Conversations On Natural Philosophy: In Which the Elements of That Science Are Familiarly Ex... Book

Periodically I return to this great book, not only to squeeze every last drop of wisdom from it, but also to simply enjoy its prose. Organizationally, the book is discursive, yet coherent.

THE COHERENT WHOLE:
The plan of the book is four-fold.

(1) We notice that even in the most objective sciences, we have to make subjective judgements. The situation relies even more on our subjective selves the less formalized a discipline becomes.

(2) This observation spurs a long meditation on how our objective standards and subjective skills go together. The melding of the two, of the subjective and objective, is what Polanyi calls Personal Knowledge.

(3) This meditation allows us to attack the question, How can we be confident in our knowledge, seeing that it relies on our finite and error prone selves? The answer is, strangely perhaps, that though our judgements might be erroneous, we nevertheless feel compelled to make personal commitments to making our worlds of experience more satisfactory.

(4) Our conclusion opens up a view of all of life, where each creature uses its tacit skill to achieve unprecedented forms of understanding. The discarded view is the idea that life's creative outburst is the result of mechanistic, formal processes. The new view is that life's lifeblood is a organic gestalt, where parts contribute to wholes in unprecedented and non predictable ways.

THE DISCURSIVE SIDE:

Outside of this main plan, yet contributing to it, we travel over a huge range of territory. Physics, mathematics, psychology, biology, politics, history, religion, philosophy are all called into play. Along the way, we critique Marxism, scientism, mechanism, anti-traditionalism, over-traditionism, rationalism and more. It's quite an adventure. In it all, Polanyi says, "look and see how it all goes together." And it does.

APPRAISAL:

History and tradition might, and I think should, look upon Polanyi's work favorably. It is a very well argued work. His discursive range is vast, and for dilettantes, a smorgasbord of delight. And large portions of it are incontestably true (very rare for philosophy). A blemish appears to me Polanyi's realism. It seems Polanyi is unsure that we ever actually make contact with the real world, though we must nevertheless accept naively the appearances we're given. It would have been better if he had been aware of or argued for an Idealist conception of reality, where what is given in experience is actually the world. In this case, a gnawing sense of unreality about our knowing acts, would have transfigured into a joyful contact with actuality. But this means, at least, Idealists can appropriate his thoughts and feel their full vigor.