From Tacit Knowing to a Theory of Faith1

Both Polanyi and many of his interpreters saw the implications of tacit knowing for restoring the Augustinian principle that faith precedes understanding. Polanyi’s contribution to the rediscovery of the essential role of faith in the achievement of knowledge has, however, had a limited impact in science, philosophy, and in Christian theology. Polanyi’s epistemological contribution, nevertheless, is much more than a restoration and a reformulation of tradition. Tacit knowing provides a new vehicle for deeper interpersonal understanding. This essay is a beginning attempt to propose how tacit knowing provides a theory of faith and why a new theory is now needed. Just as process philosophy changes metaphysics, tacit knowing changes epistemology. Just as a change in metaphysics reorients concepts, language, perspective, and worldview, tacit knowing affects basic terms and worldview. One of these changes is to provide a new way of discussing the relation between faith as trust or fides qua creditur and faith as a set of beliefs or fides quae creditur so that faith is replaced by the tacit dimension. A second change then is to widen the range of faith from a religious framework to the total framework of knowing or epistemology. A third change is to coordinate and integrate the vast contributions of evolutionary biology and neuroscience into the general epistemology of our age. These changes are all nascent in Polanyi’s writing, but await an adequate theoretical development as a theory of faith. 1. Polanyi’ s epistemology developed from his experience over his lifetime and led to his theory of tacit knowing, the central principle of his philosophy. His four major books show a development toward tacit knowing and then an application to the achievement of meaning in society. a. His first book length treatment of the epistemological problem of our time was in Science, Faith and Society in 1946. The book is what I call his inaugural address for his epistemological career. Within this elegant discussion, many of the primary notions that will later flower into tacit knowing are present. Chief among his discussions are the fiduciary components in traditional authority, a community of inquirers, apprenticeship, intuition, and the process of scientific discovery. Guiding Polanyi’s argument for political and intellectual freedom is the role of faith in guiding us toward finding and serving the truth. He speaks passionately for a free society guided by commitment to transcendent ideals. (Polanyi once told me that T.S. Eliot said that he thought that Science, Faith and Society read with the excitement of a novel.) In this book, Polanyi has not yet found the heart of his epistemology: how a society confused and often dominated by a mistaken understanding of science can be reformed through a new, improved theory of knowledge. b. Freed from teaching duties, Polanyi produced over a number of years many articles, radio addresses, and lectures (including the Gifford Lectures of 1951-52) that culminated in the publication of Personal Knowledge in 1958. The problems raised in Science, Faith and Society are approached with the general thesis that all knowledge from the most exact sciences to religions and worldviews is personal and rooted in tacit components and coefficients. Personal Knowledge is a panoramic laboratory of analysis and demonstration of the evidence for the tacit dimension in Polanyi’s episTradition & Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical, 41:1 11 temology. Here Polanyi boldly aligns his fundamental findings from across the academic fields with the principle of the Christian traditions that faith precedes understanding and also that growth of knowledge and discovery are like the Pauline paradigm of grace and faith (PK, 266, 285). Personal Knowledge earned for Polanyi an important reputation in universities, professional societies, and international conferences; he received visiting professorships and appointments in advanced studies groups such as the Center For Advanced Studies at Stanford University. He chaired grant-funded programs such as the several conferences sponsored by the Study Group on the Foundations of Cultural Unity and the Study Group on the Unity of Knowledge. As Polanyi lectured across the world, he kept working and trying to condense into theoretical simplicity his driving insights into the fiduciary nature of knowing that is rooted in our personal and embodied being in the world. c. This desired goal of theoretical simplicity was achieved with the Terry Lectures at Yale in 1962 and published later in 1966 after many lectureships and revisions. In The Tacit Dimension, Polanyi presents the theory of his epistemology and briefly applies it to the grand crisis of culture. Compared with the over four hundred pages of Personal Knowledge, The Tacit Dimension’s ninety-two pages seem incredibly concise. The point, however, is that Polanyi sets forth here with clarity and evidence the far-reaching principle that makes possible human knowing. The principle is tacit knowing which consists of the way we rely subsidiarily upon clues in order to attend to a focal awareness. This principle can explain the universe of human knowing and judgment by emergence through biological and cultural evolution to the development of societies that now struggle for truth, freedom, and justice. Strikingly, Polanyi consistently maintained that faith precedes understanding and is thus best understood in terms of tacit knowing; this is especially important for a theory of faith, as I will later argue. d. After the publication of The Tacit Dimension, Polanyi began the task of bringing together his epistemological discovery with its relation to his driving concern for a free society and human responsibility. To the crisis of modem culture, rooted in a mistaken, powerful, and intellectually attractive cultural bifurcation of the knower and the known, the tacit dimension is applied more explicitly as a principle and remedy. Though hindered by his age, Polanyi managed to produce a series of six papers on the subject of meaning that would become the basis of his final book, Meaning. The term “meaning” itself tells what tacit knowing leads us to find. Meaning is achieved through the deliberate and surprising acts of ourselves in cumulative cultures arising out of a long history of evolution and human striving. At our current stage of history, we are faced with destructive influences from the pervasive disease of the objective ideal of knowledge that denies the tacit dimension essential to human knowing and flourishing. Professor Harry Prosch, one of the members of the conference on “The Crisis of Culture” in 1972 sponsored by the Consortium for Higher Education Religion Studies in Dayton, Ohio, was asked by Polanyi to coauthor the book. In 1973-74 during a sabbatical at Cambridge, I also worked with Polanyi on Prosch’s final draft of Meaning. Meaning expands further tacit knowing’s fundamental role in all cultural life. Prosch, following Polanyi’s guidance, emphasizes intellectual freedom and a free society as essential for the long term nurture of human knowing and responsible action. The application of tacit knowing to major domains of human knowing is demonstrated again, but a new step is made by focusing on the way tacit knowing illuminates the achievement of meaning from self-centered integrations of subsidiary clues to a focal target as in a scientific discovery to the self-giving integrations of subsidiary clues to a focal target as in metaphors, art, and religious frameworks. Here Polanyi adds a new feature to tacit knowing. In perception and the physical sciences, the clues or subsidiaries are of little interest except insofar as they contribute to what is focused upon. In poetry, drama, painting, myth, and religion the self-involving subsidiaries are of more intrinsic interest than the focal target to which they contribute. This difference between the intrinsic interest of the subsidiaries