The Polanyian Revolution: Post-Critical Perpectives for Ethics

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) marks a turn in human perspective parallel to and as significant as the turn from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican angle of vision. The Ptolemaic way of viewing the world is named after Claudius Ptolemy, one of the great geographers and astronomers of the Graeco-Roman period, who was active in Alexandria, Egypt, in the Second Century of the Christian Era. In Ptolemy’s world, humanity and earth were regarded as the center of the universe, with the earth motionless and the moon, sun, and planets circling around it; the stars were spots of light on the dome arching over the whole. This view was generally accepted through the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Western Europe. It began to be displaced by the view of Nicolaus Copernicus (14731543), a Polish astronomer, set forth in Concerning the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in 1543, that the earth was not the center of the world but was itself one of the planets circling the sun. Copernicus sparked what has become known as the Copernican Revolution. This momentous change of perspective requires humans to reject the notion that they live as the center of the physical universe and to accept the view that the center is displaced away from earth. Since the time of Copernicus, there have been a series of events heralded as “Copernican Revolutions” in many areas of human life articulating the implications of the insight that our world can no longer be regarded from what has been called an anthropocentric perspective.