The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Michael
Polanyi
Faith and Reason
The Journal of Religion, 41 (4)
October 1961, 237-247.
RECENTLY there fell into my hands - by the kindness of its author - a
book which has revealed to me a new, and I think much better, understanding of
the situation we are facing today in consequence of the modern scientific
revolution. The author’s name is Josef
Pieper, professor of philosophical anthropology at the University of Münster, and his book which so impressed me is entitled Scizolastik. (It will be published in English
by the Phaedon Books in New York.)
Owing to this book, I can see now that the conflict between faith and
reason evoked by natural science today is but a modern variant of a problem
which has filled the thoughts of men in other forms ever since the dawn of
philosophic speculation 2,500 years ago.
You will notice that by dating the beginning of philosophy in the sixth
century B.C., I am localizing this event in Greece, and more particularly in Ionia
and the Greek isles. I know this may be
challenged and shall not argue it. Suffice
it to say that in my view our anxiety about the relation between faith and reason here in Europe today is the legacy of a
particular intellectual family. Modern
science has recently been spreading this disturbance all over the planet, but
it has formed no part of the heritage of Chinese or Hindu thought. It has originated with us here in Europe, and
for two and a half millennia it has remained the preoccupation of that part of
humanity that has culturally centered on Europe.
But even within these limits, the perspective I now
see appearing before me is widely sweeping. I see extending behind us three consecutive
periods of rationalism, the Greek, the medieval, and the modern. Greek rationalism rose from a bed of mythopoetic thought. Myths and ritual couch most thoughts of men in
terms of I-Thou and leave little of importance to be said in terms of I-It. Greek rationalism tended to lib-
* Michael Polanyi is currently in the United States as
Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the University of Virginia. He is professor emeritus of the University of Manchester, England, where he was professor of physical
chemistry (1933-48) and professor of social studies (1948-58). He holds the following degrees: MA. (Oxford and Manchester); M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc. (Hon. Princeton); D.Sc.
(Hon. Leeds); L.L.D. (Hon. Aberdeen). Among special positions he has held are those
of Riddell Lecturer, Durham, 1946; Alexander White Visiting Professor, Chicago,
1949; Gifford Lecturer, Aberdeen, 1951-52; Lindsay Memorial Lecturer, Keele, 1958; Eddington Lecturer,
Cambridge, 1960; and Gunning Lecturer, Edinburgh, 1960. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Foreign
Member of the Max Planck Gesellschaft, and Foreign
Member of the National Academy of Science and Letters, Naples. Among his most recent published works, in addition
to various scientific papers, are Science, Faith and Society (1946), Logic
of Liberty (1951), Personal Knowledge (1958), The Study of Man (1959),
and Beyond Nihilism (1960).
erate the mind from this
pervasively personal network and to establish in its place broad areas of
objective thought. It extended I-IT relations
into a philosophic interpretation of things.
The Christian message exploded into this scene as an outrage to
rationalism. It restored the I-Thou relation to the very center of everything. It proclaimed that a man put to death a few
years before in a remote provincial capital was the Son of Almighty God ruling
the universe, and he, this man, had atoned by his death for the sins of
mankind. It taught that it was the
Christian’s duty to believe in this epochal event and to be totally absorbed by
its implications. Faith, faith that
mocks reason, faith that scornfully declares itself to be mere foolishness in
the face of Greek rationalism - this is what Paul enjoined on his audiences.
The picture is well known. But
you may ask where I see any trace here of a new Christian, medieval rationalism
striving to reconcile faith with reason. It emerged later as the Christian message
spread among an intelligentsia steeped in Greek philosophy. It was formulated by Augustine in terms that
became statutory for a thousand years after. Reason was declared by him ancillary to faith,
supporting it up to the point where revelation took over, after which in its
turn faith opened up new paths to reason. What Professor Pieper has shown me for the
first time is that the entire movement of scholastic philosophy from Boethius to William of Ockham was
but a variation on this theme.
Ockham brought scholasticism to a close by
declaring that faith and reason were incompatible and should be kept strictly
separate. Thus he ushered in the period
of modern rationalism, which, too, accepts this separation, but with the new
proviso that reason alone can establish true knowledge. Henceforth, as John Locke was soon to put it,
faith was no longer to be respected as a source of higher light, revealing
knowledge that lies beyond the range of observation and reason, but was to be
regarded merely as a personal acceptance which falls short of rational
demonstrability. The mutual position of
the two Augustinian levels of truth was inverted.
In a way, this step would have brought us back to Greek rationalism,
and many of its authors did so regard it. They hoped that the new secular world view
would appease religious strife and bring back the blessings of an antique
dispassionate religious indifference. However,
post-Christian rationalism soon entered on paths man had never trodden before,
and we stand here today at the dismal end of this journey.
But I have not come here to denounce modern rationalism. The arts, the intellectual splendors, and moral
attainments of the last 300 years stand unrivaled in the history of mankind. The very failures and disasters that surround
us may themselves bear testimony to this. Only gigantic endeavor could precipitate us
into such absurdities as the modern scientific outlook has made current today
and could set millions ablaze with the peculiar skeptical fanaticism of our
age.
Keeping these awful aspects of our situation tacitly in mind, I shall try to trace a new line of thought along which, I believe, we may recover some of the ground rashly abandoned by the modern scientific outlook. I believe indeed that this kind of effort, if pursued systematically, may eventually restore the balance between belief and reason on lines
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essentially similar to those marked out by Augustine at the
dawn of Christian rationalism.
I shall start off in this direction by surveying some essential
features of the process of knowing which are disregarded by the modern
conception of positive, scientific knowledge.
A few years ago a distinguished psychiatrist demonstrated to his
students a patient who was having a mild fit of some kind. Later the class discussed the question whether
this had been an epileptic or a hystero-epileptic
seizure. The matter was finally decided
by the psychiatrist: “Gentlemen,” he said, “you have seen a true epileptic
seizure. I cannot tell you how to
recognize it; you will learn this by more extensive experience.”
The psychiatrist knew how to recognize this disease, but he was not at
all certain how he did this. In other
words, he recognized the disease by attending to its total appearance and did
so by relying on a multitude of clues which he could not clearly specify. Thus his knowledge of the disease differed
altogether from his knowledge of these clues. He recognized the disease by attending to it,
while he was not attending to its symptoms in themselves, but only as clues. We may say that he was
knowing the clues only by relying on them for attending to the
pathological physiognomy to which they contributed. So if he could not tell what these clues were,
while he could tell what the disease was, this was due to the fact that, while
we can always identify a thing we are attending to, and indeed our very
attending identifies it, we cannot always identify the particulars on which we
rely in our attending to the thing.
And this fact can be generalized widely. There are vast domains of knowledge - of which
I shall speak in a moment - that exemplify in various ways that we are in
general unable to tell what particulars we are aware of when attending to a
whole, that is, to a coherent entity which they constitute. Thus we discover that there are two kinds of
knowing which invariably enter jointly into any act of knowing a comprehensive
entity. There is (1) the knowing of a
thing by attending to it, in the way we attend to an entity as a whole and (2)
the knowing of a thing by relying on our awareness of it, in the way we rely on
our awareness of the particulars forming the entity for attending to it as a
whole.
These two kinds of knowing are not only distinct but also, to an
important extent, mutually exclusive. We
cannot attend to a clue as a thing in itself without depriving it of its
meaning as a clue and losing sight thereby of the thing to which it served as a
clue. Gestalt psychology has proved
quite generally that we cannot focus our attention on the particulars of a
whole without impairing our grasp of the whole; and that, conversely, we can
focus on a whole only by reducing our awareness of the particulars to the
contribution they make to the whole. We
may call the latter a subsidiary awareness of the particulars in terms of our
knowledge of the whole that is subserved by them.
As a rule the two alternative kinds of knowing do not
completely extinguish each other. We may
successfully analyze the symptoms of a disease and concentrate our attention on
its several particulars, and then we may return to our conception of its
general appearance by becoming once more subsidiarily
aware of these particulars as contributing to the total picture of the disease.
Indeed, such an oscillation of detailing
and in-
tegrating is the royal road for
deepening our understanding of any comprehensive entity.
In saying this I have pronounced a key word. I have spoken of understanding. Understanding, comprehension - this is the
cognitive faculty cast aside by a positivistic theory of knowledge, which
refuses to acknowledge the existence of comprehensive entities as distinct from
their particulars; and this is the faculty which I recognize as the central act
of knowing. For comprehension can never
be absent from any process of knowing and is indeed the ultimate sanction of
any such act. What is not understood
cannot be said to be known.
Let me rapidly run through various forms of knowing to which this
analysis can be seen to apply. I have so
far used as my leading example the process of medical diagnostics. We have a closely similar process in the
identification of the species to which an animal or a plant belongs. An expert who can identify 800,000 species of
insects must rely on a vast number of clues which he cannot identify in themselves. This is
why zoology and botany cannot be learned from printed pages, any more than
medicine can. This is why so many hours
of practical teaching in the laboratory have to be given in many other branches
of the natural sciences also. Wherever
this happens, some knowledge of the comprehensive aspect of things is being
transmitted: a kind of knowledge which we must acquire by becoming aware of a
multitude of clues that cannot be exhaustively identified.
But we hardly ever do such diagnosing without examining the object in
question, and this testing has itself to be
learned along with the art of recognizing the physiognomies of the tested objects.
We must jointly learn to be skilful
testers as well as expert knowers. Actually, these are only two different and inseparable
processes of comprehension. Expert
knowing relies on a comprehension of clues, while skilful examination relies on
a combination of dexterous motions for tracing these clues.
This reveals the structure of skills quite generally. A performance is called skilful precisely
because we cannot clearly identify its component muscular acts. The craftsman’s cunning consists in
controlling these component acts jointly with a view to a comprehensive
achievement. Such also is the sportsman’s
and the musical performer’s art. Neither
can tell much - and mostly can tell very little - about the several muscular
acts he combines in accomplishing his art.
Skills usually require tools - instruments of some kind, and these are
things akin to the particulars of a comprehensive entity. For they are tools or
instruments by virtue of the very fact that we rely on them for accomplishing
something to which we are attending by using the tool or instrument. In this case we can admittedly identify that
on which we rely, though mostly we do not quite know how we actually use it. In any case, it still remains strikingly true
that we cannot direct our attention to an object as mere object while relying
on it as the tool of a skilful performance. You must keep your eye on the ball, and if you
look at your bat instead, you inevitably lose the stroke. Any skilful performance is paralyzed by attending
focally to its particulars, whether these are the dexterous movements of our
body or the tools which we employ.
The same is true of speech. Listen intently to the sound of your own words,
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disregarding their meaningful context which is the
comprehensive entity that they should subserve, and
you will be instantly struck dumb. The
same is true of the whole multitude of signs, symbols, and gestures by which
human communications are achieved and by the practical use of which the
intelligence of man is developed far beyond that of the animals. Here is another vital area of skilful doing
and knowing, all over which we are met with comprehensive entities to which we
can attend only by relying subsidiarily on things and
acts of our own to which for the time being we do not attend - and must not
attend - in themselves.
Last, deep down, in the most primitive forms of knowing, in the act of sensory
perception, we meet with the very paradigm of the structure which I have
postulated for all kinds of knowledge at all levels. It is sensory perception, and particularly the
way we see things, that has supplied Gestalt
psychologists with material for their fundamental discoveries which I am
expanding here into a new theory of knowledge. They have shown that our seeing is an act of
comprehension for which we rely, in a most subtle manner, on clues from all
over the field of vision as well as on clues inside our body, in the muscles
controlling the motion of the eyes and in those controlling the posture of the
body. All these clues become effective
only if we keep concentrating our attention on the objects we are perceiving. Many
of the clues of perception cannot be known in themselves at all; others can be
traced only by acute scientific analysis; but all of them can serve the purpose
of seeing what is in front of us only if we make no attempt at looking at them
or attend to them in themselves. They must be left to abide in the role of unspecifiable particulars of the spectacle perceived by our
eyes if we are to see anything at all.
This concludes my list. We have
now before us the art of diagnostics and of the testing of
objects to be diagnosed, as taught in universities; we have the practice of skills
in general and the skilful use of tools in particular which leads on
to the use of words and other signs by which human intelligence
is developed; and finally we have the act of perception, the most
fundamental manifestation of intelligence, both in animals and men. In each of these cases we have recognized the
typical elements of comprehension. I now
want to show how this panorama of knowing suggests a new conception of
knowledge, equally comprising both the I-It and the I-Thou
and establishing at the same time a new harmony between belief and reason.
Clearly, the new element I have introduced here into the conception of
knowing is the knowing of things by relying on our awareness of them for attending
to something else that comprises them. And
we may remember now that there is one outstanding and obvious experience of
certain things which we know almost exclusively by relying on them. Our body is a collection of such
things; we hardly ever observe our own body as we observe an external object,
but we continuously rely on it as a tool for observing objects outside and for
manipulating these for purposes of our own. Hence we may regard the knowing of something
by attending to something else, as the kind of knowledge we have of our own
body by living in it. This kind of
knowing is not an I-It relation but rather a way of existing, a manner of
being. We might perhaps call it an
I-Myself or I-Me relation.
We are born to live in our body and to feel that we are relying on it
for our
existence, but the more skilful uses of our body - however
elementary - have to be acquired by a process of learning. For example, the faculty of seeing things by
using our eyes is not inborn; it has to be acquired by a process of learning.
Hence when we get to know something as a clue, as a particular of a
whole, as a tool, as a word, or as an element contributing to perception, by
learning to rely on it, we do so in the same way as we learn to rely on our
body for exercising intellectual and practical control over objects of our
surrounding. So any extension of the area
of reliance by which we enrich our subsidiary knowledge of things is an
extension of the kind of knowledge we usually have of our body; it is indeed an
extension of our bodily existence to include things outside it. To acquire new subsidiary knowledge is to
enlarge and modify our intellectual being by assimilating the things we learn
to rely on. Alternatively, we may describe
the same process as an act of pouring ourselves into these things by relying on
them.
Such ways of acquiring knowledge may sound strange, but then we are
dealing with a kind of knowledge which, though familiar enough to us all, seems
never to have been clearly identified by students of the theory of knowledge. Hitherto recognized processes for acquiring
knowledge, whether by experience or deduction, apply only to the knowledge of
things we are attending to and not to what we know of things by relying on our
awareness of them in the process of attending to something else. I shall continue, therefore, my account of the
way such knowledge is acquired and held, however curious, this account may
sound at first hearing.
I have said that when we rely on our awareness of some things for
attending to something else, we assimilate these things to our body. In this sense, then, subsidiary knowledge is
held by indwelling. We comprehend the
particulars of a whole in terms of the whole by dwelling in the particulars;
or, in other words, we grasp the joint meaning of the particulars by dwelling
in them.
All my earlier examples of comprehension can be seen to illustrate this
conclusion. To diagnose a disease is to
grasp the joint meaning of its symptoms, many of which we could not specify; so
we know these particulars only by relying on them as clues. Indwelling comes out more evidently when
applied to the skilful testing of an object, or to any other feat of dexterous
handling. Here we literally dwell in the
innumerable muscular acts which contribute to our purpose, and this purpose is
their joint meaning. But indwelling is
perhaps most vivid in man’s use of language. Human intelligence, which surpasses that of
animals, comes into existence only by grasping the meaning and mastering the
use of language. Little of our mind
lives in our natural body; a truly human intellect dwells in us only when our
lips shape words and our eyes read print. The intellectual difference between a naked
pigmy of central Africa and a member of the French Academy is grounded in the
cultural equipment by which Paris surpasses the African jungle. The French academician’s superior mind is
formed and dwells in his intelligent use of this superior equipment.
At this point we see before us a way of knowing a
human being in the fulness of his dignity through
recognizing in him the same powers of understanding by which we are
understanding him.
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But let us
look first at the way comprehension is achieved - comprehension as understood
by my examples. More often than not we
comprehend things in a flash. But it is
more illuminating to think of the way we struggle from a puzzled
incomprehension of a state of affairs toward its real meaning. The success of such efforts
demonstrate man’s capacity for knowing the presence of a hidden reality
accessible to his understanding. This
capacity is at work in all our knowing, from the dawn of discovery to the
holding of established truth. Our active
foreknowledge of an unknown reality is the right motive and guide of knowing in
all our mental endeavors. Formal
processes of inference cannot thrust toward the truth, for they have neither
passion nor purpose. All explicit forms
of reasoning, whether deductive or inductive, are impotent in themselves; they
can operate only as the intellectual tools of man’s tacit powers reaching
toward the hidden meaning of things.
Plato has argued that the task of solving a problem is logically absurd
and therefore impossible. For if we already
know the solution, there is no occasion to search for it; while if we do not
know it, we cannot search for it either, since we do not know then what we are
looking for. The task of solving a problem
must indeed appear self-contradictory unless we admit that we can possess true
intimations of the unknown. This is what
Plato’s argument proves, namely, that every advance in understanding is moved
and guided by our power for seeing the presence of some hidden comprehensive
entity behind yet incomprehensible clues pointing increasingly toward this yet
unknown entity.
When a student is taught how to identify a disease or a biological
specimen, his confidence in the hidden coherence of a puzzling state of affairs
is guided by an external aid. For
example, when the psychiatrist I mentioned said to his students that they will
learn to recognize in practice the characteristic appearance of an epileptic
seizure, he meant that they would learn to do so by accepting his own
diagnosis of such cases and trying to understand what he based it on. All practical teaching, the teaching of
comprehension in all the senses of the term, is based on authority. The student must be confident that his master
understands what he is trying to teach him and that he, the student, will
eventually succeed in his turn to understand the meaning of the things which
are being explained to him.
But whether our confidence in the powers of our comprehension arises
spontaneously from the depth of our inquiring mind or leans on our trust in the
judgment of our teachers, it is always an act of hope akin to the dynamism of
all human faith. Tillich
says that “that which is meant by an act of faith cannot be approached in any
other way than through an act of faith.” And this holds here too. There is no other way of approaching a hidden
meaning than by intrusting ourselves to our intimations of its yet unseen
presence. And such intimations are the
only path toward enlarging and upholding our intellectual mastery over our
surroundings.
Tillich says that his dynamic conception of
faith “is the result of conceptual analysis, both of the objective and
subjective side of faith.” This is precisely
what I claim for my derivation of the dynamic conception of knowing. It is derived in the last resort from our
realization of the two kinds of knowledge which combine to the under-
standing of a comprehensive entity. Our reliance on our awareness of the particulars
is the personal; our knowledge of the entity, the objective element of knowing.
The dynamic impulse by which we acquire understanding is only reduced
and never lost when we hold knowledge acquired and established by this impulse.
The same impulse sustains our conviction
for dwelling in this knowledge and for developing our thoughts within its
framework. Live knowledge is a perpetual
source of new surmises, an inexhaustible mine of still
hidden implications. The death of Max
von Laue last year should remind us that his discovery
of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals was universally acclaimed as an
amazing confirmation of the existing theory of crystals and X-rays. In a like manner, Dalton’s atomic theory was
an amazing confirmation of Boyle’s speculation on the structure of crystals,
which itself was a development of ideas originating with Lucretius
and Epicurus. And Dalton’s theory was
amazingly confirmed in its turn by the experiments of J. J. Thompson ninety
years later. To hold knowledge is indeed
always a commitment to indeterminate implications, for human knowledge is but
an intimation of reality, and we can never quite tell in what new way reality
may yet manifest itself. It is external
to us; it is objective; and so its future manifestations can never be
completely under our intellectual control.
So all true knowledge is inherently hazardous, just
as all true faith is a leap into the unknown. Knowing includes its own uncertainty as an
integral part of it, just as, according to Tillich,
all faith necessarily includes its own dubiety.
The traditional division between faith and reason, or faith and science
(which Tillich, too, erroneously reaffirms), reflects
the assumption that reason and science proceed by explicit rules of logical deduction
or inductive generalization. But I have
shown that these operations are impotent by themselves, and I could add that
they cannot even be strictly defined by themselves. To know is to understand, and explicit logical
processes are effective only as tools in search of the solution of a problem,
commitment by which we expand our understanding and continue to hold the
result. They have no meaning except
within this informal dynamic context. Once
this is recognized, the contrast between faith and reason dissolves, and the
close similarity of this structure emerges in its place.
Admittedly, religious conversion commits our whole person and changes our whole being in a way that an expansion of natural knowledge does not do. But once the dynamics of knowing are recognized as the dominant principle of knowledge, the difference appears only as one of degree. For - as we have seen - all extension of comprehension involves an expansion of ourselves into a new dwelling place, of which we assimilate the framework by relying on it as we do on our own body. Indeed, the whole intellectual being of man comes into existence in this very manner by absorbing the language and the cultural heritage in which he is brought up. The amazing deployment of the infant mind is stirred on by a veritable blaze of its confidence, in surmising the hidden meanings of speech and other adult behavior, and so eventually grasping their meanings. Moreover, the child’s dynamic intellectual progress has its closely similar counterpart on the highest levels of man’s creative achievement
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- and the structure of both these processes resembles in its
turn that of the self-transformation entailed in a religious conversion.
But perhaps the deepest division between reason and faith arises from
the urge toward objectivity which tends to destroy the I-Thou
commitment of the religious world view and establish a panorama of I-It
relations in its place. Has not the
modern positivist outlook exercised its pressure even on the purely secular
studies of the human mind, as well as of human affairs whether past or present,
in favor of a mechanical conception of man which represents him as a bundle of
appetites, or as a mechanical toy, or as a passive product of social circumstances?
But this too is the outcome of the obsessive limitation of knowledge to
the results of explicit inferences. Persons can be identified as comprehensive
entities only by relying on our awareness of numberless particulars, most of
which we could never specify in themselves. This is the same process by which we diagnose
an elusive illness or read a printed page. Just as we assimilate the symptoms of a
disease by attending to their meaning, so we assimilate the workings of another
man’s mind by attending to his mind. In
this sense we may be said to know his mind by dwelling in its manifestations. Such is the structure of empathy (which I
prefer to call conviviality), which alone can establish a knowledge of other
minds - and even of the simplest living beings.
Behaviorism tries to replace convivial knowledge by I-It observations
of the particulars by which the mind of an individual manifests itself and
tries to relate these particulars to each other by a process of explicit
inference. But since most of the
particulars in question cannot be observed in themselves at all and, in any
case, their relation cannot be explicitly stated, the enterprise ends up by
replacing its original subject matter by a grotesque simulacrum of it in which
the mind itself is missing. The kind of
knowledge which I am vindicating here, and which I call personal knowledge, casts
aside these absurdities of the current scientific approach and reconciles the
process of knowing with the acts of addressing another person. In doing so, it establishes,
a continuous ascent from our less personal knowing of inanimate matter to our
convivial knowing of living beings and beyond this to the knowing of our
responsible fellow men. Such I believe
is the true transition from the science to the humanities and also from our
knowing the laws of nature to our knowing the person of God.
But is the person we may know in this manner not floating vaguely above
his own bodily substance, outside of which he actually cannot exist at all? The answer to this question will reveal a surprising
affinity between my conception of personhood and a central doctrine of
Christianity.
I have said that the mind of a person is a comprehensive entity which is not specifiable in terms of its constituent particulars; but this is not to say that it can exist apart or outside of these particulars. The meaning of a printed page cannot be specified in terms of a chemical analysis of its ink and paper, but neither can its meaning be conveyed without the use of a physical medium, such as ink and paper. Though the laws of physics and chemistry apply to the particles of the body, they do not determine the manifestations of the mind; their function is to offer an opportunity - an admittedly limited and precarious
opportunity - for the mind to live and manifest itself. Our sense organs, our brain, the whole
infinitely complex interplay of our organism offer to the mind the instruments
for exercising its intelligence and judgment, and, at the same time, they
restrict the scope of this enterprise, deflecting it by delusions, obstructing
it by sickness, and terminating it by death.
The knowing of comprehensive entities thus establishes a series of ascending
levels of existence. The relationship I
have just outlined obtains throughout between succeeding levels of this
hierarchy. The existence of a higher
principle is always rooted in the inferior levels governed by less comprehensive
principles. Within this lower medium and
by virtue of it, the higher principle can operate widely but not unconditionally,
its range being restricted and its every action tainted by the very medium on
which it has to rely for exercising its powers.
We see, then, that as the rising levels of existence were created by
successive stages of evolution, each new level achieved higher powers entramelled by new possibilities of corruption. The primeval matrix of life was inanimate and
deathless - subject neither to failure nor suffering. From it have emerged levels of biotic
existence liable to malformation and disease and, at higher stages, prone also
to illusion, to error, to neurotic affliction - finally producing in man, in
addition to all these liabilities, an ingrained propensity to do evil. Such is the necessary condition of a morally
responsible being, grafted on a bestiality through which alone it can exercise its
own powers.
Such is the inescapable predicament of man which theology has called his fallen nature. Our vision of redemption
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is the converse of this predicament. It is the vision of a man set free from this
bondage. Such a man would be God
incarnate; he would suffer and die as a man, and yet by this very suffering and
death he would prove himself divinely free from evil. This is the event, whether historic or
mythical, which shattered the framework of Greek rationalism and has set for
all time the hopes and obligations of man far beyond the horizons of Greek
philosophy.
I have mentioned divinity and the possibility of knowing God. These subjects lie outside my argument. But my conception of knowing opens the way to
them. Knowing, as a dynamic force of
comprehension, uncovers at each step a new hidden meaning. It reveals a universe of comprehensive
entities which represent the meaning of their largely unspecifiable
particulars. A universe constructed as
an ascending hierarchy of meaning and excellence is very different from the
picture of a chance collocation of atoms to which the examination of the
universe by explicit modes of inference leads us. The vision of such a hierarchy inevitably
sweeps on to envisage the meaning of the universe as a whole. Thus natural knowing expands continuously into
knowledge of the supernatural.
The very act of scientific discovery offers a paradigm
of this transition. I have described it
as a passionate pursuit of a hidden meaning, guided by intensely personal
intimations of this yet unexposed reality. The intrinsic hazards of such efforts are of
its essence; discovery is defined as an advancement of knowledge that cannot be
achieved by any, however diligent, application of explicit modes of inference. Yet the discoverer must labor night and day. For though no labor can make a discovery, no
discovery can be made without intense, absorbing, devoted labor. Here we have a paradigm of the Pauline scheme
of faith, works and grace. The
discoverer works in the belief that his labors will prepare his mind for
receiving a truth from sources over which he has no control. I regard the Pauline scheme therefore as the
only adequate conception of scientific discovery.
Such is, in bold outline, my program for reconsidering the conception
of knowledge and restoring thereby the harmony between faith and reason. Few of the clues which are guiding me today
were available to the Scholastics. The
modes of reasoning which they relied on were inadequate; their knowledge of
nature was tenuous and often spurious. Moreover, the faith they wanted to prove
rational was cast into excessively rigid and detailed formulas, presenting
intractable and sometimes even absurd problems to the reasoning mind.
Even so, though their enterprise collapsed, it left great monuments
behind it, and I believe that we are today in an infinitely better position to
renew their basic endeavor. The present
need for it could not be more pressing
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The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy