The Tacit in Experience: Polanyi and Whitehead

THE TACIT IN EXPERIBNCE: POLANYI AND WHITEHEAD THERE IS A striking resemblance between some of the work of Michael Polanyi and that of A. N. Whitehead. As one of his foremost interpreters, Marjorie Grene, observes, Polanyi's "approach has much in common with some forms of existentialist and phenomenological thought as well as with the Lebensphilosophie of Dilthey and the organismic philosophy of Whitehead." 1 While Grene does not herself explore these commonalities in any detail, the one in which we are interested involves various epistemological and ontological features of what Polanyi calls the " tacit dimension " and of Whitehead's analysis of experience. I wish to explore this resemblance here, and to indicate ways in which their work can be mutually supportive. Both philosophers are speculative thinkers whose reflections range over a vast array of human achievement and thought. Of the two, Whitehead is the more systematic and Polanyi the more concrete. If there is genuine commonality in various respects, it may be that some of the variety of examples which Polanyi provides can serve as concrete illustrations for Whitehead 's theory of experience. The systematic scope of Whitehead 's theory, in turn, may be able to give additional rigor and form to some of the general theses which Polanyi is presenting . At any rate this is a possibility which we shall consider . Both Polanyi and Whitehead entered philosophy late in their lives-Polanyi as a chemist and Whitehead as a mathematician. Each entered in part because he had reservations about the philosophical underpinnings of science. Whitehead was con1 The Knower and the Known (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 14. 28 THE TACIT IN EXPERIENCE cerned that people forget too easily the selective character of inquiry that is essential to scientific activity and knowledge. Because they forget, they are likely to substitute a tissue of concepts for the fullness of reality. Misplaced concreteness is a temptation for all and particularly so in science. Polanyi was concerned about the ideal of .science as detached and impersonal knowledge. Such an ideal of exact science is mischievous because it is unattainable. There can be no wholly explicit knowledge. Inquiry can never eliminate the tacit and, thereby, the personal element of knowledge. This is an issue which may be more familiar when cast in the terms of the later work of Edmund Husserl. In fact, it may be that this is what Grene had in mind in her reference to phenomenology. Science, Husserl argued, presupposes the lifeworld for its very meaningfulness. By this he meant that it is our common and pre-given experience that is the matrix for all our scientific abstractions. It is this prior world of perception and daily activity which is the fundament for the sciences. It is the life-world that functions "not as something irrelevant that must be passed through, but as that which ultimately grounds the theoretical-logical ontic validity for all objective verification, i.e., as the source of self-evidence, the source of verification." 2 It follows, then, that the precision and objectivity of science are logically derivative, not basic. Husserl retained the ideal of philosophy as an exact science, however, and his work also ultimately involves theses about the constitutiveness of consciousness-an ideal and theses which distinguish his thought from that of both Whitehead and Polanyi.3 It is rather this important priority of pre-scientific experience which is one of the basic points upon which both Whitehead and Polanyi alike are insisting. Let us turn first to the way in which Polanyi presents this notion. It involves his s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 126. 8 In another essay I have explored in greater detail these and other differences between Husserl and Whitehead. See "Husserl's Crisis and Whitehead's Process Philosophy," The Personalist (Summer, 1975), pp. !l89-SOO. so JOHN B. BENNETT concept of the tacit, one of the most suggestive features of his work. Following this, we shall look at Whitehead and then at the ontologies of the two men. I According to Polanyi, the tacit dimension is the foundation or presupposition of all knowledge and of...