Who Was Michael Polanyi?

Abstract

Full appreciation of Bill Poteat’s work requires an understanding of Michael Polanyi. This essay briefly recounts Polanyi’s biography, then describes central features of his thought, especially the centrality of discovery, commitment, and tacit knowing. It then reports on Poteat’s own summary of Polanyi’s thought in his major work, Polanyian Meditations. While this paper may seem unnecessary to readers of Tradition & Discovery, there are actually scholars now coming to Poteat directly, without having gone through Polanyi first. And yet Polanyi is essential for appreciating a major portion of Bill’s thought, as Polanyian Meditations makes clear. So this will be a primer for some, and a refresher for more “mature” scholars; my aim is to highlight features of Polanyi’s story relevant to Poteat’s story. Michael Polanyi was born in Budapest in 1891 to a large non-practicing Jewish family which was relatively wealthy during his childhood. He grew up fluent in German, French, English, and Hungarian, and had a broad, classical education. He completed his medical training, served as a doctor in World War I, and served briefly in the government after the war, but his interests shifted to physical chemistry, in which he received his PhD in 1919. What strikes one about Polanyi’s background is the cultural richness of the central European humanism shared by assimilated Jews prior to World War II, giving him an acute intelligence and high standards. He could read Latin and Greek as an adolescent, read widely in the literature of four languages, and had a Tradition & Discovery: The Journal of the Polanyi Society 42:1 11 life-long interest in politics and social issues. Among his friends and acquaintances were Karl Mannheim, George Lukacs, Arthur Koestler, and his brother Karl Polanyi; his first scientific paper was published at 19; a second paper employing the new quantum mechanics received a very positive evaluation from Albert Einstein, to whom it was sent before publication; at the age of 23 he was first offered a position in the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft in Berlin, which he had to decline because of his military commitment. Beyond the extraordinary character of his early training and environment, Michael Polanyi also had a deep sense of responsibility for western society, such that his later move from science to social science and philosophy seemed natural to him. During his ten years as a member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in physical chemistry in Berlin, his research “focused mainly on three areas: adsorption of gases on solids, x-ray structure analysis of the properties of solids, and the rate of chemical reactions,” and it was here that his international reputation in science was established, and here that he experienced what would always remain for him a model of intellectual community (Mitchell 2006, 1). It was also in this period that Polanyi had the first experience that was to lead him eventually to the writing of Personal Knowledge. While in Germany and again after moving to the University of Manchester when Hitler came to power, Polanyi had travelled to the Soviet Union several times to academic conferences, and in 1935 he had a conversation about the social role of science with Nikolai Bukharin, a major theoretician of the Communist Party. Bukharin declared that the belief in pure scientific research was an aberrant result of capitalism, and that in the future, Soviet scientists would spontaneously pursue research that would benefit the latest government plan, due to the internal harmony of a communist society. Polanyi states that “in 1935 I could still smile at this dialectical mystery mongering, never suspecting how soon it would show terrible consequences” (SFS, 8). Polanyi was not naive about communism—he had read a great deal of Marx and engaged in intense discussions with family members on various aspects of socialism from his youth on—in fact, his sister-in-law (Karl’s wife Ilona) had been imprisoned once in Vienna for her communist sympathies. Polanyi had opposed a strong movement in England to place science at the service of society in imitation of the Soviet model. But until Russian biologists began to be imprisoned for declining to practice science in accord with Bukharin’s vision and appealed to western science in their defense, Polanyi did not realize that he had no philosophy of science to support his beliefs. The allegiance of western intellectuals to philosophical skepticism, and their romance with the utopian dreams of communist rhetoric, left them unable to respond to the ruthless realities of the Soviet situation. Polanyi therefore increasingly began writing to respond to this challenge, becoming more and more interested in the social sciences and philosophy: “Marxism has challenged me to answer these questions.... Like the Marxist theory, my account of the nature and justification of science includes