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Reasons of the Heart: A Polanyian Reflection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Jerry H. Gill
Jerry H. Gill
Affiliation:
Professor of Christianity and Culture, Eastern College, Pennsylvania
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Extract

Reasoning about religion would seem to involve both explicit and tacit factors. These latter are what Pascal had in mind when he spoke of the ‘reasons of the heart which the reason knows not of’. Moreover, these reasons of the heart are the more interesting by virtue of being at least the more difficult and perhaps the more crucial. In these pages I want to examine the notion of reasons of the heart from the angle provided by the insights of Michael Polanyi. Space will not permit a review of the major features of Polanyi's crucial concept of tacit knowledge.1 I shall simply introduce and explore certain of these features as they seem relevant to the main concern of the paper. I trust this can be done in such a way as to be both meaningful to the reader and fair to Polanyi.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , June 1978 , pp. 143 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

page 143 note 1 I have pursued this topic at some length in ‘The Case for Tacit Knowledge’, Southern Journal of Philosophy (Spring, 1971)Google Scholar, ‘Saying and Showing’, Religious Studies (Fall, 1974)Google Scholar, ‘Tacit Knowing and Religious Belief’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (Dec. 1975)Google Scholar, and ‘On Knowing the Dancer from the Dance’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Dec. 1975).Google Scholar

page 144 note 1 Knowing and Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 128.Google Scholar

page 145 note 1 ibid. pp. 134–5.

page 145 note 2 ibid. p. 154.

page 145 note 3 ibid. pp. 153–4.

page 146 note 1 The Logic of the Faith (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967), p. 17.Google Scholar

page 147 note 1 Knowing and Being, pp. 193–4.Google Scholar

page 147 note 2 ibid. pp. 212–13.

page 148 note 1 Cf. especially the work of Robert Ornstein, The Psychology of Consciousness (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1972).Google Scholar

page 148 note 2 Cf. also Knowing and Being, p. 170.Google Scholar

page 148 note 3 Cf. especially Knowing and Being, pp. 173 and 194.Google Scholar

page 149 note 1 Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975) p. 80.Google Scholar

page 149 note 2 Cf. Ramsey, , Christian Empiricism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974)Google Scholar; Heidegger, , Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1974)Google Scholar; Funk, , Language, Hermeneutic and Word of God (New York: Harper and Row, 1966)Google Scholar; TeSelle, , Speaking in Parables (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975)Google Scholar; McClendon, , Biography As Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1974).Google Scholar

page 150 note 1 Knowing and Being, p. 163.Google Scholar

page 150 note 2 Sometimes interpreters take Polanyi to provide a licence for maintaining whatever particular system of thought they prefer. Thomas Torrance's Theological Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969) at times exhibits this confusion, it seems to me.Google Scholar

page 150 note 3 Knowing and Being, p. 182.Google Scholar

page 151 note 1 ibid. pp. 131–2.

page 151 note 2 Personal Knowledge (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 162.Google Scholar

page 151 note 3 Cf. especially his Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Humanities Press, 1962).Google Scholar

page 151 note 4 Knowing and Being, p. 147.Google Scholar To my way of thinking Polanyi himself did not carry his analysis of embodiment far enough. He often seemed to give a slight ‘intellectualist’ twist to his discussion of indwelling, emphasizing the mental dimension of it without fully exploring the somatic side. It seems evident in the following quotation (Knowing and Being, p. 152) for example, that actually replaying the chess master's games allows us to indwell his actions from ‘inside’.Google Scholar ‘We know another person's mind by the same integrative process by which we know life. A novice trying to understand the skill of a master will seek mentally to combine his movements to the pattern to which the master combines them practically. By such exploratory indwelling the novice gets the feel of the master's skill. Chess players enter into a master's thought by repeating the games he played. We experience a man's mind as the joint meaning of his actions by dwelling in his actions from outside.’

page 152 note 1 I once saw Joseph Papp give an exhibition with some of his actors wherein he tried to get them to express a given emotion verbally while in a posture that was more characteristic of the opposite emotion. He was decidedly unsuccessful.

page 154 note 1 Personal Knowledge, p. 203.Google Scholar

page 155 note 1 ibid. p. 309.

page 156 note 1 ibid. p. 65. I must say that I find Polanyi's almost exclusive reliance on the scientific enterprise a bit confining. He is, to my mind, not sufficiently aware of the power of ‘informal’ dimensions of community. In addition, I think he is far too confident of the Western scientific posture. His highly provincial remarks about the inadequacies of the Azande culture's reliance on oracles are a case in point. Fortunately the shortcomings are not entailed by his overall position; in fact they seem to me to be excluded by it.

page 156 note 2 Knowing and Being, p. 134.Google Scholar

page 157 note 1 Personal Knowledge, p. 312.Google Scholar