J. Dalton Ansley
Abstract: The relationship between politics and science has been a topic of philosophical and scientific inquiry throughout recorded history; in the last century research on this topic has continued to provide mixed results for both the fields of the philosophy of science and political science. Perhaps never before have the foundations of all human knowledge been threatened so gravely as they have in the modern age, and never has the need for a proper understanding of knowledge been greater. Perhaps none have provided more valuable insight into the nature of the relationship between politics and science than Michael Polanyi and the line of research developed around his work and continued by Murray Jardine.
Keywords: Murray Jardine, Michael Polanyi, William Poteat, Colin Gunton, Hannah Arendt, Aristotle, language, epistemology, philosophy of science, modernity, political theory, political epistemology, theology, trinitarianism, oral culture, literate culture
The relationship between politics and science has been a topic of philosophical and scientific inquiry throughout recorded history; in the last century research on this topic has continued to provide mixed results for both the fields of the philosophy of science and political science. Perhaps never before have the foundations of all human knowledge been threatened so gravely as they have in the modern age, and never has the need for a proper understanding of knowledge been greater. Perhaps none have provided more valuable insight into the nature of the relationship between politics and science than Michael Polanyi and the line of research developed around his work and continued by Murray Jardine.
Politics is epistemically prior to the sciences. Politics, however, is developed with a view of the world, its metaphysics or nature, and humanity’s place in that world. Aristotle recognized this and argued, “It would seem to belong to the most authoritative art and that which is most truly the master art. And politics appears to be of this nature; for it is this that ordains which of the sciences should be studied in a state, and which each class of citizens should learn and up to what point they should learn them; and we see even the most highly esteemed of capacities to fall under this” (Aristotle [350] 2009, 1094a-1094b). The proper ordering of social relations—the aim of politics—can allow for the freedom and leisure required for scientific inquiry. Even on the level of the individual, reason itself cannot function in a vacuum. If reason is what distinguishes us from other animals, then we are necessarily concerned with the political or, as Aristotle says, “man is by nature a political animal” (Aristotle [350] 1962, 1253a)—the most political animal in fact, according to Aristotle, and this is by virtue of our unique capacity for language. Language is necessarily a social phenomenon, and the ordering of a community, in some degree, is necessary for language to develop. Individuals who are by nature without a community, whether through the inability to share or total self-sufficiency, are, at least according to Aristotle, not human but “a beast or a god” (ibid). Therefore, for an individual to be human and reason via language, humans must be amongst themselves, and in order for scientific inquiry to take place, the community must be properly ordered, e.g., some degree of freedom and leisure is required. Scientific inquiry and the development of knowledge are reliant on politics, and politics are themselves reliant on an epistemology. A closer study of the relations between politics, science, and epistemology offers promising alternatives for the modern and postmodern world.
Revising Epistemology
Polanyi and Jardine are two philosophers who, although their works appear distinct at first glance, share a complex and intriguing relationship. This paper seeks to delve into the intellectual interplay between these two thinkers, shedding light on the profound influence of Polanyi on the work of Jardine. Polanyi, a polymath of the twentieth century, is celebrated for his groundbreaking contributions to epistemology, the philosophy of science, and the sociology of scientific knowledge. His ideas on tacit knowledge, personal involvement in scientific inquiry, and the role of passion and intuition in the pursuit of scientific truth have had a profound impact on the philosophical landscape. His influence is felt more in the philosophy of science than in the sciences themselves. Jardine, on the other hand, is known for his substantial contributions to political theory and theology. While Jardine’s work may seem to occupy a different intellectual sphere, a closer examination reveals intriguing parallels and intersections with Polanyi’s ideas. This paper aims to explore these intersections and the extent to which Jardine’s work in political theory is influenced by Polanyi’s ideas, directly or indirectly. By undertaking this investigation, we seek to shed light on the intellectual dialogue that transcends the boundaries of individual philosophies and enriches our understanding of the world and our place in it.
Polanyi made significant contributions to the philosophy of science, particularly in the mid-twentieth century. His work in this field is marked by a unique and influential perspective, which centers on the role of personal knowledge, tacit knowledge, and the significance of community, passion, and commitment involved in scientific endeavors. One of Polanyi’s most renowned and pioneering concepts is “tacit knowledge.” He argued that much of what we know is not explicitly articulated or codified but rather resides in the background of our consciousness. Tacit knowledge is personal and often difficult to express in words. For example, a skilled musician might possess a deep understanding of how to play an instrument, but much of that knowledge is tacit, making it challenging to explain to someone else.
Polanyi emphasized both the personal and social dimensions of knowledge. He opposed the positivist account of reason and science, which emphasized empiricism, verification, and the objective nature of scientific knowledge, and he instead argued that scientific discovery and problem-solving are not purely objective processes but involve the personal and collective engagement and judgment of the scientists. Scientists rely on their intuitions, hunches, and a sense of what is relevant, drawing on their tacit knowledge and the customs of the scientific community to make informed decisions. Polanyi believed that passionate commitment and personal involvement are critical elements of scientific discovery. Scientists are not dispassionate, objective observers but are deeply engaged in their research. This emotional and personal involvement drives the pursuit of knowledge. Polanyi often used the metaphor of a “fugue” from music to describe the process of scientific discovery. In a fugue, multiple voices and themes interact and intertwine, creating a complex and harmonious whole. Similarly, in science, various factors, including personal knowledge, intuition, and the prior knowledge of past scientists, combine to form a cohesive and meaningful scientific explanation.
Polanyi recognized the political dimensions of science. Inspired in part by a trip to the Soviet Union, he used the economic model of the free market to critique centralist attempts at dictating the scientific community and articulated the need for free exchange in producing scientific knowledge. Pulling from another field yet again, this time Gestalt psychology, he employed the concept of “spontaneous order” to explain how if scientists are given the freedom to pursue truth as an end in itself, an order will arise in the scientific community, and furthermore, only in these conditions can science flourish. He writes, “Any attempt to organize the group of helpers under a single authority would eliminate their independent initiatives and thus reduce their joint effectiveness to that of the single person directing them from the center. It would, in effect, paralyse their cooperation” (Polanyi 1962, 54-73).
In summary, Michael Polanyi’s work in the philosophy of science centers on the acknowledgment of the social, subjective, and tacit aspects of scientific knowledge. He challenged the presumed strict objectivity of logical positivism and emphasized the importance of the scientists’ passion, intuition, and cooperation in the scientific process.
Murray Jardine, a political philosopher with a significant focus on the philosophy of science, has made notable contributions to several areas within this field. His work often employs the language of theology to explore the nature of scientific explanation, the structure of scientific theories, and the relationship between science and politics. Jardine takes on the crisis of liberalism, and his prescription is directly influenced by the work of Polanyi; he notes Polanyi’s “revisionist” approach to epistemology as the starting point for his political project of recovering the place for human responsibility (Jardine 1998, 52).
Liberalism can be viewed as the political and social consequence of the Enlightenment epistemology, posited by Descartes and Spinoza and then made political by Rousseau, Kant, and Locke. Reason was the central concept of the Enlightenment era. Reason was promised to free not only the mind from dogma but the body from servitude and subjugation. In the foundational work of Descartes, all is forsaken save reason. Existence is grounded in the capacity for reason, in the subject. From base cognition reason is used to assess every sphere of human life, overturning superstition and dogma. The subject-centered epistemology was first crafted and exhibited in Descartes’ meditations; this model can be estimated as a “knowing thing,” the subject, observes the rest of the world as objects to be known. This became the basic model of inquiry for modern thought. This epistemology was continued by other French Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, D’Alembert, Diderot, Montesquieu, and also by Locke and Hume. The French thinkers expanded the subject-centered model of epistemology and pursued lofty, ambitious projects to exhaustibly apply the new logical schema to every aspect of existence. The paradigmatic project that exemplified this pursuit was Diderot’s Encyclopedia. Other examples of philosophical projects that sought to capture all knowledge in discreet, universal formulas for the relation of simple components include Bertrand Russell’s logical atomism and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The purity of reason was not without its critics. Locke and Hume criticized and adjusted the model while working from within it. That is to say that they did not greatly depart from model but used the logic of the subject-centered epistemology to account for possible contradictions.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche saw that the end result of the Enlightenment’s subject-centered epistemology and reliance on the resulting rationalism was nihilism, and he prophesized that the coming twentieth century would see the advent of nihilism. Nihilism, as Nietzsche meant it, is the realization of the radically contingent nature of the world and the breakdown of all truths. Without an objective ground on which to stake reason, the concept of truth degenerates to a mere subjective interpretation with no authority beyond the coercion or allure of the interpreter. According to Nietzsche, with the coming nihilism would come limitless human creativity and power with no collective or social, normative constraints. This was not something to be despaired according to Nietzsche; by recognizing that philosophy and science, all knowledge, is nothing more than a chaotic jungle of interpretations where the strongest survive, and that politics are nothing more than arbitrary domination of the weak by the strong, society could allow for the return of a strong or aesthetically persuasive aristocracy.
This subject-centered epistemology, over the last century, is recognized as being roundly defeated. Disciples of Nietzsche, witting or otherwise, are ascendent in many of the fields of social science. Jardine recognizes Polanyi’s work as an alternative to the classical, positivist account of knowledge while avoiding the relativistic consequences of the more popular postmodern alternatives. The epistemology of Polanyi stands as a valid critique of the Enlightenment epistemology, and the works of Jardine are explicitly the political implications of this different epistemology. However, there are great differences in how the implications of this new epistemology for politics are worked out in Polanyi and Jardine’s works.
Jardine uses Polanyi’s insights on the concept of necessity to elucidate objectivist elements within modern political theory which has attempted to get beyond the objectivist/subjectivist paradigm. For Polanyi, order and meaning are not objective facts observed by a neutral subject or the assertions of radically contingent individuals, and he accounts for irreducible personal appraisal and how knowledge manifests through a “temporal process, a groping toward rationality and order which is rooted in our most primordial forms of sentience and motility, and is shared with more primitive organisms” (ibid., 54). Jardine emphasizes the participatory aspect of Polanyi’s account of knowledge; this is crucial for escaping the objectivist/subjectivist and mind/body paradigms of the Enlightenment epistemology. Jardine’s work uses Polanyi and a line of literature developed therefrom to produce political theories that are consistent with the “revisionist” epistemology.
Polanyi’s prescription for the scientific community is that the formation of knowledge through scientific inquiry is a process that takes place in a dynamic community of inquiring agents interacting with a shared reality; the conditions for this type of community are undoubtedly political, and the critique needs to be transferred to the political. Likewise, Jardine prescribes the recovery of the polis—a place in which a dynamic, interactive community can engage in good faith debates and wherein a shared vocabulary can be developed for speech and acts concerning the common good. “The polis,” states Jardine, “…fulfills the same function for action as does reliance upon established scientific opinion in Michael Polanyi’s account of scientific discovery” (ibid., 134). This particular project, recovering a political place, Jardine inherits from William Poteat.
Political Epistemologies
Poteat, a younger colleague of Polanyi, was in agreeance with his critique of centralism and of governments like the Soviet Union’s attempts to control scientific inquiry top-down. In order for science to function it requires a place in which a spontaneous order can arise. This can only occur through free and open debate of individuals committed to pursuing truth. Poteat places Polanyi’s critique in dialogue with a project within the field of political theory dedicated to the recovery of the polis, a project said to have begun with Hannah Arendt. The polis, similar to the place required for scientific inquiry, is a political space in which equals freely speak and act in accord with the common good. Arendt argues that this place, the polis, is a prerequisite for political freedom and an ideal political order. By place she means not a physical locale but the relations of people, their speaking and acting together (Arendt 1958, 196-198). In The Human Condition, Arendt categorizes human activity into three: labor, the drudgery of existence; work, worthwhile creative acts; and action, speech and actions which reveal one’s character to others. The city, or state, can facilitate this space by creating the conditions necessary for this type of place to flourish, and according to Arendt this place is the only legitimate space of politics. All other forms of governance, void of a polis, are illegitimate and deficient forms of government.
Arendt expands on this view in On Revolution, where she tailors her definition of revolution to mean the coming forth of a polis, and all other regime changes are merely that. Her account of the polis is heavily influenced by the Ancient Greek conception. This conception of the political place, while compelling, has its problems. Arendt writes of the polis as the place of ultimate significance for human life and that through actions in a polis individuals could achieve a degree of subsistence beyond death by shaping the world in one way or another through action, e.g., forming a polis (revolution), securing a military victory, or shaping an institution. The effects themselves as well as the stories of the acts repeated by the polis beyond death are an afterlife; i.e., it is what happens to you and your name after your life. Arendt considers this a type of immortality, but as Poteat points out, this conception of the afterlife is not as Greek as was presented by Arendt, and the immortality posited in this model may be influenced by other aspects of Arendt’s life.
Poteat recognizes the similarities between Polanyi’s philosophy of science and Arendt’s political theory, and he critiques Arendt’s conception of the polis by pointing out differences between her conception and the historical concept of the Athenian polis, the polis of Aristotle. According to Poteat, the enduring “immortality” produced, in theory, by Arendt’s conception of the polis is nowhere to be found in classical Greece. The afterlife produced by the polis of classical Greece was a product of the direct impact and the tales of an individual’s deeds, kept alive by the living through stories and institutions, but this is not true immortality. The Greeks had theories, or myths, that posited a bodily, existential immortality, like the deification of Heracles. The place in which these stories and institutions are carried on, the polis, changes and occasionally falls apart; the memories of the majority of these deeds fall into the wastebin of history. This problematizes the foundation of any knowledge accumulated in these places and risks ending in hermetically sealed cultural relativism. The immortality of Arendt’s conception differs slightly from this classical Greek conception.
Poteat argues that the place in which an enduring foundation for knowledge and freedom can be conceived is not only a place before equal individuals but also in communion with an omniscient God. His critique of Arendt is that although she considered herself not particularly religious, her conception of immortality as sustained beyond mere temporality, both in life and after, is not Greek but reliant upon a God, particularly the God of Abraham (Poteat 1993). Here is the entry of Jardine’s political work. In Speech and Political Practice: Recovering the Place of Human Responsibility, Jardine presents an articulation of the place required for freedom and knowledge by committing to and participating in a community and its traditions, looking not to Athens like Arendt but further East to Jerusalem. Jardine argues that Christian theology contains the most stable and enduring conception of a place in which through faith in the individual and communal presence before an all-knowing God, the foundation for all knowledge and freedom can be coherently conceived. Jardine provides a cosmological analysis of the ancient cultures and finds that the pagan, polytheistic cultures posit a chaotic world in which nature is unstable, human action is dynamic, and humans are capable of heroic deeds, with legends of achieving deification. The gods of the ancient pagan cosmology are unstable, capricious, and untrustworthy—hardly the type whose presence can provide an objective, lasting ground for communal truth and human action. The monotheistic Hebrew tradition, however, posits a dynamic world but also provides limits to human actions. Furthermore, the omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent god of the Hebrew tradition provides a possibility for a stable, enduring, and trustworthy ground for communal truth and human actions.
In other works, Jardine has conducted this analysis on the technologically oriented culture of the modern day, finding many of the same problems. Jardine also pulls from Poteat’s theory of the origins of the modern age and the epistemological and political crises therein. He argues that the origins of the modern epistemology were the fusion of Greek and Hebraic metaphysics. Jardine notes that this is not the same argument made by previous protestant liberals—that a pristine version of Christianity was corrupted by Greek metaphysics—but rather that the Greek metaphysics is drawn from a visually oriented culture, as opposed to the aurally oriented culture of the Hebrews.
The distinction between aural and literate cultures and the impact of these orientations on their respective models of reality is a crucial element of both Poteat’s and Jardine’s critique of the modern age. Poteat uses historical and anthropological sources to draw a distinction between premodern, oral cultures and literate cultures like Ancient Greece and the modern age. These sources, such as the work of Walter Ong, explain the phenomenological and epistemological implications of this distinction. Oral cultures communicate knowledge through poems and narratives with often exaggerated or aggrandized details for the purpose of making the knowledge memorable. Literate cultures, on the other hand, are more visually oriented and communicate knowledge in more impersonal, logical terms. (Ong and Hartley 2013) Poteat points out that the Classical Greek thinkers represented an exception to this dichotomy; the Greek alphabet, with its relatively easy to learn system, served as a catalyst for literacy, creating the earliest literate culture. The Hebrew metaphysics are drawn from an aurally oriented culture; its concepts are derived from a culture that centered the spoken word. Aural cultures are much less analytic and rely on a poetic, narrative structure for their knowledge. The result, according to Poteat and repeated by Jardine, is that the Greeks conceived of reality in the terms of a written text; “the experience of living in a literate environment caused them tacitly to draw upon the static and impersonal characteristics of the written word when formulating their conception of the world” (Jardine 2018, 26-42).
The Hebraic conception of reality is starkly different: the world is created, according to the book of Genesis, as an act of speech. Each stage of creation is a speech-act. Reality then is like a speech-act, like a conversation. It follows that the metaphysics derived therefrom would be like a speech-act: dynamic and personal. Jardine likens this to the epistemology developed by Polanyi. This model of metaphysics provides for the radically contingent aspects of creation, similar to the radical contingency conceived of by the postmodernists but still limited by necessity through faith. This model of metaphysics accounts for infinite possibilities which are limited or ordered by a God who is faithful to his word. This is connected to Polanyi’s epistemology which accounts for the personal, constructed, or relative aspects of knowledge while limiting this radical contingency by grounding it in a community of scientists committed to the pursuit of truth. Poteat and Jardine tie many of the failures of modern and Enlightenment epistemology to what they refer to as “the parallax” (Jardine 2009, 56). The parallax is a “incoherent mixture” of the Greek and Hebraic models of metaphysics, coming together in Medieval Christianity.
The Greek metaphysics can be generalized as positing static, eternal concepts and their relations. Poteat and Jardine explain this view as resulting from a logic that prioritizes the visual and literal (as in relating to literacy), equating the static written word and reality. Accordingly, relations between concepts in this model can be logically necessary if there are no contingencies. The Hebraic model, however, operating in a logic that is aurally oriented, allows for a relation that is both logically necessary and contingent. The model for this logic is not the written word but the spoken word—a dynamic speech-act as opposed to static words on a page. The resulting theory of modernity is a story of the undermining of the static, Greek conception of logic and truth by the radical dynamism displayed in the industrial revolution and the Enlightenment. This resulted in a rejection of the classical epistemology in favor not of the Hebraic model with its groundings and limitations on dynamism but of postmodern ideologies that embrace radical contingencies and reject necessities. It is worth noting that Poteat and Jardine do not find anything inherently “wrong” with the classical Greek metaphysics which is fitted for static problems like mathematics (Jardine 2013). However, this metaphysics dominated by visually derived concepts, when applied to the inherently dynamic problems of social sciences, results in models incapable of accounting for the radically contingent and personal aspects of human experience. This is the central hypothesis of Poteat’s theory of modernity: the Hebrew metaphysics that underride Christianity were confused by the influence of the Greek metaphysics. Both Poteat and Jardine posit that this did not occur during the early formation of Christian doctrine but during the Middle Ages when medieval theologians introduced the “static, impersonal concepts of Greek metaphysics” into Christian metaphysics, which concealed the dynamic, radically contingent aspects of reality that were better explained by the Hebrew model (Jardine 2019, 57).
Jardine’s early work picks up where Poteat left off by explicating the Hebraic metaphysics for the modern world. In Speech and Political Practice, he takes this immediately to a communitarian political theory, similar to Alasdair MacIntyre, by tying Polanyi’s critique to the project of Hannah Arendt as outlined above. This early work of Jardine’s is successful in showing how Polanyi’s critique of epistemology has profound political implications, if explicated.
Shift from Political Epistemology to Theology
Both Polanyi and Jardine make arguments for the positive justifications for freedom, such as the facilitation of pursuing spiritual ends, rather than negative justifications, i.e., the protection of personal liberties from others. Polanyi argued against centralization, specifically against the central control of science like in the USSR, and instead pioneered the concept of spontaneous order. This concept was immediately politicized, and critics of oversight coopted the term to argue against any form of regulation. Friedrich Hayek extended Polanyi’s critique to conclude in free market economics, but Polanyi himself was an early critic of laissez faire economics, arguing instead for the importance of monetary regulations through central banks (Polanyi 1945). Jardine’s contention is that Polanyi does not thoroughly extend this critique to his politics. Ostensibly, Jardine and Michael Polanyi settle on somewhat different political theories, but Jardine makes a convincing argument that Michael lacked the vision, as many in the postwar era did, to conceive of viable economic alternatives to liberal capitalism. Jardine shows that if Polanyi’s critique was thoroughly applied it would not support laissez faire economics or Keynesianism, but instead the critique supports communitarian theories of regulating the economy relative to the common good of small communities.
To correct, or fully explicate, Polanyi’s criticisms of liberal economics Jardine turns to Polanyi’s elder brother Karl. In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi points the finger at what he terms as the “disembedded” markets of liberal capitalism. An embedded market is one which is still tied to a community and is in service to their common good. The disembedded markets of liberal capitalism pursue profit at the expense of tradition, customs, individuals, and the environment. Michael overcame the problems of the static epistemology and its centralized institutions by accounting for the social and personal aspects of experience and inquiry. This is done, in part, by recognizing how concepts find meaning in a shared community and how being explicit with that ground can allow for scientific advancement and the formation of knowledge while avoiding the pitfalls of the static classical model and the unstable postmodern alternatives.
Transferring the logic of Michael’s revisionist epistemology to economics, Jardine argues that the resulting policies would not be top-down Keynesianism but instead policies that reconnect the incentives and operating procedures of businesses to the local communities in which they exist. Modern markets are referred to by Karl as disembedded, that is, they are operating on the maxim of increasing profit with no connection or concern for the community, neither laborers nor consumers. Similar to Michael’s prescription for the scientific community, Karl’s prescription for the business community is to ground or embed their actions not in the abstract and supposed laws of their respective science but in the common interests or good of the community.
Jardine’s later work continues to cite the important influence of Michael Polanyi but has moved from the project of recovering the place of human responsibility to working out a harmonious conception of nature. Jardine, like Poteat, located the source of the problems with Enlightenment epistemology in the faulty conception of nature which pervaded the culture of the West. As mentioned above, Hebrew and Greek societies had different ways of life and different orientations towards the world. The highly literate society of Ancient Greece tacitly interacted with the world in a similar fashion as their texts and developed rigid, static conceptions of nature. The Hebrew societies, as well as many other societies including the early Greek societies, were aurally oriented peoples who passed down knowledge through the spoken word; they tacitly interacted with the world in a similar fashion. This results in a more dynamic conception of nature. The conception of nature which tacitly or otherwise influenced the Enlightenment epistemologists is a confused chimera of Greek and Hebrew metaphysics. The result is an epistemology that has been reasoned to be either a static, classical conclusion ill equipped to explain the radical contingency of the modern world or an unrestrained dynamism that undermines its very justifications. To untie the knot at the heart of this crisis, Jardine has turned towards orthodox doctrines of Christianity which have been neglected by modern scholars. In his later work he has begun merging the political communitarian thought and theological communitarian thought to develop a conception of nature that is in line with Polanyi’s criticism but nonetheless has Christian justifications. The key is a Trinitarian conception of nature which has lain dormant in Christian metaphysics. Jardine’s move to theology and the Trinitarian model of nature ties back to Polanyi, and he continues to be cited as the motivation for the entirety of Jardine’s work.
The move to theological language departs from Polanyi, but Jardine reasons that Polanyi’s revisionist epistemology is best articulated in terms of Christian metaphysics. If this is the case, then Polanyi’s criticisms must be already present within Christian metaphysics; i.e., Christianity is much older than Polanyi’s revisionist epistemology, so in order for Jardine to translate Polanyi’s central critique and resolution to Christian theological terms, this critique and resolution must already exist therein or Jardine would be committing an anachronistic, post-hoc heresy. But fear not; as pointed towards in Poteat’s work, Jardine and Poteat hold that the early church, supposedly free of Greek influence, established the Christian doctrine within the Hebraic metaphysics and therefore provides a model of reality with an epistemology capable of accounting for both necessity and contingency. Poteat begins the project of commensurating Polanyi’s work with Christianity but not to the satisfaction of Jardine.
In more recent works, Jardine has begun to work out the symbology of the Trinity as a model for reality. The absence of a truly Trinitarian conception of nature is, according to Jardine and other theologians, synchronous with the rise of the modern age and the Enlightenment’s inability to account for the radically contingent aspects of nature. Jardine’s entry into Trinitarian theology is noted as remaining congruent to Polanyi’s work: “…some of Polanyi’s own formulations could be seen as supplying intimations of the Holy Spirit” (Jardine 2013, 185). Jardine uses the history of Trinitarian theology as outlined by Presbyterian theologian Colin Gunton to translate Polanyi’s epistemological critique into the terms of a Trinitarian, Christian metaphysics. Gunton’s theory begins with Augustine’s Platonic misreading of the creation story of Genesis. This led to conceiving of God and reality as Platonic forms and an overemphasis on the Father and secondarily on the Son, with almost none at all on the role of the Holy Spirit. Jardine argues, like Poteat, that modernity is a result of theological missteps, specifically the influence of Greek metaphysics.
The Platonic conception of God is a one-dimensional, static, bygone creator with nature being likewise static and mechanical. A properly conceived Trinitarian metaphysics account for the Holy Spirit, the living will of God on Earth. The Holy Spirit’s role in the metaphysical model allows for radical contingency, i.e., God acts in the world with infinite possibility. However, the covenants of the Old Testament and the life of Jesus serve as testaments to the faithful and loving nature of God, thereby limiting the contingencies. This concept of God limiting himself has a long tradition within Christianity and is referred to as kenosis, or condescension. (The concept of kenosis is used in theology to explain various aspects of the Christian faith, including God the Father’s self-limiting which was necessary for creation, the “self-emptying” of Jesus mentioned in Philippians 2:7, and the emptying of oneself and one’s own will in response to the Holy Spirit.)
The Platonic understanding of creation in Genesis posits the Father as creating existence not as an ongoing dynamic act but as a onetime act that set forth the forms in an ordered and mechanistic fashion. Without a properly conceived role for the Holy Spirit, the dynamic person of the Godhead who intervenes in actions and souls, Christian metaphysics support a logic of a unitary God and a world of universals, amenable to the Greek metaphysics. This trend was bucked by William of Ockham in favor of nominalist conceptions of particulars with no relation except God as pure will. Jardine notes that although this was at the time viewed as a repudiation of the Platonic model, Gunton sees this as its logical conclusion; by denying the forms, the particulars are all that exist and are unified only by the absolute will of God. This sets the stage for the works of Calvin and Hobbes, who replicate the nominalist metaphysics, Calvin explicitly within Christian metaphysics and Hobbes implicitly in his attempt at a secular political theory. Reducing God and humans to will implies a cosmology in which there is “the God who appears to impart particularity only to that which is a function of his will, and therefore to deprive of true particularity; and the human will which appears to achieve independence only in a kind of arbitrary self-assertion which appears to be the mark of divinity” (Gunton 1993, 58-59). The theory continues then that this drive for self-assertion is the catalyst for the increasingly dynamic conceptions of human action found in the Enlightenment. This dynamic conception of human action, supported by the feats of modern technologies, contradicted the remaining static aspects of the Middle Age Christian metaphysics and culminated in the absence of a sound logic for relations amongst particulars and what Nietzsche referred to as the advent of nihilism—the characteristic philosophy of modernity. Postmodernists interpret this as a liberatory theory that overturns the modern world and, with the values of tolerance, can eliminate injustice by undermining authorities with deconstructions that expose arbitrary assertions of will. However, Jardine and theologians like him see postmodernism not as a move beyond modernism but rather as its logical conclusion, the same way they see Nominalism as not a move beyond Platonism. They also see the societal dangers and, more fundamentally, the logical missteps that led to postmodernism.
Some prominent theologians have contributed to developing a more thorough Christian conception of nature which use a Trinitarian model, emphasizing the oft neglected Holy Spirit. Henri de Lubac, Pope John Paul II, and Pope Benedict XVI articulate a Christian conception of nature that accounts for more dynamism than the static concept inherited by Aristotle. Jardine finds himself on the cutting edge of contemporary theology, with thinkers like David Bentley Hart and John Milbank recently turning to the debate over Aquinas’s legacy which was reignited by Lubac’s insistence during the Second Vatican Council on the mistakes of the early Neoscholastics’ interpretation of a pure nature independent of grace.
Lubac noted that while Thomas Aquinas is often attributed with tying the works of Aristotle to Christianity, he may have been attempting to articulate a more dynamic conception of nature just as medieval societies were beginning to interact and even shape nature in radically new ways. Neoscholastic scholars of the modern era are blamed for failing to pick up on this aspect of Aquinas’s work and instead supplementing Christian metaphysics with the classical, static Aristotelian model. Jardine uses Lubac’s analysis of the neoscholastic influence to account for the differences in the development of modernity across Europe. He states,
Thus within the Catholic world modern political theories and movements have been less tied to a mechanistic conception of nature than their Anglo-American counterparts, and less concerned with the structure of the subject than in Germany, but rather tend to focus on establishing a purely secular, that is, autonomous in Lubac’s sense, social order. And indeed Lubac’s analysis can explain the differing tendencies of France and southern Europe in the modern age. The neoscholastic conception of pure nature could lead to an autonomous and possibly perfectible nature or to an essentially Aristotelian nature with a Christian veneer. The former would characterize France and the latter could describe the much less dynamic societies of Spain and Italy, at least until relatively late in the modern age. Finally, Lubac’s conception could account for the fact that whereas secularization in the Protestant world took place gradually, because the dominant conceptions of nature and human agency were only slight modifications of earlier theological formulations, secularism in the Catholic world attempted a much sharper break with existing pre- and early modern institutions. (Jardine 2019, 12)
The remedy prescribed by Jardine for the church is to properly explicate the role of the Holy Spirit and return to a metaphysics which therein accounts for the contingent and dynamic qualities of man and God and yet remains grounded by the ever-presence of an all-knowing God. As stated, Jardine found a commensurate model for this metaphysics in the works of Polanyi, stating, “some of Polanyi’s own formulations could be seen as supplying intimations of the Holy Spirit” (see Polanyi 2013, 185). Specifically, Polanyi pioneered the concept of tacit knowledge and argued that we know things tacitly before we know them explicitly, implying that humans have some vague understanding of the world that collectively we are working towards grasping. Poteat refers to this as the temporal logic of Polanyi’s epistemology, arguing that the existence of tacit knowledge implies a philosophy of history. Jardine equates this with Gunton’s conception of God interacting and guiding man throughout history—the role of the Holy Spirit.
The adoption of Christianity as the language through which Jardine politicizes Polanyi does not preclude Polanyi or non-Christians from the new political place. Remember, this place is only possible through the earnest engagement of individuals living amongst each other who are committed to pursuing truth and the common good through open debate and other dynamic speech-acts. This does not require that any of these members recognize a pluralistic conception of personal truths in the postmodern sense or pledge allegiance to any static dictate of irrefutable facts, like the classic and neoclassical alternatives. This model of consensus formation allows for individual freedom of thought but is limited by the faithfulness of each individual to the earnest pursuit of truth and the common good. It requires that members still hold to their beliefs but does not neutralize the possibility of disagreement, like the pluralist, postmodern model. In fact, it is reliant upon the promise of each member to espouse and defend their position while remaining earnestly engaged with others’ beliefs. As long as these members recognize the dynamic aspects of reality while remaining limited by their commitment to the truth and the common good of the community, they can maintain the “polis,” even with differences in the language or traditions used to communicate. Thus, Polanyi and Jardine could remain in agreement about the political implications of Polanyi’s epistemology and could exist harmoniously in a shared polis without Polanyi having to adopt the Christian faith. Of course, Jardine could and does make the argument that the Christian tradition provides the superior tools for understanding and articulating reality.
This piece began with Aristotle’s reasoning that politics are epistemically prior to the sciences. Michael Polanyi recognized the personal, political, and social aspects of scientific inquiry and knowledge. His conclusion was that political and administrative freedoms are a prerequisite for scientific inquiry and knowledge but that the individuals involved must be committed to a community with some shared language and customs. He articulated the need for a place in which scientists can form this community and exercise their freedom to speak and act in pursuit of the truth, in full recognition of the social, personal, and tacit aspects of this pursuit. Poteat began the process of explicating the political implications of Polanyi’s alternative epistemology, likening it to the Hebraic metaphysics and introducing it to the political theory discourse via Arendt’s project of recovering the polis. Jardine’s early work explored the political model for scientific inquiry and knowledge which could remain impervious to the critiques of radical contingency and the defeated rigidity of classical epistemology. He makes convincing arguments that Polanyi’s conclusions support a MacIntyre-style communitarianism and, in doing so, connects Polanyi’s work to Christianity.
Jardine’s later work begins to explore the theological support for Polanyi’s epistemology which has been recognized by Poteat as synchronous with the Judeo-Christian metaphysics. Jardine uses the symbol of the Trinity as a metaphysical model of reality that accounts for contingency and necessity on its own terms rather than through the terms of the scientific community. In a sense Jardine has inverted his work, which began in Polanyi and worked towards Christianity only to find that if the conclusion to Polanyi’s work, as he sees it, is Christianity, then the epistemology and model of reality must already be contained within the Christian tradition on its own terms, and rightfully so. Jardine recognizes the Trinity as the model of reality which preceded Polanyi’s insights but were neglected by medieval theologians in favor of Greek metaphysics. Jardine’s work is left in great debt to Polanyi’s work but in a sense no longer in need of it for explanation or articulation of his diagnosis or prescription for the crises of the modern age. In a Wittgensteinian sense, Jardine has thrown away the ladder (Wittgenstein 1933, 6.54). He has moved away from apologetics engaged with the scientific community on its terms and, by using Polanyi’s scientific terms, has reasoned them to a conclusion by which he no longer need engage in those very terms. Instead, Jardine has created a line of literature that engages with the same topics but in the terms of Christian theology.
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Gunton, Colin. 1993. The One, the Three, and the Many: God, Creation, and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). See also The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd ed. (London: Clark, 2003).
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_____. 2013. “Michael Polanyi’s Response to the Crisis of Modernity and Its Relation to Recent Developments in Theology.” Perspectives on Political Science 42, no. 3.
_____. 2018. “The Political Implications of William H. Poteat’s Philosophy.” Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical 44, no. 1: 26-42.
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_____. 1962. “The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory.” Minerva 1, no. 1: 54-73; JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41821550.
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