The abstract for today’s talk makes some wild promises. I’ve
promised to talk of Martin Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world and Hans-Georg
Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics as well as making connections between them
and Michael Polanyi’s understanding of science. And I’ve promised to do so in a
way that is accessible to the layperson. We’ll see how we go!
I have decided that the best way forward is to let you in on a
conversation I had recently with a renowned biochemist and Nobel laureate. He’s
an Australian acquaintance who likes fishing and hunting crocodiles.
Professor Hermen E. Utic is responsible for a number of
significant advances in his field over the last 25 years. And he’s the
quintessential Polanyian scientist. He’s engaging to listen to; his eyes light
up as he talks of his research; and his passionate commitment to the search for
truth is obvious. Professor Utic is convinced that the secret to his success
lies in a combination of two things; firstly, his own innate attitudes,
abilities and personality; and secondly that he works for a university that
values theoretical research and gives him freedom to pursue possibilities where
they lead.
Utic enjoyed philosophy in his student years and says he
particularly enjoyed the renowned continental philosophers Martin Heidegger and
Hans-Georg Gadamer. But Professor Utic soon turned to science, somewhat
influenced by an Australian philosophical climate, which was not known for its
love of continental philosophy.
Given that some of the roots of Utic’s views on science lay
with the German philosophers of interpretation, it was there we had to start.
My personal experience of trying to read Heidegger and Gadamer decades ago was
not pleasant; I particularly found Heidegger convoluted, obscure, and I was not
at all convinced he was actually on to something. Talk of ‘Dasein’s
Being-in-the-world’ and speaking of ‘language as the house of being’ mystified
me.
As one wit said, analytic philosophers typically accuse the
continental ones of being insufficiently
clear, while the continental philosophers accuse the analytic ones of Being insufficiently. I hope today’s
talk is both clear and takes account of Being.
Anyway, I started by asking Professor Utic what it was that
he had learned from Heidegger and Gadamer. Here’s some of what he had to
say—though I should apologise for the recording quality; he’s a busy man so I
had to catch up with him at a cricket match as he was preparing to go in to bat.
Professor Hermen Utic:
Yeh, sorry we had to meet here but I’ve been flat out like a lizard drinking so
it was here and now, or wait till it snows at Christmas.
Anyway you asked about Heidegger. I guess from Heidegger I learnt
that the model of the world I grew up with is naïve. In our early years we grow
up thinking we are the centre of the world, thinking that there is me and then
the rest of existence. We make this distinction tacitly without thinking about
it pretty early on.
But when we get a bit longer in the tooth we realise that there are
other people in the world too, each at the centre of their own worlds. And so
our thinking takes on the subject-object model; we think that it is possible to
stand in judgement on the world from a distance; that we can gaze at it and
analyse it and experiment on it, without being changed by or dependent on the
so-called ‘external world.’ This is a commonplace understanding of science and
has roots in a mechanistic worldview.
What Heidegger taught me is that there is no line between subject
and object or between internal and external world. Why is this? Let me give you
an example. Say you’re a tradey[1],
let’s say a chippy, a carpenter. Every day you use your hammer. We think of the
hammer as an object; a thing existing independently of all people and things
around it. But what is a hammer really? It is only a hammer when it takes its
place in a world of chippies and construction. Where there are no chippies
there are no hammers.
But that’s not the last round of drinks; there’s more. Heidegger
also taught me that where there are no hammers there are no carpenters. What do
I mean by that? I mean simply that you can’t be a carpenter without being
enmeshed in a world of hammers and nails and social understandings about the construction
industry and tradesmen and where a carpenter fits into all that.
You see, every one of us is part of a world. We are only who we
are, as part of our world, as part of our web of meanings, our network of
beliefs and relationships. And our identity is also the ongoing end point of a
history that leads to us.
In addition we are partly who we are today only as we think about
where we are going, what our plans and projections are for the future. What’s a
chippy if he isn’t thinking of building houses or cupboards next week or next
month?
And finally we also live in a world of language that conditions our
every thought; our language gives us a world of meanings that we have to adapt
to even if we want to go beyond it.
You see, there are more things in Heidegger and Gadamer than are
dreamt of in ‘Australian philosophy’.
skandalon:
Professor Utic’s description of his engagement with continental philosophy
seemed to ring truer to me now than my own forays into the subject years
earlier. I asked him if he thought that people like Heidegger and Gadamer could
contribute to our understanding of science.
Professor Hermen Utic:
Too right mate. But the problem with the philosophers is that they’re out of
touch with the bloke[2] and sheila[3]
in the street: they’ve got no idea how to help Joe Average understand the
implications of their philosophy.
Heidegger was brilliant: he laid bare the fact that nothing can be
laid bare, there are no objects in themselves—including the so called objects
of science—that are not already interpreted, that are not already in language,
that are not already part of a world. And he highlighted how everyone of us,
the scientist included, is always already part of the world that we live in and
investigate. In other words, there can never be a disinterested, neutral
observer that the great myth of science promotes.
But Heidegger spoke a language of his own. He had his reasons of
course, although some people thought he was a sandwich short of a picnic[4].
He wrote in his obscure way deliberately, to loosen the grip on us of the
common language including its tendency to force us into thinking of subject and
object. But by doing this he was unlikely to find favour with scientists or
their analytic philosophical bedfellows.
Gadamer on the other hand, especially in his great work Truth and Method… he reveals a
disconcerting acceptance of the received view of science: he contrasts his own
interpretive search for truth in the human sciences and the arts with the
method-based approaches of the natural sciences.
skandalon: I knew
where this conversation was going. I knew that Professor Utic was a fan of
Michael Polanyi, the Hungarian physician turned chemist turned philosopher of
science. Polanyi’s major work Personal
Knowledge was published in 1958, two years before Gadamer’s Truth and Method. Utic outlined why he
was enamoured with Polanyi talking at length about tacit knowledge and focal
and subsidiary awareness and about the nature of truth and the relationship
between truth and belief. He also made some connections between the philosophy
of interpretation and the nature of science. Here he is again:
Professor Hermen Utic:
Polanyi of course was not a ridgy-didge[5]
philosopher and was never accepted as one. He didn’t dot his philosophical i’s
or cross his t’s. But that is by the by. His genius was his fearless
challenging of the accepted views of science, and writing about such things in
a way that is both profound and accessible. Sure, Personal Knowledge is a long and winding road, but along the road,
if you’ve got eyes to see, there is Heidegger and Gadamer and of course so much
of Thomas Kuhn. His blockbuster, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
came out a few years after Polanyi and his belated references to Polanyi don’t
do justice to his borrowings. Polanyi eventually spat the dummy[6]
over that one and I can’t say I blame him.
Anyway, you asked why I see Heidegger and Gadamer in Polanyi. My
answer is this: while Polanyi didn’t use the language of continental philosophy
his description of scientific knowledge fits neatly with those emphases that I
have already referred to.
Let’s go back a bit: Heidegger and Gadamer were theorists of
interpretation. Their claim is that the human condition is a sea of
interpretations; there are no brute facts, empirical or otherwise, there are no
uninterpreted facts. Now, this presents two distinct challenges: the epistemic
and the ontological.
skandalon: At
this point let me interrupt Professor Utic’s summary for a moment to clarify
the two terms that he has just used. Epistemic issues are those that have to do
with our knowledge. So epistemology is the study of knowing: how we know the
world, how we justify our knowledge claims and so on. And ontology is the study
of being, of what is. So for example the ontology of a human being is
simply—well not so simply actually— is the question of what a human person is.
Back to Professor Utic:
Professor Hermen Utic:
…two distinct challenges: the epistemic and the ontological.
The epistemic challenge is that of minding the gap. There is a
knowledge gap, between my beliefs and the world around me, the world that I
investigate as a researcher. I’m an empirical scientist I love data. I theorise
and then dream up empirical ways of testing my theories. But I know that every
interesting piece of data involves my own interpretation of it. This is where
Polanyi’s personal dimension comes in: Polanyi’s sort of knowledge is called
personal knowledge because he dared to risk a barney[7]
with empiricists and rationalists alike by saying that no knowledge stands
apart from the personal commitments and beliefs of the person making a
knowledge claim.
But this talk of an epistemic gap is dangerous. It’s true in a way:
sure all our knowledge claims are interpretations and none are guaranteed; it’s
fiduciary all the way down.
However, it sounds like I’m painting a picture of the scientist as
a subject confronting the world as object. It runs the risk of reinforcing the
subject-object distinction, which for Heideggerian philosophy is to miss the
point entirely. Why is that? Because this sort of talk obscures the fundamental
nature of the human being. For Heidegger, before we can even talk of science or
any other human practice we need to wrestle with the problem of Being itself, with ontology and with
what it means to be a human being.
This is where the carpenter comes in, along with his or her hammer.
Now I’m not saying that Heidegger would have put it this way but let me say it
anyway.
If you live in a world of subjects and objects and neatly defined
chippies and hammers then the answer to the question, ‘what is a hammer?’ or
the question ‘what is a carpenter?’ has to be in terms of some intrinsic or
maybe essential attributes or qualities of carpenters or hammers. But Heidegger
says that’s all a furphy;[8]
it’s just not how the world is.
You see, the identity of a carpenter is neither an independent
thing nor a fixed thing. Firstly, it’s not independent, because it depends on
hammers and nails. I remember when I was a young tacker[9]
we could see a visual metaphor of how chippies were defined by their hammers:
have you ever seen the difference in size of a chippie’s forearm? Hours and
years of hammering makes the carpenter’s hammer arm bigger than the other one:
it’s a model for the way part of the chippie’s identity depends on hammers.
Now that leads to the second issue: the idea that the identity of
the carpenter is fixed. Now that’s a pork pie[10]
if I’ve ever heard one! Identity endures but it is not static, because the
world of the carpenter changes and he changes with it.
You know they don’t use hammers now? It’s all nail guns and high
tech wiz bang power tools. So you see, a chippie today just isn’t what he used
to be—or she, but there aren’t many sheilas in construction.
skandalon:
Professor Utic talked more about Heidegger and Gadamer, only interrupted by a
brief time at the batting crease where he was caught and bowled[11]
for a golden duck[12]. He talked
of how their thinking broke the neat categories so beloved of analytic
philosophy and the received view of science. But for our purposes today there
are two parts of our conversation that are particularly pertinent. The first is
how Utic sees Michael Polanyi’s epistemology connecting with the continental
philosophy of interpretation. The second, is a question I had when confronted
with this amorphous destructuring of the world and of human knowledge; it was
the question of relativism.
First I asked Professor Utic how he tied in Polanyi’s
philosophy of science with the interpretive view.
Professor Hermen Utic:
Well I think Polanyi gets nine out of ten for the epistemic challenge although
he hasn’t kicked as many goals when it comes to his ontological sophistication.
I reckon if he’d been a bit more subtle about his ontology it would have helped
him to sharpen up his epistemology.
skandalon: We
won’t bother now with all the professor had to say about Polanyi’s
epistemology. I assume this audience is well acquainted with Polanyi’s
criticisms of what I have called the received view of science. Polanyi’s
project was to challenge that view at a time when few were doing so. But,
according to Utic, as Polanyi challenged the epistemic idols of the time he was
doing tacit ontology.
Professor Hermen Utic:
As for ontology, well I reckon Polanyi was a bee’s whisker away from a more
nuanced embodied ontology although once again he didn’t theorise it in
philosophical terms like Merleau-Ponty for example.
But think of Polanyi’s descriptions of focal and subsidiary
awareness and the way tools become embodied as we focus on simply using them.
Take Bruce for example, out there batting: he hasn’t got enough brains to give
himself a headache[13], but he’s a
brilliant batsman. Watch the way he handles his bat without thinking about it;
it becomes part of him, an extension of his body.
While Bruce focuses on the bowler there is only a tacit awareness
of the sensations of holding the bat, let alone what goes on in his head when
he clobbers the ball for a six.[14]
In situations like that we shift outward the boundary between the
taken-for-granted and the critically examined.
Now I’d want to put that another way and say we incorporate into
ourselves what was previously outside ourselves. And we do so unknowingly most
of the time. So not only do we know more than we can tell as Polanyi did say, but, as he might have said, we are more than we can tell.
Think of his examples of tacit knowledge, things like visual
perception, learning skills, recognising faces, using tools, communicating in
language—we can see with a continental eye that they are also examples of the
formation of a self that would be a different self, in fact would be no self at
all, except by recognising that the self is made up of all of these things just
as part of the being of a carpenter includes hammers.
skandalon: We
talked through the next innings about Polanyi’s tacit ontology of being but
before we finish today I want to share something of our conversation about the so-called
‘threat of relativism’ in this neo-Polanyian continentally-informed
epistemology.
Professor Hermen Utic: The
problem is that once you bring this different ontology into the equation then
epistemology starts to look like a dog’s breakfast.[15]
One way to go is to try and squeeze your Gadamers and Polanyis into
a sort of re-jigged old-fashioned subject-object epistemology. Polanyi, like Gadamer,
recognises that human reason is, at least partially, historically and
culturally constituted; both reject the possibility of a rule-based method for
guaranteeing truth and both recognise the provisionality of all knowledge. So
instead of having certainty you have degrees of confidence and instead of
having neutrality and objectivity you have fiduciary commitment.
Now if you want to go down that track then the battle you’re going
to have to fight with the old epistemology is about one sort of relativism:
it’s about epistemic justification. Eduardo Echeverria said the question that
needs to be clarified is the link between epistemic justification on the one
hand and truth on the other. So he calls Polanyi an epistemic relativist. What
does he mean by that? Well, Polanyi is a realist about the world: he thinks
there is a truth about the world but that doesn’t mean that we have any guarantees of accessing that truth. So
he’s an epistemic relativist because our beliefs are relative to our epistemic
context.
Now that’s all very well and lots of philosophers get their
knickers in a twist about a relativist apocalypse. But strewth[16],
even blind Freddie can see that just because we can’t prove a thing doesn’t
make it false.
I reckon climate change is a God-given Polanyian case in point. So
we don’t know for certain that humans are causing climate change. Fair enough I
say and Polanyi too. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have good reasons for
believing it. I reckon we should lock up the climate deniers with a few
absolute relativists and watch the fireworks. If you ask me, they’ve all got a
few kangaroos loose in the top paddock.[17]
skandalon: We
talked more about climate change and the opportunities to use it as a live case
study to educate people about the reality of science: on the one hand most
serious scientists are convinced of the truth of human-induced climate change,
but on the other hand there is genuine scientific disagreement, and any opinion
on the matter is an interpretive judgment based on unspecifiable factors
arising from a personal participation in the web of trust that is science.
But let’s move on; as we heard before, my new friend Hermen
Utic wanted to burrow down to the ontological level.
Professor Hermen Utic:
But the really interesting questions are ontological: if Gadamer and his
Heideggerian mates are right then the problem is not just bridging the
epistemic gap between subject and object. You can have that problem and still
not give away your epistemic framework. And if you maintain that framework then
you have two options: either some sort of fallibilism—maybe a Polanyian
committed fallibilism—or the other option is to pike it; toss in the towel[18]
and say we can’t know anything.
But like I say, it’s a good deal more complicated than that: the
problem isn’t the gap, it’s that there is no gap at all. Subject and object are
indistinguishable because they are parts of each other. This is the logical Heideggerian
conclusion of Polanyi’s indwelling: it’s not that indwelling is like diving
into the sea where we always remain distinguishable from the water around. True
indwelling is who we are. Whatever we indwell becomes part of our personal
networked identity.
It’s Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world: in fact by the time Polanyi wrote
the preface to the 1964 edition of Personal
Knowledge he says that all understanding is based on indwelling and he
calls this “a participation of ours in the existence of that which we
comprehend; it is Heidegger’s being-in-the-world.”
That’s Polanyi, 1964!
skandalon: I was
fascinated, so after our talk I dug out the reference and sure enough there it
was. Let me quote from the preface that Hermen referred to:
Indwelling is
being-in-the-world. Every act of tacit
knowing shifts our existence, re-directing, contracting our participation
in the world. Existentialism and phenomenology have studied such processes
under other names. We must re-interpret such observations now in terms of the
more concrete structure of tacit knowing.[19]
I need to finish here. I hope you’ve seen something not only
of Michael Polanyi’s latent Heideggerian inclinations but also that the
challenge of communicating such a view of science need not be overwhelmed by
ineffable philosophy.
And if you ever visit Australia, I’d be happy to introduce you
to Hermen Utic. Perhaps we could bend the elbow[20]
and have a yabber[21] at the pub
while we sink a few tinnies[22].
Thanks very much for listening.
[1] Short for tradesman.
Common Australian practice is to shorten words and finish them with ‘y’ or ‘ie’
(postie for postman, chrissy for christmas) or ‘o’ (arvo for afternoon, bizzo
for business) and also for male names (Davo, Chriso, Robo).
[2] Man, hence blokey-adjective describing mainstream
male culture; also activities and places where women are not generally involved
or welcome.
[3] Woman
[4]
Intellectually deficient
[5] Genuine
[6] To have a
tantrum. To become visibly upset.
[7] An argument.
[8] A lie or
deception.
[9] Person.
Never used alone but always used in conjunction with ‘young’ or ‘little’, hence
little tacker or young tacker.
[10] Rhyming
slang for lie. Other examples: Joe Blake for snake, dog and bone for phone, bag
of fruit for suit.
[11] Caught and bowled: the batsman is caught
out by the bowler.
[12] Only
lasting one ball after going in to bat.
[13] Expected to
perform poorly on a standard IQ test.
[14] In the
gentleman’s game of cricket if the batsman hits the ball out of the field he
scores six runs.
[15] A mess or
muddle. Not to be confused with a dog’s
dinner, which refers to an ostentatious style of dressing.
[16] Shortened
form of ‘it’s the truth’.
[17] Showing
evidence of handicapped mental capacity.
[18] Pike, toss in the towel: to give up.
[19] Torchbook
edition, x. Italics added.
[20] The action
of raising one’s glass to drink.
[21] A
conversation or simply a convo.
[22] A tinny
(singular, plural: tinnies) is a can of beer. The term harks back to the days
when cans were made of tin and not aluminium. Cf., ‘stubby’: a small bottle of
beer of the same volume as a tinny and usually the same price. Hence sink a tinny-drink a can of beer, but
never sink a stubby. Yobbos or bogans
(unrefined working class people who might wear Ugg boots, moccasins or
flannelette shirts in public) probably prefer tinnies while more refined people
drink from stubbies or simply drink wine.
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