This essay is a study of Polanyi’s career as scientist and philosopher from the point of view of the history of science, starting with the first step in his academic career helped by an intervention of Albert Einstein. Polanyi’s ideas are better understood if placed against the background of then-fashionable philosophical movements, including logical positivism, and his disagreement with Bukharin in 1935. The essay studies the sources and ambitions of Polanyi’s notion of the tacit dimension, his attitude to evolution and “emergence,” and his contribution to the search for the origins of Einstein’s Relativity Theory. His success in the last of these is shown to be an exemplar of Polanyi’s own philosophy.

Post-modernism is receiving much attention, but it is often seen as merely an extrapolation of modernism. Michael Polanyi’s post-critical epistemology offers a useful way of understanding post-modernism. The modern objectivism of critical thought leads to a dead-end dehumanization. Polanyi offers a recovery of the human dimension by demonstrating the ways in which all knowing, especially scientific discovery, requires human participation. An analogy is drawn with post-modern art and architecture, which similarly attempt to recover the human form and traditional or classical ornamentation in a way which goes beyond the sterile abstractness of modernism.

The modern critical tradition’s strategy for defeating the demon of self doubt and securing certainty, as Hannah Arendt has written, restricts serious candidates for belief to those whose conditions of truth can be rendered wholly immanent to focal consciousness within a point of view that is simply taken for granted. Thereby it forecloses the possibility of recognizing the partiality of its own perspective vis-a-vis that of others, taking into account the relevant perspectives of other persons, and reaching any kind of sense in common between perspectives. The institutionalization of this strategy in 20th century academic life is amply and insightfully documented in Bruce Wilshire’s Moral Collapse of the University. Michael Polanyi, in his writings, adumbrates a post-critical intellectual ethos in whichthe making of sense in common between persons of differing perspective is central to the enterprise of teaching, learning, and research. Key elements of such an intellectual ethos are articulated and explored.

Polanyi’s post-critical philosophy contains a tension between the personal commitment of the knower to the apprehension of knowledge and the understanding of the incomplete, or potentially mistaken, nature of current understanding. This essay addresses this tension, both theoretically and practically, by drawing parallels between Polanyi’s theory and George Kelly’s Personal Construct Psychology. The two approaches share many similar assumptions about the development of knowledge. Application of Kelly’s perspective may assist us in developing direct awareness of our active participation in creating knowledge, and helping us to articulate some of our underlying assumptions. Such activities facilitate movement toward more comprehensive understanding.

Michael Polanyi’s work supports the idea of progress by linking progress to the transcendent, the universal, and the teleological. Polanyi’s epistemology is developed in tandem with an implied metaphysics, one which incorporates a tripartite dialectic among the community, the individual, and the transcendent,universal reality which both community and individual progressively seek. Traditions, whether scientific or religious, may rightfully claim a penultimate authority. However, in science just as in religion, only the living God can possess ultimate authority. Hence, traditions may undergo progressive development by breaking out of their current understandings en route to greater understandings. In order to do so, the tradition must continually submit itself to the reality which it seeks to mediate to its members.