作者：Michael Polanyi
出版社：University of Chicago Press
发行时间：1966年
来源：下载的 pdf 版本
Goodreads：4.09（222 Ratings）
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作者介绍
Michael Polanyi (11 March 1891 – 22 February 1976) was a Hungarian-British polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He argued that positivism supplies a false account of knowing, which if taken seriously undermines humanity's highest achievements.
读后感
本书应该是 Michael Polanyi 1962年左右在芝加哥大学的授课讲义，大约100多页，结合作者科学、经济、哲学的三重背景，展开了对 Tacit Knowing 的介绍，期间穿插了作者利用 Tacit Knowing 而解答的各种哲学、经济、政治、科学命题，有不少醍醐灌顶的观点，比如说科学的怀疑主义和社会主义的完美主义的不可调和性
之前读《人类知识的默会维度》知道的 Michael Polanyi，昨天读彼得德鲁克的《Adventures of a Bystander》发现这个家族非常的特别，所以今天就读起了《The Tacit Dimension》这本小册子，读完以后对 Michael Polanyi 有了更加深层的认知，是一个可以深挖的人，而且我本身对德意志的崛起和衰落的历史非常有兴趣，之后会系统的阅读
这个人有三个领域的跨学科背景，并且在三个领域到达到了巅峰的认知，1962年他73岁时候讲的课，一个这么厉害的人在那个年龄 serious 的看待 Tacit Knowing 这个问题，必然有他的原因
回头会继续研究一下 Michael Polanyi，这个人哲学思想的影响力，在我看来，堪比维特根斯坦 http://www.polanyisociety.org/ 也可以说和维特根斯坦一起，构成了整个已知的哲学体系，Michael Polanyi 做了对维特根斯坦哲学体系的补充，就像印度人定义的数字 0
摘录
On a related matter, Polanyi was in disagreement with the "early Wittgenstein" of Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. Among other things, he clearly did not believe that important recognitions can typically be articulated very "clearly," but nor, unlike Wittgenstein, did he see that to be an adequate reason to "be silent" (as advised in the Tractatus). However, the "later Wittgenstein" of Philosophical Investigations did not satisfy Polanyi any more than did the Tractatus, and he expressed himself firmly against relying so much on rules of language. The philosophical divides that engaged AngloAmerican philosophers of that period left Polanyi rather cold, and this did not make his integration into mainstream philosophy any easier.
some of you may know that I turned to philosophy as an afterthought to my career as a scientist. I would like to tell you what I was after in making this change, for it will also explain the general task to which my present lecture should introduce us.
I first met questions of philosophy when I came up against the Soviet ideology under Stalin which denied justification to the pursuit of science. I remember a conversation I had with Bukharin in Moscow in 1935. Though he was heading toward his fall and execution three years later, he was still a leading theoretician of the Communist party. When I asked him about the pursuit of pure science in Soviet Russia, he said that pure science was a morbid symptom of a class society; under socialism the conception of science pursued for its own sake would disappear, for the interests of scientists would spontaneously tum to problems of the current FiveYear Plan.
I was struck by the fact that this denial of the very existence of independent scientific thought came from a socialist theory which derived its tremendous persuasive power from its claim to scientific certainty. The scientific outlook appeared to have produced a mechanical conception of man and history in which there was no place for science itself. This conception denied altogether any intrinsic power to thought and thus denied also any grounds for claiming freedom of thought.
I saw also that this self-immolation of the mind was actuated by powerful moral motives. The mechanical course of history was to bring universal justice. Scientific skepticism would trust only material necessity for achieving universal brotherhood. Skepticism and utopianism had thus fused into a new skeptical fanaticism.
It seemed to me then that our whole civilization was pervaded by the dissonance of an extreme critical lucidity and an intense moral conscience, and that this combination had generated both our tightlipped modem revolutions and the tormented self-doubt of modem man outside revolutionary movements. So I resolved to inquire into the roots of this condition.
My search has led me to a novel idea of human knowledge from which a harmonious view of thought and existence, rooted in the universe, seems to emerge.
I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell. This fact seems obvious enough; but it is not easy to say exactly what it means. Take an example. We know a person's face, and can recognize it among a thousand, indeed among a million.
We are approaching here a crucial question. The declared aim of modem science is to establish a strictly detached, objective knowledge. Any falling short of this ideal is accepted only as a tempomry imperfection, which we must aim at eliminating. But suppose that tacit thought forms an indispensable part of all knowledge, then the ideal of eliminating all personal elements of knowledge would, in effect, aim at the destruction of all knowledge. The ideal of exact science would turn out to be fundamentally misleading and possibly a source of devastating fallacies.
But I must not rest my case on such an abstract argument. Let me finish this lecture, therefore, by presenting you with a most striking concrete example of an experience that cannot possibly be represented by any exact theory. It is an experience within science itself: the experience of seeing a problem, as a scientist sees it in his pursuit of discovery.
It is a commonplace that all research must start from a problem. Research can be successful only if the problem is good; it can be original only if the problem is original. But how can one see a problem, any problem, let alone a good and original problem? For to see a problem is to see something that is hidden. It is to have an intimation of the coherence of hitherto not comprehended particulars. The problem is good if this intimation is true; it is original if no one else can see the possibilities of the comprehension that we are anticipating. To see a problem that will lead to a great discovery is not just to see something hidden, but to see something of which the rest of humanity cannot have even an inkling. All this is a commonplace; we take it for granted, without noticing the clash of self-contradiction entailed in it. Yet Plato has pointed out this contradiction in the Meno. He says that to search for the solution of a problem is an absurdity; for either you know what you are looking for, and then there is no problem; or you do not know what you are looking for, and then you cannot expect to find anything.
The solution which Plato offered for this paradox was that all discovery is a remembering of past lives. This explanation has hardly ever been accepted, but neither has any other solution been offered for avoiding the contradiction. So we are faced with the fact that, for two thousand years and more, humanity has progressed through the efforts of people solving difficult problems, while all the time it could be shown that to do this was either meaningless or impossible. We have here the classical case of Poe's Purloined Letter, of the momentous document lying casually in front of everybody, and hence overlooked by all. For the Meno shows conclusively that if all knowledge is explicit, i.e., capable of being clearly stated, then we cannot know a problem or look for its solution. And the Meno also shows, therefore, that if problems nevertheless exist, and discoveries can be made by solving them, we can know things, and important things, that we cannot tell.
The unprecedented critical lucidity of modem man is fused here with his equally unprecedented moral demands and produces an angry absolute individualis~. But adjacent to this, the same fusion produces political teachings which sanction the total suppression of the individual. Scientific skepticism and moral perfectionism join forces then in a movement denouncing any appeal to moral ideals as futile and dishonest. Its perfectionism demands a total transformation of society; but this utopian project is not allowed to declare itself. It conceals its moral motives by embodying them in a struggle for power, believed to bring about autornatically the aims of utopia. It blindly accepts for this belief the scientific testimony of Marxism. Marxism embodies the boundless moral aspirations of modem man in a theory which protects his ideals from skeptical doubt by denying the reality of moral motives in public life. The power of Marxism lies in uniting the two contradictory forces of the modern mind into a single political doctrine. Thus originated a world embracing idea, in which moral doubt is frenzied by moral fury and moral fury is armed by scientific nihilism.
It may appear extravagant to hope that these self-destructive forces may be harmonized by reconsidering the way we know things. If I still believe that a reconsideration of knowledge may be effective today, it is because for some time past, a revulsion has been noticeable against the ideas which brought us to our present state. Both inside and outside the Soviet empire, men are getting weary of ideas sprung from a combination of skepticism and perfectionism. It may be worth trying to go back to our foundations and seek to lay them anew, more truly.