishes a more secure and accurate meaning of them. But the damage done by the specification of particulars may be irremediable. Meticulous detailing may obscure beyond recall a subject like history, literature, or philosophy. Speaking more generally, the belief that, since particulars are more tangible, their knowledge offers a true conception of things is fundamentally mistaken.”[2]

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was a Hungarian chemist, philosopher, and social scientist who overcame dislocation and disappointment to make uniquely impactful and wide-ranging contributions to the physical and intellectual worlds. Born to Jewish parents, Polanyi first studied medicine, obtaining a diploma in 1914. The cataclysm of World War I drew him in, alongside other young intellectuals such as Wilhelm Ropke and Friedrich Hayek. Serving on the Serbian front as a medical officer, Polanyi eventually found time to complete a PhD thesis on adsorption, a chemical phenomenon that earned him a doctorate from the University of Budapest.

In the immediate post-war period, the newly formed nation of Hungary underwent significant political turmoil, including time spent as a democracy and a socialist state. Polanyi worked briefly as a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Health before fleeing the country and taking an academic position in Berlin. During this period, many prominent European academics were struggling to grapple with the world after the war. Michael’s brother Karl, a prominent economics, became increasingly attracted to Fabian socialism. Michael, by contrast, embraced religion, converting to Christianity.

Michael remained a productive scientist throughout this period, associating with leading thinkers such as Albert Einstein, although not always in agreement with the scientific mainstream. With his thesis on adsorption being questioned, Polanyi also produced work on x-ray diffraction and plastics. However, with runaway inflation overtaking Weimar Germany, his interests turned toward social science, and the political rise of Adolf Hitler caused Polanyi to leave Germany, taking up a chair in chemistry at the University of Manchester.

During this period, Polanyi began to develop his theory of tacit knowledge. This idea, presented in works such as The Tacit Dimension and The Study of Man, is a unique understanding of how to understand science, society, and meaning. The books are short, (90 pages), and I would recommend them to everyone, so I would not want to spoil the self-discovery. Nevertheless, I would say that Polanyi uniquely overcomes the misconceptions of science as flowing from a rejection of reliance on authority in favor of a strictly evidence-based, objective approach. He also accomplished a special integration of different scientific disciplines, including things as disparate as history and physics, in a way that few philosophers of science have achieved.

Polanyi deepened and applied his theory of tacit knowing to help him understand phenomena such as consciousness and the emergence of higher-order phenomena. His works demonstrate criticisms of many of the well-known theories or people in the sciences. The theory of evolution by natural selection comes in for repeated critique as unsophisticated, while eminent thinkers such as Bertrand Russell are also censured for statements about science that demonstrate lack of knowledge and depth. In this period, Polanyi was elected a member of the Royal Society and travelled and lectured widely, even in the USSR, although he consistently opposed central planning in the society and the economy.

While a professor of chemistry at Manchester, Polanyi raised his sons, one of whom became a Nobel prize-winning chemist, while the other became a well-known economist. Two of his students also achieved the Nobel Prize in chemistry, demonstrating Polanyi’s ability as a teacher and inspirational figure. However, he moved to a chair in social science and spent a decade articulating ideas such as spontaneous order, which would be taken up and used by Polanyi’s contemporary Friedrich Hayek, publishing works such as The Logic of Liberty. Polanyi was also elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Michael Polanyi’s unique contributions across a wide spectrum of thought and inquiry composed a very special career. While a maverick in many ways across all the disciplines he pursued, Polanyi nevertheless accomplished much and corrected the errors of the scientific orthodoxies in his day. Impressively, throughout his works he argues for the need of scientific authority in the pursuit of knowledge. Although such humility is rare for polymaths of Polanyi’s stature, his faith hopefully helped him endure equally the trials of his youth and the fame of his later years.

• “Basic assumptions about the nature of things will tend to lie most widely apart between persons inside and outside of science. Laymen normally accept the teachings of science not because they share its conception of reality, but because they submit to the authority of science. Hence, if they ever venture seriously to dissent from scientific opinion, a regular argument may not prove feasible. It will almost certainly prove impracticable when the question at issue is whether a certain set of evidence is to be taken seriously or not. There may be nothing strange to the layman in the suggestion that the average periods of pregnancy of various animals are integer multiples of the number π, but he will only drive the scientist to despair if he challenges him to show why this is absurd. So he will be confronted by the scientist’s blunt, unreasoning judgment, which rejects at a glance a set of data that seem convincing to the layman. He will demand in vain that the evidence should at least be properly examined and will not understand why the scientist, who prides himself on welcoming any idea with an open mind and on holding his own scientific theories only tentatively, sharply refuses the request….Hence, to defend science against lay rebellions on the grounds of its technical achievements may be precarious. To pretend that science is open-minded, when it is not, may prove equally perilous. But to declare that the purpose of science is to understand nature may seem old fashioned and ineffectual. And to confess further how greatly such explanations of nature rely on vague and undemonstrable conceptions of reality may sound positively scandalous. But since all this is in fact true, might it not prove safest to say so?”[3]

• “It recalls that no knowledge of nature lacks some measure of indwelling of the observer in his subject matter, and that the intimacy of this indwelling shows a continuous progression towards that fullest indwelling which has been rightly claimed to be a characteristic method of the historian. The physicist may dwell deeply in a mathematical theory, but he enjoys above all its general qualities: its grandeur, simplicity and accuracy. The chemist shows already a somewhat different affinity to his subject. He finds pleasure in the peculiarities of compounds and the delicately graded conditions of chemical changes. The naturalist’s love of living shapes and vital functions is even more intimate…And as we rise to the study of animal behaviour we enter into a whole universe of sensations, appetites, and purposive activities which we understand only by deeply identifying ourselves with the animal. Rising even higher, we establish contact with the animal’s intelligence, and this indwelling is so intimate that we can learn to set problems to it which will evoke its most intense mental efforts and so bring it to the verge of mental breakdown. It seems hardly extravagant to extrapolate from here to the further step which will make us understand an historic figure like Napoleon”[4]

[1] Michael Polanyi, The Study of Man, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), 34-35.

[2] Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), 19.

[3] Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 80-81.

[4] Michael Polanyi, The Study of Man, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), 80-81.