Contact with Reality: Michael Polanyi's Realism and Why It Matters by Esther Lightcap Meek (review)

It has been 61 years since philosopher-scientist Michael Polanyi published Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 1958, 2015). With this, his most important book, philosopher-scientist Polanyi introduced a revolutionary, paradigm-shifting conception of reality as existing independently from us and how, nevertheless, we have contact with it and know it—a conception having the potential to restore rapport and unity among the multiply-splintered disciplines of the university in what has become the post-modern academy we find today. Esther Meek's new book is the first to focus on this conception and explain its significance in an easily accessible manner.¹

The core content of Meek's book was originally composed as a PhD dissertation at Temple University (1985) under the direction of philosopher Joseph Margolis and the guidance of philosopher of biology Marjorie Grene. (Polanyi himself had worked closely with Grene in putting together his Gifford Lectures which became Personal Knowledge, as well as most of Polanyi's philosophical work in the 50s and 60s.)² In it Meek situates and justifies Polanyi's understanding of reality in relation to mid-twentieth-century philosophy of science (relating to controversies concerning realism/ anti-realism, scientific progress, and truth), and specifically how it is that on Polanyi's "Post-Critical" account we may be said to make contact with reality, despite the Kantian ("Critical") legacy that denies that we have access to and can know nothing beyond the perceptual phenomena that we ourselves rationally constitute, that is, that we can never know noumena, reality in itself. Meek tells of her own early skepticism concerning Polanyi's account, so counter to the Kantian legacy, and her initial attempt to give it justification on "Critical" grounds. Eventually in the course of writing the dissertation and in the years since she came to see the whole enterprise of giving it such a justification as deriving from a critical rather than a post-critical frame of reference. Realizing this, she concludes the enterprise to be moot.

In Part II of the book, Meek extends her discussion of Polanyi and philosophy of science to developments since 1985. She does not, unfortunately, attempt to take into account related developments within Continental philosophy—with the important exception of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty—or other postmodern philosophical thinkers. The highlight of this section is her extended analysis, comparison, and criticism of Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor's Retrieving Realism (Harvard University Press, 2015),³ perhaps the most important recent book on realism in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy (which also attempts to incorporate major insights of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty). She sees this book as anticipating many of Polanyi's fundamental insights. However, she concludes that it does not succeed nearly as well as Polanyi in recovering a robust realism. Meek goes on to explore some convergences between what she finds in Polanyi's thinking about reality and two major figures in recent philosophical theology (Hans Urs von Balthasar and D. C. Schindler⁴).

What is the revolutionary conception of reality, according to Meek, that Polanyi introduces? Near the start of Polanyi's brief introduction to epistemology published as The Tacit Dimension (University of Chicago Press, 1966, 2009), Polanyi begins his argument with what at the time seemed to be a rather audacious and provocative claim given the presuppositions of modernity: "We can know more than we can tell." This declaration does not mean simply that there is a lot more that we know than we can state; it means that of all the things that we rightly claim that we know, our knowledge (our knowing) in these instances includes far more than we can hope to prove or justify in the "Critical" sense, and that it is these nonexplicit aspects that are the most important in connecting us with reality in its independence from us...