i've been interested for awhile in the work of historians of science and philosophers of knowledge who seek to criticize the enlightenment emphasis on the material without resorting to "un-scientific" reliances on the spiritual or hidden.
A big one for me in this area is the late Michael Polanyi, who was somewhat in the same room as Thomas Kuhn, who is more familiar to most as the origin of the much abused term, "paradigm." Polanyi devised a term "tacit knowledge" to describe a certain kind of extra-sensory knowledge that is crucial to science, to life, social functioning. He opposed this view to materialist science, in which meaning and knowledge arise from the division of the world into quantifiable parts.
Here is a an excerpt from a short essay where he explained this lifetime of work in a few paragraphs:
Unbridled detailing, the ideal advocated by Laplace and his modern followers, not only destroys our knowledge of things we most want to know; it clouds our understanding of elementary perception--our first contact with the world of inanimate matter and of living beings and our initial act of self-transcendence. Against the self-destructive commitment to ultimate lucidity, I propose the theory of tacit knowing. A theory of knowledge which endorses our capacities for understanding transcendence in the world will be found to establish self-transcendence.
I look at my hand, another face, or a machine. I recognize its area by its enclosed contours, by the relation between the object itself and its background within my field of vision. While I attend to the object itself I am relying on multiple clues-shapes, colours, extensions, perhaps in changing relations to each other. But I do not focus directly on each aspect of the object in its field. I have awareness of many of these aspects of the whole. In the case of the human face I rely on an awareness of its many features for attending to the characteristic appearance of a particular physiognomy. Attending to the details implicitly while focally addressing myself to the whole, I integrate the features into the cast they jointly form. The act of perception, therefore, comprises two types of awareness. I have subsidiary awareness of multiple facial features while I integrate these aspects into the face as a whole to which I attend focally. I perceive things through the dual activity of subsidiary and focal awareness. This is, in outline, the theory of tacit knowing.
Subsidiary awareness is controlled by focal awareness. The first type of awareness leaves itself open to the integrating function of the second. I am not able to specify with distinctness the particulars of a comprehensive entity. In this sense I know more than I can tell. I rely on my subsidiary awareness of the details of an object for attending to the coherent entity which is their meaning. There is, then, a from-to movement in all knowing. If, in allegiance to the ideal of total lucidity, I claim to know directly and distinctly aspects I actually only rely on subsidiarily, all comprehensive entities are destroyed, a program of self-and world-destruction results, a "world" composed of bits of matter in motion in which nobody lives. I rely not only on the several aspects of an object as I attend from these to a coherent view of the whole; I also rely on my body with its multiple and complex levels of functioning as I perceive things away from my body in the external world.
My body is the only thing in the world I normally never experience as an object. Instead I experience my body in terms of the world to which I am attending from my body. I continuously rely on my body as a subsidiary means for observing objects and other comprehensive entities outside and for using these entities for my own purposes.
The kind of knowledge I have of my body by dwelling in it is the paradigm of knowing particulars subsidiarily with a bearing on the comprehensive entity formed by them. Hence when I rely on my awareness of particulars for attending to a whole I handle things as I handle my body. In this sense I know comprehensive entities by indwelling their functional parts, as if they were parts of my body. Such is my conception of knowing by indwelling.
Through indwelling I participate in comprehensive entities, from my own body and the objects I perceive, to the lives of my companions, and the theories we employ to understand inanimate matter and living beings. I partly transform myself in that which I am observing and thereby extend my range of knowing to include knowledge of all the hierarchies--from inanimate matter to the frameworks of our convivial settings and the firmament of obligations which supervene the operations of our intelligence within these frameworks.
This is why a commitment to unbridled lucidity tends to destroy understanding of complex matters. Focus only on the particulars of a comprehensive entity and their joint meaning is effaced. Our conception of the entity is destroyed, leaving us only with bits and pieces scattered about in random meaninglessness.
Our view of life must account for how we know life; biological theories must allow for their own discovery and employment. Theories of evolution must provide for the creative acts which brought such theories into existence. Beginning with our own embodiment our theory of knowledge must endorse the ways we manifestly transcend our embodiment by acts of indwelling and extension into more subtle and intangible realms of being, where we meet our ultimate ends.
Posted by kevin at May 26, 2004 02:19 PM