Ikujiro Nonaka, whose formative experience is Japanese, is an established scholar who has written about large business organizations. He sees knowledge at the heart of the organization and its products and aims to develop Michael Polanyi’s conception of tacit knowledge in a practical direction to enhance organizational “knowledge creation.” For Nonaka, what matters is the practice, the doing, the embodiment of knowledge. An organization can amplify and crystallize individuals’ tacit knowledge in a process that allows them to experience deeper understanding . Nonaka holds that it is iimportant to explore the potential that knowledge holds. His spiral process describes disciplined practices that make tacit knowledge independent and available to restructure the organizational knowledge context.

In this paper I argue that there are good reasons for not reading the last part of Polanyi’s book Personal Knowledge (1958) as the outline of a finalistic metaphysics, as proposed recently by Haught and Yeager, but rather as a modest speculative attempt to fulfill the requirements of a Gifford Lecturer, namely to treat of the relation between God and the world. Apart from the background of the writing of the book, I suggest that the predicament of theism in the contemporary antimetaphysical climate and Polanyi’s emphasis onreligious practice, rather than metaphysical theorizing, as the locus of meaning in his other writings on religion, support this reading as well.

Using the ideas of Clifford Geertz, Adolf Portmann, Charles Taylor, and others, I seek to develop and expand Polanyi’s account of language and its role in our human way of being bodily mindful in the world. The expansion of Polanyi’s ideas on language in the evolutionary rise of Homo sapiens and in the moral and mental development of the child does two things that I believe are important: (1) obviates the need to appeal to an incorporeal thinking substance - i.e., dualism - to ground the reality of human transcendence, and (2) highlights the place of natural language in the irreducibility of human mentality.

The keystone of Polanyi’s epistemology is his idea that tacit knowing integrates subsidiary knowledge and creates personal meaning. However, Polanyi’s preoccupation with scientific discovery seems to have prevented him from developing the idea of tacit knowing in the context of human creativity. This omission leaves Polanyi with a static universe in which personal knowledge is subsumed under impersonal fields. This calls for further work.