Various Ideas of Tacit Knowledge – Is There a Basic One? (original) (raw)

Tacit Knowing, Personal Knowledge, and Cultural Trends (article)

Mother Pelican. A Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, 2019

Polanyi’s intellectual work outside chemistry was motivated by his perceived collapse of Western culture, as shown in his lifetime by the two World Wars, the Great Depression, fascism and Stalinism. Polanyi regarded these tokens of self-proclaiming modern “progress” as results of the West’s rejection of its cultural traditions. Polanyi and Prosch single out rationalist and positivist “scientific obscurantism”, i.e. the modern trend that takes detached, impersonal, abstract, formalised, analytical reason, as best exemplified by the hard sciences, qua sole true path to knowledge. Theology, ethics, the humanities, common morals, common sense and religion are thus neglected or abandoned because they are not scientific, ergo subjective and irrational. Tacit knowing and personal knowledge, however, show how and why these cultural dimensions ought to be preserved and cultivated.