The Tacit Dimension

My first lecture dealt with our power of tacit knowing. It shows that tacit knowing achieves comprehension by indwelling, and that all knowledge consists of or is rooted in such acts of comprehension. The second lecture showed how the structure of tacit knowing determines the structure of comprehensive entities. By studying the way tacit knowing comprehends human performances, we saw that what is comprehended has the same structure as the act that comprehends it. The relation of a comprehensive entity to its particulars was then seen to be the relation between two levels of reality, the higher one controlling the marginal conditions left indeterminate by the principles governing the lower one. Such levels were then stacked on top of each other to form a hierarchy, and this stacking opened up the panorma of stratified living beings. This stratification offered a framework for defining emergence as the action which produces the next higher level, first from the inanimate to the living and then from each biotic level to the one above it. This holds both for the development of an individual and for the evolution of living things.

Thus emergence took over from tacit knowing the function of producing fundamental innovations; but, as emergence continued to scale the heights leading on to the rise of man, it gradually resumed its encountered form of human knowing. So in the end we were confronted again with the mind of man, making ever new sense of the world by dwelling in its particulars with a view to their comprehension.

Now we enter anew range of subjects. We must ask whether intellectual powers, grounded in tacit knowing and descended from evolutionary emergence, can exercise the kind of responsible judgment which - we must claim if we are to attribute amoral sense to man. Could, in fact, my rebuttal of exactitude as the ideal of science open the way toward a theory re-establishing the justification of moral standards?

Let me take my bearings once more from the questions which formed my point of departure. I told you how I was struck by the theory that prevailed for a considerable time under Stalin in Soviet Russia, which denied the justification of science as a pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. I said that this violent self-immolation of the mind was actuated by moral motives, and that a similar fusion of unprecedented critical lucidity and intensified moral passions pervades our whole civilization, inflaming or paralyzing both reason and morality.

The story has often been told how scientific rationalism has impaired moral beliefs, first by shattering their religious sanctions and then by questioning their logical grounds; but the usual account does not explain the state of the modern mind. It is true that the Enlightenment weakened ecclesiastical authority and that modern positivism has denied justification to all transcendent values. But I do not think that the discredit which the ideal of exact scientific knowledge had cast on the grounds of moral convictions would by itself have much damaged these convictions.

The self-destructive tendencies of the modern mind arose only when the influence of scientific scepticism was combined with a fervor that swept modern man in the very opposite direction. Only when a new passion for moral progress was fused with modern scientific scepticism did the typical state of the modern mind emerge. The new social aspirations had their origins in Christianity, but they were evoked by the attacks on Christianity. It was only when the philosophy of Enlightenment had weakened the intellectual authority of the Christian churches that Christian aspirations spilled over into man's secular thoughts, and vastly intensified our moral demands on society. The shattering of ecclesiastical control may have been morally damaging in the long run, but its early effect was to raise the standards of social morality.

What is more, scientific scepticism smoothly cooperated at first with the new passions for social betterment. By battling against established authority, scepticism cleared the way for political freedom and humanitarian reforms. Throughout the nineteenth century, scientific rationalism inspired social and moral changes that have improved almost every human relationship, both private and public, throughout Western civilisation. Indeed, ever since the French Revolution, and up to our own days, scientific rationalism has been a major influence toward intellectual, moral, and social progress.

Where, then, is the fateful conflict between the moral skepticism of science and the unprecedented moral demands of modern man?

Throughout the very period during which they were so beneficiently combined, we can trace the rising undercurrent of their joint destructive influence, and this current finally surfaced and eventually became dominant in the last fifty years. Both scientific scepticism and moral perfectionism had for some time been growing more radical and more irreconcilable, and more deeply ingrained in our thought; and eventually they fused into various unions, each of which embodied a dangerous internal contradiction.

These hybrids of scepticism and perfectionism fall into two classes, one personal, the other political.

The first kind of hybrid can be represented by modern existentialism. Scientific detachment, it says, presents us with a world of bare facts. There is nothing there to justify authority of tradition. These facts are there; for the rest, man's choice is unrestricted. You might expect moral perfectionism to be shocked by this teaching. But no, it rejoices in it. For modern existentialism uses moral scepticism to blast the morality of the existing society as artificial, ideological, hypocritical.

More scepticism and moral perfectionism thus combine to discredit all explicit expressions of morality. We have, then, moral passions filled with contempt for their own ideals. And once they shun their own ideals, moral passions can express themselves only in anti-moralism. Professions of absolute self-assertion, gratuitous crime and perversity, self-hatred and despair, remain as the only defences against a searing self-suspicion of bad faith. Modern existentialists recognise the Marquis de Sade as the earliest moralist of this kind. Dostoyevsky's Stavregin in The Possessed is its classic representation in terms of fiction. Its theory was perhaps first outlined by Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals. Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer was its first major epiphany. Modern literature is replete with its professions.

The conception of morality established by this movement eliminates the distinction between good and evil, and it is pointless therefore to express opposition to it by moral reprobation.

The unprecedented critical lucidity of modern man is fused here with his equally unprecedented moral demands and produces an angry absolute individualism. But adjacent to this, the same fusion produces political teachings which sanction the total suppression of the individual. Scientific skepticism and moral perfectionism join forces then in a movement denouncing any appeal to moral ideals as futile and dishonest. Its perfectionism demands a total transformation of society, but this utopian project is not allowed to declare itself. It conceals its moral motives by embodying them in a struggle for power, believed to bring about automatically the aims of utopia. It blindly accepts for this belief the scientific testimony of Marxism. Marxism embodies the boundless moral aspirations of modern man in a theory which protects his ideals from skeptical doubt by denying the reality of moral motives in public life. The power of Marxism lies in uniting the two contradictory forces of the modern mind into a single political doctrine. Thus originated a world-embracing idea, in which moral doubt is frenzied by moral fury and moral fury is armed by scientific nihilism. (Polyanyi: The Tacit Dimension. Routledge Kegan Paul).