Thoughts on a Polanyian Collaboration

by Phil Mullins & Struan Jacobs

The polymath Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) trained in medicine at the University of Budapest, then earned a doctorate and conducted important research in physical chemistry, studied and wrote about economics and political philosophy and made an economics education film, and spent the last thirty years of his life writing about philosophy of science, epistemology and other areas of philosophy.

Mary Jo Nye (Michael Polanyi and his Generation, 2011) has shown how Polanyi shifted the approach in philosophy of science away from the formalism associated with positivist, empiricist and falsificationist views toward a focus on scientific practice. Polanyi emphasized the growth of scientific knowledge as a communal enterprise reliant upon tradition, skill, and the personal understanding and initiative of individuals engaged in ongoing public conversation; those who have “personal knowledge”, are, of course, always shaped in a particular historical socio-political-cultural context.

Phil and Struan have written, both together and independently, about neglected aspects of Polanyi’s thought (e.g., his study of anthropology), and have analysed his relations with “significant others” including Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, T.S. Eliot, Karl Mannheim, Marjorie Grene, Eduard Shils and J.H. Oldham. Their recent joint article in Appraisal 11 (4), “Polanyi’s Early Work on Knowledge” focuses on some of the early Polanyi’s writings, published and unpublished. They point to some early nascent ideas about scientific practice and knowledge that Polanyi later develops. They also point to some of the tensions reflected in early Polanyi writing before Science, Faith and Society (1946).

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Struan: Let me say a bit more about the collaboration between Phil and me, going back now about 15 years, and suggest some possible future joint work. There is probably nothing unique about our cooperation. Most of our joint essays originated as e-mail exchanges with questions or half-baked notions put forward: “look at these letters that Polanyi and Mannheim (or Polanyi and Hayek) exchanged in the mid-forties. There seems to be a story here. Can we ferret out the details?” Sometimes we have speculated about topics about which we were curious for several years before we actually sorted things out fairly clearly and began writing an essay which we then passed back and forth while criticizing, revising, and expanding it. This approach has seemed to work for us as a way together to dig into some of the things about which we originally were separately curious.

We have a few projects percolating and some of our ruminations may eventually produce an essay of general interest.

(1) We have for some years been curious about Michael Polanyi’s relationship with his Manchester colleague, the philosopher Dorothy Emmet. Polanyi and Emmet seem to have been friendly and to have cooperated sometimes. She appreciated much of Polanyi’s thought but also had some sharp criticisms. Emmet and Polanyi both were apparently excited by the inaugural lecture of the first Manchester social anthropologist, Max Gluckman, who introduced them to the work of Evans-Pritchard. They were in a reading/discussion group focusing on Evans-Pritchard and all of this plays into Polanyi’s Gifford Lectures, his writing in the early fifties and eventually into Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). Emmet was the head of the Manchester University Philosophy program in the early fifties and apparently invited Polanyi to give his Series II Gifford lectures as a class before he actually delivered them.

(2) Polanyi’s connection with Emmet and their joint interest in social anthropology is linked to our recent essay, “Anthropological Materials in the Making of Michael Polanyi’s Metascience” (Perspectives on Science. 25:2: 261-285) that focused on how Polanyi’s reading in anthropology in the late forties influenced his developing ideas in the middle period of his philosophical development. We found in the Michael Polanyi Papers (hereafter MPP) Polanyi’s notes on anthropologists he was reading in the late forties and looked at how references to this literature began to appear in mid-century essays, the Gifford Lectures and later Personal Knowledge and how all this played into Polanyi’s interaction with Karl Popper. But there is another chapter to this story yet untold. Polanyi gave three sets of Meaning Lectures in 1969, 1970 and 1971 and Harry Prosch later turned some of this material into the book Meaning. In his Meaning Lectures, Polanyi again begins to draw on anthropological literature (Lévi-Bruhl and Evans-Prichard particularly) as he discusses “truth in myth,” but his late reflection also included comments on Cassirer and Eliade. (3) Polanyi had interesting and somewhat odd things to say about “totalitarianism.” He seems to have paid some attention to thinkers like Arendt (who he apparently invited to Manchester to lecture and reviewed at least one of her books). But Polanyi put together his own account of modern totalitarianism which is tied up with his ideas about the scientific revolution and its aftermath, that is, with his more general account of modern intellectual history. He argues that totalitarianism is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Scholars like Richard Allen have explored this topic, but Phil and I suspect there may be some things not yet fully uncovered. So, these three areas of inquiry Phil and I have been looking into and we may or may not eventually come up with essays that we believe those seriously interested in Polanyi’s thought should consider.

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Phil: Struan and I have looked at Michael Polanyi examining “neglected aspects”, and some of his relations with “significant others”. Such historical work at close quarters reveals some important things shaping Polanyi’s thought. We continue to dig around in archival and other little-known Polanyi material, trying to make sense of it because we presume Polanyi was an intellectual who himself was trying to make sense of things. His framework of ideas grew as he attempted to integrate a bewildering array of personal experiences and ideas vibrant in his milieu. There are more than 50 boxes of archival materials in the MPP. Polanyi had a correspondence with many important figures in his time and the MPP includes not only letters but notes, notebooks sketching interests, incomplete abandoned manuscripts and other interesting material. Some of this material was used in our recent Appraisal essay “Polanyi’s Early Work on Knowledge.” I hope that future scholars will look at archival material more carefully as more of this material becomes available on the web and in articles and books.

There are two especially interesting areas in Polanyi scholarship which I think archival material is now beginning to illuminate.

(1) In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in Polanyi’s economic writings and particularly his economics education film. Particularly some of the research done by Eduardo Beira and Gábor Bíró is promising, but there are also others working on this. If the interesting set of materials on Polanyi’s economics (by Beira, Bíró and others, including Struan) delivered at the November 2017 MIT conference (sponsored by the Polanyi Society) is published, this should generate more interest. In my view, it is becoming clearer as to how Polanyi’s economic ideas, in the thirties and forties, are woven with his ideas about reform of political philosophy, and how all of this morphs into his broader mid-career interest in reframing the philosophical account of the epistemic roots of science and society.

 (2) In early 1965, Michael Polanyi and Marjorie Grene, with some help from others, including key figures at the Ford Foundation, applied for (in the name of the Study Group on the Foundation of Cultural Unity – the SGFCU), and received a Ford Foundation grant to sponsor an ambitious experimental project seeking to transform the mainstream intellectual ethos, using Michael Polanyi’s philosophical ideas as a catalyst. The grant proposal 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 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 endeavour” (Appendix A, Ford Grant 6500113). This grant funded two important conferences at Bowdoin College in 1965 and 1966 that brought together an interesting set of people. There are two little known publications generated by these conferences, put together by Marjorie Grene, The Anatomy of Knowledge (1969) and the monograph in Psychological Issues (6:2, monograph 22) titled “Toward a Unity of Knowledge.” The SGFCU grant was succeeded by a much larger, five-year Ford Foundation grant to the remodelled SGFCU successor group, the Study Group on the Unity of Knowledge (SGUK) which sponsored about 20 interdisciplinary conferences on a variety of topics. The importance of the SGUK’s work (which included figures like Marjorie Grene, Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor) as a contributor to late 20^th century intellectual history is a topic bigger than Polanyi; but it is a topic I hope future intellectual historians willing to dig into the more than 200 letters in the Polanyi-Grene correspondence in MPP and the abundant Ford Foundation archival records will explore. The increasingly frail Polanyi’s role in the SGUK was limited but it was important. I think that Polanyi’s work with Grene in the SGFCU and the SGUK sheds much light on the philosophical interests found at the end of Polanyi’s career. These interests are reflected in late Polanyi publications on (1) imagination, art, and the material that comes together, with the help of Harry Prosch, as Polanyi’s last book Meaning and (2) the late Polanyi publications in which he seems increasingly concerned about “moral inversion” (e.g., “Why Did We Destroy Europe”). Gus Breytspraak and I have given papers at two North American Polanyi conferences in 2016 and 2018 treating Polanyi and Grene’s work in the SGFCU and the SGUK; one of these is forthcoming in Polanyiana and we expect soon to send out a second for possible publication. What I hope is that future Polanyi scholarship will dig into Polanyi’s work with Grene on the SGFCU and the SGUK because this appears to me to be the key to the final stage of Polanyi’s work on his Meaning Lectures and the sometimes puzzling Polanyi publications from roughly 1967 to 1976.