“We can account for this capacity of ours to know more than we can tell if we believe in the presence of an external reality with which we can make contact. This I do. I declare myself committed to the belief in an external reality gradually accessible to knowing, and I regard all true understanding as an intimation of such a reality which, being real, may yet reveal itself to our deepened understanding in an indefinite range of unexpected manifestations. I accept the obligation to search for the truth through my intimations of reality, knowing that there is and can be no strict rule by which my conclusions can be justified” (Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being, 133).

The paragraph above succinctly states scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi’s view of the personal pursuit of truth and reality. Polanyi rejects the possibility of “complete objectivity” and “absolute certainty” and argues that all knowledge is “personal knowledge.” His rejection of complete objectivity and absolute certainty does not result in intellectual despair, but actually impels him to truly pursue reality with passionate commitment. Our inability to be completely objective or absolutely certain in our personal knowledge does not imply that there is no objective reality or absolute meaning in the universe.

By integrating Polanyi’s philosophy with the insights of great Christian thinkers of the past, I believe that we can produce an epistemology (a theory of knowing) that concurs with contemporary postmodern insights on the limitations of language and knowledge without completely abandoning the possibility of objective reality and personal confidence.

Neither complete despair nor empty faith are the only two options for postmodern people. The real world exists. Even more, a real God exists. However, our human limitations should cause us to recognize that even though our apprehension of reality and God may be true, it can never be complete.

Seeking Knowledge

“We can account for this capacity of ours to know more than we can tell if we believe in the presence of an external reality with which we can make contact…”

Polanyi’s personal knowledge is driven by something he calls “tacit knowledge” – “this capacity of ours to know more than we can tell.” We all possess knowledge that we routinely use and take for granted that is irreducible to explicit propositional statements and thus cannot be articulated. For example, a child can ride a bicycle without being able to articulate all that is involved in doing so – especially when it comes to explaining balance, the mathematics of curve radius, and other details. In the same way, an infant recognizes a face without being able to articulate how he or she does so.

All discoveries stem from this tacit knowledge. “Scientific knowledge would get nowhere without the dim foreknowledge and the capacity to know more than we can tell. And this means we do believe there is an external reality of which we can thus be aware” (59). In other words, we begin to seek truth because of an intuitive sense that there is more to life than we can articulate. Our inability to fully articulate this knowledge demonstrates that we are truly interacting with a reality far greater than ourselves.

St. Augustine wrestled with this same problem. What is it that provokes us to seek greater knowledge – especially in regard to things we apparently have no knowledge of? Put another way, if we have no knowledge of something, what could possibly cause us to begin our search for it? In order to seek something, we must at least have an initial awareness of it; otherwise, we would not begin to seek it in the first place. Where does this knowledge come from? How can a person want to know something without already possessing the knowledge he or she seeks?

Augustine’s answer is similar to Polanyi’s answer, but augmented by his belief in God. We seek to know because of an innate knowledge implanted by God in the human person. Even though fallen, we are fashioned in the image of our Creator. Consequently, we harbor a deep longing for God, even though that longing is often misguided and misdirected. Put simply, in Augustine’s most famous dictum, “You have made us for Yourself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in You.”

For Augustine, this innate knowledge is manifestly demonstrated to be a gift from God when it results in the soul’s search for God. In spite of the contemporary use of the term “seeker” for interested-yet-not-quite-committed non-Christians, the Bible uses the term in regard to committed believers. Christians are God-seekers: “Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness,” (Matthew 6:33); “Without faith it is impossible to please God, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him” (Hebrews 11:6). We seek only because God has first sought us and implanted within us a desire to seek him.

The Real World

“We believe in the presence of an external reality with which we can make contact… [and is] gradually more accessible to knowing…”

Polanyi believed in a real world in which he personally participated. For him, truth corresponds to reality – a reality that is greater than ourselves and thus forever eludes our complete comprehension. As a personal being with tacit knowledge, he courageously committed himself to searching for a deeper understanding of reality. His rejection of absolute certainty did not lead him to despair but to a realistic pursuit of truth, for he truly believed that he could “progressively understand, though not completely or certainly.”[1]

The grandeur of reality excited Polanyi and drove him to pursue greater knowledge of it. Reality is infinite and inexhaustible, full of profound beauty and open to endless discoveries. Reality is not known by reducing it to its lowest levels – e.g., molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles, etc. – but by discovering its deeper meanings revealed in the profound relationships of the manifold levels of reality.

Polanyi readily admits a hierarchy of reality: “whatever has more depth of meaning and thus more attractive power to our minds, is more real.”[2] This prevents him from assigning equal meaning to everything and subsequently reducing all things to their lowest common denominator. Instead of attributing primacy to mere matter, Polanyi granted preeminence to the least tangible aspects of creation.

What is most tangible has the least meaning, and it is perverse then to identify the tangible with the real. For to regard a meaningless substratum as the ultimate reality of all things must lead to the conclusion that all things are meaningless. We can avoid this conclusion only if we acknowledge instead that the deepest reality is possessed by higher things that are least tangible.[3]

This is obvious from the simplest tangible objects to the most intangible – persons and ideas. “The sight of a solid object indicates to everyone that it has both another side and a hidden interior which we could explore; the sight of another person indicates to us a set of unlimited workings of his mind and body.”[4] Put simply, “A person or a theory is more real than a cobblestone.”[5]

By establishing a hierarchy of reality, Polanyi concurs with the medieval worldview that creation is structured, ordered, and real. Even more important, inherent within creation is an order of meaning. According to the medieval understanding of creation,

existence itself is on a scale of more and less, or, as we may put it, things are properties are more or less ‘real’. We, of course, have no way of thinking of such a conception comfortably, for the intellectual culture has long disappeared in which it was natural to think of a horse being ‘more real’ than a cabbage, a human ‘more real’ than a horse, an angel ‘more real’ than a human… For us [in the modern world], existence cannot come in degrees, for the rules governing the logic of existence are those of the zero-sum: a thing either exists or its does not.[6]

In the medieval worldview, degrees of reality correspond to the “degrees of ‘proximity’ to the creating cause.”[7] The closer something or someone is to God, the more “real” and “meaningful” that object or person is.

A World Full of Meaning

“I regard all true understanding as an intimation of such a reality which, being real, may yet reveal itself to our deepened understanding in an indefinite range of unexpected manifestations...”

A commitment to pursue truth in reality leads to deeper levels of meaning and understanding. Since Polanyi holds to a hierarchy of meaning, the higher the level of discovery, the deeper the meaning.

“A simple example could be a watermill, which harnesses the physical properties of water, the laws of gravity and other physical facts for the purpose of grinding corn.”[8] The water can be understood on its most basic level – its chemical structure, density, properties, etc. This reveals one level of meaning in regard to understanding water. The water falling into the mill, pushing the mill’s shelves downward, reveals a level of meaning that includes the meaning of the water but goes beyond it in the purpose for which the water is used. The grinding of the corn propelled by the water pushing the mill reveals another level of meaning that includes the water and the mill, but goes beyond them both, and so on. Each new principle presents a higher level of control that harnesses the meaning of the lower levels. The higher level of control cannot be accounted for on the lower level but the lower level can be accounted for on the higher level.

The things on the lower level participate in a deeper reality than is immediately obvious. Their meaning is more significant than simple water running down a hill, or buckets catching water, or energy being created for grinding corn. Polanyi believed that all creation held the potential to reveal deeper meanings than lay on the surface. Reducing all of reality to its lowest levels and thus equalizing all possible meanings negates the possibility of discovering deep meaning within the world. When one embraces a hierarchy of meaning within creation, the possibility of discovery is so great as to be nearly infinite.

Ultimately, the meaning that harnesses each subordinate level is the deepest and greatest reality. The deepest meaning does not depend on the lower levels even though it harnesses the lower levels in order to manifest meaning. Drussila Scott provides a wonderful illustration of this:

Take a book for example; would anyone maintain that the printed letters on the pages are more real than the meaning, because they are visible and tangible? Clearly the contrary is the case, the reality of the letters depends on the meaning they express. The reality of the meaning does not depend upon the printed words, for it can be expressed in many other visible or audible forms.[9]

Likewise, for Christians, the reality of the meaning of God is greater than the printed words of Scripture or the sacramental signs of God in creation. These instruments are harnessed by the ultimate meaning but are not the meaning themselves. They point to a deeper reality that exists regardless of whether creation or Scripture ever existed.

Christian mystics also embraced an ordered reality in which deep meaning was demonstrated through all creation. For the mystics, ultimate reality is God himself. Therefore, the key to the meaning of all creation is to understand creation in relationship to God. Creation points to God – it is full of natural signs – but it is not God.

But the best the simulacra naturae [natural image] can give us are ‘signs’ of their Creator, simulacra which can tell us about, or signify God, but they cannot provide us with the key to understanding their proper meanings; they gesture towards God, but God is not in any way made present by them; they signify from a distance and only in a partial way, and so they are, as we would say, ‘signs’, not ‘symbols’, because, like street signs, they point the way, but themselves possess none of the character of what they point to.[10]

As we ascend higher in our knowledge of God, we come to see all things in light of their relationship to God. The common mystic image of advancing up steps in one’s knowledge of God involves embracing every level of personal discovery and growing in deeper awareness of the significance of each lower level by climbing higher in one’s pursuit of God. “At every stage she [the mystic] has not only passed through the preceding steps but has brought them along with her, for every higher step contains within it all that is contained in the lower.”[11] New discoveries allow us to see the old discoveries in a new light. Like the order of creation, the higher levels cannot be accounted for on the lower levels but the lower levels can be accounted for on the higher levels.

Personal Commitment to Truth

“I accept the obligation to search for the truth through my intimations of reality…”

Polanyi demonstrated that commitment is not the enemy of truth. Rather, commitment to further discovery is the proper response to truth – “a vital part of our discovery.”[12] In the scientific worldview, commitment is the enemy of truth. It reveals personal bias and traditional loyalties that must be rejected in the name of complete objectivity.

Contrary to the modern mind, it is not “more honest to doubt than to believe.”[13] Polanyi understood that everyone comes to reality with a fiduciary framework – a framework of beliefs. Radical skepticism – doubting everything that can be doubted – is impossible to sustain. No one consistently practices it.

When [radical skeptics] claim that they hold no belief that could be doubted, they simply mean that they have decided not to accept the arguments against the beliefs they do hold. There are unprovable assumptions built into our very language and perception, and it is impossible to doubt any belief except from a commitment to a different belief. To doubt everything that could be doubted leads not to truth but to imbecility.[14]

Polanyi was “committed as a person to reality.”[15] True commitment is not fanatical, mindless devotion. This stance reveals a lack of commitment by “passing the buck, avoiding responsibility, [and] setting up some rigid structure which can be left holding the baby.”[16] True commitment is always “the commitment of ourselves to reality.”

True commitment does not allow us to hand over our choice of beliefs to an authority or a rule or a formula, though these are useful tools; the commitment is of ourselves to reality, and as it is a characteristic of reality that we can never know it completely, such a commitment is always risky.[17]

In the same way, we cannot come to know God without a true personal commitment to seeking God. This commitment is not merely intellectual or emotional, nor is it simply to creeds or institutions (as important as these are as instruments of truth). The commitment is total – the complete abandonment of our person to the reality and purpose of God. This is both a dangerous and exciting step, for just as Polanyi expected the unexpected from reality, so we can expect the same from God. We can therefore modify Polanyi’s view of reality: “such a reality [namely, God]… may yet reveal itself to our deepened understanding in an indefinite range of unexpected manifestations.”

A Society of Explorers

Ideally, this discovery takes place within a community – “a society of Explorers”. This society is strongly committed to its tradition while remaining open to new discoveries. This firm yet tolerant community exists because of its beliefs in the inexhaustible nature of reality.

The members believe in a common truth, ultimately self-consistent, which they are pursuing. And they know that this truth is inexhaustible and can always be understood more deeply; known more comprehensively. No one of them can think he has the final answer and try to keep others from discovering other possibilities. They are only members because they are bitten with the bug of pursuing the never-ending truth.[18]

When this balance is maintained, then the community grows together in shared discovery. “Science is constantly revolutionized and perfected by its pioneers, while remaining firmly rooted in its traditions.”[19] The tradition is thus “a living tradition, both authoritative and developing, within which individual creative discovery can grow.”[20] This is “convivial understanding” – understanding that is rooted in a shared life and pursuit.

It is amazing how Polanyi’s vision of “the society of Explorers” corresponds so directly with the ideal church community. Read the quotes above and substitute the church community for the scientific community and you’ll see what I mean!

There is another parallel in Polanyi’s vision of “the society of Explorers.” He envisions a community where the radical diversity of the individuals united in a common purpose leads to a greater breadth of discovery. This sounds remarkably similar to the church’s identity as “the body of Christ” which is intended to demonstrate that it is only when the church consists of radically different individuals united by faith in Christ who serve the common good of the community through their various gifts that the community truly represents the fullness of Christ to the world. Read Polanyi’s quote below concerning his “society of Explorers” with this “body of Christ” image in the background:

each person’s obligation to the truth is from his own particular setting, whose particular advantages and disadvantages are his own path to truth. This is what gives each person his unique contribution to make and his special responsibility, as each sees the truth from his own unique reservoir of tacit knowledge. The objects of our knowledge, being real, can be perceived from many different angles, just as a real live model sitting for a life class can be truly represented by quite different shapes drawn by students seeing her from different angles. The truth of their representations depends on the faithfulness and skill with which each draws what he sees, while believing that he is drawing a real person who exists in the round. There can be no true representation that is drawn from no particular place.[21]

A New and Glorious Vision

Postmodernity has recovered the ancient idea “in conceiving of the world as a text to be read by means of an adequate hermeneutic rather than as a system of causes to be explained by means of hypothesis and verification.”[22] Polanyi’s reading of the world provides a helpful framework to recapture reality and progressively discover its profound meaning from the top down.

The meaning of the world shines through all God’s creation. “The meaning belongs to a higher level in the hierarchy, and may be glimpsed only in a few clues on the natural level, but if it can be grasped it illuminates and can change the whole of every level. This supra natural is the meaning of the natural, as the mind is the meaning of the brain.”[23] Ultimately, the “supernatural” may be better understood as the “supra natural” – “the natural world revealing a meaning.”[24]

I have a picture in my office of a robed man sitting beside a gorgeous stream surrounded by trees, reading a scroll. On initial observation, the meaning of the picture seems simple. However, once one looks deeply at the picture, one begins to make out the shape of a face in the trees. Once the pieces come together, one realizes that the face in the trees is the face of Jesus looking down with approval upon the man reading the scroll. With this one revelation, the meaning of the picture changes even though none of the individual elements have changed. A deeper reality – a deeper meaning – shines through. The separate and seemingly meaningless marks can never be viewed in the same way again once the shape of the face of Jesus is revealed.

It is the same with reality. Once Jesus has been seen in the world, nothing can ever be viewed the same way again. Everything is given new meaning and new purpose. One cannot return to the old way of seeing again. The highest reality – God in Christ – unlocks the profound meaning in all lower realities. Yet, even with this new awareness, we must never conclude that we have complete understanding. We “know but in part.” Indeed, it is precisely because we do believe in the infinite glory of God that we remain open to shocking surprises and unpredictable revelations that shed new light and pour new meaning into all we believe in our passionate pursuit of God.

Of all people, Christians should be able to embrace with passion the vision of reality that Polanyi presents – a vision that is profoundly greater when the ultimate reality is the infinite, exhaustible, and all-glorious God.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities – all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything. For it was the Father's good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven. (Colossians 1:15-20)

© Richard J. Vincent, 2004