Tacit Knowledge

More thoughts on Michael Polanyi

The Discovered Self

If you follow this space you know I have a new book coming out shortly, The Discovered Self, subtitled Identity in the Therapeutic Age. It’s about the therapeutic worldview, which I try to explain rather than merely describe. One of the themes has to do with our way of knowing, and the work of Michael Polanyi is quite relevant.

I introduced Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) in my last post. He was a twentieth-century philosopher who should be known much better than he is. He developed an understanding of what he called “tacit knowledge,” which has far-reaching implications in our understanding of what a human being is; about the nature of consciousness; and about how we can “know” anything.

In my last post I introduced Polanyi but departed from his terminology, substituting my own as used in The Discovered Self. I’ll try to behave this time, by hewing more to Polanyian terms. In my book and my last post I wrote of “rational” and “subrational” rather than, as Polanyi did, “focal” and “subsidiary” (in his Personal Knowledge) and “proximal” and distal” (in his The Tacit Dimension). Please note also that I’m barely skimming the surface of Polanyi’s erudition, on the way to discussing some of the themes of my book. What follows is not a summary of Polanyi’s thought, but a mention of it in the context of my own.

Objectivity

How does anybody know anything? In philosophy, this is the subject of epistemology. We have developed over the course of the last few centuries a very scientistic way of thinking, marked by a presumption of what Polanyi called “objectivity,” a duality that supposes a me in here looking out on objective world-facts and explaining them through testable observation.

This is among the presumptions underlying scientific inquiry, for example. It is a way of thinking about reality that is particular to our time, however. It is a hold-over from the Age of Reason; of hyper-rationality; of repudiation of mysticism and superstition; of hard-headed scientific empiricism. It is a bequest of the Enlightenment era, which we can date to around the late-eighteenth century. The history of ideas isn’t really neatly sectioned off into eras, but we can certainly say post-Enlightenment mankind is a different animal than his medieval forbears.

The harshness of the scientistic outlook was softened somewhat by the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century, and then by the therapeutic inward turn beginning in the late nineteenth century. And then the most significant development in the evolution of our epistemology was to venture away from belief in God. For reasons I explain elsewhere, I put the societal tipping point to that development at the beginning of the twentieth century. So we progressed through that century with an increasing reliance on testable hypothesis-driven logic, to the exclusion of any sort of religious mysticism, for understanding reality. The apogee of this way of thinking was, I would say, the New Atheist movement of the early twenty-first century.

In all of this time since the putative death of God, however, mysticism of a distorted kind lurked in the background. It is the mysticism of inner psychology. The “objectivity” described by Polanyi still ruled, however, and so the mystery of the inner psychological being is objectivized to what has come to be understood as Identity, an authentic “true” self that emerges inexplicably from tides of Freudian subconscious and subrational psychology.

Polanyi criticized postmodern “objectivity,” and I have written extensively (for example in The Mountain and the River) of objectivity of truth and morality and beauty, so let’s pause to understand nuances in how the term is used. With respect to morality, I used it to mean moral realism; that is, the idea that right and wrong is written into the cosmos, eternal and unchanging. By God, in fact, but one can accept moral realism without further inquiring into how it originates.

Probably Polanyi would not disagree with the concept, but he uses the word “objectivity” in a different, and pejorative, way. He means to critique the scientistic presumption that there is no personal involvement in the acquisition of knowledge; that it is all out there to be acquired in just the same way by any observer from any vantage point.

This would mean the universe unfolds mechanistically without agentic human input or “participation,” but it’s an incorrect or at least incomplete epistemological model because in actuality we bring to any question “tacit knowledge” by virtue of being subjects doing the observing rather than objects ourselves. The presumption of objectivity on Polanyi’s definition leads to “moral inversion,” the relativism of postmodernity combined with—and giving rise to—coercive social systems.

Participation

Using innumerable examples, Polanyi explains in Personal Knowledge how subjective, “tacit” knowledge precedes acquisition of objective facts. In my last post I cited tool use, as when you are subsidiarily aware of the hammer in your hand but have focused awareness on the nail. In his book The Tacit Dimension Polanyi used “proximal” to describe knowledge of the hammer, and “distal” to describe knowledge of its effects. Our focus is on the nail, but we have tacit knowledge of the hammer. The proximal knowledge precedes the distal.

This is always true, even when we tell ourselves we “do science” by relentless critique of dispassionate hypotheses. We delude ourselves, however, if we think we go at science dispassionately, with no “personal” driver. There is proximal knowledge in identifying the “problem” to be tested in the first place. We don’t go around developing hypotheses at random. The “problem” we begin with is of our subjective devising.

And formal science is the extreme of scientistic knowing. We approach all of our knowing through the subjectivism of presuppositions or conceptual frameworks, and often we are not conscious of what those are.

This is of interest to me because the therapeutic worldview presents an extreme of this. It lends credence to the warning of Alisdair MacIntyre (and others) against reacting to circumstances with “emotivism,” meaning a differentiation of right from wrong on the basis of how a circumstance makes us feel, rather than how it comports with unchanging moral values.

Now Polanyi was not an emotivist, far from it, but his thought helps us understand the feature of human cognition that can entrap us into emotivist therapeutic ideology. We must understand that we proceed with certain conceptual presuppositions about which we may be unaware, and indeed, this is the foundation of all ideology—“ideology” as a pejorative, meaning a self-sustaining “speculative system” (in Eric Voegelin’s phrasing) that can set us adrift from the realism of moral structure to the world. These are systems like nazism, communism, one-world-ism, materialism, and, importantly, secular psychotherapy.

Indwelling

When you wield a hammer, or a conceptual framework, or an unanalyzable skill, you “indwell” it. Imagine riding a bicycle, one of the skills Polanyi cited to explain tacit knowledge. You get on this two-wheeled thing and immediately fall over, but very quickly you figure out how to stay upright. If you’re falling left, you balance by steering left, enough but not too far. You don’t have to stop and think about it, or perform differential equations in your head to make it happen. You just do it. The knowledge of staying upright on a bicycle becomes tacit knowledge.

Importantly, that tacit knowledge becomes a part of you, in a sense. And you “inhabit” the tool you use, like the hammer or the bicycle. You’re only subsidiarily aware of the tool, be it hammer, bicycle, piano, or automobile. It becomes a part of you; an extension of you physically.

And now moving on from physical tool use, you can apply this to mental constructs, or frameworks. You use heuristics all through life, about everything. You apply an appropriate hermeneutic to every idea. You approach every problem, idea, or relationship with a mental model that you have already “inhabited.” You aren’t a blank slate. You don’t go into the lab to do experiments at random; you have a purpose. You aren’t merely reactive to the trials and vicissitudes of life, you have agency, the ability to form ideas and execute.

You do so through conceptual frameworks formed in your education and in what you learn from your environment, including social norms you internalize. All these form conceptual frameworks you bring to anything, and these conceptual frameworks, like the knowledge of how to stay upright on a bicycle, are tacit knowledge. You “indwell” the tacit knowledge; it indwells you.

This concept of indwelling is helpful to understanding religion. Christians speak of the Holy Spirit “indwelling” them, meaning that being a believer means adopting an outlook on the world through which we perceive it. This means absorbing certain moral precepts, but also their deeper meanings, what those moral precepts point us toward. You know that you are morally “prone to wander.” You deal gently with morally wayward people, just as you would wish for yourself, but at the same time you don’t turn a blind eye to the waywardness of it. You “indwell” this moral outlook (among many others, of course) because you are in turn indwelled by Spirit.

And what this means (my words, not Polanyi’s) is that by joining God’s team, so to speak, we make of ourselves His instrumentality; He indwells us. This makes us free, actually, a paradox we should inquire into and understand. Our participation in the world as flawed but willing instruments of God means participation in it rather than wringing our hands on the sidelines, captured by ideologies that are sustained in ignorance and indignation.

Polanyi: “Religion is an indwelling, not a mere affirmation.”