Hovering in the background of this pursuit [of turning philosophy into a rigorous science] is what might be called ‘the Cartesian Anxiety’—the fear or apprehension that if there are no … basic constraints, no foundations, no determinate ‘rules of the game’, then we are confronted with intellectual and moral chaos where anything goes.Today I want to consider two thinkers who have overcome their Cartesian anxiety, but who emphatically do not believe that anything goes. The question I am working on in my doctoral studies is whether they are successful in holding on to a sensible notion of truth without either falling backwards into Cartesian neurosis or tripping over their own feet into the relativist puddle.
It is an interesting accident of history that in the space of a couple of years in the mid 20th century, two of the most significant critiques of the Enlightenment dream of certain knowledge and neutral objectivity were published. Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge in 1958 and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method in 1960. Yet apparently neither author was significantly influenced by the other.
For Polanyi, once one of the world’s leading physical chemists, the focus of his attention is the knowledge that comes from the natural sciences, while for Gadamer the project is about human understanding, the object of which ranges from history and texts to art and music.
Today I will explore some parallels between Polanyi’s epistemology and Gadamerian hermeneutics, focussing particularly on aspects relevant to the charges of relativism levelled against them.
