Introducing Michael Polany

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was born in Budapest, Hungary, the fifth of six children of Michael Pollacsek and Cecilia Wohl. His family life was marked by a rich and stimulating intellectual world featuring countless discussions about artistic, literary, and social issues. His family’s roots belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and he maintained ties with Hungary all his life. His biographers point out, however, that he saw himself more as a citizen of Europe than as a member of any particular nation.1

His father was a civil engineer, and his mother was the daughter of a Lithuanian scholar. She established a salon in Budapest and became the centre of a circle of poets, painters, and scholars. His two brothers and two sisters all distinguished themselves in pursuit of higher education and learning.2 Polanyi was born in March of 1891 one year after the family moved to Budapest; the Polanyis magyarized the family name and entered the social circles of the city’s intellectual elites (Mitchell 2006:2).

Despite the family’s financial woes3

Polanyi matriculated at the Minta Gymnasium (model school), the leading humanities high school in Budapest, where he studied Hungarian, German, Latin and Greek, religion and philosophy, geography, natural history, geometry, mathematics, and physics. Among the Minta’s other noted graduates

1

The definitive biography of Michael Polanyi was published in 2005 by Oxford University Press (Scott and Moleski 2005). The work was begun by scientist William Taussig Scott (University of Nevada) who began writing after researching the project for 17 years. After his death, theologian Martin X. Moleski completed the volume.

2

Polanyi’s four older siblings, Mausi, Adolf, Karl, and Sophie were born in Vienna. The sixth child Paul was mentally retarded and must have been institutionalised at an early age (Scott and Moleski 2005:12).

3 _{Polanyi’s father suffered a catastrophic business loss when steady rains washed out a rail line his firm}

was building from the Danube Valley into Slovakia and Poland. The family hoped for a return to prosperity but those hopes were dashed when the elder Pollacsek died suddenly after contracting pneumonia in the winter of 1905.

were Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner (Scott and Moleski 2005:15-16).

Polanyi’s accomplishments at school were set in motion by his precociousness at an early age. Michael was multilingual by the age of 6 years, speaking Hungarian, German, and French. He learned enough English at home to read a magazine from England and to begin reading Shakespeare. Polanyi appreciated poetry as a young boy and memorized poems in all four languages he spoke. Although poetry and literature captured Polanyi’s interest, science became his chief intellectual satisfaction. Later he declared that physics and art were his favourite school subjects (Scott and Moleski 2005:10-11).

Polanyi’s education continued at the University of Budapest where he enrolled to study medicine. There he joined the Galileo Circle, a student organisation that combined scientific pursuits with an exploration of social, economic, and political issues, and whose first president was Polanyi’s brother Karl. Like his mother’s salon discussions hosted in the Polanyi home, the Galileo Circle promoted robust dialogue and debate. These early discussion circles influenced Polanyi’s notion of the importance of camaraderie and mutuality that he later called ‘conviviality’ (Scott and Moleski 2009:129, 259). Polanyi’s first career as a medical doctor gave way to a second career as a physical chemist, and he spent 1913-14 in Karlsruhe, Germany, studying physical chemistry. Polanyi began the First World War serving as a medical officer starting in 1914, but contracted diphtheria and spent several months convalescing. During this convalescence he managed to write and revise several scientific papers. He wrote a paper on thermodynamics that his mentor sent off to Albert Einstein. Polanyi and Einstein exchanged many letters during 1913-15, beginning a correspondence that lasted for 20 years. He translated his paper on the ‘adsorption of gases’ into Hungarian and eventually submitted it as a doctoral dissertation in 1916.

Fiber Chemistry in Berlin in 1920. While in Karlsruhe he met a Hungarian graduate student, Magda Kemeny, and they were married in Budapest in 1921. They had two sons during their years in Berlin. Polanyi moved to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and began working and corresponding with the best minds in German science. Polanyi laboured alongside such luminaries as Max Planck, Fritz Haber, Ernest Schrodinger, and Albert Einstein. In the early 1930s the rise of Adolph Hitler radically altered Germany’s political and social climate; the change unfavourably affected the Jewish population. In 1932 Polanyi initially rejected an offer to set up a department of physical chemistry at the University of Manchester, but after the Nazi takeover that year, Polanyi reconsidered and moved his family to Manchester, England, in September of 1933.

Polanyi presided over the newly established Manchester University Department of Physical Chemistry. His accomplishments led to his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1944. One year later Polanyi gave the Riddell Lectures at Durham University, which were subsequently published as Science, Faith and Society. These lectures displayed Polanyi’s convictions that the practice of science depends on both tradition and authority practiced by a community of scientists. In 1947 Polanyi was invited to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures (he finally produced them in 1951-2), and in 1948 Manchester University offered him a chair in social studies. After much success as a researcher and teacher in physical chemistry, Polanyi turned definitively to matters of social thought and philosophy (Mitchell 2006:12-17; Scott and Moleski 2005:214-44).

His last scientific paper appeared in 1949. The questions of economics, human liberty in the face of totalitarianism, political matters, and epistemology occupied Michael Polanyi until he died in 1976. His slim volume in 1946, Science, Faith and

philosopher Marjorie Grene, Polanyi turned his Gifford Lectures into a mighty treatise on the human enterprise of personal knowing (Prosch 1986:5). Polanyi left the faculty at Manchester in 1959 after his election as a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford’s Merton College. Because Oxford philosophy at the time was one of the intellectual homes of logical positivism, Polanyi’s unconventional epistemology went largely unnoticed. Nonetheless, he had a busy speaking schedule in 1960. He gave Oxford lectures at Merton College and another series at Edinburgh titled ‘Perspectives on Personal Knowing.’ He also gave the Eddington Lecture at Cambridge titled ‘Beyond Nihilism.’ The lecture’s publication gave rise to a vigorous response (Scott and Moleski 2005:243- 5).

Because of his age (70 years) Polanyi was forced to retire from his position at Merton in 1961. This launched him on a whirlwind travel schedule giving lectures at many institutions, mostly in the United States. He spent a semester at Duke in 1964 where his Terry Lectures became the draft of a small but important volume, The Tacit

Dimension (1966). Two other works would follow and advance elements of Polanyi’s

epistemology: Knowing and Being (1969), a collection of 14 essays written between 1959 and 1968, and Meaning (1975), a collaborative effort with Skidmore College professor Harry Prosch.4

Polanyi’s theory of personal knowing, a major resource for this research in the field of mission studies, was derived from Polanyi’s wide range of intellectual interests. Polanyi never hesitated to delve into or comment upon ideas and subjects that properly belonged to a different professional realm. This interdisciplinary curiosity and the ability to see various lines and points of convergence may be the root for Polanyi’s insistence of the personal participation of the knower in the knowing enterprise.

4 _{Meaning is based on a series of lectures Polanyi gave at the University of Texas and the University of}

Chicago in 1969. Prosch prepared Polanyi’s lectures for publication and drafted the book in 1973; it was published in 1975. In the Polanyi biography (Scott and Moleski 2005:280-286), Moleski indicates that Polanyi scholar Richard Gelwick has questioned how much of Meaning is truly the thought of Polanyi. Polanyi’s advanced age, poor health, and use of a co-author may have altered the content.

In his lifetime Michael Polanyi had four careers: medical doctor, physical chemist, social thinker, and philosopher. Leaving medicine early for the attraction of scientific research, he achieved international recognition in his other fields. His talent and breadth of knowledge made him a polymath and prepared him for the philosophical creativity that crowned his life with a vision and proposal for a new theory of knowledge; a theory intended to save advanced scientific culture from its own self-destruction by its dehumanized notion of objective detachment.5