THE VALUE OF SUBJECTIVITY: Knowledge is Personal

The importance of understanding that all knowledge is personal is to begin to redress the overbalance toward objectivity that became the obsession of the late nineteenth early twentieth centuries. Geoffrey Clive in his book The Romantic Enlightenment: Ambiguity and Paradox in the Western Mind, a monumental critique of the 19th Century, demonstrates the emergence of the daemonic through what amounted to a war on subjectivity. This is a brilliant book that uses music and literature as the basis of much its analysis. This connection of art, philosophy, and science provides a rich tapestry for discussion.

According to Michael Polanyi, a scientist of the mid 20th century, a free society that strives to be value-neutral undermines its own justification. In his book Science, Faith and Society (1946), Polanyi set out his opposition to a positivist account of science. A revised version of his 1951 Gifford Lectures was later published as Personal Knowledge in 1958. Polanyi asserts that all knowledge claims rely on personal judgements. He denies that scientific method can yield truth mechanically. All knowing, no matter how formalized, relies upon personal commitment. 

As knowers we do not stand apart from the universe, but participate personally within it. Our tacit awareness connects us with reality. Our awareness generates the context within which our articulations have meaning. 

It was while writing Personal Knowledge that Polanyi identified the "structure of tacit knowing,”which he viewed as his most important contribution. We experience the world by integrating our subsidiary awareness into a focal awareness. In his later work, The Tacit Dimension (1966) he distinguished between the phenomenological, instrumental, semantic and ontological aspects of tacit knowing, articulating concepts much more developed than in his previous writing.

Knowing and Being are a set of essays by Michael Polanyi assembled and edited by Marjorie Greene.