Michael Polanyi is not the first name people who know arguments remember. He thought about science–not in the casual way of just “doing” science, nor really as a academic philosopher. He enjoyed a life full of lectures and highly readable summaries about the way we know things and how we work together productively to refine knowledge and get along with each other best while doing so.
Oddly enough, despite massive success in holding tenured positions on faculty, selling thousands of books, and top lectures around the world, he still wasn’t happy with the progress he had made. Little matters angered him, like not being shown enough gratitude by Thomas S. Kuhn for setting up the basic argument for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He said in a letter that “its content largely repeats, without reference to their origins, the ideas I have developed in my previous books.” (Moleski, 16) But in his own work he even admitted that scientists are likely to find very similar findings, given the right context. If there hadn’t been a Polanyi or a Kuhn, we’re probably still have a less “objectivist” scientific community than a century before, even though we might use different words to describe it. In fact, we can probably thank Hitler for making positivism and “objective” state-endorsed science look fairly bad.
He wrote about how scientists in disagreement better reveal their alliance and shared tradition than ones who fail to argue. Oddly enough, Polanyi mostly avoided disagreements with other scholars or scientists–he used different terminology, published mostly in lectures without heavy citation of peers, and often made what I consider strange maneuvers to take out enemies in politics (especially communism, out of his escape from Soviet Budapest) in lieu of inviting a productive disagreement with his allies in philosophy or science.
It’s one of those fairly frequent cases of authors missing their own advice.
So this visual maps out the basic outlines of Polanyi. Clicking on it should take you to Prezi. You’ll find I’ve pulled some of Polanyi’s most moving words, made a few fill-ins myself when the author was vague, and tried to understand how exactly the life of society (I read him as especially meaning formal associations like academic disciplines, corporations, and states), intuition and knowing, and moral conscience and traditions all fit together. As the name lets on, he basically tries to put the cosmos together in less than a hundred pages. I have a twisted love for people who write like that.
No wonder many philosophers disregarded him, though. It’s not fun when somebody tries to do your job without giving you proper credit, without playing by the rules of exchange, without dedicating years to learning that vocabulary . . . and then getting some prestige for it.
All the time, people live in these vicious cycles of feeling under appreciated for their work and then not showing utmost appreciation to others to get it back; elsewhere, I’ve called them “victimization cycles.” It’s just a little more apparent when the person doing it is the most eloquent author on the inherent appreciation of and within scientific communities.
“If action, then drama; if drama, then conflict; if conflict, then victimage.” (KB)
The only cure for these meannesses is seeing self in the Other. That starts with a little transparent, public disagreement about the thing that really matters, outside of self. Polanyi should’ve done that, too–his career was spent writing about it.
Citations:
Kenneth Burke, “Interaction: Dramatism,” International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 6 (New York: MacMillan Co and The Free Press, 1968) 451. The longer version comes from Kenneth Burke, Language As Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 55.
