A Review Essay of “The Metaphysics of Michael Polanyi: Toward a Post-Critical Platonism” by Martin Turkis II


Dale Cannon

§1. Introduction and review

I am honored and humbled by being welcomed to serve in this review of Martin’s book, in part because some things that I myself have published on the shift from the critical to the post-critical orientation have figured so prominently in Martin’s overall argument. But more so because I believe it represents (1) a major breakthrough in Polanyi studies (nothing like it has been written before), (2) a breakthrough in Platonic philosophy, and (3) a breakthrough in contemporary metaphysics.

The book is extraordinarily well written. Though it does introduce some unfamiliar terminology (jargon), it does not get a reader bogged down. This book doesn’t read like a typical PhD dissertation turned into a book, which it is; it is a pleasure to read. Being a secondary language arts teacher contributes to Martin’s skills as a good communicator. Regular periodic summaries and reviews help a great deal with comprehension.

In regard to more substantial considerations, I want first to say that Martin has understood well this theme of the shift from the critical to the post-critical in Polanyi’s thought and its implications. Its significance has often been overlooked and, at times, I am sorry to say, been barely taken notice of by Polanyi interpreters. But not Martin, for as I have read and come to understand his book, I find that the shift to the post-critical is foundational for virtually every one of the major conceptual moves that make up Martin’s account of Polanyi’s metaphysics; for example,

  1. his clear conceptualization of Polanyi’s “Copernican Realism” (and his differentiation of this interpretation from other versions of Polanyi’s realism among Polanyi interpreters), which for him “bridge[s] the gap between speculative metaphysics and scientific practices” (vii)—for both in Polanyi’s understanding give access to metaphysical reality;
  2. his reconciliation of the disparate, unsystematic comments that Polanyi makes of a metaphysical nature and his drawing out and filling in the gaps (and at times Martin’s modification) of Polanyi’s incompletely articulated metaphysics, demonstrating (once developed, cleaned up, and refined) that it is coherent, comprehensive, and sensible through and through;
  3. his overcoming of the modern prejudice of twentieth-century Analytic Philosophy against any attempt at serious metaphysics in our day;
  4. his manner of dialectically bringing Polanyi’s ideas into fruitful philosophical conversation with other contemporary metaphysical theories of realism (more on this theme below);
  5. his drawing forth from this exploratory investigation into speculative metaphysics an understanding of how it is possible to have both a flat ontology of comprehensive entities and a hierarchy of metaphysically emergent orders constituting the evolution of life in all of its forms as well as mereological hierarchical relationships between subsidiary particulars and comprehensive forms within “comprehensive entities” (which is Polanyi’s primary ontological category);
  6. his demonstration of how the notorious fact-value dichotomy in metaphysics can be overcome and a place found for telos or purpose and for meaning in our understanding of nature (more on this theme below);
  7. his creative reinterpretations of both Plato’s and Aristotle’s metaphysical ideas, with the help of the Neoplatonic interpretation of each; and
  8. his reconciliation and harmonization of Aristotle and Plato on the subject of universals.

It is amazing to me how in Martin’s hands, this shift from the critical to the post-critical contributes to a resolution of what has seemed for centuries to be irreconcilable metaphysical orientations and insoluble metaphysical conundrums. In Martin’s hands it opens up new horizons of reasoning about metaphysical issues; indeed, it opens up a new epoch for creative advances in fundamental philosophy and not just in Polanyi studies. Martin reveals how Michael Polanyi (accompanied by Martin’s refinements, interpretations, and commentary) is a much greater and more serious philosopher than many of us have realized.

There has been a long-standing controversy in Polanyi studies concerning how much and to what extent Polanyi’s philosophy is Platonist. Martin has answered this question more clearly than any previous interpreter of Polanyi’s thought, not just in one respect but in many. Notice how Martin did so: it required challenging a number of taken-for-granted conceptions of Plato’s philosophy in recent and contemporary philosophy (including Polanyi scholarship) by digging deeply into, and refreshing his understanding of, the best scholarship on Plato’s thought (some of which was centuries old in the Neo-Platonic tradition but also very recent historical scholarship as well) to identify mainstream strands of Plato’s thought which demolish stereotypical preconceptions (for example, of Plato’s alleged “Two Worlds” view) but also turn out to correspond deeper than they first appeared on the surface with Polanyi’s metaphysical convictions. This is first-rate creative philosophical scholarship, and we readers of Martin’s thesis are privileged to witness it. (The same is true of Martin’s challenge to taken-for-granted conceptions of Aristotle’s philosophy to be found in Polanyi studies and elsewhere.) One could also say that Martin has brought out how Plato in many respects anticipates Polanyi’s thought—i.e., that Plato, post-critically considered and interpreted, can be said to be Polanyian. Indeed, Martin’s thesis opens up a huge new horizon of creative research in Post-Critical Platonism.

§2. Questions for Martin

  1. How does Polanyi’s post-critical perspective serve to open up for us (a) a way to understand how science empirically has access to reality in its metaphysical transcendence, (b) a way to understand how philosophical reasoning about first principles has access to metaphysical reality in its transcendence; and (c) a way to understand how these two avenues of access to metaphysical reality (making up what Martin calls Polanyi’s Copernican Realism) are convergent? I believe Martin answers this question in his book, but I would like him to explain it more simply and straightforwardly in his own words.
  2. An area of recent philosophical discussion of issues in metaphysical realism is what has come to be called the “Critical Realism” movement in sociological theory. It has been around for some time now, and it is puzzling to me that Martin does not take it up in his book. It first arose in the middle of the last century, I believe, in the writings of Oxford philosopher Rom Harré in his attempts to explain the concept of causation in natural science. Roy Bhaskar, Harré’s student and later a philosopher in his own right, has written a great deal to promote “Critical Realism” as a contemporary movement in mainstream sociological theory in opposition to positivist and constructivist tendencies that oppose metaphysical realism in sociology and other disciplines in the social sciences. Because of its widespread adoption and notoriety, it only seems right that Martin explain how Polanyi’s account of realism relates to it. From my limited understanding, I believe that Polanyi’s account and Bhaskar’s account (and presumably Harré’s) are quite compatible with one another. Polanyi’s “post-critical” take on these matters may not be entirely compatible with Bhaskar’s “critical realism,” though I believe that they are. Whether they are or not needs clarifying.
  3. Martin claims that Polanyi not only rejects the “fact-value” dichotomy (that goes back to eighteenth-century British Empiricism) but that in significant respects he demolishes it. “Factual reality (even material, non-living things) objectively considered” is no longer to be entertained as “value free” or “meaningless.” Meaning, as Martin puts it, in Polanyi’s metaphysics “goes all the way down.” I would like Martin to explain how this dichotomy as it has come down to us is the result, according to Polanyi’s post-critical perspective, of a fundamental misconception or distortion of the nature of reality and a scientific knowledge of it. Where, and specifically how, does the dichotomy get things wrong? (It might be well worth it to link this misconception up with how the so-called “extractionist” attitude that characterized the rise of Capitalism toward natural resources as well as how “property” came to be understood.)

    Bruno Latour, in his We Have Never Been Modern (1995), traces how the conception of what it is to be modern in modern intellectual culture historically emerged in a controversy in the Royal Society in the seventeenth century between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle. Latour’s account may be usefully relevant to Martin as he recounts this development. Latour identifies the issue in terms of a radical disjunction between “nature” (the subject of the new natural sciences) and “culture” (the product of human meaning-making) and a corresponding taboo against mixing the two that gets entrenched in modern thinking. It is important to realize what Polanyi’s metaphysical view is up against and to recognize how deeply lie the conceptual roots of the ideas which he opposes.

  4. Polanyi’s post-critical metaphysics reintroduces the conceptions of, and distinction between, formal cause and final cause that have long been out of favor. How is it that Polanyi’s metaphysics, as Martin has articulated it, succeeds in not only reintroducing them but granting them a new kind of respectability and undeniability?
  5. To my thinking there are some other, lesser matters that could also bear clarification.
    1. Martin claims in a number of places that Polanyi’s emergentism is “plausibly reductive” in Thomas Nagel’s sense. I would like to have further clarified what “plausibly reductive” means in this sense. Martin in his book seems to shy away from taking up a full discussion of “emergence” in Polanyi’s thought. I would like to have Martin explain more clearly what the issue is, and in what respects “emergence” in Polanyi’s thinking turns out to be reductive and in what respect not, and what consequences follow from Polanyi’s position on this matter.
    2. Although the term “mereological” is used several times in the book, I do not remember encountering it before and it still remains somewhat unclear in my mind. I would like Martin to explain what precisely “mereological” means, as distinct from (yet somehow related to) ontological and metaphysical.
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