Thus said the 20th century scientist-philosopher
Michael Polanyi. Tom Christenson, in his
book “The Gift and Task of Lutheran Higher Education” tips his hat to Michael
Polanyi on several occasions. In one
instance, as Christenson explains what our approach to knowing should be, he
says the following:
“Our own approach, I would argue, should be the opposite of
Descartes’ exclusivism. Let us begin by
looking at knowing inclusively, by noting the variety of ways of knowing there
are and then examine the variety of modes such exemplars embody:
-Being able to recognize one’s own camel in a herd of 200
camels
-Knowing how to successfully turn the corner on a bicycle
-Driving a car – safely getting where we wanted to go
-A doctor diagnosing a disease
-A teacher detecting that a student does not yet understand
-A young man discovering that he is gay [note: I would say
has homosexual inclinations]
-A child learning to recognize that she is experiencing a
headache (not as simple as it seems)
-A person realizing she was born (or do we only know this on
someone else’s authority?)
-A person realizing that he will die (Tolstoi’s Ivan Illich)
-A student concluding on the basis of lab experiments that
the unknown substance is aluminum oxide
-A psychologist diagnosing a patient’s problem
-A physicist concluding that the earth is in motion
-Knowing what time it is in spite of not being able to say
anything non-metaphorical about it (St. Augustine’s puzzlement)
-Einstein postulating that time is the fourth dimension
-Shakespeare seeing deeply into the human psyche
-A reader seeing deeply into Shakespeare
-Annie Dillard experiencing “the tree with the lights in it”
-A parent realizing deep love for his children
-A child learning the language of his parents well enough to
say, “I don’t want to eat because I amn’t hungry”
-A student of Buddhism understanding the truth of the
teacher’s claim: “The self is a cultural construct, not a reality”
-A young woman knowing her self well enough to set
priorities for her life, turning down a proposal of marriage
-A man discovering that some of his most basic beliefs about
human fulfillment were false
-A grandmother once again making flawless piecrust
-A student finally “getting” a poem by Wallace Stevens
-A witness to a crime testifying under oath
-A couple dancing a samba
(pp. 105 and 106)
