Meaning

Meaning
By Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch
Universtity of Chicago Press, 1975
ISBN 0-226-67295-6
246 pages; paperback; $21.00

Meaning, an excellent, yet very accessible introduction to Polanyi’s thought edited by Harry Prosch and published shortly before Polanyi’s death in 1975, is based on lectures he gave at the Universities of Chicago and Texas between 1968 and 1971.

Michael Polanyi was a Fellow of the Royal Society of England, a professor of physical chemistry and of social studies at the University of Manchester and a Fellow of Merton College at Oxford. As few others of his time, he saw how a one-sidedly reductionist, materialistic science undermined the foundations of human culture, and he set out to break the powerful spell of a worldview that seemed to him not only to reject our deepest convictions but to fly in the face of actual scientific experience.

By distinguishing between our focal awareness of an object as an integrated, meaningful whole and our subsidiary awareness of its component parts, Polanyi laid the groundwork for a science that recognizes the reality of that which makes the object a whole: the conceptually grasped principle of which it is the expression. This personal knowledge or insight into the lawfulness governing an object, when applied to organic nature, provides the basis for an organic science that affirms the reality of dynamic organizational principles which determine the formation and/or behavior of organisms. Polanyi goes further demonstrating that all skillful, meaningful actions are subject to the same structural lawfulness: all subsidiary parts of the organism are organized to accomplish the purpose of the action. In the case of human speech, for example, our vocabulary, our organs of speech, our breathing, intonation and gestures are orchestrated to convey a certain meaning. The meaning remains our focus and provides the organizational principle guiding our subsidiary movements. While we are focally aware of the meaning we wish to convey, we are subsidiarily aware of our words, intonations, and gestures.

Polanyi lays the foundations for a science that

1. encompasses human cognitive experience in its fullness. The richness of sense perception and the depth of conceptual insight are validated as two aspects (subsidiary and focal) of one and the same reality.
 2. leads to an hierarchical world view in which a “higher” lawfulness such as vegetative growth, sentience, or human insight or love, are understood as innate organizational principles that structure and animate the “lower” levels through which they manifest.

Contents
1. The Eclipse of Thought
2. Personal Knowledge
3. Reconstruction
4. From Perception to Metaphor
5. Works of Art
6. Validity in Art
7. Visionary Art
8. The Structure of Myth
9. Truth in Myths
10. Acceptance of Religion
11. Order
12. Mutual Authority
13. The Free Society