Introduction to Michael Polanyi

Michael Polanyi was a genius who died in 1976. I had not heard of him until recently. He might be the most under-appreciated philosopher of the 20^th century. Many say his most important philosophical work was Personal Knowledge/Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Here I’ll give a précis of one of his main themes.

I would like to frame this in terms of active consciousness, in contrast to the subconscious, though this is not how Polanyi set up his analysis. He referred to subconscious knowledge as “tacit” knowledge. I might have used “implicit” instead. It is implicit because it’s there but we’re not actively aware of it. By definition, then, it’s in the subconscious.

It is in the active consciousness that we exercise agency, formulating the decision to do x or not do y, and acting thereon. In our consciousness we direct our attention. We have a subconscious, but we are not actively aware of what goes on there because that’s what it means to be sub-conscious. (For present purposes I use “subconscious” to mean also unconscious or preconscious).

To qualify this somewhat, I acknowledge that one could as well simply speak in terms of active and aware knowledge as against implicit or tacit knowledge, bypassing the conceptual duality of conscious and subconscious, but I invoke active- and sub-consciousness for reasons that will become evident.

The subconscious, I suggest, interacts with active consciousness and it’s worth our while to try to understand how. In my book The Discovered Self I wrote that the subconscious may be the repository of certain axiomatic principles that—by virtue of being maintained in the subconscious—we’re not really aware of. My particular interest in Polanyi is that he suggests a mechanism for how this might work.

Polanyi explains tacit knowledge as that which you acquire without active, direct engagement. For example you know how to drive a nail with a hammer as a result of responding to the feel of the hammer’s handle in your hand as you drive the nail, but this is tacit knowledge, acquired without active thought. You’re only subsidiarily aware of the hammer and the feel of the handle. Your active focus is on the nail. You “inhabit” the hammer. (Michael Crawford masterfully describes this phenomenon, by the way, in his The World Beyond Your Head). Combined with your active knowledge, tacit knowledge constitutes what Polanyi calls “personal knowledge.” Personal knowledge is an epistemological approach that acknowledges subjective predispositions in our apprehension of the objective external world.

In the same way you “inhabit” a tool like a hammer, you “inhabit” certain conceptual “frameworks” or “presuppositions” in your encounter of the world. These are conceptual axioms on which you build your conscious conception of reality. Epistemologically, it sets up a profound interaction between you and the world you perceive, rather than a dry, impersonal recording of objective facts.

To get just a little ahead of what I understand Polanyi to be saying, it may be that the “presupposition” or “framework” you use like a hammer can include the spirit of negation I’ve talked about often, which is sometimes referred to as “ressentiment,” or critique that includes a presumption of bad faith, or a hermeneutic of suspicion. I believe this to be subtly implied, in fact, in Polanyi’s subtitle: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Axioms contained in tacit knowledge could likewise include a conservative disposition, a Burkean respect for evolved tradition and skepticism of untested change.

And to go further with Polanyi’s analysis, this could be the way in which the subconscious feeds the conscious more generally, contra Freud’s made-up functions of id, superego, and ego. Indeed, the interaction of tacit and explicit knowledge could signify the role of the subconscious as the meeting place between material and immaterial; between body and spirit. Hence the “place” where you interact with the spirit world, the “place” where your soul is fed or drained, by prayer or the occult respectively.

So there’s a teaser on Polanyi, and a small extrapolation from his work. By all means read him yourself, it’s worth your while.