The Fullness of Knowing: Modernity and Postmodernity from Defoe to Gadamer

7. Reconciling the Heart with the Head in the Poetry of William Cowper and the Thought of Michael Polanyi

185 Q RECONCILING THE HEART WITH THE HEAD IN THE POETRY OF WILLIAM COWPER AND THE THOUGHT OF MICHAEL POLANYI 7 In my last physics class—the one that convinced me that I had no higher calling in that field—we derived Einstein’s famous equation e=mc2 from a purely mathematical and theoretical chain of reasoning. I could follow the formulas, but they meant nothing to me because I could not sense the brilliant relationships that the various steps signified. I did not really participate in those classes with true comprehension—even though I could have repeated the derivations methodically. Did I understand what Einstein had done? No. Beyond seeing that a little matter translates into a large amount of energy, I could not reflect personally on the physical and mathematical relationships that our chain of reasoning had described. I could not “indwell” them, to use a term from the lexicon of the chemist-philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976). And without that indwelling, as Polanyi writes, formulas “inevitably spread out into a desert of trivialities.”1 I am not criticizing my teachers, of course. I had simply reached the end of my ability to pursue physics. Without any intuitive or personal connection to the next problem our class approached, the problems seemed inert and unconnected. Previously, a certain kind of relationship had bound me together with my fellow students, teachers, and the material. There was an implicit faith that each new acquisition of knowledge would deepen our understanding 186 The Fullness of Knowing Q of how electromagnetism and mechanics explained the workings of nature. Nature, of course, was the external authority that confirmed or contradicted our attempts at understanding. And when I could no longer personally understand nature’s confirmations of how the world worked, further advances in my knowledge of physics were impossible. Unlike their Enlightenment forebears, many modern scientists have embraced a personal element as crucial to their research. Knowledge is attained by persons, Polanyi emphasized, and scientists are personally committed to what their fields of knowledge claim to explain. In practice, research scientists exercise personal judgments about what kind of knowledge to pursue, which guides their empirical or theoretical inquiries. Their research includes an unspoken, “tacit knowledge,” whose intuitions cannot be reduced to a method.2 This chapter begins by focusing on William Cowper (1731– 1800), the most widely read poet and hymn writer of the final decade or so of the eighteenth century. Cowper protested the elimination of the personal element of knowledge in the Enlightenment. He saw that Enlightenment figures had discounted the epistemological significance of one’s commitment to and passion for the objects of knowledge. He protested the Enlightenment effort to separate the advancement of knowledge from one’s personal participation in that knowledge. At the end of the chapter, I will show how Polanyi draws together and extends similar critiques of the Enlightenment in his ambitious philosophy of personal knowledge.3 Cowper shows as great an awareness of Enlightenment approaches to knowledge as his contemporary, Edmund Burke. Both writers were acutely aware of the claims being made for modern methods of acquiring scientific, historical, and even theological knowledge. Like Burke, Cowper criticizes them for failing to understand their proper limits. He knew he was on the losing side of the cultural shift that was occurring, and yet (also like Burke) he also knew he represented cultural institutions that were still the objects of powerful critiques. Cowper’s positive contribution to an alternative to Enlightenment knowing differs from Burke’s, however, in that his emphasis on the personal element of knowledge largely avoids the entanglements of history, tradition, and prejudice. Q Reconciling the Heart with the Head 187 Cowper’s Struggle for Mental Health Because William Cowper’s critique of the Enlightenment concerns one’s personal relationship to knowledge, one must confront the sad and bizarre elements of his biography. Cowper battled madness throughout his adult life, and even when sane, he was often deeply depressed. After an early breakdown and suicide attempt in 1763, he thought he had committed the unforgivable sin;4 then followed an eighteen-month stay in a mental asylum, St. Albans, run by a forward-looking physician, Nathaniel Cotton, who was an evangelical Christian. Sometime during the summer of 1764, Cowper experienced a conversion, and about a year later he left Dr. Cotton’s care.5 Observers of Cowper sometimes attribute the gloom of his...