The Body Has Reasons: Tacit Knowing in Thinking and Making

Abstract

interest in this topic proved singularly unrewarding.1 The approaches to this topic that I studied tended to be overly intellectual and not concrete enough; making, as contrasted to thinking, was not taken seriously as a cognitive activity. These thinkers basically held on to the traditional dichotomy drawn between these two human phenomena based on the duality between mind and body introduced by Plato and elaborated by the remainder of Western philosophical activity. They assumed that all is essentially mental in nature, that even such judgments as are made in artistic creation really happen in the mind of the maker and are merely given shape by the body in the work of art itself. Being both a thinker and a maker myself, I find this traditional posture toward in fiaking, and toward the role of the body in cognition, flatly untrue. With respect to the making with which I am involved, that of ceramics, my body frequently knows more than my mind can explicate. In such cases the cognitive process does not arise and develop from the mind to the body, but the other way around. Clearly some other approach to this topic must be found, one which will do justice to the facts known experientially by every person engaged in creative activity. In this article I shall explore a philosophical approach that strikes me as especially promising. In his major work, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy,2 and in many other books as well, Michael Polanyi sets forth an enlightening and thorough theory of cognition that overcomes the traditional dichotomy between mind and body. He maintains that all human cognition is to a large extent bodily in nature, acquired through a kind of absorption, as it were, and known in a way that largely escapes articulation by the knower himor herself. The first section of this article will analyze Polanyi's theory of tacit knowing by examining it in relation to cognition in general. In the second part I shall show how his theory may be applied to ceramics in particular and to artistic creation in general.