TRADITION & DISCOVERY

Tradition and Discovery is no longer available in print. All contents remain available for no cost on at www.polanyisociety.org.

General Editor

David James Stewart

St. Catherine University

St. Paul, MN 55105

contact@davidjamesstewart.com

Book Review Editor

Jean Bocharova

Department of English,

Mt. San Jacinto College

jbocharova@msjc.edu

Associate Book Review Editor

Spencer Case

University of Colorado

Boulder, CO 80309

casesj@colorado.edu

Managing Editor

Paul Lewis

Roberts Department of Religion

Mercer University

Macon, GA 31207

lewis_pa@mercer.edu

Editorial Board

Ellen Bernal

Bioethicist, Retired

Perrysburg, Ohio 43551

ellermob@gmail.com

Araminta Johnston

Independent Scholar

Charlotte, NC

asjohnclt@aol.com

Charles Lowney

Hollins University

Roanoke, VA 24019

lowneycwl@gmail.com

Stan Scott

Emeritus Professor, UMaine—Presque Isle

Independent Scholar

Portland, ME 04101

stan.scott@maine.edu

Kyle Takaki

Independent Scholar

Honolulu, HI

ktakaki@hawaii.edu

Editor Emeritus

Phil Mullins

Missouri Western State University

St. Joseph, MO 64507

mullins@missouriwestern.edu

Book Review Editor Emeritus

Walter Gulick

Montana State University Billings

Billings, MT 59101

wgulick@msubillings.edu

Tradition & Discovery is prepared for printing by Faithlab in Macon, GA.

Tradition & Discovery is indexed selectively in The Philosopher’s Index and Religious and Theological Abstracts and is included in both the EBSCO online database of academic and research journals and the Directory of Open Access Journals. Tradition & Discovery is also available online at www.polanyisociety.org.

© 2020 by the Polanyi Society

ISSN 1057-1027 (print)

ISSN 2154-1566 (online)

Volume XLVI Number 3 (completes vol. 46) October 2020

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Submissions: All manuscripts should be submitted as a Microsoft Word file attached to an email message. Articles should be no more than 6000 words in length (inclusive of keywords, abstract, notes, and references) and sent to Paul Lewis at lewis_pa@mercer.edu. All submissions will be sent out for blind peer review. Book reviews should be no more than 1000 words in length and sent to Jean Bocharova at jbocharova@msjc.edu.

Spelling: We recognize that the journal serves English-speaking writers around the world and so do not require anyone’s “standard” English spelling. We do, however, require all writers to be consistent in whatever convention they follow.

Citations:

• Our preference is for Chicago’s parenthetical/reference style in which citations are given in the text as (last name of author year, page number), combined with full bibilographical information at the end of the article. One exception is that Polanyi’s major works may be cited parenthetically using the following abbreviations (with abbreviations italicized):

CF Contempt of Freedom

KB Knowing and Being

LL Logic of Liberty

M Meaning

PK Personal Knowledge

SEP Society, Economics, and Philosophy

SFS Science, Faith, and Society

SM Study of Man

STSR Scientific Thought and Social Reality

TD Tacit Dimension

For example: Polanyi argues that …. (TD, 56). Full bibliographical information should still be supplied in the references section since many of us may work with different editions of his works.

• Endnotes should be used sparingly and be placed before the reference section.

• We do recognize that Polanyi’s work connects with scholars who work in diverse disciplines that use different style guides. To the extent that our software allows, we will accept other styles (e.g., APA or MLA) so long as the author is consistent and careful in following it. The main point, of course, is to give the reader enough information to locate and engage your sources. Manuscripts that are not careful and consistent in style will be returned so that the author can make corrections, which may delay publication.

For more information see http://polanyisociety.org/Aims-and-Scope-9-12-18.htm and http://polanyisociety.org/TAD-Submissions&Review-9-12-18.htm

PREFACE

With COVID-19 rapidly changing the world as we know it, combined with the recent civil unrest where I live in Minneapolis, it has admittedly been hard to focus on much else. There are moments when academic endeavors such as ours have started to feel trivial and unimportant, and then there are moments when they seem more meaningful and timely than ever. Preserving and curating a body of knowledge and scholarship dedicated to critical reflection on and in light of Michael Polanyi is, I believe, a noble and virtuous pursuit in and of itself, one that will never become passé or impractical, regardless of what’s going on in the world.

These are my first words as the new General Editor of TAD. And while I don’t expect them to be remembered or celebrated, I do hope that they reflect my commitment to maintaining the tradition of our journal as we discover together exactly what comes next for ourselves and the academy as a whole. To continue pursuing the ideals of an open-access publishing model, to protect our practice of rigorous peer-review, to broaden our readership and to invite new voices into the conversation—these are a few of my goals as I take the reins from Paul Lewis and stand on his shoulders and those who came before him.

So let’s get to it. Check out www.polanyisociety.org for the latest news on the annual meeting and other happenings, and kindly submit your dues by December 31.

David James Stewart

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

John Apczynski (apczynsk@sbu.edu) is Professor Emeritus at Saint Bonaventure University. He works in the areas of the intersection of religion and culture and the retrieval of the Roman Catholic tradition.

Gus Breytspraak (gus.breytspraak@ottawa.edu) is retired from teaching for Ottawa University’s adult program in Kansas City. His recent research has focused on Polanyi’s work in the sixties with various study groups leading into his late work on meaning in lectures and writing.

Jon Fennell (jfennell@hillsdale.edu) is Professor Emeritus at Hillsdale College. His teaching and research reflect a deep interest in philosophy, politics and education.

C. P. Goodman (cpgoodman@lineone.net) has published articles in TAD and Appraisal and was a member of the group who initially collaborated in work on the Polanyi Reader. He is particularly interested in Polanyi’s social and political ideas.

Phil Mullins (mullins@missouriwestern.edu) edited TAD from 1991 to 2012 and is currently President of the Polanyi Society.

Jonathan Reibsamen (jonathan.reibsamen@ciu.edu) is associate professor of philosophy and philosophy program director at Columbia International University in Columbia, South Carolina. He received his PhD in philosophy from Saint Louis University in 2015.

Kyle Takaki (ktakaki@hawaii.edu) is interested in the intersections of tacit knowing, complexity, and comparative explorations of wisdom and spirituality. He is currently investigating these themes as applied to contemporary, global problems.

POLANYI AND THE STUDY GROUP FOR THE UNITY OF KNOWLEDGE

Gus Breytspraak and Phil Mullins

Keywords: Michael Polanyi and Marjorie Grene, the Study Group on the Unity of Knowledge, Michal Polanyi’s late thought

ABSTRACT

The Ford Foundation funded not only the important 1965 and 1966 Bowdoin College interdisciplinary conferences of the Study Group on Foundations of Cultural Unity (SGFCU), but also the many later conferences from 1967-1972 of the SGFCU successor group, the Study Group for the Unity of Knowledge (SGUK). Michael Polanyi chaired the group making these grant proposals and his cultural criticisms and his constructive post-critical philosophical ideas underlay both the SGFCU and the early SGUK programs which Ford generously supported. There is interesting Ford Foundation archival material about these grants and their programs as well as many relevant letters in the Michael Polanyi Papers. This essay focuses on Polanyi’s limited role in three SGUK meetings and its decisive importance in shaping late Polanyi publications. It also traces the declining Polanyi’s aspiration to work with Marjorie Grene to convene a never realized European SGUK conference (in the early seventies) that used his ideas to illumine the destruction of Europe in the twentieth century.

Our Polanyiana essay (Breytspraak and Mullins 2017) focused attention on Michael Polanyi’s deep involvement in two Ford Foundation-funded interdisciplinary conferences which brought together, in 1965 and 1966 at Bowdoin College, an international mix of academics and artists. Although Scott and Moleski (2005, 257-261) briefly treat these conferences, the biography does not show how important Polanyi’s work on the Bowdoin conferences project was in shaping the last phase of Polanyi’s work as a scholar. Nor does the Polanyi biography say enough about Polanyi’s subsequent work in the Study Group for the Unity of Knowledge (hereafter SGUK), which was a successor, multi-year Ford-funded interdisciplinary project that Polanyi helped launch and in which he participated in limited but important ways. Like the earlier Bowdoin conferences, Polanyi’s work for the SGUK had a significant influence on Polanyi’s late interests and scholarship. This essay discusses Polanyi’s involvement in the SGUK, showing both how the SGUK was initially grounded in Polanyi’s ideas and how SGUK programs shaped some important late Polanyi publications and led toward Polanyi’s Meaning Lectures delivered in 1969, 1970 and 1971 and the book Meaning. We discuss Polanyi’s urgent but failing effort, with the help of Marjorie Grene, to put together a European SGUK meeting in 1971, which was to engage intellectuals in a wide-ranging discussion of Polanyi’s account of modern history and “moral inversion.”

A Prelude: Polanyi and the Study Group on Foundations of Cultural Unity

The Ford-funded project sponsoring the 1965 and 1966 Bowdoin College conferences was an experimental endeavor in which Ford and the conference organizers sought to transform the mainstream intellectual ethos, using Michael Polanyi’s philosophical ideas as a catalyst. The project posited an emerging “unsuspected convergence of ideas separately developed in various fields…[by a variety of persons who should be brought together in a meeting since they all] actively oppose in their work the scientism, and the related methodological and ontological over-simplifications, which in one or another form are ascendant in every field of scholarly and creative endeavor” (Appendix A, Ford 6500113).1 This Ford project thus began as a deliberate attempt to encourage an intellectual “movement”—a term used throughout the project correspondence—based in Polanyi’s thought, but which would galvanize “convergent” voices.

The Bowdoin conferences project was organized by the Study Group on Foundations of Cultural Unity (hereafter SGFCU), which was chaired by Michael Polanyi and included Marjorie Grene and Eduard Pols as members of the organizing committee. There are extensive Ford Foundation archival records as well as much archival material in the Polanyi-Grene correspondence in the Michael Polanyi Papers (hereafter MPP) that provide detailed information about the 1965 and 1966 conferences as well as the successor SGUK meetings. Our Polanyiana essay treats Polanyi’s key role in the 1965 and 1966 conferences. In collaboration with several others, but particularly Grene and Sigmund Koch, Polanyi initiated discussion about the SGFCU project in 1963 and 1964. Koch was, during Polanyi’s spring 1964 Duke residency, a Duke faculty member with whom Polanyi was already acquainted and with whom he apparently had conversations. In October, 1964, he took a new job as Director of Humanities and Arts program at the Ford Foundation. Koch was deeply involved in planning the SGFCU project (and later was involved in both the 1965 and 1966 conferences) and it was the Humanities and Arts program that funded the 1965 conference in January 1965 ($25,000) and “extended” the grant ($36,000) for the 1966 conference. Although Koch was instrumental in securing Ford support for this project, it is clear that Grene was the force on the ground, conceiving, drafting the proposal for and implementing, in close collaboration with Polanyi, the SGFCU project. This project, as the Ford materials and correspondence with Polanyi show, in many ways is simply one more incidence of Polanyi’s fruitful collaboration, after 1950, with the Grene whirlwind.

Initiation of the Continuing Project with a Re-named, Re-organized, Re-located Group

After the August 1966 SGFCU Bowdoin conference, the SGFCU was re-organized and re-named the SGUK, with Marjorie Grene as the principal investigator. The SGUK received a five-year (1967-1972) $220,000 Ford Foundation grant (Ford 6700128) in January 1967. This large, multi-year grant was apparently made because Ford was generally pleased with the experimental SGFCU Bowdoin conferences and wished to continue the experiment with some modifications.

Sigmund Koch continued in his role as Director of Humanities and Arts program at Ford at the time the new grant application was submitted. Koch had already been deeply involved in the SGFCU and is listed as attending three SGUK meetings up through March 1969. He left the Ford Foundation not long into the five-year tenure of the SGUK for a position at the University of Texas, Austin, but was officially added to the SGUK core group and its steering committee (see Grene’s Ford Narrative Report, March, 1, 1967-March 1, 1968, pp. 2-3). But Koch eventually resigned from the steering committee after one of the squabbles about SGUK meeting topics among the members of the steering committee (see discussion below).

The cover letter accompanying the SGUK grant proposal (Grene to Koch, November 9, 1966, Ford 6700128) was signed by Grene and included the names of Polanyi (listed as Chairman) and Pols, identified as the “original organizing committee” of the SGFCU. The letter suggests the original organizing committee proposed changing the SGFCU project name to “Study Group on the Unity of Knowledge” subject to the approval by the “expanded committee.” Ten names were listed (including Grene, Polanyi and Pols) as those to be included on the “expanded Organizing Committee.” All of those listed except two were people who participated in the SGFCU Bowdoin conferences, but eventually the SGUK membership was expanded to about twenty and did include several who had not been involved in the SGFCU. Grene’s letter suggested that “at least five and at most seven of the committee members would be active in organizing a given meeting.” Effectively, this steering committee made program decisions and eventually there was much conflict between factions of the steering committee.

The SGUK project moved its institutional center of operations from Bowdoin College to the University of California, Davis, when Grene took a faculty position at Davis in 1967. The SGUK grant application is actually co-signed by UC Davis officials. Grene was the force behind the scenes pushing for this move, but Polanyi and Koch were the figures who made the public case for this move, despite opposition from Pols and Bowdoin College. George Gale, a Davis graduate student who worked with Grene, was hired in 1967 as the project administrator with a central office at Davis; the relatively successful effort of the SGUK to organize and coordinate its many small and large conferences over five years owed much to Gale’s skill. Grene seems, above all else to have liked and gotten along well with Gale who was, according to Gale, the only student whose Ph.D. dissertation she ever directed.2 Grene’s correspondence with Polanyi late in the life of the SGUK, clearly shows she became quite weary of her difficult role as principal investigator. She had many other responsibilities and also at times was seriously squabbling with Davis colleagues as well as having great difficulty working with the fractious SGUK steering committee. She took steps to move the project from UC, Davis to Boston University where it would be directed by Robert Cohen and Marx Wartofsky. But Ford would not allow this transfer of leadership and institutional sponsorship so Grene continued as principal investigator, although Cohen and Wartofsky did organize some of the later SGUK meetings.

The Presumed Polanyian Framework

Clearly, the SGUK began as a re-modeled version of the SGFCU, trading on its connections, good record, and prestige, with the Ford Foundation. Polanyi’s backing was important; at least some at Ford still in 1970 regarded the SGUK as “the Polanyi Project” (Lowry to Pols, 5 June 1970, Ford 6700128).

Polanyi’s general outline of modern intellectual history is presumed in the SGUK grant proposal. Polanyi’s cultural criticism and his alternative “post-critical” philosophical ideas are highlighted in early correspondence about a possible SGFCU grant. They are an easily recognizable backdrop in the 1965 SGFCU grant proposal and they remain the backdrop for the later SGUK grant.

The SGFCU Ford proposal identifies the misguided “ideal” that emerged in Western culture after the seventeenth century, an ideal which “carries with it a new conception of the nature of things: all things whatsoever are held to be intelligible ultimately in terms of the laws of inanimate nature.” This “reductionist program” has made anomalies of “the finalistic nature of living beings, the sentience of animals and their intelligence, the responsible choices of man, his moral and aesthetic ideals, [and] the fact of human greatness.” The existence of these anomalies and “even the existence of science itself—has no legitimate grounds; our deepest convictions lack all theoretical foundation” (Appendix A, Ford 6500113).

The SGUK grant proposal simply presumes this basic Polanyian framework and indicates, in Grene’s November 9, 1966 introductory letter (Ford 6700128), that a new grant to the SGUK would “continue the work begun by the Study Group during its previous meetings at Bowdoin College in 1965 and 1966.” The internal Ford Foundation document evaluating the grant request spends two pages commenting on the Bowdoin conferences and then notes that the SGUK proposal is simply a reapplication “for the type of continuing support it [SGFCU] had sought from the beginning” (p. 4, internal Ford document commenting on SGUK proposal titled “Grant Request-Division of Humanities and the Arts” dated January 19, 1967, Ford 6700128).

Projected SGUK Meetings and Topics

Grene’s November 9, 1966 introductory letter and the grant proposal (Ford 6700128) outline a general plan to sponsor interdisciplinary conferences, large and small (called “major” and smaller “regional” or, in later narrative reports, “exploratory”) which treated important intellectual issues of the day which are identified in Grene’s letter as “of common interest to our participants.” Neither Grene’s introductory letter nor the grant proposal do more than suggest what in fact the meeting topics might be.

Grene’s letter suggests that meetings (at least the “major” ones at intervals of 18 months) will be “a further series” which focuses on “some of the problems which the previous meetings have shown to be in need of further discussion on an interdisciplinary basis.” She identified the next conference in March 1968 as dealing “with the relation of biology and physics, a problem raised in Professor Commoner’s paper of 1966 and the lively and complex discussion which followed it.” In fact, Commoner’s paper had been roundly attacked by Polanyi who raised the question as to whether Commoner (and others) properly understood reducibility and levels in biology (see the discussion below). Grene also suggested that a conference in the winter of 1969-70 “might deal with the problem of meaning as it arises in philosophy, the arts, and the biological and behavior sciences.”

The grant proposal itself provided a list of eight possible future topics for meetings: (1) “Relations between Physics and Biology: Identity, Complementarity, or Hierarchy?” (2) “The Nature and Function of Models in the Behavioral Sciences.” (3) “The Psychology and Epistemology of Imagination.” (4) “Meaning in Language and Art.” (5) “Patterns of Discovery in Art and Sciences.” (6) “The Cultural Implications of Cybernetics.” (7) “Taste and Morality: The Ethical Use and Abuse of Art.” (8) “Ethical Relativism and the Natural Law Tradition.” (Appendix A, Ford 6700128).

Polanyi’s Participation in the SGUK: An Introduction

Although we believe it is an important topic for mid-century intellectual history, we will not attempt here to discuss the broader and evolving SGUK program which sponsored approximately twenty meetings from 1967-1972. The balance of this essay focuses only on Polanyi’s participation in the SGUK; his direct involvement was limited to three SGUK meetings in 1968 and 1969. Nevertheless, the major publication of the SGUK was a Grene-edited collection of eight essays, Interpretations of Life and Mind: Essays around the Problem of Reduction (Grene, 1971), which was presented to Polanyi for his eightieth birthday 11 March 1971 (see Grene, 1971, p. v). Polanyi may have planned to attend other SGUK meetings but could not because of his wife’s or his own health problems. We emphasize here that Polanyi very much wished to convene a European SGUK meeting on “The Effect of the Scientific Outlook on History” (as he described it—see the discussion below) in 1971, but this meeting never came together. The Polanyi-Grene letters (treated below) shed light on why this was the case.

Although Polanyi’s direct personal participation in SGUK events was limited, he did, as the SGUK letterhead reflects, remain officially a member of the SGUK and received official communications from Grene (as PI) and George Gale (as administrator) about SGUK events and business. In addition, Polanyi’s personal correspondence with Grene provided him (as well as Breytspraak and Mullins) with interesting details—a Grene’s eye view—about SGUK affairs. There are approximately 350 pieces in the Grene-Polanyi collection in Box 16, Folders 1-9 of the MPP and clearly this is an incomplete record. At least 200 personal letters were written between the fall of 1966 and the end of 1972 (i.e., the period of the SGUK application and funded operations) and many of these mention details about SGUK. In some cases, Grene’s letters provide a candid camera view of particular SGUK programs or issues, a view which is in some tension with the annual narrative reports and other materials in the Ford Foundation archives for the SGUK grant.

In three subsections below, we discuss what the Grene-Polanyi correspondence and Ford Foundation archival records suggest about the three SGUK meetings in which Polanyi was involved.

The Austin, TX, April 1968 Meeting

On April 20 and 21, 1968, there was a SGUK meeting discussing “The (Ir)reducibility of Biology to Physics and Chemistry ” at the University of Texas, Austin (Grene, 1971, xii). Polanyi attended this meeting, but his connection with the meeting is an odd and convoluted one. He seems originally not to have been intended as a presenter, although one of his papers (see discussion below) apparently, at the last minute, was circulated by Grene. Grene invited papers on the topic from Michael Watanabe (a physicist) and Francisco Ayala (a biologist). The Ford narrative report (March 1, 1968-February 28, 1969, p. 2, Grant 6700128,) indicates papers were sharply criticized by Ilya Prigogine and Alasdair MacIntyre. Prigogine (who became thereafter a SGUK member) outlined his research which today is regarded as working out the basic ideas about self-organization in dynamic systems theory. The Ford narrative report notes his “illuminating presentation” showing that “biological phenomena can in fact be explained, not by means of orthodox thermodynamical concepts, but by reference to the principles and experimental techniques of irreversible thermodynamics” (p. 2). This is covered in Prigogine’s essay, “Unity of Physical Laws and Levels of Description,” in Grene’s SGUK volume, Interpretations of Life and Mind, Essays around the Problem of Reduction (Grene, 1971, 1-13). In PK, Polanyi notes his interest in literature comparing living beings to “open systems” and he cites approvingly early work in which Prigogine was involved in the forties (PK, 384, note 1) on this topic. Polanyi may have had a hand in suggesting Prigogine (who was spending some time at the University of Texas, Austin in this period) be invited to this meeting. Comments in some of Grene’s letters suggest that she is relying on Polanyi to understand the chemistry and physics in Prigogine’s presentation. The Ford report suggests the views of the primary presenters at the Austin meeting were sharply criticized (apparently for their mechanistic ideas) by the philosophers, but Polanyi’s views per se are not mentioned in the Ford report (p. 3).

The April 1968 Austin meeting’s topic (mentioned as a projected topic in the original SGUK grant proposal), in fact grew out of the 1966 SGFCU Bowdoin College meeting at which there was a great dispute over the biologist Barry Commoner’s paper, “Is Biology A Molecular Science?”, which is included in Grene’s volume, The Anatomy of Knowledge (Grene, 1969a, 73-102), which included some of the papers from the 1965 and 1966 conferences. Polanyi strenuously contended that Commoner misunderstood reducibility and irreducibility. Polanyi subsequently wrote two theoretical biology-related essays which clearly grew out of the 1966 Bowdoin discussion. “Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry” was published in the August 21, 1967 issue of Chemistry and Engineering News (Polanyi, 1967) and “Life’s Irreducible Structure,” a revision and expansion of the earlier essay, was published in 1968 in Science (Polanyi, 1968). Polanyi’s first attempt publicly to respond to Commoner was a May 31, 1967 presentation at the Center for Theology and Science in Chicago; subsequently, he made another presentation in a general symposium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) on December 30, 1967 at Rockefeller University in New York City, which included Gerald Holton, Ernest Nagel, John R. Platt, and Barry Commoner in addition to Polanyi (Scott and Moleski, 2005, 268-269; Zygon 3[4], 442). An edited transcription of the general symposium, including Polanyi’s remarks (444-447), was published under the general title, “Do Life Processes Transcend Physics and Chemistry?” in the December 1968 issue of Zygon (3:4, 442-472).3 Polanyi argues in his first essay “Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry” that “no mechanism—be it a machine or a machine-like feature of an organism—can be represented in terms of physics and chemistry” (Polanyi, 1967, 55, or see Allen, 1997, 284, which includes this essay[283-299]). This was the general position Polanyi took in the 1966 Bowdoin dispute as well as all subsequent presentations and publications. Polanyi’s AAAS presentation (apparently “On the Structure of Living Things” [Box 38, Folder 10, MPP]) was a revised form of the recently published “Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry.” He notes in a February 21,1968 letter to Grene (Box 16, Folder 2, MPP) that he had great difficulty adding “three pages to the original text” for the AAAS presentation.

Polanyi was invited to make yet another presentation of what is very likely a further revision of “Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry” (or perhaps a revision of the AAAS presentation) in mid-March 1968 at a Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored meeting at the Bellagio villa (a plush venue loaned to certain groups for meetings) in Italy. All of these presentations and revisions precede the April 20-21, 1968 Austin SGUK meeting and apparently contribute to “Life’s Irreducible Structure.”

The letters Polanyi and Grene exchanged early in 1968 touch upon “Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry” (“L.T.” in these letters). When Polanyi apparently was revising the published essay (or his AAAS presentation version of it) in early 1968, presumably for the mid- March Bellagio presentation, Grene advises him (Grene to Polanyi, 8 Jan. 1968, Box 16, Folder 2, MPP) that she wants to talk to him about the essay. She and others have found the published “L. T” too long and not straightforward.

Grene did include the revised and expanded “Life’s Irreducible Structure” in her 1969 collection of Polanyi essays (Grene, 1969b, 225-240), Knowing and Being (hereafter KB). She clearly considered this revised and expanded version a better essay than “Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry.” Although Polanyi wanted both essays in KB, Grene refused to do this since there is overlap and since the earlier essay was, in Grene’s view, obscurely organized. In KB, the first endnote for “Life’s Irreducible Structure” (Grene, 1969b, 239) identifies the essay as an expanded version of Polanyi’s contribution to the December 30, 1967 AAAS symposium. The note also identifies the first half of “Life’s Irreducible Structure” as “anticipated” in the August 1967 essay “Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry” published in Chemical and Engineering News.

Although Grene liked “Life’s Irreducible Structure” better than its predecessor, she, nevertheless, offered sharp criticisms. In her March 13, 1968 letter to Polanyi, she comments on the essay:

I think we’re on very shaky ground in our criticisms of evolutionary theory and that you must produce much better arguments than you have done so far. They [mainstream evolutionary theory] are confused but so are we. For example, that higher principles can gradually die away doesn’t prove that they can’t gradually appear, just in terms of variation and selection. Nor does it prove anything about how they originate (Box 16, Folder 2, MPP).

Grene suggests some passages in “Life’s Irreducible Structure” are very doubtful and she wanted carefully to go over the essay with Polanyi “before circulating it to the study group—in that case we might have to circulate it at or after the Austin meeting” (Box 16, Folder 2, MPP). Grene thus seems to have planned to include, at some point, Polanyi’s “Life’s Irreducible Structure” as a paper that might have been useful to the SGUK’s consideration of the topic of “(ir) reducibility in biology.”

Grene’s letter goes on to review how much material is already to be considered at the April 1968 Austin meeting. But then she pencils in the margin of her March 13 typewritten letter, “PS The Ayala paper is so bad, I have to circulate your new one—with some misgivings and a few editings—hope you don’t mind” (Box 16, Folder 2, MPP). In a March 21, 1968 letter from Polanyi to Grene Polanyi replied, “I am glad you will circulate my new paper. It should be marked Draft (Deadline April 25). Please revise what you think necessary. thanks in advance” (Box 16, Folder 2, MPP). Although Polanyi seems to have agreed that his essay could be circulated before or after the meeting, in the Ford narrative report commenting on the Austin meeting, there is no mention of Polanyi’s paper.

The Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy Meeting in Late July and Early August, 1968

There was a small SGUK meeting from July 28 through August 3, 1968 on the topic “Art and Perception” at the Rockefeller Foundation villa in Bellagio, Italy at which Polanyi made a presentation. Grene convinced the Rockefeller Foundation to provide this exclusive villa for an SGUK meeting for twelve people. In many ways, this SGUK meeting, like the April 1968 Austin meeting, grew out of an earlier SGFCU meeting, in this case the 1965 Bowdoin meeting.

As the title “The Creative Imagination” implies, Polanyi’s paper used to open the 1965 Bowdoin SGFCU conference emphasizes the importance of imagination in promoting scientific discovery. This paper was published (with edited discussion) in the Grene-edited 1969 monograph, Toward a Unity of Knowledge, which includes a selection of essays and edited discussion of these essays from the 1965 conference (Grene, 1969c, 53-91). Polanyi’s essay was also published in other places in 1966, 1967 and 1968, plus a version was used as Polanyi’s third fall of 1965 Wesleyan Lecture. “The Creative Imagination” is a first step on the way to Polanyi’s later efforts to analyze how imagination plays a special role in making possible meaning in works of art and, ultimately, in symbol, myth, ritual and religion. Polanyi’s work on imagination in the 1965 Bowdoin conference is amplified in his1968 Bellagio SGUK conference presentation on painting.

Other 1965 Bowdoin papers perhaps complemented Polanyi’s interest in imagination. Donald Weismann’s paper on collage emphasized “the kind of integration of incompatibles that typifies the achievements of art as well as science” (1965 Ford Narrative Report, 8, Ford 6500113) and Polanyi later develops an interest in the incompatibility of particulars in works of art. Polanyi likely was particularly impressed with M. H Pirenne’s 1965 Bowdoin conference presentation. Pirenne set forth ideas “about the philosophical applications of visual perception” (1965 Ford Narrative Report, 7, Ford 6500113), illustrated by using slides of a Pozzo painting on the concave ceiling of a baroque church, which produced an optical illusion. A Polanyi letter from October 1963 (Polanyi to Coghill, October 22, 1963, Box 6, Folder 4, MPP) confirms that Polanyi already was interested in some of Pirenne’s work on optics and art and its connection with Polanyi’s epistemic ideas; this is likely how Pirenne came to be invited to the 1965 Bowdoin conference to make a presentation.

Soon after the Bellagio meeting, Grene candidly told Polanyi that she thought Pirenne’s 1965 presentation was “appalling” (26 August 1968, Box 16, Folder 3, MPP). She berated Polanyi for writing a preface to a Pirenne book (28 October 1968, Box 16, Folder 3, MPP), and later she noted she thought he “grossly overrate[d]” Pirenne (2 Feb. 1970, Box 16, Folder 5, MPP). Nevertheless, in part because Polanyi seems to have been captivated by Pirenne’s work, it seems likely that Polanyi encouraged Grene to put together the 1968 SGUK Bellagio meeting on art and perception, which was a meeting that brought together Richard Gregory, Rudolf Arnheim, Ernest Gombrich, Iris Murdoch and others. Clearly, the nature of perception and the views of some of these figures were also of interest to Grene (see Grene, 1990, 17-22). Polanyi borrowed slides from Pirenne (Pirenne to Polanyi, 17 July 1968 and Polanyi to Pirenne, 19 July 1968 Box 7, Folder 2, MPP) which he used in his Bellagio SGUK presentation which is apparently what is published in 1970 as “What is a Painting?” (Polanyi, 1970b).

By late 1968 or early 1969, according to Prosch (Polanyi and Prosch, 1975, ix), Polanyi is working on his Meaning material, which, we suggest, at least in part grows out of his SGUK work on imagination and painting. Polanyi delivers lectures and holds classes on his Meaning material at the University of Chicago and the University of Texas in 1969, 1970 and 1971 (and possibly in 1968 also). Eventually, parts of this material are pulled together (with some excerpts from earlier Polanyi writing and bridge material provided by Prosch [Polanyi and Prosch, 1975, 227-228]) and published as Meaning in 1975, Polanyi’s last book, co-authored with Prosch. See the Moleski and Mullins discussion (2005: 8-24) in Tradition and Discovery, following Prosch’s death, for an effort to piece together the chaotic story of Prosch’s effort to work with the increasingly mentally fragile Polanyi.

The Austin, TX Meeting on March 29-30, 1969

Polanyi was apparently in Texas possibly to give his Meaning Lectures and he also participated in the SGUK March 29-30, 1969 meeting on “Scientific Knowledge and Discovery.” Grene’s Ford report says about the meeting,

Robert Cohen opened the discussion on Saturday of Michael Polanyi’s theory of heuristics and of scientific knowledge in general, and Keith Gunderson opened a discussion in defense of the logical reconstruction approach…We felt that this weekend’s talk had opened a number of questions which ought to be carried further, and so we held a second meeting on this general theme at Boston in October, 1969 (Ford Narrative Report 1969-70, pp.1-2, Ford 6700128).

What Polanyi and Grene’s letters following the meeting reflect is Polanyi’s waning interest and energy:

I am getting a bit doubtful whether to attend the meeting of the Study Group in October. On second thought I find none of the questions or remarks at the Austin meeting to have been of use to me. Such a meeting exhausts me without corresponding benefits. And in any case this kind of discussion can be conducted more freely and effectively in my absence” (Polanyi to Grene, June 10, 1969, Box 16, Folder 4, MPP).

Polanyi did not go to the October Boston meeting or any later SGUK meetings. As to the Boston meeting, Grene assured Polanyi that Rom Harre who was very keen on Polanyi’s ideas would go to the Boston meeting and could represent Polanyi well. She agreed with Polanyi that his presence might impede discussion. The narrative report on the Boston meeting reports that Harre “presented some aspects of his own view rather than continuing the discussion of the problem of heuristics as it had been opened at Austin” (Ford Narrative Report 1969-70, p.2, Grant 6700128). Grene acknowledged this was a side issue rather than the original theme; she suggested a future SGUK meeting might return to Polanyi’s heuristics and noted that Cohen was writing a paper about the problems of scientific discovery “and its relation to other imaginative activities, with the question of the reducibility of biological and social sciences to physics…” (Ford Narrative Report 1969-70, p.2, Grant 6700128). That Cohen essay is apparently Cohen’s “Tacit, Social and Hopeful” in Interpretations of Life and Mind, Essays around the Problem of Reduction (Grene, 1971, 137-149). When Polanyi read the volume in 1971, he commented to Grene about how much he liked the Cohen essay (Polanyi to Grene, 30 Sept. 1971, Box 16, Folder 6, MPP).

Polanyi’s Uneasy “Fit” in the SGUK

The Polanyi-Grene correspondence is a large but incomplete correspondence stretching over several years. It reads a bit like pieces of a strange mystery novel with many intricate details but much missing; some of what is missing is suggested in the annual reports to the Ford Foundation on SGUK activities. Together the letters and Ford documents reveal some important things about Polanyi and Grene in the late sixties and early seventies, as well as the way the SGUK developed and left Polanyi behind.

Polanyi’s June 10, 1969 letter to Grene quoted above makes clear that Polanyi did not find the March 29-30, 1969 meeting on “Scientific Knowledge and Discovery” very fruitful and that he recognized his own increasing frailty and that he had other projects into which he wished to put his energy; he declined to attend the follow-up Boston meeting in the fall of 1969. There are signs, however, well before mid-1969 that Polanyi’s “fit” in the SGUK was an uneasy fit—at least this is the case if you compare his fit to the Polanyi-Grene symbiosis of the SGFCU and Polanyi’s centrality to the two Bowdoin conferences.

In early 1968, Polanyi wrote George Gale to inquire about starting a study group in Europe affiliated with the SGUK. He apparently asked Gale to send him some materials, which Gale did, but Gale also advised Grene about Polanyi’s inquiry. On Feb 9, 1968, Grene wrote Polanyi that Gale had advised her Polanyi was interested in starting “a European (or British) branch of the Study Group:”

This seems a sound idea, but please do remember that, although I agree with you that any member ought to be able to propose and organise a regional meeting, the establishment of an affiliated group would be very much something else again and could not possibly be carried out without the approval of the steering committee and of the group as a whole (Box 16, Folder 2).

It is unclear whether Polanyi wished to organize a regional SGUK meeting outside the US (which involved more Europeans) or whether he hoped to start another group. It seems likely that Polanyi did not understand the terms of the Ford Foundation grant. George Gale noted that Polanyi was “for the most part simply oblivious to the bureaucratic ins and outs of the Study Group’s functioning” (Gale e-mail to Breytspraak an Mullins, 27 May 2018).

What is clear is that Grene was worried that Polanyi was taking steps which might publicize the SGUK and Polanyi’s role in the SGUK in a way likely to get her into difficulty with the SGUK steering committee and the larger SGUK membership:

Moreover, your TES [TLS—Times Literary Supplement] man is, in my view, a very weak reed on which to hang such an enterprise. And further, whatever you do, please do not allow him to print anything about us without clearing it with me! Otherwise we’ll have another write-up of this as a movement to spread the Polanyian gospel and I’ll be in hot water all over the place. However devoutly I may happen myself to subscribe to the principles of your philosophy (some of them), I do operate on the thesis that “not Socrates but the truth shall prevail.” If you are right we’ll discover it sometime (“we” as distinct from “I,” but let us get there at our own pace in our own way.

Later in her letter, she apologizes for what she terms her (above) “tirade” and she notes “to put the matter at its most subjective: having just got over two rows, I’d like to avoid another if I can.” She also reports that Jacob Bronowski has resigned from the SGUK steering committee.

In her February 15, 1968 letter to Polanyi, Grene laments that Gale sent materials to Polanyi without consulting her: “If he [the TLS man] writes us up I’m sure I’ll be in for still another row—oh dear” (Box 16, Folder 2). What all this seems to suggest is that the SGUK steering committee, even in early 1968, is a fractious group. Polanyi’s role, his connection with Grene and perhaps what we dubbed above the “Polanyian framework” (underlying the SGFCU and the later SGUK grant) were matters Grene was sensitive about in the context of the steering committee making programming decisions. She also clearly feared publicity identifying the SGUK with Polanyi. The TES [TLS] man who Grene regarded as a weak reed was Walter James, a British journalist (Polanyi to Gale, 21 February 1968, Box 16, Folder 2) who Polanyi had earlier worked with. Polanyi’s response to Grene’s February 9 letter sought to reassure Grene, but what he said is itself puzzling:

Do not worry about the speculative discussion of a European branch of the Study Group. This is merely an exercise in propaganda with a view to the interest of a foundation which is supporting my work. Should, contrary to expectation, something actually develop in this direction, I shall draw you in well in time (16 February 1968, Box 16, Folder 2, MPP).

It is worth noting that about fifteen months later, Polanyi did write Shepard Stone (10 June 1969, Box 7 Folder 12, MPP), who formerly was affiliated with the Ford Foundation and who became the President of Association International pour la Liberté de la Culture, the organization that succeeded the Congress for Cultural Freedom (hereafter CCF, which was in part formerly funded by the Ford Foundation) when the CCF collapsed soon after the CIA funding of the CCF became public knowledge. Polanyi reminded Stone about the SGFCU and SGUK projects sponsored by Ford:

…a group of intellectuals, ranging from physics to poetry, are involved in this movement now. They still pursue the lines of the programme drawn up under my chairmanship. They share a sense of the cultural crisis, arising from a mechanistic conception of man, particularly in the universities from which this mentality spreads into the mass media (10 June 1969, Box 7 Folder 12, MPP).

In a somewhat indirect fashion, Polanyi asked about funding and his request seems to be an appeal to Stone as the director of the successor of the now defunct CCF whose European work needed to continue. Polanyi asked Stone if his new organization might “take some interest in the enterprise of the Study Group. So far we have done very little in Europe and the openings for it remain untouched” (10 June 1969, Box 7 Folder 12, MPP). As George Gale candidly put matters regarding what seems to have been Polanyi’s initial understanding of and continuing view of the SGUK,

Michael thought the Study Group was all about him, full stop. But of course it wasn’t. And once we got a fully functioning steering committee, with the likes of Bert Dreyfus, Chuck Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre (not to mention John Silber!) on it, the SG took on its own life. I don’t think Michael ever fully realized that and his participation dwindled as the grant ran on (Gale e-mail to Breytspraak and Mullins, 27 May 2018).

Polanyi also early in the life of the SGUK made proposals to Grene for additions to the SGUK membership and the steering committee but Grene seems to have rejected these out of hand: “My dear, you are wrong about Wigner—he may ‘love consciousness’ and of course he’s charming and your old friend—but he has no idea what the score is” (22 December 1968, Box 16, Folder 2). She then identifies the plurality of steering committee votes (including her own) which she foresees as against Wigner. Polanyi was also interested in adding J. C. Eccles who wrote a paper that Polanyi’s original 1968 paper “Why Did We Destroy Europe?” was intended to complement. However, Grene indicates Eccles also probably would not be approved for membership.

In mid-1968, Polanyi definitely made a proposal for a 1969 SGUK meeting, although the topic is never clearly identified. George Gale responded to the proposal suggesting a meeting on Polanyi’s proposed topic “sounds very interesting and exciting. Marjorie has seen it and I am planning on sending it out in late August or early September to the Steering Committee for their votes. I am sure the proposal will be met with approval” (Gale to Polanyi, 12 June 1968, Box 16, Folder 3, MPP). Grene, on September 9, advised Polanyi “as to your weekend meeting, we intend to ask the steering committee’s opinion” as soon as the secretary returns to work and the steering committee is available (9 Sept. 1968, Box 16, Folder 3). On September 23, 1968, Gale advised Polanyi his proposal for a 1969 SGUK meeting had gone out and replies were coming in (Box 16, Folder 3, MPP). But Polanyi’s letter of October 26, 1968 to Grene mildly complains about the slow response to what he calls “‘my meeting’” and asks to be advised “as quickly as possible how this matter stands” (Box 16, Folder 3, MPP). The correspondence does not clearly reflect whether Polanyi’s proposal for a 1969 meeting was approved but it seems likely. Comments in letters in this period suggest that Polanyi’s original proposal possibly morphed into the March 28-29, 1970 SGUK meeting on the topic “Psychological Models,” which Polanyi did not attend. In general, it appears that Polanyi’s role in shaping the SGUK was declining in 1968 and 1969.

It also appears that over several years of the life of the SGUK the fractious nature of the SGUK steering committee became more and more a problem. Steering committee friction started early in 1968. Polanyi was provided a Grene’s-eye view of the steering committee conflict in letters, but he seems to have tried to stay out of the conflict, although it may have affected responses to Polanyi’s input. In a February 28, 1968 letter, Grene tells Polanyi, “Dreyfus has been put on the steering committee [at the February 1968 Montreal meeting] (over the dead bodies of Koch and Silber who are furious)” (Box 16, Folder 2, MPP). In August of 1969, John Silber, a University of Texas, Austin philosopher who had become a dean and was a member of the steering committee, proposed at a steering committee meeting three future SGUK meetings on behalf of four or five members of the SGUK (including Texas colleagues Koch and Weismann). These topics were “The End of Art,” “Man and the Environment” and the “Problem of the Universities” and Grene’s notes (Box 16, Folder 4, MPP) on the steering committee meeting imply that things are now moving forward toward putting together meetings on these topics which will help to complete the programming of the final years of the SGUK. In her Sept. 3, 1969 letter she confides to Polanyi (Box 16, Folder 4, MPP) that she regards Silber as a bully who is likely to poison the SGUK project by complaining to figures like Koch, who is now his colleague. Grene’s later October 27, 1969 memo to the full membership advises that at a recent October 1969 meeting of the SGUK in Boston the full membership suggested it “would like to be consulted about the further planning of our meetings once we have the outlines of a plan before us…” (Box 16, Folder 4, MPP). Silber and others who earlier in August had proposed SGUK programming take the plan to have a full membership review as a Grene move to eliminate their program proposals. Silber resigned from the steering committee and there was apparently a dramatic verbal altercation at a meeting. His fiery letter of resignation (Silber to Grene, 16 December 1969, Box 16, Folder 4, MPP) indicates that he resented Grene’s accusations of a “Texas take-over” and that she and others were manipulating programming. He regarded the SGUK programming as lacking in creativity and favoring steering committee members like Dreyfus who will yet again be “flogging the computer problem at another meeting.” Koch, Arrowsmith and Weismann also soon resigned. This great conflagration almost fifty years ago has today a somewhat comical aspect and it likely will to be regarded as academic politics as usual. But it also perhaps suggests some of the reasons that Polanyi kept his distance from the SGUK.

The Planning for and Demise of the August 1971 Meeting in Europe

What follows is the outline of the unfolding narrative revealed in the Grene-Polanyi letters about the effort to pull together a European SGUK meeting that apparently at one point was projected to occur in August 1971. The letters tell a reasonably clear story reflecting Polanyi’s great hope for this European meeting and Grene’s early work to support Polanyi in putting this meeting together followed by what seems to be something like a Grene nervous breakdown about the SGUK and ineffectual later efforts to come up with a way to put together Polanyi’s European meeting. Not only does Grene’s energy for putting together this meeting flag; she seems to acknowledge that her understanding of why Polanyi wished to have this meeting was limited. Grene was Polanyi’s most intimate intellectual companion but she seems by this stage of her own life to have turned away from Polanyi’s late emphasis on modern history and moral inversion.

On February 27, 1970, Polanyi wrote to Grene straightforwardly asking to convene a European meeting of the SGUK, apparently primarily involving British and Continental scholars interested in Polanyi’s writings:

I would like you to consider that I am now in touch with a number of people in England and on the continent of Europe who are interested in the kind of problems my writings have aroused. Your own writings reach out further on the Continent than mind do. So I would like to be given authority to convene one of our week-end meetings, or perhaps even a larger one, on some subjects which I would like to explore (Box 16, Folder 5, MPP).

In a March 27, 1970 letter, Grene advised Polanyi (Box 16, Folder 5, MPP) that Edward Pols had resigned from the SGUK, that she was planning to attend a Paris meeting of the SGUK with Derrida in September 1970, and that she would “bring up the question of your European meeting” with those attending the March 28 and 29, 1970 SGUK meeting in the US. But she could not see “why there should be any problem about it. Do you still want one? Shall I try to get Bellagio? Or will you? Or may I do so on your behalf?” In Polanyi’s April 3, 1970 reply to Grene (Box 16, Folder 5, MPP), he advised he would “explain my ideas about a meeting in Europe as soon as I arrive in Chicago, which is to be on Sunday, 19th April.” Later in the same letter, he identifies the length of his stay in Chicago (more than a month) and concludes “we may, in fact, arrange a meeting for preparing the European seminar.” He also noted that he had finished “Science and Man” (i.e., his Nuffield Lecture delivered February 5, 1970, Polanyi, 1970a) but that he must quickly deliver the text to the Royal Society of Medicine to be printed and there was not time for Grene to scrutinize the essay.

In early July, there is a letter from William Olson, (the Rockefeller Foundation figure in charge of granting access to the Bellagio villa) to Grene (July 2, 1970, Box 16, Folder 5, MPP) advising that the Program Committee had not been provided sufficient information about a proposal for a future Bellagio meeting: “The subject is interesting but is so broad that it seems difficult to imagine much headway being made in a matter of three or four days.” He also asked about planned publications from this meeting and clearly implies he thinks Grene is again representing the SGUK in requesting use of the villa (as she did for the Art and Perception SGUK meeting held there July 28 to August 3, 1968). Grene replied to Olsen four days later (July 6, 1970, Box 16, Folder 5, MPP) advising that this SGUK meeting proposal came from Polanyi and that he should write directly to Polanyi (who she was copying) “for further details.” She somewhat finessed Olson’s question about planned publications by discussing other SGUK publications and ended the letter noting “we do not, however, in general publish the proceedings of our discussions as such and presumably would not do so for the Science and History meeting.”

It is possible that when Polanyi was in Chicago in April 1970 he and Grene had the promised discussion about his meeting which Green dubbed for Olson “the Science and History meeting” (July 6, 1970, Box 16, Folder 5, MPP). But there is not much evidence of this in the correspondence record. Grene wrote Polanyi a short note on 7 July 1970 which has the tagline “PS on the Rockefeller Stuff” (Box 16, Folder 5, MPP). This letter simply lists six names which Grene suggests Polanyi has advised are people who might be involved in a European meeting. Grene added the name Lescek Kolakowski who she thinks definitely should be interested and who will be in Oxford from October, 1970. But she ends her note oddly, commenting “Nor can I say really what you want to do.”

On July 17, 1970, Polanyi wrote to Grene (Box 16, Folder 5, MPP) that he has been too exhausted to work on his projected meeting but he does provide a few relevant comments. This letter succinctly identifies the topic of the meeting as “The Effect of the Scientific Outlook on History.” He notes that he has been or will be in contact with several people about this projected meeting; these included Patrick Moynihan to whom Polanyi had sent a copy of “Science and Man” and to which Moynihan enthusiastically responded, although he did not commit to attending a meeting. He indicates he will contact Kolakowski if Grene can provide an address. Polanyi outlines his plan to distribute “Science and Man” to several people, apparently persons who might be involved in this projected meeting. Near the end of this July 17 letter, Polanyi asked Grene “please let me know what you think about the project. If you do not feel clearly in its favour, I might hesitate to pursue it further.”

At the end of July, Grene sent Polanyi (28 July 1970, Box 16, Folder 5, MPP) a short letter that noted she is assuming his projected meeting is “about history in the sense of what happens and not in the sense of historiography.” She is making this assumption in her effort to clarify matters for Olson to whom she is also going to send “Science and Man.” Grene did take on the role, on Polanyi’s behalf, of trying to place the projected meeting at Bellagio. Near the end of August, Polanyi wrote to Grene (25 August/27 August, Box 16, Folder 5, MPP) more about his contacts for the meeting. He has had discussions with at least two Polish intellectuals. Kot Jelenski, with whom he had worked earlier in the CCF, had “promised his participation and help in organizing the meeting.” Polanyi had apparently drawn up a list of participants for a letter to Jelenski, but he suggested he will not approach people on the list until he hears Grene’s opinion on them. The other Polish intellectual, Lescek Kolokowski, Grene had earlier recommended to Polanyi when Kolokowski was still in the US before coming to Oxford. Polanyi has now met with Kolokowski who he found receptive; he remarks about Kolokowski’s writing, in this August letter to Grene, that “judging by his writings I have looked at, he seems just on the point of concentrating attention on the history of our disasters and the prospects of our hopes.” He reports he has sent Kolokowski a copy of “Science and Man” so that later he can resume conversation with Kolokowski. In mid-September of 1970, Grene wrote to Polanyi (18 September 1970, Box 16, Folder 5, MPP) that she was presuming this European meeting of the SGUK would be after March 19-21, 1971 because she already had another commitment for these dates. She also asked Polanyi to provide any “more news about your proposed meeting.” In a follow-up letter dated September 28, 1970 (Box 16, Folder 5, MPP), Grene reports “Bellagio turned out [us?] down, now what? Shall we give up?” She asks “what’s the next thing you want me to do about your proposed spring meeting, or do you want to have it at all?” This set of Polanyi-Grene letters from July to mid-September 1970 suggests Polanyi is working toward his proposed meeting but that Grene does not seem to be altogether attentive and perhaps did not understand Polanyi’s deep interest in this meeting. She likely was devoting her attention to many other things.

On October 5, 1970, Grene advised Polanyi that she has been worrying about

that spring meeting of yours, especially since the Bellagio people turned us down. Honestly, I just don’t have the energy to try to organize a meeting at some unknown place, inviting unknown people and managing the financial end without George Gale’s help. In fact, I’m bone tired…[and want] very badly to get the Study Group off my hands on March first (Box 16, Folder 5, MPP).

George Gale had gone to England to study and March 1970 was the end of the SGUK fiscal year and Grene (later correspondence confirms—see below) tried to give up her role as PI and to move the SGUK project from Davis to Boston University where Robert Cohen and Marx Wartofsky would take charge for the remaining time of the grant. She advised Polanyi, “maybe the Boston people would carry on for you” and she said she will talk to them about this soon. She asked what Polanyi thought about this proposal and ends her October 5 letter on this note: “We might be able to have a summer meeting, somehow combined with one of Cohen’s, but I don’t know; at the moment, I just can’t cope with organizing ANYTHING!!” (Box 16, Folder 5, MPP).

Two days later (7 October 1970, Box 16, Folder 5, MPP), Grene again wrote Polanyi a (typed) letter (possibly responding to a very recently received Polanyi letter lamenting his health problems) that affirmed “I too am too weary of life and administration to undertake organizing your history meeting. Possibly the Boston people would do it.” But she notes Cohen and Wartofsky are slow getting projects together and organizing Polanyi’s meeting is complicated by the fact that there is no place to have the meeting: “Let’s let it be for the moment in any case: ok?” In pen she added following this question in parentheses: “I’m giving up the Study Group absolutely from March!”

In mid-October (18 October 1970, Box16, Folder 5, MPP), Grene wrote to Polanyi telling him there had been a clarification from the Ford Foundation: she had been misled earlier by a program officer. To have the SGUK grant transferred to Boston would require re-applying for the grant and Ford no longer gave grants such as the SGUK grant and “we’d probably lose the whole thing. So it seems I have to keep on with the wretched thing…as we are not spending enough money I’ll have to plan your meeting—but March is impossible—we suggest late August.” She advised that Dreyfus was trying to find for “us some Norman chateau” and that she is considering a brief visit to UK in December 1970 to consult Polanyi about the meeting. Polanyi’s reply to Grene a few days later (22 October 1970, Box 16, Folder 5, MPP) commented “I am happy to hear that you will take up after all the project of our meeting.” He noted a commitment August 18-26, 1971 and asked if it is possible to schedule around this and suggested that “London or perhaps Paris” would be a better site for a meeting since this could likely better accommodate Continental participants. Grene’s October 28, 1970 letter (Box 16, Folder 5 MPP) to Polanyi comments “I’m glad you’re glad about the meeting next summer; I am not sure whether I am or not. However, we’ll try.”

In his letters late in 1970, Polanyi seems at first again to be energetically planning his meeting but then seems to have given up pressing for his meeting. On November 11, 1970 (Box 16, Folder 5, MPP), he advised Grene about his own holiday travel plans and suggested that she arrive in London around December 17 in order to “have ample time for thinking over our project.” He asked whether to include Jelenski in this meeting and noted he will in any event talk to Jelenski before meeting Grene since he values “his knowledge of Continental personnel.” But in another very brief letter to Grene about a week later (17 November 1970, Box 16, Folder 5, MPP), Polanyi wrote “I can well understand that you prefer to delay any action on the meeting I am dreaming of.” He noted that he may travel to the US in March or April 1971 and he will “keep the matter in abeyance until there is a chance to talk to you, be it here or in America.” It seems likely that Grene had written Polanyi very recently (perhaps suggesting again that putting together his meeting was going to be very difficult) and Polanyi’s letter was a response. On November 27, 1970, Polanyi wrote to Grene (Box 16, Folder 5, MPP), “I am grateful to you for your letters, even though your decisions have changed in them in response to my strange project. In a way your acceptances have been a joy, but your refusals have been almost equally refreshing to my lacking faculties.” He notes that he will definitely be coming to Austin in March, 1971, and, after a family reunion in Toronto, will spend six weeks at the University of Texas: “I trust this should give me a chance to talk to you about a number of things and clarify the project of the PLAN.” Grene’s brief November 30, 1970 reply to Polanyi (Box 16, Folder 5, MPP) notes “I didn’t know I’d been vacillating about your meeting—I suppose that’s because I really don’t know what to think about it.” This is the final comment in the Grene-Polanyi discussion of Polanyi’s meeting on the topic “The Effect of the Scientific Outlook on History.” George Gale perhaps sheds some further light on matters insofar as he has noted that Grene “simply wasn’t interested in politics, or political culture in the broad sense.” She was primarily focused on the revisioning of philosophy of science and she saw Polanyi’s thought as a key to this, but the Polanyi deeply interested in the concerns of political culture in the early and middle twentieth century she considered as no more than a “kind of Austro-Hungarian 19th C nostalgia” (Gale e-mail to Breytspraak and Mullins, 27 May 2018).

Conclusion

Our discussion focusing on the Ford Foundation funded SGUK project has emphasized how this project grew out of the 1965 and 1966 Ford funded SGFCU project sponsoring the Bowdoin College conferences. The SGFCU, organized by Polanyi, Grene, Edward Pols and a sympathetic Ford Foundation official, Sigmund Koch, attempted to use Polanyi’s account of modern intellectual history to stimulate a broader intellectual movement of convergent voices which would counter the dominant reductionism and scientism found in many fields of inquiry in the mid-sixties. The SGUK was a project with significantly expanded funding that was initiated to extend the work of the SGFCU from 1967 to 1972 and the initial SGUK’s operating model was a refashioned SGFCU model. The topics treated in some early SGUK conferences clearly grew out of matters first treated in the 1965 and 1966 conference discussions. Polanyi participated in only three of the approximately twenty SGUK conferences. Polanyi seems to have had a strong interest in the topic of these three meetings; Polanyi’s writing done in connection with two of these meetings led to some of his late philosophical publications treating questions in philosophy of biology and the problems of recovering meaning in contemporary culture. Polanyi seems to have lost interest in the SGUK programs as he became increasingly frail and wanted to devote more of his energy to his final philosophical projects. The SGUK soon developed its own strong governing board and a program agenda which left Polanyi behind. The Polanyi-Grene correspondence outlines an interesting account of Polanyi’s poor fit with the SGUK; it also suggests Grene’s increasingly difficult problems as the SGUK principal investigator in trying to work with the members SGUK. The correspondence makes clear that Polanyi was working diligently on and had great hope for a 1971 European SGUK meeting which would re-examine his account of “moral inversion” and, more generally “The Effect of the Scientific Outlook on History.” Grene assisted Polanyi in trying to put together this meeting but the many complications of setting up such a meeting—complemented by Grene’s own problems and her apparently limited understanding of Polanyi’s interest this topic—meant Polanyi’s desired meeting never happened.

Epilogue

Part of our original interest in investigating Polanyi’s focus on this 1971 SGUK meeting that was never convened was to probe the question why—given the many philosophical issues that Polanyi creatively engaged—“The Effect of the Scientific Outlook on History” was apparently his dominant concern in this last period of his productive life.

Polanyi was increasingly aware of his physical and mental failings, yet he expended his diminishing energy to address the problem captured most vividly in the pressing query in his 1970 article title “Why Did We Destroy Europe?” (Polanyi, 1970c). This theme rose to late prominence, we have concluded, because it was a query that had served as the central organizing motif of much of Polanyi’s life’s work.

For many, Polanyi’s insights into the impact of a misconceived understanding of science on the Western imagination and civilization contribute to a larger picture painted with help from figures like Charles Taylor, Thomas Pfau, and even Zdzislaw Najder, who provided sharp criticisms of Polanyi’s account of moral inversion (Nadjer, 1968, 364-385). But for Polanyi, the question “Why Did We Destroy Europe?” succinctly identified for him his calling. There are many supporting narratives throughout his life. As a young scientist, Polanyi wrote a letter to Nature affirming the value of the inexact (Polanyi, 1936/1992,, 35-36). In the same period, his work on economics education was designed to counter destructive ideas and movements he believed were bringing European disintegration. (Polanyi, 1937/2016, 18-24). His extensive involvement over many years in the programs of the CCF as well as his engagement in “neo-liberal” movements (recently documented in Beddeleem, 2019) are projects of the forties, fifties and early sixties which aimed broadly to establish a world order like the one that Polanyi associated with the fin de siècle Europe that had disappeared. The original goal of the Study Groups represents yet another iteration of his response to his calling.

Ruel Tyson’s recollection of his first conversation with Polanyi in 1956 with its focus on “moral inversion” and the “dynamic-objective coupling” (Tyson, 2006, 19) expressed this calling.4 Paul Craig Roberts’ response to the Scott and Moleski biography also speaks to this point:

The last 55 pages of the biography, which covers the period that corresponds with my time with Michael, passes too lightly over Michael’s concept of moral inversion. This concept was important to his thought and was a subject to which he intended to return….Moral inversion was at the core of Michael’s understanding of the violence of the 20th century. He hoped to explain, in insightful outline, 20th century history in terms of moral inversion (Roberts, 2006, 17).

The emergence of the pointed question “Why Did We Destroy Europe?” as the dominant theme in Polanyi’s last years should not really surprise anyone. How Polanyi’s insights might address today’s “post-truth” climate with “alternative facts,” increasing general skepticism, overt attacks on science, and increasingly autocratic threats to liberal values and institutions is a milieu in which Polanyi’s insights should be central to understanding our current calling. “Why Did We Destroy Europe?” remains a central question for us some fifty years after Michael Polanyi posed this question and tried to use his failing powers to address it.

ENDNOTES

1Most references in this essay are in parenthesis and cite archival materials for Ford Foundation grants 6500113 (funding the 1965 and 1966 Bowdoin conferences) and 6700128 covering the subsequent five-year program growing out of 6500113 (discussed below),which sponsored approximately twenty large and small conferences. When the context does not make this clear, the parenthetical reference will specify the grant number for materials quoted. There are also many parenthetical references to archival correspondence and other materials in the Michael Polanyi Papers (MPP), Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago Library. Citations in parenthesis include writer and recipient, date, box and folder number and the abbreviation MPP. If the context makes some of these particulars of archival material clear (e.g., the writer and recipient), they are omitted from the parenthetical reference. The authors thank the Ford Foundation as well at the University of Chicago Library Department of Special Collections for assistance and permission to quote materials they hold.

2The authors interviewed George Gale on May 27, 2014 as part of the larger project of trying to understand the programs of SGFCU and the SGUK and Polanyi and Grene’s roles. He also illumined his own role and advised us he had, so far as he knew, been the only Ph.D. student whose dissertation Grene sponsored. Subsequent e-mail with Gale (noted below) clarified many ambiguities.

3Remarks of all those in the symposium were published under this title in Zygon 3:4. Allen (1997, 299-303) republished Polanyi’s comments in the AAAS symposium that were in Zygon (444-447) and simply used the general title for all the symposium pieces for Polanyi’s component; this Polanyi essay has thus come to be known as “Do Life Processes Transcend Physics and Chemistry?”

4Diane Yeager’s account (Yeager, 2002, 22-48) of Polanyi’s ideas “moral inversion” is the most illuminating discussion that we know in the Polanyi literature.

REFERENCES

Allen, R.T. (ed.). 1997. Society, Economics & Philosophy, Selected Papers of Michael Polanyi. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

Commoner, Barry, Gerald Holton, Ernest Nagel, Michael Polanyi, and John Platt. 1968. “Do Life Processes Transcend Physics and Chemistry?” Zygon 3(4): 442-472.

Beddeleem, Martin. 2019. “Michael Polanyi and Early Neoliberalism.” Tradition and Discovery 45 (3): 31- 44 (online at: http://polanyisociety.org/TAD%20WEB%20ARCHIVE/TAD45-3/Beddelem-TAD45-3-p31-44-pdf.pdf).

Breytspraak, Gus and Phil Mullins. 2017. “Michael Polanyi and the Study Group on Foundations of Cultural Unity.” Polanyiana 26 (1-2): 23-82 (online at https://polanyiana.org/volumes).

Gale, George, e-mail to Gus Breytspraak and Phil Mullins dated 27 May 2018.

Grene, Marjorie. 1990. “Perception and Human Reality” in Harre and His Critics. R. Bhaskar (ed.) Oxford: Blackwell: 17-22.

Grene, Marjorie (ed.). 1969a. The Anatomy of Knowledge, Papers Presented to the Study Group on Foundations of Cultural Unity, Bowdoin College, 1965 and 1966. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Grene, Marjorie (ed.). 1969b. Knowing and Being, Essays by Michael Polanyi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Grene, Marjorie (ed.). 1969c. Toward a Unity of Knowledge. Psychological Issues, 6(2), monograph 22. New York: International Universities Pres, Inc.

Grene, Marjorie (ed.). 1971. Interpretations of Life and Mind: Essays around the Problem of Reduction. New York: Humanities Press.

Mullins, Phil and Martin X Moleski SJ. 2005.“Harry Prosch: A Memorial Re-Appraisal of the Meaning Controversy.” Tradition and Discovery 32 (2): 8-24 (online at http://www.polanyisociety.org/TAD%20WEB%20ARCHIVE/TAD32-2/TAD32-2-fnl-pg6-24-pdf.pdf).

Najder, Zdzislaw. 1968. “‘Moral Inversion’ or Moral Revaluation.” in Intellect and Hope, Essays in the Thought of Michael Polanyi. Thomas A Langford and William H. Poteat (eds.). Durham: Duke University Press, 364-385.

Polanyi, Michael. 1936/1992. “The Value of the Inexact” (April, 1936 letter in The Philosophy of Science 13, 233-234). Tradition and Discovery 18(3): 35-36 (online at: http://www.polanyisociety.org/Ltr-Vlu-Inexact-18-3.pdf).

_____. 1937/2016. “Popular Education in Economics” (February, 1937 lecture to the Manchester Political Society, available in Box 25, Folder 9 of MPP) Tradition and Discovery 42 (3): 18-24 (online at http://www.polanyisociety.org/Popular-Educ-in-Econ-essys.htm).

_____.1967 (August 21). “Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry.” Chemistry and Engineering News: 54-56.

_____. 1968. “Life’s Irreducible Structure.” Science 160: 1308-1312.

_____. 1970a. “Science and Man.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine. 58: 969-976.

_____. 1970b. “What is a Painting?” British Journal of Aesthetics 10 (3): 225-236.

_____. 1970c. “Why Did We Destroy Europe?” Studium Generale 23 (20): 909-916.

_____ and Harry Prosch. 1975. Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Roberts, Paul Craig. 2006. “Michael Polanyi: A Man for All Times.” Tradition and Discovery 322 (3): 15-18 (online at http://polanyisociety.org/TAD%20WEB%20ARCHIVE/TAD32-3/TAD32-3-fnl-pg15-18-pdf.pdf).

Tyson, Ruel. “From Salon to Institute: Convivial Spaces in the Intellectual Life of Michael Polanyi.” Tradition and Discovery 32 (3): 19-22 (online at http://polanyisociety.org/ TAD%20WEB%20ARCHIVE/TAD32-3/TAD32-3-fnl-pg19-23-pdf.pdf).

Yeager, D. M. 2002. “Confronting the Minotaur: Moral Inversion and Polanyi’s Moral Philosophy.” Tradition and Discovery 29 (1): 22-48 (online at http://polanyisociety.org/TAD%20WEB%20ARCHIVE/TAD29-1/TAD29-1-pg22-48-pdf.pdf).

BOOK REVIEWS

Matheson, Jonathan. The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. 190 + xii. ISBN 978-1-137-40089-5. $109.99.

Matheson begins his investigation with an understatement: “The world is rife with disagreement.” I doubt anyone would disagree. What is contentious, however, is how we ought to respond to disagreement; that is, how we epistemically or rationally ought to respond. Matheson puts the question this way: “how does our awareness of such [i.e., religious, political, scientific, philosophical, etc.] disagreements affect the rationality of our beliefs on these topics?” (2). His own “somewhat radical” answer is that the rationality of our beliefs on controversial matters is dramatically affected by our awareness of disagreement—so much so that “we often are not epistemically justified in holding [such beliefs] at all” (2).

After addressing introductory matters in chapter one (such as explaining his terminology and why he considers relativism a non-starter), Matheson begins his main argument in chapter two, starting with an explanation of the concept of an idealized peer disagreement. In such a disagreement, you would be aware of someone who holds the opposite view from you on some particular issue, and you would be aware this person is an epistemic peer—that is, this person has all and only the same evidence pertinent to the issue that you have, and this person is just as intelligent, skilled in reasoning, and sincere in seeking the truth as you are (29). In such a case, there is no epistemic difference between you and your opponent in the disagreement. If you suspect such idealized peer disagreements are rare, Matheson agrees with you. In fact, he admits that “it is doubtful whether it ever actually occurs” (33, cf. 113). Nevertheless, Matheson argues that the concept of the idealized peer disagreement serves the important function of focusing our attention on the epistemic significance of the disagreement itself. By considering the highly idealized cases, he argues, we come to see that the fact of the disagreement defeats our justification for our belief, even if this defeater might itself be defeated in non-idealized disagreement cases (33). As we will soon see, however, the epistemic consequences of disagreement turn out to be rather dramatic even if there are no real-world cases of idealized disagreement.

After considering and rejecting hold-your-ground “steadfast views” of disagreement (chapter three), Matheson turns to the direct positive case for his own view in chapter four. The view Matheson defends is known as the Equal Weight View (hereafter “EWV”), which belongs to the “conciliatory” family of views. These views share in common the idea that idealized disagreement gives you a reason to reduce your confidence in your own belief, such that it would be irrational of you to not do so (66). The EWV is the most demanding of the conciliatory views in the sense that it demands you to give the most: evidence you are in an idealized peer disagreement not only provides you with a reason to modify your confidence in your belief, but it gives you a reason to give equal weight to both sides of the disagreement. Though there are different ways to do this, Matheson argues you should “split the difference” between your confidence (or doxastic attitude) and that of your opponent (74). For example, if you are an atheist and discover you are in an idealized epistemic peer disagreement with a theist, you should become an agnostic—that is, you should move from the doxastic attitude of believing God does not exist to withholding judgment on the issue. If your theist opponent is also being rational, he or she should move from theism to agnosticism. (This example is my own, and assumes a scale of three possible doxastic attitudes: belief, withholding judgment, and disbelief. Matheson remains neutral on the issue of whether doxastic attitudes are more fine-grained than this; see pp. 6-7.) Matheson’s own summary statement of his version of the EWV is as follows: “In gaining evidence that you are party to an idealized disagreement about p, you gain a reason to split the difference with the other party with respect to p that is only defeated by considerations independent to [sic] the disagreement” (83).

Why that last clause, regarding how the defeater generated by awareness of idealized disagreement might itself be defeated? Matheson is concerned here to counter the claim, made by some epistemologists, that the very fact someone disagrees with you regarding some proposition for which you have very good evidence can be a reason to believe that person is your epistemic inferior (79-80, cf. 45-46). Matheson argues the first-order evidence regarding the disputed proposition cannot be used as higher-order that evidence that your handling of first-order evidence is better than your opponent’s. Whatever higher-order evidence you might appeal to in order to make such a judgment should be independent of the immediate disagreement (106-107). Matheson responds to a variety of objections to the EWV in chapter five.

In chapter six, the everyday epistemic significance of disagreement is brought to the fore. Matheson argues that, even when idealizations are stripped away, the EWV implies many of our everyday disagreements regarding controversial propositions defeat our justification for our doxastic attitudes toward those propositions (128-131). This is because, even if we have good reason to doubt our opponents in our disagreements are our epistemic peers, we will rarely have sufficient independent higher-order evidence to judge which of us is in the superior epistemic position (128). If we cannot justifiably make such a judgment, then we ought to treat the disagreement as if it were an idealized peer disagreement. Being skeptical about the status of our higher-order evidence therefore should result in skepticism toward (withholding of judgment regarding) the disputed proposition (135).

This, then, is Matheson’s “somewhat radical” result: the EWV results in skepticism toward controversial propositions, and especially controversial propositions in politics, religion, science, and philosophy (135). Does this make the EWV self-defeating? After all, the propositions that compose the EWV are, themselves, currently controversial propositions in philosophy; therefore, by his own reasoning, Matheson should suspend judgment regarding whether the EWV is true. Matheson addresses this (and other) objections to the skeptical implications of the EWV in chapter seven, where he admits the higher-order evidence of philosophical disagreement about the EWV is, indeed, evidence that supports withholding judgment regarding the view (152-153). However, he argues, this does not make the view self-defeating, since this doesn’t imply the view is false. At most, it just implies one would not be epistemically justified in believing the view is true—it does not imply competitor “steadfast” views are correct (154-156). In other words, the fact the EWV has the consequence of recommending withholding judgment about its own truth is not evidence it is not true; therefore, it is not self-defeating.

But this reply doesn’t explain what justifies Matheson (or anyone else) in believing the EWV is true and commending it to others—as he clearly does. After all, it would seem he has admitted he lacks epistemic justification for believing the EWV. Perhaps he would respond by pointing out that, since the EWV is only a view about how epistemic reasons support or fail to support synchronic epistemic justification (how your epistemic reasons support your doxastic attitude at a particular moment in time), it does not entail there are no other kinds of “epistemic goods” besides the good of having synchronically epistemically justified beliefs (nor, for that matter, does it entail there aren’t other kinds of reasons—pragmatic, moral, religious, etc.—that are also relevant to one’s “all things considered” justification for belief) (144). Perhaps the communal epistemic good of discovering truth and avoiding falsehood over time diachronically justifies individual persistence in believing and publically advocating for a controversial view (144-145). Consequently, you can have reasons, and even epistemic reasons, that justify advocating a particular view that does seem true to you, in spite of your awareness of disagreement from (possible) epistemic peers. So perhaps Matheson regards himself as not having synchronic epistemic justification for believing the EWV is true, but he does regard himself as having diachronic justification for his belief and advocacy—even if he shouldn’t claim to know the view is true. Indeed, he concludes his book by stressing the importance of intellectual humility, and stating, “I do not claim to know many of the claims contained herein” (166).

Matheson has written an engaging book that not only argues for a the EWV regarding the epistemic significance of disagreement, but also presents the reader with a helpful guide to the various positions currently taken by the philosophers debating the issue and the arguments that have been used to defend their various views. Polanyi scholars will be particularly interested in the discussion in chapter seven regarding the skeptical implications of the view, and limiting factors on that skepticism. As we have seen, considerations regarding distinctions between kinds of reasons, and even kinds of epistemic reasons, become important in understanding the rationality of belief in controversial matters. Interesting work could be done bringing Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge into the current debate regarding the epistemic significant of disagreement, and specifically into conversation with Matheson’s book.

Jonathan Reibsamen

Jonathan.reibsamen@ciu.edu

Trepanier, Lee and Eugene Callahan, eds. Tradition v. Rationalism: Voegelin, Oakeshott, Hayek, and Others. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. Pp. 265 + xviii. ISBN 1-4985-7172-2. $105.

What distinguishes humans from other animals? Some focus on our ability to make tools. Others assert that it is our capacity for language. Neurological investigations indicate that these capabilities are located in our left hemisphere. But isn’t it the case that other animals make tools and communicate with each other? Some distinguish us from other animals by drawing our attention to the capabilities of our right hemisphere. While our left hemisphere (which is attentive to predation) re-presents our awareness, our right hemisphere (which is attentive to predators) generates our contextual awareness. These emergent capabilities do not replace earlier abilities, they are built over our lizard brain, our mouse brain, our monkey brain, and so forth. The expansion of our frontal cortex in each hemisphere enhances our capacity to reflect creatively on our immediate experience, but in a different way. Each comprehends the world differently. Our right brain hemisphere is more dominant. Or at least it should be. McGilchrist, in The Master and his Emissary (2009), claims Western culture (since the Enlightenment and possibly from the beginning) has become too left-brained—which is another way of saying that it has become too rationalist.

The above is the neurological context for the debate at the heart of the book Tradition versus Rationalism: Voegelin, Oakeshott, Hayek, and Others (2018), a collection of essays edited by Lee Trapanier and Eugene Callahan. Another way of framing its content is to situate it within a dispute about the nature of science. All the thinkers discussed in this book (in their different ways) are opposed to scientism—the claim that it is only science (or more broadly only that which it is possible to render wholly explicit) that tells us about the real. But there is a difference between opposing rationalism because it pays insufficient attention to the context of its practices, that it creates cityscapes that ignore how we actually live, and an opposition to rationalism based upon the claim that it ignores spiritual realities.

Le Corbusier aspired to flatten central Paris and replace it with something more rational. I watched a BBC 24 news presenter mystified why people were crying when Notre Dame in Paris was burning. She could see that people were getting emotional, but it is clear that she thought that getting upset about a building burning down (after all, nobody was killed) was irrational, which of course it is, if you have the spiritual awareness of a rock. One sees something similar in efforts to rebuild the English Midlands after the bombing raids of WWII: the urban planners finished the job started by the Luftwaffe. The editors (in my view correctly) note there is a connection (it is a matter of degree is the implication) between city planning and the Gulags. Just as in a new and better sort of society there is no place for the wrong sort of buildings, so there will be no place for the wrong sort of people. But Hayek and Oakeshott, as well as Polanyi and Voegelin (to pick four of the thinkers discussed in the volume), have different things in mind when they oppose rationalism. The first two believe that goods are whatever we want them to be, and people should have the freedom to pursue them, so long as they let others do the same. The second two, however, believe something is good not because we pursue it, we pursue it because it is good. It is not a difference to which the editors pay sufficient attention.

In the first essay Grant Havers notes that Wittgenstein claims that it is not the task of science to tell us how to live. Indeed it is not absurd to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end of humanity. They leave us with a void that only religion can fill. According to Wittgenstein all that Socratic inquiry does is generate more questions than answers. In a shift from Athens to Jerusalem, Wittgenstein defends the ontological argument for the existence of God. Not because the concept of God corresponds with anything in our experience, but because it justifies a form of life that counters the view that life is meaningless. Havers notes that Wittgenstein declared, “I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.” But this is like a spiritualist in Victorian times telling a skeptical inquirer that they don’t believe people survive after their death, they just behave as if they do. The investigator might reasonably conclude that the spiritualist is a fraud.

In the next essay David Corey notes that Voegelin attempts to supply a philosophical anthropology. Following Aristotle he claims that to be a human being is to have within us an inorganic, a vegetative, an animal, and a rational nature. Each higher level contains the lower. Our rational nature also has higher and lower levels. Its lower function is instrumental. It is concerned with means. Our higher rationality is concerned with ends. Aristotle sought to comprehend the meaning of our lives by relating us to the structure of intelligible being. Voegelin argued that a healthy state for a human being is—in a term he found in Bergson—an open soul. To be human is to exist in a state of unrest deriving from questions to which we cannot find settled answers. The temptation according to Voegelin is to replace our situated/transcendent nature (our “metaxy” or state of “inbetweeness”) with ideologies.

By ideology Voegelin means claiming that the world is imperfect, that it can be perfected, and that we have the knowledge to bring about this change. This, he claims, supplies us with a dangerously inaccurate account of what it is to be human. He detects this “disorder” in the prophet Isaiah, who counseled Israel to rely upon Yahweh rather than military power and alliances, and he identifies this “metastasis” or world-ignoring enthusiasm in the early Christians, the millennial heresies of the Middle Ages, and in various Puritan sects. An alternative approach invoked Prometheus, the Titan who rebelled against the gods. Marx prefaced his doctoral dissertation with a quotation from the play about Prometheus attributed to Aeschylus “I hate all the gods.” Voegelin, according to Corey, traces modern ideologies back to three pivotal events: the advent of Christianity, the decline of Christianity as an imperial power, and the rise of modern scientism. The early Christians tempered their eschatological expectation of the Parousia by accepting that all perfection is transcendent. In the early modern period the decline of imperial Christianity had the consequence that numerous radical sects claimed to be the true faith. Such dissident groups had always existed, but after the Reformation activists transformed Christianity into political programs. Voegelin detects a connection between Jewish messianic beliefs and various mass political movements in the twentieth century. Scientism in the Enlightenment encouraged people to recast religious expectations into the conviction that we can create heaven on Earth. All that is needed is the right knowledge, and the will to transform the universe into something better. The result is a manufactured “second reality” that has no connection with the way we actually live. Voegelin declares that all philosophies of history that reject the personal and its meaning are misguided.

At this point Corey usefully reminds us of some of the arguments of Voegelin’s critics. It has been noted that his Gnostic claim (that utopian ideologies are varieties of Gnosticism) ran into problems when it became clear that the Gnostic writing discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945 had as their goal rejecting the world not transforming it. Voegelin was forced to abandon his multi-volume History of Political Ideas when he realized that similar ideas may be the result not of intellectual influences but of individuals reflecting upon the same experiences. The quest to capture all ideas within a single narrative is misleading because there is a diversity of people and circumstances, an insight Oakeshott also recognized. Thirdly, Voegelin lumps different political approaches together as variations of the same thing. But this does not pay sufficient attention to the differences between say Russian communism and Anglo-American liberalism. Last but not least, Corey questions the implication that every attempt to improve human existence is misguided. When it is restored maybe Notre Dame could be improved by some changes to its design, maybe some of the medieval buildings of Coventry should have been demolished to make way for something better. I am not saying this is correct, but common sense dictates that there ought to be some sort of balance if we are to work with human beings as they are, creative and innovative, rather than trying to fix them at some idealized moment (which, as Voegelin noted, is itself another ideology).

In the next article, Daniel John Sportiello points out that prior to the Axial Age happiness was presumed to be immanent, but after the Axial Age happiness was presumed to be transcendent. Voegelin claims that modern political thinkers such as Hobbes and Bentham set out to return us back to a material conception of life. Sportiello claims that the jury is still out on which approach is correct.

In his 1951 Walgreen lectures at the University of California, Voegelin asserts that scientism is driven by a will to power rooted in a self-imposed ignorance of the reality of how we know. In his 1962 McEnerney lectures at the University of California, Polanyi defends the reality of the person against the delusion of a Laplacian mind. A reductionist vision in which we are nothing more than atoms in motion undermines the very possibility of science.

In his article, Colin Cordner notes that instead of exploring how we use symbols to evoke and explore realities, Voegelin claims that a positivist approach eclipses reality in an “egophantic revolt” against the transcendent. Polanyi argues that we are driven by intellectual passions to leap across logical gaps in pursuit of intimations of a hidden reality, integrating clues into new wholes. In order to understand we must first believe. But although our convictions are fallible, they are not groundless. They draw upon and are guided by our tacit awareness, as supplied by our body, our practices, and our beliefs. Lockean empiricism, purified by Cartesian doubt, asserts it is only the critically demonstrable which counts as knowledge, but according to Polanyi such objectivism falsifies knowing by rejecting what we know but cannot prove, even though it underlies all that we can prove. This may be a harmless delusion in the exact sciences, but it falsifies knowing beyond the domain of science. Once we abandon the concept of dispassionate knowing, the false division between facts and values collapses.

In his article, Mark T. Mitchell argues that this approach is consistent with the account supplied by Voegelin. Both Polanyi and Voegelin are committed to moral realism. There may be different views about what grounds this reality (C.S. Lewis calls it the Tao), but they agree values are not simply subjective.

According to Polanyi when moral passions are rendered homeless by the quest for objectivity, they re-emerge as moral inversions. This creates nihilists who passionately deny any distinction between good and evil, and at a political level this moral fervor is secularized into tasks justified by the end of creating heaven on Earth.

In his article, Timothy Fuller notes that Hobbes denies that we will agree about the meaning of life, and so he sought instead to justify a civic realm in which individual freedom is secured by an understanding of common features of human nature. As Voegelin explains, on the one hand societies want to maintain their established order, and on the other individuals want to change that order in the name of a new truth. Hobbes solved this conflict on the grounds that there are no public truth except the laws of harmony and peace; any political opinion that is conducive to discord is on those grounds deemed to be untrue. Voegelin both praises and blames Hobbes. He praises him for countering apocalyptic tendencies within Christianity, but he criticizes him for seeking to explore the transcendent only immanently. Strauss responds that to abandon the search for meaning is tantamount to abandoning our humanity. Politics is the realm of opinions about how we ought to live, and what ends we ought to pursue. Oakeshott selects three key moments in political philosophy, and associates them with Plato’s The Republic, Hobbes Leviathan, and Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. He views The Republic as a demonstration of the limits of the Socratic quest to transform our lives for the better by securing secure the knowledge we seek. He views the Philosophy of Right as a commentary upon the exploration by Hobbes of the morality of individuality. There is revulsion at subjective individuality amongst those who reject Hobbes vision of civil order. Hegel seeks to reconcile subjective desire and rational will. This led to (although it is distinct from) a Marxist collectivist interpretation of political order.

For Oakeshott practices are constantly changing, and we should resist the temptation to seek transformations that settle things once and for all. Fuller concludes his article by asserting that what Oakeshott is attacking is not reason, but the misuse of reason that takes place when rationalists ignore its limitations.

In the next article, Kenneth B. McIntyre notes that Oakeshott agrees with Ryle that practical knowing is largely tacit, and that all explicit knowing relies upon practical knowledge. In the following article Ferenc Horcher points out that Oakeshott outlined a historical background for Western political thought, and is skeptical of any attempt to study political ideas in isolation from their context. This approach is shared by Alistair McIntyre, who in his book After Virtue (1981) declared that if moral claims become separated from the tradition within which they become meaningful, they become groundless. This explains the Enlightenment failure to secure a rational foundation for morality. Reason must be situated within the limits supplied by finitude and historicity. This, according to MacIntyre, does not necessitate relativism, because some claims can be shown to be superior.

In his article Nathanael Blake claims that much of the philosophical groundwork for McIntyre’s project was laid by Hans-Georg Gadamer. According to Gadamer it is not possible to climb a ladder out of our existence and arrive at an absolute perspective from which we can objectively evaluate everything. All such projects, the progeny of the Enlightenment, are dangerous delusions. The hermeneutic process by which a knower understands the world is circular, but as we fuse with other circles of understanding we can discover new insights. As we attempt to persuade them of the validity of our beliefs, dialogue requires a willingness to entertain the possibility that the residents of other circles may also possess truths.

In the next essay John von Heyking notes that Hayek comprehends rationality as replacing experience guided practice with abstract rules. Although he cautions against ideologies that seek to rearrange societies in accordance with a plan of political perfection, and in his defense of liberty, he (like Burke) upholds tradition and spontaneous order. Hayek (like Kant) views history as a progress towards universalist cosmopolitanism. A society organized around a vision of the good is dismissed by Hayek as a retreat to tribalism. A “Great Society” is not simply a discovery mechanism, it upholds laws that enable the individuals and communities that make up a civil society to pursue a diversity of ends. The only common good is maintaining the rules that render this freedom possible. Although social evolution yields results better than any individual can consciously devise, an increased scientific understanding of evolutionary social processes enables us to improve societies.

In the most original and insightful article in the collection, Eugene Callahan notes that even though Hayek and Oakeshott make the same contrast between a spontaneous civil order and an enterprise organization orientated by shared goals, they reign back the dreams of “Constructivist” central planners on different grounds. Although Hayek recognizes the limitations of the abstractions of formal economic theory, and claims that because knowledge is dispersed it cannot be wholly centralized, Oakeshott on Hegelian grounds argues that abstract reasoning will always fall short of the complexity of the concrete universal. Within this vision a concept is not something outside the world of sensuous experience, it is the very structure and order of that experience. But because it is not possible to abstract without falsifying, all abstractions mislead.

For a rationalist, all that is required for a successful performance is a correct theory. For Oakeshott, however, this is to apply the standards of one mode (theoretical reason) to another mode (practice) where they are not relevant. Awarding the primacy to theory ignores that all theory is grounded in practice. Theorists are correct to believe that they have identified a higher (because more abstract) form of knowledge, but in their enthusiasm they (to put it in Polanyian terms) ignore the primacy of our tacit awareness.

Aurel Kolnai, the subject (with Oakeshott) of the final essay in this collection, declares that philosophers should try to keep as close as possible in touch with the world of ordinary experience. As the author of this essay, Zoltan Balazs, reminds us, not because reason is reducible to will, but because our quest for understanding should be informed by intellectual humility. Oakeshott reminds us that it is reality not reason, experience not inference, that is the foundation of our being. Kolnai claims however that Oakeshott gives too much emphasis to practice: rationality is treated as if it were a disease, in ways reminiscent of European intellectual fashions between the World Wars. For Kolnai it is morality rather than science that should be our primary concern; though not the happiness centered Aristotelian, the duty obsessed Kantian, or the consequence dominated Utilitarian versions. He seeks to ground morality in an objective phenomenology.

I compliment the editors for the way they arranged the articles in their book: each follows on from the next, in ways that extend and deepen the readers thoughts on the topic at hand. I recommend it as a starting point for a study of the thinkers they discuss, not least because every one of the contributors is clear and informative.

C. P. Goodman

cpgoodman@lineone.net

Bagger, Matthew, ed. Pragmatism and Naturalism: Scientific and Social Inquiry After Representationalism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. 328 + ix. ISBN 978-023-118-188-4. $75.

What does it mean to be a naturalist, and relatedly, a pragmatist? In Pragmatism and Naturalism (hereafter PN), Michael Raposa writes that “one can surely be a naturalist without embracing pragmatism. It is not immediately obvious whether the reverse is true” (33), due in part to the variety of contested versions of naturalism. If Polanyi is plausibly classified as a pragmatist, Polanyians might consider whether this classification is for the best (given the iconoclastic nature of his writings, experience, etc.), and whether his philosophical project is fruitfully cast under the shadow of “naturalism.” With regard to the latter, Philip Kitcher raises similar concerns in drawing his distinction between content and method naturalism. The former encompasses predominant (largely analytic) preoccupations with what naturalism is, and the latter expresses Dewey’s pragmatic worldview. Method naturalism embodies the pragmatist concern with recategorizing human experience to reform human thought (75; a similar orientation is advanced in Matthew Bagger’s essay on William James). In Polanyian terms, the distinction would hold between a static conception of what tradition-and-discovery reflect—a Cartesian search for a separate order of the real—and a dynamic, evolving view reflexively countenancing tradition(s)-and-discovery(ies) in the process of making-and-being-made.

Thus a cornerstone of pragmatism is fallibilism, which allows for evolvability. Bagger notes that in “[e]schwing metaphysical or theological touchstones, pragmatic naturalism consists in the denial of any sources of authority transcending the practices by which humans collectively, cooperatively, and fallibly authorize their beliefs and behavior” (23). Most of the essays in PN argue for a different kind of naturalism that pragmatism presents, where the major pragmatists are considered (Peirce, Dewey, and James) and their ideas appropriated in view of the light pragmatic naturalism (Part I) sheds on questions regarding religion (Part II), democracy (essays by Jonathon Kahn and Jeffrey Stout), and experience more generally (Part IV).

One of the virtues of pragmatic naturalism, I think, is that it reflexively reflects on its own evolving conception of naturalism. Wayne Proudfoot makes the important distinction between “naturalistic accounts of beliefs and practices as products of humans regarded as natural creatures and the naturalizing of concepts, beliefs, and practices in a way that assumes them to be naturally given and occludes their social and historical origins and development” (102). For example, consolidating the complexity of religious beliefs into “thin” evolutionary considerations (often subject to indignant charges of reductionism) falls in the latter category, which the former “thick” pragmatic naturalism (deploying, for example, Nietzschean genealogies or Foucaultian strata) seeks to avoid. Still, one may wonder whether pragmatic naturalism, no matter how thick, fundamentally misses the import of deep religious experience, the nature of spirituality, and the centrality of various transfigurative modalities; in other words, just what constitutes the field of experience?

Nancy Frankenberry represents a contemporary pragmatist position honoring the analytic sentiment that language goes all the way down, where experience—religious or otherwise—concerns “‘the things discussable in terms of the human ability to have and ascribe sentential attitudes’” (223). Tacit knowing apparently figures little in this accounting of religious experience (even more so for claims to prereflective or ineffable experience), as the tacit dimension would be relegated to a role outside the space of reasons/sentential attitudes that delimits the bounds of experience. But is experience conceptual through and through?

Terry Godlove considers a Kantian nonconceptualism (which he compares to Schleiermacher’s view on piety and prereflective experience) that blurs the line between “epistemological and religious reflection” (253). On this differing interpretation of Kant, first offered by Robert Hanna and running against the mainstream view that all experience is conceptual, we “stand in” the “grip of the given.” Although sounding like the “myth of the given,” it actually seeks to turn this view on its head (employing the embodied metaphors of “grip” and “standing in”), as we always and already have “an inherently spatiotemporally situated, egocentrically-centered, biologically/neurobiologically embodied, pre-reflectively conscious, skillfully perceptual and practical grip on things in our world” (255). While offering a point of contact with Polanyi’s view that all knowing is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowing (and also contact with contemporary non-Cartesian accounts of embodied knowing), what is interesting is that Godlove does not go the Polanyian route but instead lingers on the outskirts of the standard view; for his question isn’t whether tacit knowing grounds all epistemological projects, but “whether we can isolate the nonconceptual aspect of empirical cognition in the sense of entertaining it itself as a conscious state. Can we ‘have’ a Kantian nonconceptual experience” (256)? For Polanyi this isn’t really a question worth asking, as it trades in Cartesian “contraband” (and from a cognitive science point of view, it begs the question that the Kantian picture of how concepts are formed is accurate). Thus the key marker distinguishing Polanyi from Godlove’s reflections on Kant and Schleiermacher is that nonconceptual content is still essentially beholden to the space of reasons (267)—which Schleiermacher seeks to move beyond, and which for Polanyi fundamentally misses the point of tacit knowing’s open-ended relations to experience (and the rich ways that the space of reasons is funded by the prethetic).

The last essay brings us full circle to pragmatism, naturalism, and the bounds of experience. The issue earlier mentioned looms in James Wetzel’s essay: the suspicion that pragmatic naturalism, no matter how thick, fundamentally misses the import of deep religious experience, the nature of spirituality, and the centrality of various transfigurative modalities. For in pragmatically inquiring into these kinds of limit-experiences, the line appears irretrievably blurred between content naturalism and methodological naturalism (the Polanyian intertwining of ontological questions and our projected epistemic-ontologies). A bit of contextual background for PN helps to situate Wetzel’s inquiry. The contributors by and large are part of what can be characterized as a conservative contemporary pragmatism: PN is dedicated to Proudfoot’s earlier work in philosophy of religion (especially his book Religious Experience), which has strong affinities with Donald Davidson’s view that language goes all the way down regarding the fundamental conceptuality organizing the field of experience. The view that Wetzel questions presents conservative pragmatism cast in a disenchanted world, whereby as historical beings we define what is meaningful; the process of making-and-being-made places significance on the activities and habits we choose to construct, entertain, and re-form. Conservative pragmatism thus folds deep religious experience (etc.) into naturalism’s field, as an ingredient of its re-forming project.

Wetzel is hesitant to make this modernist move, and thereby implicitly creates room for questioning the conservative approach to pragmatism. In other words, there isn’t only one narrative for what pragmatism is, what naturalism’s bounds are and what its relations to pragmatism are or should be, and what conception we ought to adopt regarding significance and our place in the cosmos.1 Inverting William James’ “piecemeal supernaturalism” (which mixes the ideal and real worlds), Wetzel opts for “piecemeal naturalism,” which “cedes the domain of causes to nature, but without making too much of causes” (284), most especially when it comes to the domain of values (from a Polanyian viewpoint, a domain of constructed ideals that occur on an emergent level of being heterarchically enabled, in piecemeal fashion, by other “lower” levels). So does this mean that value, purpose, etc. are cosmically vapid—that the universe has no telos, naturalism is inherently secular, pragmatism’s account of the construction of value is essentially Protagorean, and so forth?

Wetzel offers another option that should be of interest to Polanyians: piecemeal naturalism “is the reminder that some opacities are not mysteries to be fathomed but bricks in the edifice of humility” (294). A key exemplar is what he terms the “secret oracle,” embodied by Christ-as-teacher, which reveals the core wisdom of “giving and receiving love” (291). Such oracularity stands in opposition to an idol of supernaturalism: “a supernatural cause, as far as I can make it out, is not very supernatural. It is best cast as the tyrannical power to synopsize parts and fit them wholly within one, jealously singular perspective on the good” (291). This synoptic supernaturalism contrasts with the sort of open-ended, piecemeal naturalism that, I suggest, brings us to key considerations of Polanyian tradition(s) and discovery(ies). Two questions are again raised that this seasoned, penetrating collection of essays inspires: Is Polanyi best viewed as a pragmatist? And is his program fruitfully cast under the expanding domain of (pragmatic) naturalism? These are tacit, personalistic matters for Polanyians to contemplate and explore.

Kyle Takaki

ktakaki@hawaii.edu

1Walter Gulick’s (as usual) insightful piece in TAD 46.1 recommends focusing on “more precise terminology” (58) rather than quibbling over the “ambiguous ontology-epistemology distinction” (59). But lurking in the background of Gulick’s “more robust” (59) recommendation is a metaphysical presumption lying at the heart of the “quibble” (55), which is revealed when he claims that there “are degrees of significance but not of reality” (59). This brings us full circle to issues raised in PN: what is experience and what are its bounds? For Gulick’s focus on “significance” (59) and “intellectual traction” (58) are as much intertwined with the “metaphysics” of the ontology-epistemology distinction as this metaphysics is with conceptions of pragmatism, conceptions of naturalism, and their intimate relations to experience and its bounds. In brief, it isn’t clear that Polanyi “confused matters by saying that significant things like persons and problems are more real than cobblestones” (59)—they may in fact be key quibbles worth harnessing.

Rolnick, Philip A. Origins: God, Evolution, and the Question of the Cosmos. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2015. Pp. 264. ISBN: 978-1-60258-369-6. $29.95.

This work is a clearly developed exposition of the view that science and Christian faith are compatible and need not be at odds as they are sometimes presented in the media. Rolnick begins by explaining how a Christian should respond to grace by accepting the reasonable search for truth through scientific inquiry.

Next, he analyzes four issues sustaining evolutionary theory that are sometimes taken to challenge faith. Random mutations and natural selection are often presented as sufficient in themselves to account for evolutionary development and thus eliminate the need for a divine creator. The struggle for survival over eons with many more losers than winners might challenge a view of creation as the effect of a loving God. And the acknowledgement that human and animal life are on a biological continuum might lead one to doubt whether humans are actually unique, as the belief that humans are an “image of God” might imply. Rolnick carefully disengages the scientific claims being upheld in these issues from the typically hidden naturalistic assumptions that surround them, analogous to the way Charles Taylor uncovers the exclusive humanism presumed by modernity. When this is accomplished, he argues, the scientific claims are in fact helpful ways to develop and strengthen religious faith. Regarding the issue of human uniqueness, for example, Rolnick acknowledges the biological continuities between higher animal forms and human life, but then points to the leap afforded humans by external factors, the ability to use language and develop culture. As Teilhard de Chardin pointed out over fifty years ago this “noosphere” opens human life to a realm transcending the biological and aiming toward the infinite.

Rolnick then moves on to a cosmic framework to explore the implications of current cosmological theory where the universe has been unfolding from a singularity over 13 billion years ago. Commonly called “the big bang,” this event put in motion the processes that eventually led to the human capacity to reflect back and understand this panorama. He points out how subsequent cosmological discoveries such as cosmic microwave background radiation, dark matter, dark energy, quantum effects, and inflation all have been successfully incorporated into the model. Once creation is understood to be an ongoing process, theology clearly can engage in a dialogue with this picture (Rolnick, obviously, relies on a non-literalist reading of scripture). Another intriguing discovery of this theory is that the cosmic unfolding of reality as we know it needed to be “fine-tuned” to allow for the eventual emergence of physical and chemical structures that support planetary development and carbon-based life.

To support his efforts to promote a mutually enriching dialogue between religion and science, Rolnick appeals to the traditional Christion notion of the divine Logos. If one accepts that the unfolding of the universe is continually sustained by divine creativity, then something like the big bang with its fine-tuning coheres marvelously with a loving God calling humanity to the fullness of life in salvation.

While he does not emphasize this, Rolnick’s presentation is thoroughly informed by a Polanyian outlook. His sense of reality as capable of revealing itself in the future and the way our thought unfolds through antecedent frameworks permeate his presentation. And his treatment of the authority of religious tradition is grounded in the dynamics Polanyi explored in the process of scientific breakthroughs.

In short, this is a competent, scientifically current defense of the value and importance of dwelling in a worldview where science and religion mutually support each other. Given the cultural realities of American society where many are under the sway of popular representations of scientific theories as rendering religious beliefs superfluous, this is still a valuable work and may serve as a helpful resource in college classrooms.

John V. Apczynski

apczynsk@sbu.edu

Hodgson, Geoffrey M. Is Socialism Feasible? Towards an Alternative Future. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing Incorporated, 2019. Pp. 272 + x. ISBN 978-1-78990-163-4, $39.95.

The answer to the question which is the title of this book is “It depends on what you mean by socialism.” For Geoffrey Hodgson, our prolific author, there is both “big socialism” and “small socialism,” with the former constituted by governmental centralized planning and public ownership of the means of production (the classical definition of socialism that is unknown to a largely callow Left amidst its infatuation with “socialism” during our current election season), and the latter defined by a market economy significantly regulated by active government committed to widespread social welfare programs in conjunction with private (but state-encouraged) initiatives such as worker cooperatives and other forms of economic empowerment of labor. Hodgson, on the basis of the historical record as well as in light of a mastery of economic and organizational theory (itself the fruit of a remarkably wide and deep acquaintance with the relevant literatures), argues vehemently that while small socialism holds great promise and ought to be the subject of frequent experimentation, big socialism has shown itself, without exception, to be an economic and political disaster as well as toxic to human liberty. Our author is eminently qualified to illuminate the ignorance and naivete regarding socialism, especially among the young, that characterizes contemporary politics in both the US and UK. He makes this point particularly in connection with Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, both of whom are wily enough to recognize the political advantages of such misunderstanding and are thus inclined to contribute to it. (Hodgson’s unmasking of Sanders on pages 10-12 and 48 is especially refreshing.) Part I of this book is an excellent remedy.

Part II of Hodgson’s book is a call to adopt a third alternative to 1) big socialism and 2) an economic system of largely unfettered markets. Emphasizing that it is essential to distinguish between economic systems and systems of government, Hodgson labels his recommended approach “liberal solidarity.” Under this heading he outlines social democratic governance married to an economic system of small socialism. In doing so he points approvingly to the Nordic countries which, he is quick to point out, maintain and exploit market economies.

Making a review of this book appropriate for the present journal is Hodgson’s frequent invocation of Michael Polanyi in support of his call for small socialism and liberal solidarity. Early on this is quite appropriately done through reference to Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge. Polanyi’s “social” epistemology (129-30) plays a central role in a decisive argument demonstrating the utter inability (due to cognitive limitations) of the hubristic central planning of big socialism to carry out its declared functions. (Hodgson in addition summons additional arguments against big socialism, including the problem of incentives and motivation.) Later, drawing heavily upon Polanyi’s Full Employment and Free Trade (1945) and The Contempt of Freedom (1940), less so on The Logic of Liberty (1951) and, notably, scarcely at all on Personal Knowledge (1958), Hodgson dwells on the fanaticism of big socialism (where his reference to the “immunology” to fact of big socialism brings Polanyi’s “moral inversion” and “dynamo-objective coupling” to mind) and finds in Polanyi explication and endorsement of the very measures that for him (Hodgson) constitute small socialism. In this vein, after directly quoting from FEFT, Hodgson paraphrases Polanyi in a sentence that represents the theme of this (Hodgson’s) book: “Infeasible socialist doctrine has diverted our attention from building a better capitalism” (162).

Throughout this book Polanyi is frequently labelled a liberal. In what will jolt some readers, he is thus routinely associated with John Dewey (19, 44 and 182). Something here is amiss. How, for example, would Dewey react to the following powerful declarations from Personal Knowledge?

• “Can we face the fact that, no matter how liberal a free society may be, it is also profoundly conservative?” (PK, 244).

• “Respect for tradition [an essential feature of Polanyi’s position] inevitably shields also some iniquitous social relations” (PK, 322).

• “the absolute right of moral self-determination, on which political liberty was founded, can be upheld only by refraining from any radical action towards the establishment of justice and brotherhood” (PK, 245).

At numerous points in Is Socialism Feasible? Hodgson emphasizes the experimental nature of small socialism and liberal solidarity. We are ceaselessly to try out new measures, retain what proves productive, and abandon what is not. This approach is “pragmatic” (x, note 5; 155). In the spirit of “a pox on both your houses,” Hodgson decries the “purism” (x) of both big socialism and atomistic individualism and calls instead for the application of experience and intelligence in an ongoing process of trial and error that will move us indefinitely in the direction of a superior third alternative that will indefinitely transmute over time. In principle nothing is off the table (though experience and hence intelligence strongly counsel against repeating certain measures). And so far, so good … for Dewey. But this “liberal” stance is clearly at odds with the strongly traditional orientation of Polanyi which necessarily includes considerable submission to authority. It is true that Dewey was himself reviled by Marxists and communists who were disgusted with his widely successful propagation of what they viewed as a cowardly and reprehensible gradualism (non-violent in nature) that aimed to transform the capitalist order over time. Still, radicalism comes in various guises, and Dewey was second to none in his vehement call for immediate deep and fundamental change made possible by a dramatic break with the past. This sentiment is in striking contrast with the increasingly subtle, insightful and measured Polanyi that emerges in Science, Faith and Society (1946) and achieves full bloom in Personal Knowledge (1958, based on lectures delivered in 1951-2).

Because of persuasive efforts in recent decades to construe Polanyi as a traditionalist (and even a conservative) and therefore akin to Burke and Oakeshott as well as to Richard Weaver, Edward Shils, and Alasdair MacIntyre (consider, for example, Mark Mitchell’s Michael Polanyi and the Mars Hill audio, “Tacit Knowing, Truthful Knowing: The Life and Thought of Michael Polanyi,” and recall that The Logic of Liberty is published by Liberty Fund), there are readers of his work who are surprised to find him not only embracing Keynesian theory (supplemented, granted, by extra-Keynesian monetarist policy) but also supportive of governmental support for those in need (children, the old, the sick, the systematically unemployed, etc.). As both Hodgson and Mitchell make clear, such a reaction betrays a misreading of Polanyi, who is indeed committed to public measures required for widespread human enablement and fruition. Polanyi’s endorsement of such policies is entailed by his commitment to transcendent ideals—such as charity and justice. But to acknowledge that Polanyi supports ongoing state-mandated, taxpayer-funded compassionate social programs (as well as government regulation not only of the money supply but also of markets and their consequences, including redistributive taxation) does not entail that he would endorse uncritically or in their entirety the policies of Hodgson’s liberal solidarity.

In principle, Hodgson’s recommended program is eminently reasonable and appealing, and one can easily imagine the idealistic Polanyi nodding his head in agreement:

Liberal solidarity has to show that it can provide the politico-economic basis for human flourishing, in place of the dangerous false claims of statist socialism. Liberal solidarity can accommodate measures of small socialism, but only in a mixed economy subservient to liberal-democratic rights and principles. It can embrace elements of a Burkean experimental conservatism, but not to sanction unwarranted privilege and gross inequality (196).

When, however, in the closing chapter of the book this statement is translated into specific policies, it becomes increasingly difficult to conceive the temperate Polanyi approving the result. This is, after all, the man who, reminding us of the need for humility in the face of human finitude and a largely inscrutable universe, states that “the elimination of the existing shortcomings of our society may bring about immeasurably greater evil” (LL, 246).

The chasm between Hodgson’s liberal solidarity and Polanyi’s mature thought appears in a variety of guises. This is because for Hodgson there are eight dimensions of liberalism (182ff.) and, in each of these, liberal solidarity moves forward aggressively, in several instances leaving Polanyi behind, with Hodgson implying, misleadingly, that Polanyi too endorses the envisioned radical reform. While it is true, for example, that for Polanyi “freedom from” (Isaiah Berlin’s “negative liberty”) is not by itself sufficient but needs instead, if justice is to obtain, to be accompanied by an enabling “freedom to” (Berlin’s contrasting “positive liberty”) secured by governmental initiative, one imagines the sensitive and subtle Polanyi shuddering at the implications for centralized state authority implicit in the “radical redistribution of income and wealth” and the vaguely defined “positive institutions . . . needed to sustain freedom and emancipation” (192) attributed to him by Hodgson. Hodgson’s liberal solidarity opens Pandora’s Box. In the name of its Deweyan experimentalism (and the underlying morally charged conception of necessity), there is carte blanche for state action and intervention (anything less would be immoral). With such a license, the radical reformist mind scarcely requires assistance from the theory of big socialism.

More deeply, Polanyi’s understanding of liberty is grander and more sophisticated than what is attributed to him in this book by Hodgson. In the preface to The Logic of Liberty Polanyi states that “freedom is not our primary consideration.” He adds, “Private individualism is no important pillar of public liberty. A free society is not an Open Society, but one fully dedicated to a set of beliefs” (xviii). By public liberty Polanyi is referring to the activity within institutional settings (such as science, the market, common law, etc.) whose existence makes possible, and is the occasion for, spontaneous order. (In fairness it must be said that Hodgson is quite alert to the importance of institutions to Polanyi’s epistemology, and they do in fact play a vital role in Hodgson’s liberal solidarity.) Now, for Polanyi, it is wrong and dangerous to require that public liberty be justified in terms of the private or personal (LL, 195). And, indeed, there is little point for or impact of the latter in the absence of the former. But, as Polanyi here emphasizes (and is manifest in Personal Knowledge), it is belief and commitment, as well as an authoritative tradition which is their object, that make public liberty possible. In other words, the ultimate enabler for Polanyi is not material or even practical in nature (far from it: see LL, 237), but rather a particular frame of mind and the traditional sources which make it possible. And it is here where we see most clearly that Hodgson has inappropriately enlisted Polanyi in his aggressively progressive program. In his discussion of the eighth dimension of liberalism (“Nationalism Versus Internationalism and Openness”), for example, he states that liberal solidarity “stresses the importance of social inclusion and the benefits of free movement” (186). This statement is, one suspects, intentionally vague, for the context suggests that it is a euphemistic invitation to unlimited immigration (i.e., open borders). Nothing could be more at odds with Polanyi’s deeply traditional “calling”-based grand enterprise as it is majestically set forth in Personal Knowledge and presaged in the above account of belief and faith-based public liberty. Inconspicuously located in a footnote in Hodgson’s book is reference to the problem of justification (181, note 3). If he had examined this matter thoroughly, in conjunction with a careful review of Polanyi’s notion of “primary education” (SFS, 42, 71-72), he would have encountered the true essence of Polanyi’s thought and, in its light, would perhaps have been less inclined to enlist him as a primary inspiration for the aggressive program (including its nod to “value pluralism”) herein set forth. Indeed, given that Hodgson has already elsewhere offered a “critique of cultural relativism” and therein recognized “the need for cultural and religious assimilation” (210, note 62), such fuller appreciation of Polanyi’s tradition-grounded theory of justification might have led to comprehensive revision of the very concept of liberal solidarity.

Jon Fennell

jfennell@hillsdale.edu

Table of Contents

Tradition & Discovery

Submission Guidelines

Preface

Notes on Contributors

Polanyi and the Study Group for the Unity of Knowledge

Book Reviews