RECOVERING HOPE IN AN AGE OF DESPAIR:
A CRITIQUE OF THE METAPHYSICS OF MODERNITY
by
KIRATMANI SARAN
Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy (Honours), Trinity Western University, 2021

Thesis
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS in INTERDISCIPLINARY HUMANITIES (PHILOSOPHY)
in the
FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
TRINITY WESTERN UNIVERSITY

March 2024
© Kirat Saran, 2024

ii
Abstract
The purpose of this investigation is twofold: first, to show that the modern scientific
worldview is, in essence, reductionist and totalizing and, second, to critique the drive behind
modern science, which I call ‘scientific thinking,’ showing how this drive blocks all
legitimate channels of hope. The first two chapters examine the unacknowledged worldview,
or metaphysics, of modernity, which proves to be all the more dangerous because it is
unacknowledged, and how such a worldview diminishes the “stature of man.”1 In the third
and fourth chapters, I draw from the works of Michael Polanyi, among others, to show the
way toward a more human and humane science, one which is founded on authority and
tradition and does not preclude the scientist’s judgement and responsibility. In the fourth
chapter, I focus specifically on what Polanyi calls the “tacit,” that is, the underlying basis of
all formalizable knowledge. The final chapter takes a closer look at the posture of hope, as
articulated by Gabriel Marcel, and how far we are from it.

Hannah Arendt, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” Between Past and Future: Eight
Exercises in Political Thought, (London: Penguin, 1968), 260-74.
1

iii
Contents

Prologue

Introduction to Hope and Modern Scientific Thinking

iv

Chapter I

Objectivity and the Scientific Age

1

Chapter II

What is Called Thinking?

24

Chapter III

Personal Knowledge

45

Chapter IV

The Tacit Dimension

62

Chapter V

Hope

78

Epilogue

A Magnificent Failure

Bibliography

100
103

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Prologue: Introduction to Hope and Modern Scientific Thinking
In this paper, I take on the metaphysics of modernity, as I have called it in the title, or
what, hereafter, I shall call the ‘scientific worldview.’ The danger of conjuring this nebulous
beast—science—is, in fact, great. Few terms have been so deeply misunderstood. The
tragedy lies, however, not only in misunderstanding, but in our naive assumption that we
understand. Ignorance disguised as knowledge has been the bane of the earliest philosophers
for the very reason that such ignorance is foolproof: it seeks no alteration. If nothing else, I
aspire to show why the totalization of scientific thinking warrants our attention.
The purpose of this investigation is twofold: first, to show that the modern scientific
worldview is, in essence, reductionist and totalizing and, second to critique the drive behind
modern science, which I call ‘scientific thinking,’2 showing how this drive blocks all
legitimate channels of hope. Along the way, I also highlight the political and moral crises
endemic to the modern world as a consequence of scientific thinking. The first two chapters
focus on making apparent the unacknowledged worldview, or metaphysics, of modernity,
which proves to be all the more dangerous because it is unacknowledged, and how such a
worldview diminishes the “stature of man.”3 In chapter three and four, I draw from the works
of Michael Polanyi, among others, to show the way toward a more human and humane
science, one which is founded on authority and tradition and does not preclude the scientist’s
judgement and responsibility. In the fourth chapter, I focus specifically on what Polanyi calls
the “tacit,” that is, the underlying basis of all articulated and formalizable knowledge.
Science operates on the assumption that all experience can be made fully explicit;
however, this assumption, namely that there can be a theory of everything, relies on various
tacitly held beliefs, only some of which we are capable of explicating. Suffice it to say, for
now, that because the tacit cannot be eliminated, we must re-envision the scientific project as

Pseudo-scientific thinking would perhaps be the more accurate term, for, as I hope to show, not only
can we imagine science differently but we must.
2

Hannah Arendt, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” Between Past and Future: Eight
Exercises in Political Thought, (London: Penguin, 1968), 260-74.
3

v
human-grounded and, for this reason, more hopeful than it lets on. If Polanyi is right, then
the practice of science takes this insight for granted: in conducting scientific inquiry, the
scientist makes no scruple of relying upon meaning or tacit assumptions, even though he
cannot always account for them. However, theoretically this is not the case:4 convinced more
than ever that scientific discovery will yield truth, we aim to align our criteria to those of the
scientist. The problem is that the scientist’s unintentional dishonesty has a detrimental effect
on the world at large, which believes in a scientific vision which, ultimately, does not exist.5
The only means of escape available to contemporary man, imprisoned in conceptual
misunderstanding, is to recognize that his being is not reducible to the measurable, that there
remains more to his being than he can ever fully explain. Receptivity towards a transcendent
otherness is the very basis of hope. The final chapter takes a closer look at the posture of
hope and how far we are from it.
In a preemptive move to appease the scientifically minded reader, I wish to make
clear that this work is not a condemnation of science. Science, and all that it has
accomplished, is a testament to our humanity; however, we should not forget that the glory of
science cannot be independent of the human being. Absolutely, we should rejoice in the ease
and comfort science provides us; however, we should not be content with mere comfort—
higher ends are at stake, not least of which are truth and freedom.

Quantum theory offers a notable exception. Werner Heisenberg writes, “This again [the use of tools]
emphasizes a subjective element in the description of atomic events, since the measuring device has
been constructed by the observer, and we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in
itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in
asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from
experiment by the means that are at our disposal.” Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in
Modern Science, (New York: HarperPerennial, 1958), 32; emphasis added. As we are still dealing
with the picture of the world projected by classical physics (a point Heisenberg concedes with
qualification, 23), this but little affects my argument. Nonetheless, this point warrants more attention
than I have given it here, although it is not as damning as some believe it to be.
4

5

See Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 29-30.

vi
Robert M. Pirsig in his novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, writes,
“Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world.”6 I
should add that they are not even so concerned. Science cannot consistently speak of better or
worse; these are qualitative distinctions, which can only be made by an experiencing agent.
Pirsig, whilst engaging in a thoughtful and literary exploration of reality, draws out the
distinction between two modes of thinking: the classical (or analytical) and the romantic. He
comes to the conclusion that one needs both; neither way of thinking can go it alone.7
Science, or pseudo-science, in so far as it puts reality under the theoretical scalpel, and
totalizes the analytical stance, is forgetful of its tacit roots. All this to say, properly
understood, science may be the crowning jewel of humanity; conversely, if we fail to heed
the warning signs of modernity—the disintegration of human relations8 and the
disenfranchisement of the human world—we are headed for a deeply subhuman future,
which will push us, and scientific inquiry, to the brink of self-obliteration.
Before beginning, some clarifications are needed. First, the demand to write clearly is
undercut by the substance of the argument, for it is just this demand for clarity, at the expense
of meaning, that I oppose. However, since I oppose it not with an anarchic spirit, I hope to
show how one can rely on modern rationality without totalizing it. This is one of Raymond
Tallis’s arguments against the so-called “enemies of hope,” post-modernists who bemoan the
ills of Enlightenment without acknowledging their indebtedness to the progress of modernity.
As a woman of Indian ethnic origin, born and residing in the Western world, I appreciate
modern progress, which allows me to engage with philosophical issues in the public sphere;
not to mention numerous mundane freedoms which are taken for granted. However, the
distance from such gratitude to the dismissal of contemporary spiritual and mental ailments

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, (New York: William Morrow, 1999),
114.
6

7

Pirsig, Zen and the Art, 70-1.

8 As

Pirsig remarks, “It’s not technology that’s scary. It’s what it does to the relationships between
people” (Zen and the Art, 54).

vii
is, indeed, great. We, in the West, may admittedly owe a great debt to modernity for our
material advance; however, from this it does not follow that we cannot critique its
shortcomings.9 Moreover, just because we enjoy certain material advantages which are the
yield of modern science does not mean that scientific thinking does not degrade our being in
other ways. Thus, I am distressed by Tallis’s observation that
Organic, materially impoverished societies look attractive, perhaps, only to those who
do not have to live in them. Only to those who are not hungry, in pain, afraid of
destitution in communities whose only source of welfare is the capricious charity of the
well-heeled, do abstract forms of suffering seem more important than the concrete ones
that have been palliated by the material advancement of mankind acting in accordance
with reason and a sense of justice and equity.10
Tallis seems to trivialize the serious and deeply felt plight of many individuals, which is
“abstract” only for those who do not suffer it. Certainly, I do not think myself in a position to
decide whether the suffering of a starving child is more or less than that of one who is wellfed and depressed; however, I cannot imagine it is as obvious as the above passage implies.
I raise this objection, not to refute the notion of progress, nor to deride the
achievements of the West, but rather to put into perspective the all too common prosperous
picture of the Western world. There are gaps in this prosperity which, with the grinding gears
of time within the technocratic machine, are becoming increasingly apparent. The very fact
that I am writing today is evidence of my belief in progress; more than that, it is a testament
to the power of judgement (or reason) and an admission of responsibility. I am in agreement
with Tallis that postmodern attempts to eliminate rational consciousness are not only
contradictory but, even more importantly, disastrous to our humanity.11 So, it is not for this
reason that I take objection to his argument. More than anything, what I offer here is an
affirmative defence, lest I am branded an enemy of hope.

To be fair, Tallis acknowledges as much. Enemies of Hope: A Critique of Contemporary Pessimism,
(New York: St. Marten’s Press, 1999), 62-3 & 360-1.
9

10

Tallis, Enemies of Hope, 42.

11

Talli, Enemies of Hope, 63.

1
I: Objectivity and the Scientific Age
i. What is Objectivity?
The Copernican Revolution, it is believed, symbolically displaced man, as it
physically displaced man’s abode, the earth,12 as the centre of the universe. Modern science
thence pursued the course of pure objectivity.13 However, what does this mean?
Michael Polanyi in his book, Personal Knowledge, reassesses the lesson learned from
the Copernican Revolution, which, according to him, has been seriously misunderstood. The
Copernican system, argues Polanyi, is no less anthropocentric than the Ptolemaic, “the
difference being merely that it preferred to satisfy a different human affectation.”14 Here we
need pay attention to what is meant by objectivity: is objectivity that which is wholly
independent of the subject? Charles Taylor argues that “[t]he modern sense is one in which
We see here, already, the effects of scientific thinking: it is the world and not the earth which is the
proper abode of man; however, today, we cannot account for the difference.
12

The English term “objectivity” is of relatively recent coinage, dating only to the mid-nineteenth
century (Zagorin 381). Nonetheless, the concept predates the term. Objectivity, as Perez Zagorin
observes, whilst discussing objectivity and Francis Bacon’s “idols of the mind,” may pertain to any of
these three related denotations: “first, the true and certain knowledge of a thing, property or state of
affairs; second, a method of inquiry designed and competent to elicit a true knowledge, understanding
or explanation of a thing, property or state of affairs; third, a type of judgement or mental disposition
on the part of scientists, scholars, moralists, philosophers and other investigators that sets aside
prejudice, partiality and predetermined answers in the process of any kind of inquiry and the appraisal
of its results” (379). In providing these definitions, Zagorin fails to question the underlying concept of
truth, which, in this case, is indispensable. Whilst comparing the original definition of objective as
“an external object … present to the mind” (381), i.e., the literal quality of being an object (in relation
to a subject), and the contemporary understanding of objective as that which exists independently of
the subjective—for, when we wish to know what the world is like without the interference of the socalled ‘idols of the mind’, the kind of knowledge we are seeking excludes the subjective (this is in
answer to Zagorin who seems to think that Bacon’s acknowledgement of the necessity of
interpretation is sufficient to reintegrate the subjective and the objective; both Bacon and Zagorin
suffer from a similar misunderstanding, one which allows them to affirm and deny the efficacy of
subjectivity simultaneously)—Zagorin passes over a metaphysical shift in silence. The modern
definition impinges upon the original with one qualification: presence is no longer implied in the
concept of objectivity; it appears as an independent reality. This is precisely the conception of
objectivity that will be challenged herein. Peter Zagorin, “Francis Bacon’s Concept of Objectivity and
the Idols of the Mind,” The British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 34, no. 4 (Dec., 2001),
379-393.
13

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962), 4.
Polanyi continues, “We abandon the cruder anthropocentrism of our senses—but only in favour of a
more ambitious anthropocentrism of our reason” (4-5).
14

2
subject and object are separable entities. That is, in principle—though perhaps not in fact—
one could exist without the other.”15 Polanyi defines objectivity differently, as that which
relies more upon theory and less upon immediate sensory experience. Only if one accepts
this shift, argues Polanyi, does he have recourse to the claim that the Copernican system is
more objective.16 Objectivity, properly understood, does not minimize subjectivity but rather
is indebted to it: “Objectivity does not demand that we estimate man’s significance in the
universe by the minute size of his body, by the brevity of his past history or his probable
future career. It does not require that we see ourselves as a mere grain of sand in a million
Saharas. It inspires us, on the contrary,” writes Polanyi, “with the hope of overcoming the
appalling disabilities of our bodily existence, even to the point of conceiving a rational idea
of the universe which can authoritatively speak for itself.”17 Even so, we need remember that
it is only through our subjectivity—observation, intuition, judgement—that we encounter the
objective; we do not transcend experience, for the very act of transcendence is experiential.
John Donne captures the sentiment poetically, “Be more than man, or thou’rt less than an
ant.”18 To earn the appellation ‘human’ one must rise up out of the stream of necessity.19
Science—misunderstood, if Polanyi is right—works toward the opposite end: it lowers man
into the stream of necessity as just another, albeit more sophisticated, animal, not unlike an
ant.

15

Taylor, Sources, 188.

16

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 3-5.

17

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 5.

18

John Donne, “An Anatomy of the World,” line 190.

This theme cuts across most of Arendt’s major works; particularly damning is her critique of T. E.
Lawrence, who “believed he had entered—or had been driven into—the stream of historical necessity
and become a functionary or agent of the secret forces which rule the world” (220). “This,” argues
Arendt, “is the end of the real pride of Western man who no longer counts as an end himself, no
longer does ‘a thing himself nor a thing so clean as to be his own’ by giving laws to the world, but has
a chance only ‘if he pushes the right way’ [Lawrence] in alliance with the secret forces of history and
necessity—of which he is but a function” (221). In a word, human agency is effectively destroyed
when man no longer sees himself as an end (Kant). Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism,
(Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1958).
19

3
Although the story of modern science begins before Copernicus, with the advent of
Western rationalism, “it leads directly to him.”20 The triumph of reason over nature, as if the
two were adversaries, shifts the valuation of both: nature is no longer the sanctified
unknown; its secrets can be revealed through reason. However, this reversal is yet far from
the modern attitude toward nature as a “standing reserve.”21 Polanyi discerns two distinct
lines of thought developing in ancient Greece: the Pythagorean and that of the Ionian
philosophers. The former conceived of the universe as numeric harmony: Copernicus, and,
following him, Johannes Kepler, forwarded this project, which culminated in René Descartes’
attempt to totalize knowledge as mathematics. On the other hand, the materialists developed
the “mechanistic” worldview; for instance, Democritus rejected the theory of harmony for
atomic randomness and chaos.22 The two finally merged in “pure” mathematics, which no
longer discerns harmony in the universe, for it is abstracted from nature. The triumph of
reason, thus, proved to be counterintuitive in so far as it aimed to penetrate the objective, that
which is outside and therefore wholly other to man, and yet revealed itself as rooted in
subjectivity; pure mathematics, in as much as it is “necessarily true,” is differentiated from
the contingent events of nature.23
Here perhaps a slight digression on the essence of mathematics is needed. In his short
and insightful essay, “The Age of the World Picture,” Martin Heidegger claims that the
essence of mathematics is not synonymous with the numeric, although the latter is one of its
most obvious instances. He identifies the essence of mathematics as that which is “always-

20

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 7.

Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William
Levitt, (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 17.
21

“By convention coloured, by convention sweet, by convention bitter; in reality only atoms and the
void” (quoted in Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 8). It is perhaps not wholly accurate to categorize this
view as ‘mechanistic,’ for, as Polanyi observes, the mechanistic, although dependent on the physical,
is not reducible to it.
22

23

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 9.

4
already-known.”24

For instance, one might be unaware of the exact number of flowers in a

vase—four or five—but he is not a stranger to four-ness or five-ness. Hence, we are mistaken
when we take physics, or inquiry into corporeal nature, to be essentially mathematical (this
mistake lies behind the outright dismissal of Aristotelian physics as inaccurate). On the
contrary, mathematics is but one way of approaching corporeal reality, a way in which
“something is specified in advance as that which is already known.”25 Therefore, it is a way
or approach to being, not its internal character. Heidegger continues, “Mathematical research
into nature is not … exact because it calculates precisely; rather, it must calculate precisely
because the way it is bound to its domain of objects has the character of exactness.”26 It is
because we value exactness or precision as an epistemic criterion—think of Descartes’ “clear
and distinct ideas”27—that the book of nature seems to be written in the language of
mathematics.28 What is truly remarkable about the modern age is not the progress it has made
in understanding corporeal reality, through decoding its mathematical structure, but rather its
inability to reflect upon its means of understanding.
“[A]s human beings,” states Polanyi, “we must inevitably see the universe from a
centre lying within ourselves and speak about it in terms of a human language shaped by the
exigencies of human intercourse. Any attempt rigorously to eliminate our human perspective
from our picture of the world must lead to absurdity.”29 In a paradoxical move, as we shall
Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track, translated by Julian Young and
Kenneth Haynes, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 59. In Being and Time, whilst
reflecting on Descartes’ concept ‘world’, Heidegger writes, “Mathematical knowledge is regarded as
the one way of apprehending beings which can always be certain of the secure possession of the
being of beings which it apprehends” (93). Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan
Stambaugh, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).
24

25

Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 59.

26

Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 60.

René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 4th edition, translated by Donald A. Cress,
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998), 75, med. 3, para. 43.
27

Galileo Galilei, “The Assayer,” The Controversy on the Comets 1618, translated by Stillman Drake,
(Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960).
28

29

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 3.

5
see, the modern aim to accomplish exactly this leads to a complete subjectivization or
internalization of the outer (and truly objective) world. We succeed in eliminating ourselves
from our world picture by recreating (or representing) this picture mentally, to wit, by
favouring one aspect of our being, and mistaking this representation for reality. Descartes, of
course, famously distinguishes between the thinking substance and the corporeal substance;
following his new method, he comes to the conclusion that the thinking substance is
independent of the body.30 Nowhere along the way, however, does it become clear that
thought is actually independent of matter; or, conversely, that matter without thought is
intelligible. Nonetheless, by virtue of this articulation, a new way of being (or in Hegelian
terms, a new shape of consciousness) comes to the fore.

ii. Modern Rationality—the New Method
In Discourse on Method, Descartes introduces a new method,31 which expunges
thought of superstition and speculation—or so he believes. Discontented with
Aristotelianism, which lacked exactitude or certitude in its demonstrations, and, moreover,
which required the thinker to rely upon uncertain opinions,32 Descartes proposes a new
principle: doubt. “I thought it necessary,” writes Descartes, “that I reject as absolutely false
everything in which I could imagine the least doubt, in order to see whether, after this

René Descartes, Discourse on Method, 4th edition, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998). In
Discourse on Method, he writes, “Then, examining with attention what I was, and seeing that I could
pretend that I had no body and that there was no world nor any place where I was, I could not
pretend, on that account, that I did not exist at all, and that on the contrary, from the very fact that I
thought of doubting the truth of other things, it followed very evidently and very certainly that I
existed; whereas, on the other hand, had I simply stopped thinking, even if all the rest of what I had
ever imagined had been true, I would have had no reason to believe that I existed. From this I knew
that I was a substance the whole essence or nature of which is simply to think, and which, in order to
exist, has no need of any place nor depends on any material thing” (p. 19; para. 33). Drew Leder, in
The Absent Body, offers an insightful critique of this phenomenological misunderstanding.
30

Unintentionally, perhaps; Descartes writes, “[M]y purpose here is not to teach the method that
everyone ought to follow in order to conduct his reason well, but merely to show how I have tried to
conduct my own.” Discourse on Method, 2.
31

32

Descartes, Discourse on Method, 3-6.

6
process, something in my beliefs remained that was entirely

indubitable.”33

The two ideas

that issue from his thought experiment are certainty of the self, or what Kant later calls the
transcendental apperception, and God, the guarantor of our “clear and distinct” ideas.34
Therefrom Descartes built his “system,” for whatever follows as an effect of a certain cause
must itself be of equal certainty.35 Having established, what he thought to be, a firm
foundation for knowledge, Descartes proceeds to enumerate various medical and mechanical
applications.
What is of particular note for us is that Descartes refers to the body as a “machine.”36
Whilst Polanyi distinguishes between two lineages of modern science, the mechanistic and
the intellectual, and he primarily identifies Descartes with the latter,37 this does not preclude
Descartes from adopting a mechanical view of the corporeal world. Discussing the human
body, Descartes focuses upon the various functions of its organs and their systematic
interaction; he pays especial attention to the circulatory system and the functions of the heart.
Today, this discussion is hardly surprising, given that we equate function, what something
does, with its being; however, in the sixteenth century, the novelty of this approach would
have been more conspicuous. Thomas Hobbes’s arrogant dismissal of teleology, that “there is
no such finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor summum bonum (greatest good) as is spoke of in the
books of the old moral philosophers,”38 was still a dissenting opinion; one which awaited the
scientific discoveries predicted by Descartes and his contemporaries.
Nonetheless, the imagination of these thinkers was tempered by a belief in a distinctly
human quality. Mostly Christian thinkers, they still believed in the doctrine of imago dei;
human beings remained sufficiently separated from the beasts, and the ingenuities of their
33

Descartes, Discourse on Method, 18.

34

See footnote 27.

35

Descartes, Discourse on Method, 11-2.

36

Descartes, Discourse on Method, 31.

37

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 8-9.

38

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, (London: 1651), 60, xi. Of the Difference of Manners.

7
hand, by virtue of their rationality. Descartes prodigiously saw the risks of mechanization;
nonetheless, he also believed that these risks could be averted, for neither beast nor machine
could sufficiently develop language, or an equivalent system of semiotic interaction, or apply
its learned skills spontaneously, to challenge human superiority.39 Thus, he saw in this new
method, which rendered the world fundamentally mechanistic, as opposed to animistic, a
way for men to become the “masters and possessors of nature.”40 Moreover, he
enthusiastically anticipated the inventions which would follow from this new approach to
nature, allowing “one to enjoy trouble-free the fruits of the earth and all the goods found
there, but also principally for the maintenance of health.”41
Today, these words are tainted with irony, for what once seemed “trouble-free”
confronts us as a multi-headed monster, threatening moral, social, political, theological,
psychological, and, not to mention, ecological devastation. When we become the “masters
and possessors of nature,” i.e., when we step, or think we step, outside of nature, we remake
the world through our vision of it. In a sense, this is always the case, for nature is
indiscernible without cultural appropriation. However, prior to the modern age, we were
participators in nature, not masters of it; the proper response was to revere nature through
right relation, not to commoditize it as resource. What Descartes and company failed to see,
and perhaps could not have seen from their vantage point, was the effect this new definition
of reason and nature would have on our lived experience, that, in fact, what they were
initiating was not merely a new methodology of conducting scientific or philosophic inquiry,
but rather a new way of being.
The blame, if blame it be, does not lie entirely upon Descartes, or any one thinker for
that matter. The mechanistic worldview existed even in antiquity. Similarly, in scholasticism,
the nominalists and voluntarists, conceded an inanimate cosmos, for they saw this as

39

Descartes, Discourse on Method, 32-3.

40

Descartes, Discourse on Method, 35.

41

Descartes, Discourse on Method, 35.

consonant with God’s

omnipotence.42

8
Yet, they were not modern in the sense of Descartes—

why? Hannah Arendt argues that even the early modern thinkers were not thoroughly modern
in so far as they had not cast off the yoke of tradition and authority43—two terms antithetical
to the essence of modernity, as defined by Descartes. The point, at bottom, is that we live in
the world we inherit, not in the world we create.
As Hans-Georg Gadamer observes, “we stand always within tradition.”44 Authority,
since Kant’s definition of Enlightenment as “man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage,”45
referring, of course, to the free exercise of reason and judgement, has fallen into great
disrepute. However, as Gadamer shows, not all prejudice is bad, nor is prejudicial authority.
Without the authority of tradition, the future becomes as unintelligible as the past.46
Unwittingly, Descartes too relies upon tradition when he breaks from it; in fact, this break is
only intelligible because it lies in relation to the tradition which it seeks to leave behind.
Furthermore, even if we recognize something new in Descartes, it is not without its
precursors. Notably, it is the preeminent, albeit unduly vilified, Renaissance historian and

See Robert Doede’s “From Living Souls to Software Selves: The Movements of Enchantment in
Modernity,” in Human Flourishing in a Technological World: A Theological Perspective, edited by
Jens Zimmerman, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).
42

43 Arendt,

The Human Condition, 249.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Rehabilitation of Authority and Tradition,” The Hermeneutics Reader,
edited by Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, (New York: Continuum, 1985), 265.
44

Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?, translated by Ted Humphrey, (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing, 1992), 1.
45

The hermeneutical situation, according to Gadamer, presupposes historical effectiveness, that is, we
are shaped but not determined by the past. Awareness of our situation opens up a “horizon,” through
which we understand the past and the future. History becomes meaningful only when it is realized in
historical consciousness; otherwise it remains lifeless and inert. The key to understanding history lies
in the realization that history entails not only the past but also the present and the future. Gadamer,
“The Principle of Effective-History,” The Hermeneutics Reader, edited by Kurt Mueller-Vollmer,
(New York: Continuum, 1985), 269-273.
46

9
political thinker, Niccolò Machiavelli, who proposes a radically new (although we cannot say
completely original) view of nature, both human and terrestrial.47
Machiavelli marks a paradigmatic shift in political thought. For the premoderns,
politics was inseparable from a teleological understanding of nature, and the natural order
was discernible to man through reason. Thus, political knowledge was derived from
understanding nature, which revealed to man the best or just regime. However, as Plato
makes evident in the Republic, the definition of justice is not easily agreed upon. It was
difficult to bring a regime into practice because there was controversy over which regime
was best suited to human nature. This remained an irresolvable problem in antiquity that
persisted through the Middle Ages. In the fifteenth century, Machiavelli introduced a
radically different definition of human nature; one that was marked by greed and self-interest
(a definition later adopted by modern political thinkers, including Hobbes and Locke). In his
claim, “[M]any have pictured republics and principalities which in fact have never been
known or seen,”48 Machiavelli attacks the two foundational traditions of premodern Western

In his article, “The Question of Machiavelli’s Modernity,” A. J. Parel denies the modernity of
Machiavelli’s concept of nature: “If modernity requires the acceptance of a post-seventeenth century
concept of physical nature and human nature, then Machiavelli cannot be considered a modern”
(339); he asserts this opinion in contradiction to those forwarded by Leo Strauss, Harvey C.
Mansfield, Jr. and Allan Bloom. His argument rests on a close reading of Machiavelli that reveals
premodern influence, especially in his reliance on cosmological necessity, or “necessity of fate”
(325). Parel concedes that Machiavelli breaks with Athens and Jerusalem in so far as he focuses on
the physical rather than the transcendental (a fallacious either/or); nonetheless, he refuses to confer
upon Machiavelli modern status for the above stated reason. I agree with Parel’s conditional: if postseventeenth century physics is necessary to confer modern status, then, indeed, Machiavelli is not a
modern. However, the essence of modernity lies not in the particular view its proponents take, but
rather in the method they adopt, or the relationship in which they stand, towards nature. Machiavelli
is one of the first thinkers, at least to my knowledge, to challenge the premodern relationship to
nature—whatever he may have thought of our likelihood to succeed (see Parel, 332). A. J. Parel, “The
Question of Machiavelli’s Modernity,” The Review of Politics vol. 53, no. 2 (Spring, 1991), 320-39.
47

Machiavelli, The Prince, translated by W. K. Marriott, (The Project Gutenberg eBook, 2022), ch.
15, para. 1. Compare Machiavelli with Descartes in Discourse on Method: “I compared the writings
of the ancient pagans that deal with morals to very proud and very magnificent palaces that were built
on nothing but sand and mud” (5).
48

10
thought: Athens and

Jerusalem.49

Socrates imagines a republic he admits exists only in

speech.50 Likewise, Christians proclaim the kingdom of heaven—however, who has seen it?
Machiavelli dismisses premodern concerns with transcendental reality in the hopes of
offering a more practical account of politics. He rejects natural teleology and defines nature
as a “standing reserve”51 waiting to be conquered. He is not concerned with “imagination”
but rather is in pursuit of “real truth,” i.e., that which can be empirically verified.52
Machiavelli casts off the moral restraint nature imposes upon man by redefining virtue as
virtù, that is, the means by which the power of nature can be harnessed. The political
subtleties of his position are not wholly relevant to the discussion at hand. However,
Machiavelli’s famous advice to the Medici Prince, namely that “it is necessary for a prince
wishing to hold his own know how to do wrong, and to make use of [such knowledge] or not
according to necessity,”53 exemplifies the essence of modern political thought, and modern
philosophy generally, which severs the factual ‘is’ from the transcendental ‘ought’; moreover,
which renders knowledge instrumental.
The significance of this shift is definitely felt, if not as obviously seen, in Descartes,
for whom nature remains an ancillary reality to thought. Vindicating the primacy of thought
at the expense of sensory experience, Descartes confers upon (corporeal) nature a secondary
status. In so doing, as Taylor astutely observes, he gives the Augustinian notion of
inwardness a “radical twist,” which proves to be “epoch-making.”54 We have already

Leo Strauss claims that Machiavelli is the first to declare war on tradition, specifically Athens and
Jerusalem (see A. J. Parel, “The Question of Machiavelli’s Modernity”).
49

Plato, “Republic,” Ancient Philosophy vol. 1, 6th edition, edited by Forrest E. Baird, (Upper Saddle
River: Prentice Hall, 2011), 225, bk. III, 376d.
50

51

Heidegger’s term (see footnote 21).

Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 15, “Things for which men, especially princes, are praised or blamed,”
para. 1.
52

Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 15, “Things for which men, especially princes, are praised or blamed,”
para. 2.
53

54

Taylor, Sources, 143.

11
established that for Descartes all knowledge is built upon the certain foundation of an
existing self and God; we can trust our experience only in so far as it relies upon these first
principles.55 The account of knowledge that emerges is essentially representational: the
corporeal world, including our body, is known through right representation, and, not as it was
formerly believed, through right relation; moreover, it is best represented in mechanical
terms. This presupposes, foremost, a disengagement from bodily or corporeal reality, i.e.,
nature, to gain mastery over it.
The disengagement of reason from the objective world is closely related to the
demystification of the world order: “We demystify the cosmos as a setter of ends,” writes
Taylor, “by grasping it mechanistically and functionally as a domain of possible means.
Gaining insight into the world as mechanism is inseparable from seeing it as a domain of
potential instrumental control.”56 In other words, the mechanistic worldview presupposes an
instrumental approach to nature, e.g., as articulated by Machiavelli. The instrumentality of
reason is also evident in Descartes, who refers to the utility57 of its fruits as its chief
attraction. The resulting ethic does not concern itself with an objective good, but rather is
legitimated through its efficacy to reach a desired end, i.e., the good becomes internal or

Descartes writes, “I can have no knowledge of what is outside me except by means of the ideas I
have within me” (quoted in Taylor, 144).
55

56

Taylor, Sources, 149.

Utility, here, must be distinguished from usefulness in the Heideggerian sense, which, as Heidegger
says, is a “letting-lie-before-us” rather than an “making-to-appear” (What is Called Thinking?, 202).
“Proper use,” writes Heidegger, “does not debase what is used—on the contrary, use is determined
and defined by leaving the used thing in its essential nature” (187). However, ‘utility,’ in the modern
sense, implies a forceful taking rather than a letting lie as it is. Werner Heisenberg is closer to the
mark when he observes, “[In modernity] the human attitude toward nature changed from a
contemplative one to the pragmatic one. One was not so much interested in nature as it is; one rather
asked what one could do with it. Therefore, natural science turned into technical science; every
advancement of knowledge was connected with the question as to what practical use could be derived
from it.” Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 170-1.
57

12
subjective.58

The proof of God’s existence in this sense, even if we sidestep the problem of

circularity, does not vindicate an outer reality; rather God becomes separated from creation as
super- or supra-natural. “[T]his new conception of inwardness, an inwardness of selfsufficiency, of autonomous powers of ordering reason,” concludes Taylor, “prepare[s] the
ground for modern unbelief.”59
Thus reason is redefined, with lasting theological and anthropological ramifications: no
longer signifying the inherent order of nature, in which man partakes, reason becomes an
instrument of its domination. Underlying the redefinition of reason is a new understanding of
nature: nature is reduced to the means by which man accrues power. Hence, it is significantly
limited in scope. This new definition was not the work of a single thinker, although some
certainly adopted it more enthusiastically than others. Rather, it was an affirmation of the
cultural, both metaphysical and epistemic, shift these thinkers witnessed in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. The mechanistic worldview did not emerge as a consequence of certain
philosophers imagining the world to be so, if the imagination of a few thinkers was sufficient
to define an epoch, then the materialists would have convinced the world long before of its
“disenchantment,” to borrow the Weberian term. The fact is that the time was ripe for
disbelief, or at least belief in an enchanted cosmos had been sufficiently weakened to
entertain doubt. We lost the criteria to determine which of the “warring gods”60 to back, not
least because we had lost faith in the existence of the deities. The reason for this shift is

Taylor writes, “when the hegemony of reason becomes rational control, it is no longer understood
as our being attuned to the order of things we find in the cosmos, but rather as our life being shaped
by the orders which we construct according to the demands of reason’s dominance” (155). He
continues, “Rationality is now an internal property of subjective thinking, rather than consisting in its
vision of reality. In making this shift, Descartes is articulating what has become the standard modern
view” (156).
58

59

Taylor, Sources, 158.

60

Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” Daedalus 87:1 (Winter, 1958), 131.

13
hidden in the possibilities of the past; to provide distinct causes would be contrary to our
purpose, in so far as causality presupposes a mechanistic worldview.61

iii. Modern Science—the Age of Disenchantment & Discovery
In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer describe the program of
modernity as “the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy,”62 that is,
as the “disenchantment” of the world; a program brought into effect by the new method,
which made man sovereign over nature through his knowledge.63 This posture is evident
from Francis Bacon’s injunction: “[I]f we would be led by [nature] in invention, we should
command her by action.”64 It is not at all clear whether nature can be known in the way this
order presupposes. Moreover, the question remains whether our means of invention leave
room for true action.
The political climate of the age is not wholly irrelevant to its epistemological
development. The sixteenth century was the age of discovery in more senses than one: not
only had the Europeans “discovered”65 the Americas, but man had discovered the means
whereby he would transcend his physical horizons. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition,
argues that three major events mark the advent of the modern age: the discovery of America,
the Reformation, and the invention of the telescope. All three events lead to what Arendt calls
“world alienation.”66 In the first instance, the discoverers, who set out to expand the world
It was brought to my attention that causality may be construed in a modern or premodern sense; in
other words, causality does not necessarily presuppose a mechanistic worldview. This is a fair point.
For the sake of clarity, let us restrict the usage to its modern sense.
61

62

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (London: Verso, 1997), 3.

Bacon writes, “the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge” (quoted in Adorno and Horkheimer,
3).
63

64

Quoted in Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4.

In the Barcelona Letter of 1493, Columbus wrote to Ferdinand and Isabel that he had “discovered”
new lands (see Peter C. Mancall, “The Age of Discovery,” Reviews in American History (Mar., 1998)
26). His articulation betrays a eurocentrism characteristic of the time.
65

66 Arendt,

The Human Condition, 254.

14
“shrink her into a

ball.”67

Measurement reduces the object to the measurer, that is, to the

subject; as an abstract exercise, it compels the measurer to disengage with the world at hand
and escape into the mind. In the second instance, reformers set out to undermine the authority
of the Catholic Church to secure individual spiritual freedom, that is, to preserve the
otherworldliness of the Christian faith by disallowing political interference. This occasions a
shift toward the self and away from the world, specifically the Church. In the third instance,
the discovery of the Archimedean point outside man, outside the earth, renders experienced
reality dubious and the experiencing self, superfluous; human existence becomes a matter of
indifference not only to the universe, but, paradoxically, also to man.
These events mark the diminution of personal experience at the expense of abstract,
general principles. With its predilection for systematizing, to wit, for rendering all experience
intelligible through one language, namely of mathematics, the new science takes on a task of
conquest previously unimaginable.68 Max Weber remarks, “Scientific work is chained to the
course of progress;”69 its internal logic is defined by a principle of movement. Similarly, the
(terrestrial) European explorers sought to keep moving, taking as casualty or spoil whatever
they encountered along the way. Here, too, the mastery was calculative, although it was
encumbered by political and religious passions. The indispensable point of the matter is that
conquest was absolute, for progress, as movement toward a vague, yet definable, end,
presupposes univocity.

67 Arendt,

The Human Condition, 250.

It is just this task that Hegel celebrates in the preface to Phenomenology of Spirit: “It … appears
that everything has been subjected to the absolute Idea, which therefore seems to be cognized in
everything and to have matured into an expanded science. But a closer inspection shows that this
expansion has not come about through one and the same principle, having spontaneously assumed
different shapes, but rather through the shapeless repetition of one and the same formula, only
externally applied to diverse materials, thereby obtaining a merely boring show of diversity” (8).
Here, the reductionism inherent to science in its broadest modern articulation is evident: what is at
bottom real is the formula. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
68

69

Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 117.

15
Science as representation of nature attempts to emulate the natural processes, most
obviously through experimentation, which requires controlled reenactment of natural forces.
In a sense, the end is unknown: the results of the experiment are not evident, for, if they
were, the experiment would hardly be necessary. Nonetheless, in a different sense, if we
recall Heidegger on the essence of mathematics, the results of the experiment are
predetermined in so far as the experiment can only affirm or deny a scientist’s observation of
nature, in itself a value laden activity. Therefore, the experiment only reveals to the scientist
what he already knows. The latter view is far more consistent with the concept of progress
than the former, for it admits that progress lies outside of nature, so to speak. Hence, contrary
to Weber, science, in so far as it is “chained to the course of progress,”70 is always political. It
relies upon something other than itself to derive its motivation.
Why this point should be subject to contention after Bacon’s declaration that
knowledge is power is, indeed, curious, for implicit in this dictum is the negation of truth as
knowledge—if we entertain the possibility of truth outside of power, that is, outside the
means-ends relationship. Modern rationality, which find its most potent articulation through
modern science, does not, at least not consistently, allow for this distinction: it seeks to
dominate its object through the guise of utility. But, utility, as Arendt argues, already admits a
forfeiture of our freedom and, therefore, our claim to truth, in so far as both freedom and
truth require the existence of an objective world, i.e., a world of shared experiences.71
What is, thus, conspicuously missing from modern science is meaning. Science, or
more accurately, the scientist, cannot answer the existential question, “What shall we do and
how shall we live?”72 without appealing to something other than science. Only if we assume
the unenviable posture of a technician, as one who looks upon nature as a store of resources,
and upon the world as a complex of soluble problems, does science answer the question:
“Natural science gives us an answer to the question of what we must do if we wish to master
70

Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 115.

71

See Arendt’s discussion of instrumentality and homo faber in The Human Condition, 153-158.

72

Leo Tolstoy quoted in Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 121.

16
life technically. It leaves quite aside, or assumes for its purposes, whether we should and do
wish to master life technically and whether it ultimately makes sense to do so.”73 In a word,
science lacks the self-reflexivity to comment upon its motivations; all it can do is provide
answers, typically unsatisfactory, according to its basic formulae. To the extent that the
scientific endeavour is meaningful, it is also unscientific. I return to the concept of meaning
in a later section.
For now, what is of note is that the great project of Western intellectualism, or the
story of modern science as we understand it, culminates in a paradox: the age of discovery,
marked by new methodology, physical exploration, and literary and political expression in
the form of utopian fiction,74 leads to ever-narrowing parameters of the field of discovery;
the means we adopt to enlarge our humanity, through an expansion of knowledge, leads
directly to a diminution of what it means to be human. If we adopt the procedural method
and thereby render all ends potential means, then we forfeit meaning, which is always
purposive and inextricably linked to human intentionality. In the utility calculus, necessitated,
albeit ultimately refuted, by science, consciousness becomes an awkward obstacle, which can
neither be adequately explained nor dismissed. Consciousness thus remains a thorn in the

73

Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 122; emphasis added.

See Susan Bruce’s Introduction to Three Early Modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis, and the Isle
of Pines, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), ix-xviii.
74

17
side of science as a superfluous and useless

reality.75

Modern man, however, has proven

exceptionally creative in his avoidance of this inevitable problem.

iv. The Stature of Man
Thus far we have considered science as a means of discovery in relation to terrestrial
nature; however, what of human nature? What are the implications of scientific inquiry into
human nature? Consistent with what we have said above, science cannot maintain human
being as an end; it must reduce the person to molecules, quanta, or whatever else the
scientific vogue of the age may be, in order to render him intelligible. Anticipating the
burgeoning tide of scientific thinking, in 1963, Arendt wrote an article entitled, “The
Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” wherein she challenged some of the underlying
assumptions which facilitate the belief that science reveals what is really ‘real.’ Addressing
the humanistic concerns raised by scientific discovery in the midcentury, Arendt writes, “It
has been the glory of modern science that it has been able to emancipate itself completely
from all such anthropocentric, that is, truly humanistic, concerns.”76 Science is not concerned
with understanding natural phenomena or the world of appearances, which exist only in

Consciousness, as Raymond Tallis eloquently and astutely argues in Aping Mankind, cannot be
caught in the Darwinian net; both its purpose and emergence elude it. “There is nothing,” writes
Tallis, “that will explain why matter should ‘go mental’ once it assumes a certain form, unless we
anticipate and borrow, on account as it were, the very notion of an organism that is aware of its
environment” (173). Merely more brain activity cannot account for consciousness, which is
qualitatively distinct from it; as Tallis observes, “a chemical effect of light is not awareness of the
light that has caused this chemical effect” (172). Consciousness is antecedent to any scientific, or,
more specifically, biological, explanation for the obvious reason that without awareness we would not
ask for an explanation. The argument that consciousness has survival value is easily disarmed when
we realize that “for much of the relatively brief time [life] has been conscious, this seems to have
been a burden rather than a boon” (Tallis, 180). In other words, it is far from obvious that
consciousness enables survival. To Tallis’ point, many critics of modernity have spent their years
lamenting conscious existence—Dostoevsky and Kafka are prominent examples. Raymond Tallis,
Aping Mankind, (London: Routledge, 2014).
75

76

Hannah Arendt, “The Stature of Man and the Conquest of Space,” 260.

relation to human

beings;77

it is concerned rather with what lies

“behind.”78 As Arendt

18
goes

on to note, what lies behind is nothing but a “void,” (or “the view from nowhere”) which
man mistakes as his Archimedean point.79 Thus, attempts at expanding our world picture,
which, we assume, displaces the earth as the centre of the universe and man as the centre of
the world (or as the “highest being”), paradoxically find a new way to affirm these very
negations: the conquest of the universe, writes Arendt, “would be geocentric in the sense that
the earth, and not the universe, is the centre and home of mortal men, and it would be
anthropomorphic in the sense that man would count his own factual mortality among the
elementary conditions under which his scientific efforts are possible at all.”80 Of course,
progress in the transhumanist project has thrown this “absolute limit”—our mortality—into
ambiguity; the fruitful marriage of technology and science promises to transgress this
absolute limit. But—and this is the point the scientist fails to understand, not least because he
does not possess the conceptual language to understand it81—if this project is realized, and
man is made immortal, then not only humanity, but all human endeavours, including science,
are undermined.

Tallis makes the point emphatically: “Matter has to have an angle, a viewpoint, a perspective, to
support awareness of a world. It has none of these things intrinsically. Material objects as viewed by
physics ‘in themselves’, as matter, have no appearances. The very notion of a complete account of the
world in physical terms is of a world without appearance and hence a world without consciousness”
(Aping Mankind, p. 143). See also Tallis, The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness,
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 208.
77

78 Arendt,

“The Stature of Man,” 261.

79 Arendt,

“The Stature of Man,” 272.

80 Arendt,

“The Stature of Man,” 273.

Niels Bohr claimed that causality, determinism, and necessity of laws belong to “our necessarily
prejudiced conceptual frame” (quoted in “Conquest of Space,” 265). As Arendt observes, he went
further than his predecessors, Albert Einstein and Max Planck, who “were still firmly rooted in a
tradition that demanded that scientific theories fulfill certain definitely humanistic requires” (264;
emphasis added). The difficulty, however, remains that “what defies description in terms of the
‘prejudices’ of the human mind defies description in every conceivable way of human language; it
can no longer be described at all, and it is being expressed, but not described, in mathematical
processes” (265; emphasis added).
81

19
The suicidal impulse, however, proves strong: we rush headlong toward a future we
cannot inhabit. This is likely because we have also become rootless in a non-political sense:
the objective world, accessible to us in common, is replaced by the abstract and imaginary
world of science, articulated in mathematical language. This world is by nature solipsistic.
The irony is that despite the practical limitation, which inhibits us from ever occupying this
hypothetical point, we have found a way to live as if we already had. “Without as yet actually
occupying the point where Archimedes had wished to stand,” writes Arendt,
we have found a way to act on the earth as though we disposed of terrestrial nature
from outside, from the point of Einstein’s ‘observer freely poised in space.’ If we look
down from this point to ourselves, then these activities will indeed appear to ourselves
as no more than ‘overt behaviour,’ which we can study with the same method we use to
study the behaviour of rats.82
In other words, if we delimit human experience and human nature by expressing it in
biological or mathematical terms, then we should not be surprised upon finding our
experience, to some extent, explicable in these terms. This is because our being is susceptible
to the explanations we map on to it—it is amenable to change, although it is not reducible to
process. To grasp the gravity of this point, one must understand the malleability of human
nature.83 “Historically we know of man’s nature only insofar as it has existence,” writes
Arendt, “and no realm of eternal essences will ever console us if man loses his essential
capabilities.”84 Arendt emphasizes the historicity of our being, as beings that create their
nature. This is the boon and burden of our freedom.
82 Arendt,

“The Stature of Man,” 273-4.

83 Arendt

avoids this term, for she clearly and unequivocally denies the existence of a general human
nature (The Human Condition, 193).
Hannah Arendt, “[The Origins of Totalitarianism]: A Reply,” The Review of Politics vol. 15, no. 1
(Jan., 1953), 84. Compare with Sartre, who writes, “[F]irst of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the
scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is
indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself
will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it.
Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after
this thrust toward existence.” Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” in Theories of
Human Nature, edited by Donald Abel, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1991), 315.
84

20
In its more radical articulations, this view renders human freedom limitless: man is
condemned to absolute freedom. However, Arendt places limits on our freedom in the guise
of human capacities; she recognizes that we have certain faculties: to act, think, comprehend,
etc. Thus, our freedom is limited by the conditions that bring it into being. Nevertheless,
these conditions are not determinative: “[T]he conditions of human existence,” writes Arendt,
“can never ‘explain’ what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason
that they never condition us absolutely.”85 Therein lies the source of our freedom, which is
always curtailed by otherness. Therefore, despite the adversity of our conditions, we are
never completely beholden to them. We remain free to act spontaneously. This is the more
hopeful strain in Arendt’s practical thought. Here, however, a slight tension surfaces: despite
lacking a constant human nature, we are endowed with constant human capacities, which,
even if they are not practiced, inhere in our being. Arendt herself observes how deeply
dehumanizing our existence can become by changing these conditions (a critique only viable
if there is, in however limited a sense, human nature): if man is treated like an animal, then
he behaves like one.
This rather mundane truth was made evident in the political goings-on of the last
century. The totalitarian movements enacted the heretofore theoretical abstractions of the
modern scientific worldview. The move toward systematization is the hallmark of scientific
thinking; the effort to explain the world through one consistent language links totalitarianism
with scientism. The logical coherence of totalitarian ideology convinces the masses of its
truth, and, as Arendt observes, common sense loses the power to correct where “the whole

85 Arendt,

The Human Condition, 11. Similarly, Abraham Heschel writes, “As a thing man is
explicable; as a person he is both mystery and a surprise. As a thing he is finite; as a person he is
inexhaustible.” Who Is Man? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 28.

21
sector of communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense” is

lost.86

In other words, ideology and terror are most effective in a disintegrated world, where
common sense has “lost its validity.”87 The abstract world of modernity primes the ground
for disintegration, as discussed. Thus, totalitarian ideology, a redundant phrase, in so far as
ideology is always totalitarian, becomes even more convincing than the “truth” because it
addresses more adequately “the needs of the human mind than reality itself.”88 The
disenchantment of reality and consequent disillusionment and disintegration of the people
leaves only a mass that is held together by the force of the movement (ideology) rather than a
common world. The readiness of the masses to believe ideology is unsurprising given the
alternative of mathematical truth, which does not describe human experience. However,
ironically, the truth of ideology is nothing other than consistency: as Arendt states, “To define
consistency as truth as some modern logicians do means to deny the existence of truth.”89 In
the same vein, it might be said that science also denies the existence of truth: it eliminates its
essential quality, namely, meaning.90
The comparison between scientism and totalitarianism may seem hyperbolic: science,
unlike Nazism and Stalinism, does not promote mass murder. However, strictly speaking, no
‘ism’, regardless of how odious to human sensibility, is capable of murder. It is always man

It is worth quoting Arendt in full: “[W]hilst it is true that the masses are obsessed by a desire to
escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental,
incomprehensible aspects, it is also true that their longing for fiction has some connection with those
capacities of the human mind whose structural consistency is superior to mere occurrence. … The
revolt of the masses against ‘realism,’ common sense, and all the ‘plausibilities of the world’ (Burke)
was the result of their atomization, of their loss of social status along with which they lost the whole
sector of communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense. … Totalitarian
propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity”
(Origins, 352).
86

87 Arendt,

Origins, 352.

88 Arendt,

Origins, 353.

89 Arendt,

Origins, 477.

90 Arendt

writes in “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” “Philosophic truth, whatever it
may be, is certainly not scientific truth” (294).

22
that must bear the responsibility of his actions—but not so of his

behaviour.91

Behaviour

implies a lack of free will: if we reduce action to behaviour, then there is no substantive
difference between a man killing a fellow human being and a dog licking himself; both are
equally meaningless acts. The fact that I can differentiate between the two already signifies a
real difference. The point is that scientism, the belief that scientific explanation is the only
true explanation, or even more poignantly, that our being is exhaustible through explanation,
lies at the heart of modernity. It is precisely this kind of reductive thinking that allowed for
the political atrocities of the twentieth century.
However, we need not look to the past to justify how damaging scientific thinking
may be to our humanity; the future provides an even more harrowing picture.
Transhumanism, which Robert Doede describes, “as an interdisciplinary and international
movement whose project is to transform human nature through technological interventions
so radical that Homo sapiens will transition in the relatively near future into a superior
successor post-human species, one that transcends the fragilities and failures of our fleshly
finitude,”92 shows how seriously we have taken the insights of modern science. The primary
assumption underlying this project is that our being is indistinguishable from nature and thus
equally alterable through human ingenuity (technology). Uprooted from any sense of
belonging, the transhumanist looks upon his self as Bestand (“standing reserve”).93 Whilst
there is a latent dualism which gives rise to the transhumanist impulse in the first instance,
the language it adopts is that of scientific monism: all matter is manipulable.94 Setting aside
Tallis is absolutely right to question the increasing influence of neurological explanations on legal
proceedings: if man is his brain and the brain is already “hard-wired,” then the notions of freedom
and responsibility are moot. Fortunately, as Tallis shows, this is not the case (Aping Mankind,
306-17).
91

Robert Doede, “Transhumanism, Technology, and the Future: Posthumanity Emerging or SubHumanity Descending?” Appraisal, vol. 4, issue 3 (Mar. 2009), 40.
92

93

See Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 17.

See Robert Doede, “From Living Souls to Software Selves,” in Human Flourishing in a
Technological World: A Theological Perspective, edited by Jens Zimmerman, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press), pp. 19-49.
94

23
the difficulties of this position—the reduction of mind to brain and man to body—we see real
strides toward the transhumanist goal: everyday increasingly invasive technologies are
introduced into the market and the masses rush to purchase a new identity. As noted above,
this is only possible because man has lost his identity, or he has forsaken it for the promise of
greater certainty. The cost of this certainty now hangs over his head as the threat of
extinction; however, again, the ability of man to live in contradiction is so great, he mistakes
it for immortality. In fact, there is no difference between extinction and immortality:
immortal man is a contradiction in terms. As Arendt observes, our mortality is the “absolute
limit” which moors our existence; without this necessary limit, we are not. Modern man
totters dangerously on the edge—one foot is planted on firm ground, the other hovers over an
abyss of the incomprehensible.
Précis
For the sake of clarity, it may be helpful to review the main insights of this chapter.
Herein I have tried to cover a vast array of material to orient the forthcoming discussion and
to reveal the author’s biases: from the beginnings of modern science in the fifteenth century
to the emergence of the late modern world in the twentieth. I begin with Polanyi, who
questions the traditional understanding of objectivity following the Copernican revolution.
He argues that objectivity is not indifferent to the subject, i.e., it is not impersonal, but rather
is the culmination of our efforts to derive “a rational idea of the universe which can
authoritatively speak for itself.” In modernity, our misguided attempts to accomplish this
noble aim led to the definition of the objective as pure abstraction—or what Heidegger calls
the essence of mathematics, which primarily denotes a way of looking at the world. This way
of looking fails to consider the looker; thus, cleaving the looking from the looked at.
However, without this recognition, the objective becomes unintelligible.
Descartes, of course, solidified this cleavage by devising a method that
crystallized into modern science, which attempts to explain all reality in terms of systems
which elevate radical reductionism and instrumental rationality such that we lose the ability

24
to answer why we undertake scientific inquiry in the first instance, if we do not acknowledge
an irreducible human reality preceding it. In later chapters, with the help of Polanyi, I explore
this claim in greater depth. The point, at bottom, is to highlight a deeply rooted contradiction
in modern science which seeks to offer a total explanation of human reality without
accounting for the uniquely human capacity to encounter and question the world we inhabit.
The final section of this chapter focuses on the political and moral ramifications of
modern scientific thinking, which may, in short, be defined as the drive toward the
unintelligible objective. In the modern scientific schematic, all ends become potential means;
in fact, the distinction cannot be maintained. Therefore, it is only logical that man, too,
should be stripped of this distinction—he is subsumed into the system of which he, ironically,
is the deviser and thus seemingly loses the ability to critique it.

II. What is Called Thinking?
i. Thoughtlessness; the Most Thought-Provoking Thing
I write, man totters over the abyss of the incomprehensible—why not nothingness?
This construal of nothingness or non-being is itself an artifact of scientific thinking, which,
as Heidegger observes, takes nothing as “what is not.”95 But through this is, science recovers
what it attempts to reject. Our broader focus, in this study, is the hopelessness of the human
condition, which, in no small part, has to do with our understanding of nothing. Hope, in
essence, is nothing, in so far as it is no thing. As such, science, by definition, is hopeless. If
our existence is exhaustible through scientific explanation, then our existence too is hopeless.
Luckily for us, this is not the case. As Heidegger recognizes, science has “recourse to what it
rejects;”96 it admits that which it denies, namely, nothing, and nothing opens up the
possibility for thought.

Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” in Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, (San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 96.
95

96

Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” 96.

25
In his aptly titled book, What is Called Thinking?, Heidegger states that “Most
thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking—not even yet, although the state of the
world is becoming constantly more thought-provoking.”97 Similarly, Arendt, in The Human
Condition, entreats us to “think what we are doing,”98 implying that we have not been
thinking. Prima facie the claim is ludicrous: volumes upon volumes preserved in public as
well as personal libraries attest otherwise. Moreover, the ingenuities of our hand, think of the
countless technologies developed in the last year alone, seem to suggest thoughtfulness in
some sense. What have we been doing if not thinking? Perhaps the answer lies in the
question: we have been doing rather than thinking.99
Since the dawn of modernity,100 we have poised ourselves in a functionalist stance.
This is what Heidegger identifies as the essence of technology. Paradoxically, whilst
scientific thinking eliminates the means-ends distinction, technological progress, which
precedes and, to some extent, determines its course, depends upon this very distinction.
Progress, as previously discussed, is unintelligible without a definite end or purpose toward

97

Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 4.

98 Arendt,

The Human Condition, 5.

This is consistent with the functionalist stance: as Arendt so aptly points out in her essay on
authority, we do not question whether or not something is the same as another, only if it works as
well. Arendt, “What is Authority?,” Between Past and Future, (London: Penguin, 1968), 101-3.
99

I have taken up the common reading of modernity, which begins with Cartesian rationalism.
However, John Deely, in Four Ages of Understanding, traces “the road not taken”: he identifies two
great thinkers at the advent of modernity, only one of whom—Descartes—was to set its course on the
basis of the ‘idea’; Poinsot and his method would remain mostly inconspicuous until postmodernity,
wherein its ability to synthesize the past with the future became evident (451). As for Descartes, his
break with tradition and dismissal of history is well documented. It is not without regret that Deely
notes, “The mainstream development of modern philosophy was destined to overlook the way of
signs, and to take instead the way of ideas, a way which would lead with the inevitability that logical
consequence has in the realm of ideas to a most unsatisfactory outcome, namely, the repudiation of
the hope of modern science (continuous with the ambition of Greek and Latin philosophy) to
understand the actual world in the being proper to its physical surroundings as antecedent to and in
some basic sense independent of our individual opinions and thought processes” (448). John Deely,
Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the
Turn of the Twenty-First Century, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).
100

which our efforts are

directed.101

26
Thus we ignore the way, occupying ourselves merely with

the object. This is contrary to thinking. In“The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger
enjoins the reader “above all to pay heed to the way” built by questioning,102 for only the
way, the relation between the thinker and what is being thought, allows us to think.103
Without a way, we are left merely, in the words of Marcel, with an emission post and a
reception post, but we are bereft of the message.104 It is important to note that Heidegger
directs our attention to a, and not the, way. Underlying this linguistic nuance is a
revolutionary metaphysical distinction, which frees us from the representational schematic:
the totalization of knowledge is only possible if we think of reality as a closed system; this,
in fact, is presupposed in claims to definite answers. Far from an invitation to think, this is
the surest method of not thinking; for it delimits what can be thought and thereby closes, or,
at the very least, narrows, the avenues thereto.
But what is it that we are trying to think about? And can we think without a way of
thinking, to wit, without a method? The short answer is that we cannot: to think requires, at
first, the realization that there is a being who thinks; however, in the same realization lies the
essence of thought, without which there cannot be a thinking being—for one cannot think
about nothing, unless we give nothing positive significance. This is only a partial insight into
Dasein, or being-in-the-world. For a human being, his being, as well as the being of others, is

Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, suggest that we may avoid this problem
by viewing science as an open-ended process: “The developmental process described in this essay has
been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings—a process whose successive stages are
characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. But nothing that has
been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything” (169-170). Thomas S. Kuhn,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Polanyi, as we
shall see, argues that even process is purposive.
101

102

Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology, 3.

See also “The Necessity, Structure, and Priority of the Question of Being” in Being and Time,
1-13.
103

Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being Volume I: Reflection and Mystery, translated by G. S.
Fraser, (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1950), 119.
104

27
thematized as being; he is, as Heidegger says, concerned with

being.105

The ontological

question is thus the impetus for thinking, resulting in an inversion of Descartes’ dictum: ‘I am
therefore I think.’ The new formulation allows us to think without becoming beholden to our
thought, which, as we identified in the last section, is the bane of modern scientific thinking.
By reasserting the ontological priority of the relation between he who thinks and that about
which he thinks, we open up the possibility of thinking.
The difficulty, however, of uncovering that about which we must think is its
phenomenological timidity: as Heidegger observes, “that we are still not thinking stems from
the fact that the thing itself that must be thought about turns away from man, has turned away
long ago … what really must be thought keeps itself turned away from man since the
beginning.”106 Presumably, the thing about which we must think, the thing that keeps itself
turned from man, is the “totality of beings,”107 or Being; that it remains turned away from
man is not surprising once we reflect on our ways of knowing, which take us further inward
rather than out. Therefore, in the words of Heisenberg, “man encounters only himself.”108 In
a sense, this is impossible: even in the cloistered mind of the scientist thought reaches outside
itself, but it fails to encounter what lies without;109 rather it seeks to dominate and thereby
make otherness in its own image. This is likely the reason Heidegger claims, “Science does
not think. … nonetheless science always and in its own fashion has to do with thinking. That
fashion, however, is genuine and consequently fruitful only after the gulf has become visible
that lies between thinking and the sciences, lies their unbridgeably.”110 The tireless drive of

105

Heidegger, Being and Time, 57.

106

Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 7.

107

Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 83.

108

Quoted in Arendt, The Human Condition, 261.

This is, admittedly, an uncharitable reading of science; and science, properly understood, may
indeed differ from this articulation. However, the point is that a too literal adherence to scientific
principles threatens a complete disengagement with reality.
109

110

Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 8.

28
modernity to reduce multiplicity to oneness renders the gap unintelligible, effectively
discouraging any attempt to bridge it.
Being withdraws from us in so far as it is the source of our self-certainty, as well as
its necessary antithesis. We lie in danger of mistaking our conceptions for what is; this
danger, however, only arises if we accept a representational metaphysics, i.e., we take to be
real only what we think. This is the Cartesian orientation, which interprets being as objective
presence; it conceals either the being who perceives or that which is perceived. Heidegger
observes that Descartes “passes over” the concept of world whilst focusing on the
“innerworldly” aspect of being. Thus,
Descartes does not allow the kind of being of innerworldly beings to present itself, but
rather prescribes to the world, so to speak, its ‘true’ being on the basis of an idea of
being (being = constant presence) the source of which has not been revealed and the
justification of which has not been demonstrated. Thus it is not primarily his
dependence upon a science, mathematics, which just happens to be especially
esteemed, that determines his ontology of the world; rather, his ontology is determined
by a basic ontological orientation toward being as constant objective presence, which
mathematical knowledge is exceptionally well suited to grasp. In this way Descartes
explicitly switches over philosophically from the development of traditional ontology
to modern mathematical physics and its transcendental foundations.”111
Nonetheless, despite its negation of being as anything other than what is objectively present,
this orientation, in so far as it is an orientation, reveals something of our being. Objectivity,
as previously discussed, is only intelligible in relation to subjectivity. However, prior to
either of these concepts is their relatedness: objects become present to us only in so far as we
stand in relation to them, changing the nature of objectivity from that which is present to us
to that which we are related—this marks the beginning of the world, or rather our
understanding of it. Thus the Cartesian orientation does not ontologically negate the
existence of the world; it only comes to it in a rather roundabout way.
Nonetheless, it frustrates thought, which must carry in the sway of what is. Heidegger
writes, “What withdraws from us, draws us along by its very withdrawal, whether or not we
111

Heidegger, Being and Time, 94.

29
become aware of it immediately, or at all. … As we are drawing toward what withdraws, we
ourselves are pointers pointing toward it. … To the extent that man is drawing that way, he
points toward what withdraws. As he is pointing that way, man is the pointer.”112 This is but a
restatement of what is said above: we are both the interpreters and what is interpreted;
however, carried in either direction too far, we become a hindrance to thought. This is the
problem with scientific thinking, which defines world exclusively as objective presence.
From this mood issues also the essence of technology, which is primarily concerned with the
manipulation of objects. However, we must realize that we are always involved, that our
being, in so far as it is intelligible as object, cannot be a matter of indifference to us. Thinking
requires us, first of all, to acknowledge our being as more than merely objectively present.
This, in turn, requires us to unlearn—or at least rethink—our ways of thinking.113
The drawing board, however, is never cleared; we remain caught in the language of
our time. This explains the effectiveness of scientific thinking, from which we cannot
extricate ourselves. We have already established that science draws us toward one extremity
of thought; it is one-sided in its attempt to render intelligible all reality through what is
objectively present. The danger lies in its ability to disguise diversity as multiplicity, which
conceals the “one-sidedness” of the sciences. Heidegger writes, “The one-sidedness view,
which nowhere pays attention any longer to the essence of things, has puffed itself up into an
all-sidedness which in turn is masked so as to look harmless and natural. … It reduces
everything to a univocity of concepts and specifications the precision of which not only
corresponds to, but has the same essential origin as, the precision of technological
process.”114 Technology, thus understood, is nothing other than the manipulation of objects—
an inevitability in so far as the world is understood as a collection of objects. However,
112

Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 9.

“[W]e must allow ourselves to become involved in questions that seek what no inventiveness can
find. Especially we moderns can learn only if we always unlearn at the same time. Applied to the
matter before us: we can learn thinking only if we radically unlearn what thinking has been
traditionally” (Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 8).
113

114

Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 34.

30
because scientific thinking cannot account for the concept of world, it tries to pass its
worldview as neutral, to occupy the unoccupiable space of viewpoint-less-ness.115
In reviewing Heidegger’s notion of thinking, we have given short shrift to Arendt’s
discussion of thoughtlessness. Arendt gives a more political face to our lack of thinking. In
Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt famously coins the phrase, “the banality of evil.” Evil is born
from the worst kind of thoughtlessness, argues Arendt, which, in reality, and not only in
ideality, reduces our being to mere objective presence. Eichmann, in Arendt’s analysis, was a
“fool of history” in so far as he believed himself to be merely a cog in the Nazi machine;116
he relinquished his agency not from any supernatural or incomprehensible evil, but because
he accepted and consequently conformed to a diminished notion of human being.117
Eichmann made the exasperating claim that “he had lived his whole life according to Kant’s
moral precepts.”118 He made this claim as he “did his duty” and “obeyed the law”; however,
as Arendt points out, Eichmann failed to take into account, that for Kant, not only is man
subject to the law, he is also its legislator.119 Accordingly, Kant’s categorical imperative
assumes human beings as ends rather than means. Eichmann adopted a highly selective
version of Kant’s imperative, which Arendt describes thus: “In the household use, all that is
left of Kant’s spirit is the demand that a man do more than obey the law, that he go beyond
the mere call of obedience and identify his own will with the principle behind the law—the

115

Tallis, Aping Mankind, 113.

Nonetheless, according to Arendt, this is consistent with totalitarian regimes, which aim “to make
functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize
them.” Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, (London: Penguin,
1964), 289.
116

In other words, he was thoughtless. “It was sheer thoughtlessness,” writes Arendt, “that
predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of the period” (Eichmann, 287-8).
117

118 Arendt,

Eichmann, 135.

119 Arendt,

Eichmann, 135.

source from which the law

sprang.”120

31
In other words, it is a call upon man to relinquish his

judgement in favour of an external law.
The motivation behind this forfeiture is hidden in the logic of ideology, which
demands conformity. Although in Eichmann’s case, this defence—“a law is a law, there could
be no exceptions”121—proved wholly futile, we, in the modern world, remain amenable to
this kind of thinking. As Arendt argues, the triumph of ideology need not be violent; the
modern world’s adherence to scientific thinking, which minimizes human autonomy, is
evidence that ideology has won out over truth. In The Human Condition, Arendt cautions that
although behaviourism does not offer a good account of human nature, it might one day
become true:
The last stage of the labouring society, the society of jobholders, demands of its
members a sheer automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually
submerged in the over-all process of the species and the only active decision still
required of the individual were to let go, so to speak, to abandon his individuality, the
still individually sensed pain and trouble of living, and acquiesce in a dazed,
‘tranquilized,’ functional type of behaviour. … It is quite conceivable that the modern
age—which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human
activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.122
In Eichmann, Arendt writes, “The argument that we cannot judge if we were not present and
involved ourselves seems to convince everyone everywhere, although it seems obvious that if
it were true, neither the administration of justice nor the writing of history would ever be
possible.”123 Perhaps this is the very reason that we, today, are attempting to rewrite history
from as many perspectives as possible: to compensate for the fact that we cannot judge

120 Arendt,

Eichmann, 136-7.

For Kant, a law is a law in so far as it is derived from a legitimate authority, i.e., man. Authority, in
this sense, does not preclude judgement. Arendt, Eichmann, 137.
121

122 Arendt,

The Human Condition, 322. See also Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being Volume II:
Faith and Reality, translated by G. S. Fraser, (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1950), 148.
123 Arendt,

Eichmann, 296.

32
others.124

This, of course, is contradictory, but contradiction is hardly a deterrent. In its

crudest form, even logic and demonstration are done away with and only fanaticism remains.
The trouble, at root, is thoughtlessness.
We are still not thinking what we are doing; a claim implicit in the fact that we are
still not thinking, properly speaking. Despite the rhetoric of postmodernity or postpostmodernity, we are still experiencing, as Heidegger claims, “the long-drawn-out
consummation” of the modern age,125 which is not, as we mistakenly believe, demarcated by
the passage of time, but rather by a certain way of thinking; a way which attempts to
disintegrate the very path tread to reach this point.

ii. Heidegger’s Tree
The fact that we are here126 is unintelligible through scientific thinking; science can
account for neither a situation nor a self. What the thoroughly modern thinker takes this to
mean is that neither the self nor the fact of situatedness is real. But imagine standing before a
tree, or a tree before you. How can you, in good conscience, deny the reality of this
encounter?
Heidegger remarks upon the encounter between man and tree. “Judged scientifically,”
he writes,
it remains the most inconsequential thing on earth that each of us has at some time
stood facing a tree in bloom. After all, what of it? We come and stand facing a tree,
before it, and the tree faces, meets us. Which one is meeting here? The tree, or we? Or
both? Or neither? We come and stand—just as we are, and not merely with our head or
our consciousness—facing the tree in bloom, and the tree faces, meets us as the tree it
is. Or did the tree anticipate us and come before us? Did the tree come first to stand and
face us, so that we might come forward face-to-face with it? What happens here, that
the tree stands there to face us, and we come to stand face-to-face with the tree? Where
There are also those who deny the writing of history as a meaningful endeavour. For example, see
Alex Rosenberg, “Disenchanted Naturalism,” Kritikos, vol. 12 (Jan., 2015).
124

125

Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 54.

‘Here’ implies more than objective presence; it implies relatedness. Marcel writes, “[E]ssentially
we transcend the opposition between here and elsewhere” (Faith and Reality, 27).
126

33
does this presentation take place, when we stand face-to-face with a tree in bloom?
Does it by chance take place in our heads? … while science records the brain currents,
what becomes of the tree in bloom? What becomes of the meadow? What becomes of
the man—not of the brain but of the man, who may die under our hands tomorrow and
be lost to us, and who at one time came to our encounter? What becomes of the faceto-face, the meeting, the seeing, the forming of the idea, in which the tree presents
itself and man comes to stand face-to-face with the tree?127
We have no answers to these questions, if we suppose that the encounter never transpired. If
the tree is merely an image registered in my brain through electro-chemical currents, then I
need not concern myself with it at all. In the same way, I need not concern myself with
myself, or, more precisely, my body, in so far as this too is a simulation of brain activity.128
What, then, should I concern myself with? If the reality I experience, of which I am an
integral part, is incomprehensible through the mode of thinking I adopt, then I have a choice
before me: either to accept my experience as true, or to deny the truth of my experience. If I
accept the latter option, then I must account for my denial by subscribing to some other
definition of truth. In Cartesian terms, I opt for greater certainty: the senses deceive therefore
I cannot rely upon bodily experience, but wherefrom do I derive the knowledge that the
senses deceive? Thought offers a poor alibi, for it presupposes a living body.
I address this question at length in the penultimate section of this study with the help
of Drew Leder, who argues that our experience is always “incarnated.”129 For now, I shall
focus upon Heidegger's example. The ‘tree’ and ‘we’ cannot be sundered apart, for they are
perceptually intertwined: in attending to the tree, I lose awareness of my body; the tree
occupies my thought. But, what gives occasion to this thought? How do I come upon the
tree? Heidegger asks, does the tree anticipate us? In a sense, yes, the tree anticipates us, for
127

Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 42; emphasis added.

128 As

Tallis observes, “[T]here is nothing in the material transactions it has with the material world
that would form the basis of the sense of a centred world, of ‘me’, or of the ownership that makes a
brain my brain, a body my body, a portion of matter my world. There is nothing, in short, to underpin
the sense of self: the feeling that I am and that certain things are addressed to me.” Aping Mankind,
114
129

Drew Leder, The Absent Body, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), 1.

34
without the tree consciousness does not emerge. However, to whom appears this thing as
object; who names it ‘tree’? We need not enter into the realist-nominalist debate, for what is
at stake is not the name ‘tree’, we may have just as easily called it a ‘twig’, but rather the
object we encounter and the fact that we encounter it. What is perhaps more pertinent to the
debate is whether the concept ‘tree’ exists independent of the tree before us; however, to
reduce the tree to concept, whether inside or outside man, is to make into a picture, that is to
say, to make static, a reality which is by its very nature dynamic. Perhaps this is the reason,
today, the fact that we encounter the tree is not obvious: not only do we question the reality
of the tree or tree-ness, but also whether or not we perceive something which we might call
‘tree’. Thus we call into question not only the nature of reality, but also perceptual primacy:
we await evidence to confirm our perceptions, not realizing that evidence presupposes
perceptual reliance.130
Perhaps, today, we cannot join Heidegger in saying that the reader will dismiss the
fact that we come face-to-face with the tree as “clear as day”—to him Heidegger’s warning
may be obvious, but, for that reason, it is not as distressing. Heidegger warns the hasty
reader,
we shall forfeit everything before we know it, once the sciences of physics, physiology,
and psychology, not to forget scientific philosophy, display the panoply of their
documents and proofs, to explain to us that what we see and accept is properly not a
tree but in reality void, thinly sprinkled with electric charges here and there that race
hither and yon at enormous speeds. It will not do to admit, just for the scientifically
unguarded moments, so to speak, that, naturally, we are standing face to face with a
tree in bloom, only to affirm the very next moment as equally obvious that this view,
naturally, typifies only the naïve, because pre-scientific, comprehension of things.131
But how can we resist this forfeiture so long as we accept scientific explanation as truth; if
truth lies only in the most fundamental parts of our material existence, then wherefrom do we

130 As

Merleau-Ponty suggests, “We must not wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must
instead say: the world is what we perceive.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,
translated by Colin Smith, (London: Routledge, 1962), xviii.
131

Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 43.

35
obtain the conceptual language to affirm a higher reality? The hermeneutic of science, strictly
speaking, allows only a unilateral movement from whole to part; it provides no recourse for
us to refer back to the whole, thereby leaving the hermeneutic circle incomplete and the
sciences meaningless. Nonetheless, instead of denying this as a blatant falsehood and
degradation of our humanity, we question whether or not our experiences are meaningful, as
if they could be otherwise. Heidegger continues, “those sciences do in fact decide what of the
tree in bloom may or may not be considered valid reality. … they will do so just as soon as
we tolerate, if only by our silence, that our standing face-to-face with the tree is no more than
a pre-scientifically intended relation to something we still happen to call ‘tree’.”132 In the
words of George Eliot’s Mordecai, “Woe to the men who see no place for resistance in this
generation!”133
It is only through active resistance to the totalizing drive of scientific thinking that we
can clear the conceptual air to engage with reality. Heidegger goes as far as to deny that any
thinker in the West has done so; even the so-called realists did not affirm the existence of an
external world, although it did not occur to them to deny it.134 So how do we see the tree in
bloom other than the way we see it? To wit, how do we re-articulate our relationship to the
tree in bloom? Perhaps we must begin by acknowledging that such a relationship is real and
that it is antecedent to any theories we happen to map upon it. Whilst it is true that we cannot
think without theorizing, it is also true that we cannot live theoretically. The sciences give us
theories to better understand our existence, through these theories we learn to see the world;
however, what allows us to see also obscures what we see. The danger is unavoidable: we
must risk misconceptions to form any conceptions whatsoever. In the language of Robert
Pirsig, we need both classical and romantic modes of thinking, without allowing either to

132

Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 43-4.

133

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, (London: Penguin, 1995), 526.

Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 44. In a parallel argument, Taylor maintains that the
“meaning of life” only becomes a problem for the modern thinker; to the premodern such a problem
would have been unintelligible (Sources, 18).
134

36
dominate.135

Paul Ricœur makes much the same point when he encourages a “second

naiveté,” which allows us to experience reality without subjecting it to constant doubt or
scepticism.136 We enter this state only when we learn to see what is really there by becoming
aware of our ways of seeing and then unlearning them.

iii. The Hermeneutical Task; or Being-in-the-World
The task that thus befalls man, baffled by his inability to encounter a tree in bloom, is
a hermeneutical one: he must learn how to enter the hermeneutical circle in a different way.
Heidegger establishes the priority of understanding to interpretation: the being of Dasein, as
a being-in, is fundamentally an understanding (hence being is a kind of knowing). Heidegger
identifies projection as the existential structure of understanding: Dasein, as its own
potentiality, of what it is not, embodies this structure; being-there is a projection of and onto
the world. Therefore, the world and being-in-the-world are mutually expository.137 All
understanding is comprehensive: “In every understanding of the world,” writes Heidegger,
“existence is understood with it, and vice versa.”138
The possibilities projected in the understanding are interpreted ‘as’ and thus are
concretized. For instance, we see the pen ‘as’ a writing utensil; the various possible uses—as
a back scratcher, pointer, toothpick, etc.—are narrowed to one, which becomes “ready-tohand.” Hence the world we inhabit is an interpreted world; we do not encounter things in all
their possibilities, for, if we did, we would be unable to act. The case with the tree is
somewhat different, for it appears to us not, at least not always, in its usage; however, when
we encounter the tree, we certainly do interpret it ‘as’ a tree. Articulation makes explicit the
135

Pirsig, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 70-1.

Twentieth century theologian, Peter Wust, to whom the coinage of this term is attributed, describes
it as a “pious equilibrium of scepticism and regained affirmation of being” (quoted in Buzási, 42). See
Áron Buzási, “Paul Ricœur and the Idea of Second Naivety: Origins, Analogues, Applications” in
Ricœur Studies vol. 13, no. 2 (2022), 39-58.
136

137

Heidegger, Being and Time, 15-6.

138

Heidegger, Being and Time, 147.

37
implicit interpretative act; it is the expression of the ‘as’. This is more clearly seen in what is
“present-to-hand.” When I admit to the various uses of the pen, I see the pen as an object, not
merely a writing utensil. Accordingly, by acknowledging that the tree is not merely a refuge
from the sun, but a thing that I encounter, I thematize it as an object. Scientific thinking, in so
far as it renders being mere objective presence, makes everything present-to-hand: things
thus do not reveal themselves through proper usage, but rather they are designed for specific
use, that is, they are at first recognized as objects and only then used. In other words, the
interpretative order is reversed by prioritizing articulation. Hence genuine encounter is
frustrated.
Interpretation is not an act of blind signification, whereby something neutral is given
meaning; rather what we encounter in the world discloses itself through this encounter.
“Interpretation,” cautions Heidegger, “does not, so to speak, throw a ‘significance’ over what
is nakedly objectively present and does not stick a value on it, but what is encountered in the
world is always already in a relevance which is disclosed in the understanding of world, a
relevance which is made explicit by interpretation.”139 Understanding, as such, has a forestructure, in that prior to interpretation we understand what it is that we are interpreting.
Interpretation, on the other hand, has an as-structure; the fore-having, fore-sight and foreconcept of understanding are unified into meaning, which becomes explicit through
interpretation and articulation. Thus, meaning is not inherent to the percept, but rather is an
“existentiale,” or characteristic, of Dasein.
The relation between understanding and interpretation being reciprocal, the act of
interpretation constitutes a circle: the as-structure of interpretation is derivative of the fore of
understanding; not only is it therein derived, it is therein maintained. To view this as a
deficiency of understanding, argues Heidegger, is to misunderstand understanding “from the
ground up.”140 We need not view the circle as “vicious.” “What is decisive,” concludes
Heidegger, “is not to get out of the circle but to get into it in the right way. This circle of
139

Heidegger, Being and Time, 145.

140

Heidegger, Being and Time, 148.

38
understanding is not a circle in which any random kind of knowledge operates, but it is rather
the expression of the existential fore-structure of Dasein itself.”141 We fear the circle because
our ideal of knowledge, as scientific, is mistaken; we think that things as they are, or the
“objectively present in its essential unintelligibility,”142 can be made intelligible, i.e., that we
can gain insight into things as they are. This error thwarts human understanding; for one
because things are only in so far as they are related to other things and ultimately to us.
Intelligibility presupposes intelligence. In the circle, acknowledges Heidegger, “[a] positive
possibility of the most primordial knowledge is hidden.”143 It is for us to become receptive
toward it.
Receptivity must be facilitated through discourse, for discourse, according to
Heidegger, is equiprimordial with understanding. Being-in-the-world, which is essentially
understanding, becomes intelligible through discourse. In discourse, we communicate and
thus make being-with explicit; in a sense, being is already explicit, “but it is unshared as
something that has not been taken hold of and appropriated.”144 Being-with is equiprimordial
to being-there, for it is because there is a ‘there,’ an otherness, that we become aware of our
own being. To state that being-there is essentially understanding, presupposes something that
can be understood. “Dasein hears,” writes Heidegger, “because it understands. As Being-inthe-world with Others, a Being which understands, Dasein is ‘in thrall’ to Dasein-with and to
itself; and in this thraldom it ‘belongs’ to these’.”145 As beings that are essentially enthralled,
we cannot approach the world without presuppositions; they are inherent to our way of being
in the world.
141

Heidegger, Being and Time, 148.

142

Heidegger, Being and Time, 148.

143

Heidegger, Being and Time, 148.

Martin Heidegger, “Being-There and Discourse. Language,” in The Hermeneutics Reader, edited
by Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (New York: Continuum, 1985), 235. This quotation is taken from a different
translation than the one I have used until now. See also Heidegger, Being and Time, 157.
144

Martin Heidegger, “Being-There and Discourse. Language,” 236. See also Heidegger, Being and
Time, 158.
145

39
Science as discourse, therefore, assumes a primacy over articulated experience; it
pretends to the equiprimordiality of understanding. However, the way in which scientific
thinking appropriates what is, makes it present-to-hand, denies the fore-structure of
understanding; it denies in Heidegger’s terms the “worldliness of the world”: “The course of
scientific inquiry into reality shows that the original mode of encounter of the environing
world is always already given up in favour of the established view of the world as the reality
of nature, so that we may interpret the specific phenomena of the world in terms of its
theoretical knowledge of the objectivity of nature.”146 Our theories of nature, which
presuppose our involvement with the world, paradoxically, attempt to explain this very
involvement. In a later section, I take up the distinction Gabriel Marcel draws between
problem and mystery; here we see a patent example of the limitations of modern thinking,
which attempts to problematize all being.

iv. The Politics of Scientism
The political, or moral, questions of the modern world cannot be extricated from the
metaphysical, for it is only by way of the latter that these questions first arise; the world as
we see it demands a certain way of being. If the world becomes merely a collection of objects
that can be manipulated, among which the human body is counted, then it too is amenable to
exploitation. We have no moral claim upon this body or its actions, for these are the mere
functions of a machine.147 How, then, do we make decisions? The transhumanist project
proceeds unchecked because we have lost the moral ground to oppose it, or, which is just as
detrimental, we too are in its thrall. There are those who maintain that this is the next logical

Heidegger quoted in James Barry, Jr., “The Physics of Modern Perception: Beyond Body and
World,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy vol. 4, no. 4, (1990), 184. The original quotation is
from History of the Concept of Time.
146

The danger, as Polanyi points out, lies not in the mechanistic view of man, although this view is
founded on erroneous grounds, but rather on the unchecked moral fervour that accompanies it: “Only
when great moral aspirations, aiming at the radical transformation of society, are injected into the
mechanistic idea of man, are engines of power engendered which press for the fulfillment of this
logic” (Personal Knowledge, 239).
147

40
step in our evolution; however, they can only believe this in so far as they accept an
erroneous account of mind as fundamentally computational or disembodied.
In his semi-fictional prison memoir, The House of the Dead, Fyodor Dostoevsky
writes, “Man is a creature that can get used to anything, and I think that is the best definition
of him.”148 In this lies our greatest hope and also our greatest fear. If we define our being in
the computational register, and live out this definition, then our being, to any meaningful
extent, becomes computational. The particular danger with this definition, as Heidegger
points out, is that it does not reveal being but rather forces it out (“challenging forth”),
transfiguring it in the process. The method of discovery, in this case, mars its object. Hence,
when Dostoevsky’s “underground man” asserts, “an intelligent man of the nineteenth century
must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character,
an active figure—primarily a limited being,”149 he is at once critiquing and rejecting a
methodology, which so constrains man. According to Dostoevsky, modern man suffers from
the affliction of rationalism, which cannot give him moral guidance. Nonetheless,
paradoxically, his amoral position presupposes acceptance of a dogmatic morality in the form
of rationalism or modern science. Consequent of this acceptance, the peculiarities of man’s
character are effaced; the absolute contingency of his being, which science asserts, is
challenged by the absolute necessity of the scientific method. In the final moments of the
journal, the underground man exclaims,
Take a closer look! We don’t even know where the living lives now, or what it is, or
what it’s called! Leave us to ourselves, without a book, and we’ll immediately get
confused, lost—we won’t know what to join, what to hold to, what to love and what to
hate, what to respect and what to despise. It’s a burden for us even to be men—men
with real, our own bodies and blood; we’re ashamed of it, we consider it a disgrace,
and keep trying to be some unprecedented omni-men. We’re stillborn, and have long
ceased to be born of living fathers, and we like this more and more. We’re acquiring a
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead, translated by David McDuff, (London: Penguin,
2003), 29.
148

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky, (New York: Vintage Classics, 1993), 5.
149

41
taste for it. Soon we’ll contrive to be born somehow from an

idea.150

The final proclamation is prophetic: we, indeed, have contrived a way to be born of an idea;
the modern Prometheus faces us in all its ghastly terror. But even more to our point are the
preceding comments, on the tragic forgetfulness of our being: we have forgotten how to be
human and suffer the consequences of this forgetfulness. That we should recover from it is
unlikely, for the affliction frustrates the effectiveness of its antidote: forgetful creatures that
we are, we cannot recall what we have lost; convinced of the disembodied ‘ego’, we have
taken the body for granted—the tragic irony is that we might not lament this loss until it is
too late.
We are willing to forge ahead without remorse in the name of progress. The fact that
progress introduces into science, narrowly speaking, a moral dimension is lost upon its most
adherent disciples. In Science, Faith, and Society, Polanyi writes that the modern moral
milieu is marked by the “fusion of unprecedented critical lucidity and intensified moral
passions … inflaming or paralyzing both reason and morality.”151 According to Polanyi, it is
neither science nor morality itself, which causes such devastating confusion in the twentieth
century, but rather a morality seeking to act through science.152
Two deeply troubled and contradictory ‘isms’ emerge as a consequence of this
“fusion”: scientific scepticism and moral perfectionism, which are but two sides of the same
coin; it is the task of one to doubt and the other to seek certainty. Both render morality
untenable, for one brings into question any ideal the other may choose for itself resulting in
150

Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 130.

Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society: A searching examination of the meaning and nature
of scientific inquiry, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1964), 56. Taylor makes a similar point
whilst observing the non-neutrality of modern moralists: “They are caught in a strange pragmatic
contradiction, whereby the very goods which move them push them to deny or denature all such
goods. They are constitutionally incapable of coming clean about the deeper sources of their own
thinking. Their thought is inescapably cramped” (Sources, 88).
151

“The self-destructive tendencies of the modern mind arose only when the influence of scientific
scepticism was combined with a fervour 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.” Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 57.
152

“moral passions filled with contempt for their own

ideals.”153

42
Here, Polanyi invokes another

of Dostoevsky’s characters, Stavrogin,154 to make his point: unable to commit to any moral
precepts, Stavrogin, a nihilist and sadist, lives a depraved life, transgressing moral
boundaries he knows not how to define; the book ends with his suicide, which, for him, is the
climax in a string of equally meaningless acts. The characters of Pyotr Stepanovich, who
believes Stavrogin to be the Nietzschean messiah, and Shatov, a reactionary voice, through
whom perhaps Dostoevsky most directly speaks, orient the larger political discourse: the
nihilism of the former is armed with a seemingly noncommittal moral frenzy, which is
spurred on by nothing other than its internal logic. Stavrogin commits increasingly iniquitous
crimes, without being able to account for any crime whatsoever. Shatov, non-coincidentally,
is killed as a result of Pyotr’s plotting. What does this vignette say, more generally, of the
human condition? The answer, I fear, is not hopeful.
Nonetheless, Polanyi acknowledges that there is a way out: so long as man feels
revulsion against the kind of knowledge that lands us here (and Polanyi recognizes that such
is the case), there is the possibility of rethinking knowledge.155 We need find a way to
reconcile the “unlimited moral demands” of man with his “critical incisiveness,” if reason is
not to be impotent and morality blind. Foremost, argues Polanyi, this must be accomplished
on “secular grounds,” only thence appears the clearing toward religious thought.156 In other
words, revelation cannot secure the fruits of reflection.157

153

Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 58.

The summary is based on Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s Demons, (New York: Vintage Classics, 1994).
154

155“If

I still believe that a reconsideration of knowledge may be effective today,” writes Polanyi, “it is
because for some time past, a revulsion has been noticeable against the ideas which have brought us
to our present state” (Science, Faith and Society, 60). I am, cautiously, of the same opinion.
156

Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 62.

See Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1975),
178-181.
157

43
“In a society of explorers,” as Polanyi entreats us to become, “man is in

thought.”158

We have spent already a good while in trying to understand what is called thinking. Polanyi’s
understanding is congenial to what has been said thus far: he allows what is to guide thought
even whilst it remains elusive; even as “hidden reality” retreats, the man in thought moves
toward it. Thus all discoveries are the fruit of man’s anticipation: thinking is “man’s capacity
for anticipating the approach of hidden reality.”159 In this sense, man is not the conqueror of
reality, as we might say in the technological age, but rather the servant of reality. Speaking of
the choices made by the scientist in his inquiry, Polanyi writes, “they are his acts, but what he
pursues is not of his making; his acts stand under the judgement of the hidden reality he
seeks to uncover.”160 In other words, man must preserve the presence of what he discovers; to
do so, he must first encounter that which he discovers, for he is “under an obligation to the
external objective.”161 Modern science, as discussed, is deceptively one-sided: it
acknowledges that man penetrates objective reality without recognizing that he can only do
so because the objective presses upon him.
Moreover, he can only do so through the aid of the imagination. Polanyi emphasizes
the role of the imagination in scientific discovery: “The surmises of a working scientist are
born of the imagination seeking discovery.”162 We must commit to a certain way of looking at
the world; this commitment is not based upon individual verification—for, in this case, no
commitment would be required—but rather on authority.163 This is especially true of
laypersons’ acceptance of scientific findings too sophisticated and technical to be understood
by them, but also among scientists. Polanyi argues not only for mutual authority, which
158

Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 83.

159

Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 76.

160

Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 76-7.

161

Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 77.

Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 79. Similarly, in Meaning, Polanyi writes, “We now see that
not only do the scientific and the humanistic both involve personal participation; we see that both also
involve an active use of the imagination” (64).
162

163

See Polanyi on commitment in Personal Knowledge, 299-324.

44
guides the enquiries and discoveries of scientists, but also “mutual control,” the principle by
which “scientists keep watch over one another.”164 This, of course, presupposes that the
causal-analytic discourse of science supervenes on a broader, more ambiguous, human
reality, which shapes and is in turn shaped by science.165 Therefore, we cannot rely on the
sciences to define our politics, for something more is always assumed in our acquiescence
than we are willing, or, even able, given our accepted modes of thinking, to admit.

Précis
This chapter builds upon the critique offered in the first, relying upon Heidegger and
Arendt to show how scientific thinking, as defined, inhibits genuine encounter and the
exercise of our judgement. Heidegger critiques the representational schematic of modernity
and, in its stead, offers a relational account of phenomena showing that we are always
already involved in what we know, not mere onlookers. While Arendt, on the other hand,
maintains that totalizing scientific explanation leads to a banal evil: a complete forfeiture of
the faculty of judgement.
The problem with the modern scientific outlook is that it motivates an escape from
the hermeneutical circle: scientific discourse mistakenly prioritizes articulation over
interpretation and understanding. As Heidegger maintains, the “fore-structure” of
understanding, which gives us intuitive insight into what is, and the “as-structure” of
interpretation, which allows us to encounter genuine otherness, are woven into the cultural
fabric of meaning, a reality that cannot be re-presented in wholly objective terms. The
pretension of science as an exhaustive discourse obscures genuine encounter. Moreover,

164

Polanyi and Prosch, Meaning, 191.

Karl-Otto Apel makes the point effectively, “[T]he sole explanation of the fact that men are able to
react to the causal-analytic explanation of their behaviour with a new type of behaviour lies in the
insight that men can convert the language of a deepened self-understanding which in turn alters their
motivation structure and thus pulls the rug out from under the ‘explanation’.” In other words, man is
not reducible to explanations. Karl-Otto Apel, “Scientistics, Hermeneutics, Critique of Ideology: An
Outline of a Theory of Science from an Epistemological-Anthropological Point of View,” in The
Hermeneutics Reader, edited by Kurt Vollmer-Mueller, (New York: Continuum, 1985), 340.
165

45
modern science, while deflating man and morality to congeries of instincts, fails to quell the
moral passions which motivate not only human encounter but also scientific inquiry in the
first instance. Consequently, as Polanyi recognizes, moral passions must be regarded as
eruptions of frustrated energies that have only the amoral framework of scientific method to
give them their ends. The path to recovery, thus, must lie in our ability to rethink or
reimagine this reductive and deeply inhuman worldview.

III. Personal Knowledge
i. The Scientific Worldview; Understanding Science Anew
In an article aptly entitled “Science and Man,” Polanyi provides a scathing critique of
the modern scientific worldview, contending that the “blind violence and paralyzing selfdoubt” of the twentieth century is endemic to this outlook;166 our only hope of escaping this
rather grim prospect is to reassess this worldview and reestablish the authority of judgement.
Polanyi begins with an overview of modern science, which he divides into two “great” ages:
eighteenth century scientific liberalism and nineteenth century romanticism, rooted in
individual self-determination.167 In contrast stands the brute scientism of the twentieth
century.
Polanyi juxtaposes the optimism of Johannes Kepler, who, at the advent of the
seventeenth century, discovered the planetary laws of motion, and the despair of John Donne,
who foresaw the loss of beauty in the methodology of this newfound discovery, expressed in
his verse: “’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.”168 Kepler seemed to be in the right,
observes Polanyi, at least until the twentieth century when the contradiction at the heart of
modern science was fully realized. Kepler, of course, saw no such thing; otherwise he would
not have been able to postulate a “harmonics of the world,” for harmony is a perceptual

166

Michael Polanyi, “Science and Man,” Royal Society of Medicine vol. 63 (Sept., 1970), 976.

167

Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 972.

168

Quoted in Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 969.

46
quality and therefore

personal.169

It is only in the twentieth century that the full logical

implications of an impersonal science are realized. The atomism of Democritus and the
physicalism of Laplace, i.e., that the atomic structure of an object and an understanding of
the physical laws operating upon it exhaust all knowledge of the object, allow no moral
consideration: as Polanyi writes, “For if all that is real in man consists in his atoms obeying
the laws of physics, moral values can only be subjective feelings.”170 Nonetheless, this is the
generally accepted view of the universe not only in contemporary scientific circles but also in
the practical day-to-day.171
Polanyi refutes this view with the use of two examples.172 First, he very briefly tells
the story of carrying home an unidentified object from America, the function of which could
not be discovered from its physical and chemical topography. Only upon returning to
America did he learn that the object was used for puncturing beer cans. The point is that if all
knowledge of an object is exhausted in its physical and chemical composition, then Polanyi
(and other examiners) should have been able to discern its function. However, they were
unable to do so because function, properly speaking, is not physically or chemically
determined; rather function or operation, in Polanyi’s terminology, occupies a higher stratum
of reality: the mechanistic. The second example he gives is of pebbles rearranged to express a
greeting, which, according to Polanyi, is comparable with the information coded in DNA.
Both examples illustrate that significant arrangement is not the product of physical and
chemical processes, in so far as these processes—without being identified as processes—are
devoid of content. “Putting the matter more precisely,” writes Polanyi, “any interaction that

169

Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 969.

170

Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 972.

Polanyi writes, “Laplace’s view that all matters of our experience can ultimately be explained in
terms of physics and chemistry prevails today in science and beyond science. It is the current view of
the universe. I hold this view to be false and believe that its baneful influence has caused the cultural
and civil destruction of vast regions of Europe and has spread confusion through all countries spared
by the revolutions of the twentieth century” (“Science and Man,” 970).
171

172

Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 970.

47
would favour a particular significant arrangement of a series is a redundancy that reduces the
information content of the series.”173 In other words, significance is not inherent to physical
and/or chemical interaction; it requires a third term—the intentional consciousness of a
subject—unidentifiable by physics and chemistry alone, which is presupposed in the study of
physical and chemical matter.
“This refutation of the dominant scientific world view,” remarks Polanyi, “sets free a
vast area of the universe for renewed consideration. We can see at a glance now that almost
everything of interest to man lies beyond explication by physics and chemistry.”174 Hope is
renewed in the capabilities of man to determine his own fate. The scientific worldview, as
Polanyi observes, is not scientific in itself; to assume that it is so not only obscures scientific
inquiry but also its cultural influence.175 The scientific worldview, correctly understood, is a
cultural phenomenon in that it develops from an accepted set of values. It is because we
value impersonal objectivity that we strive for it; ironically, however, because we value
impersonal objectivity, it is personal. The ability to postulate an objective is an
accomplishment of our subjectivity, individually and collectively. The inability to see the
emanation of thought from this uncomfortable proximity is the cause of much confusion.
Thus, many scientists accept the deterministic (Laplacian) view of the world with the
detrimental effect of “casting much of the world into mindless servitude, while afflicting the
rest with basic confusion.”176
Polanyi admits that the first two “ages” of science allowed “a society that was, with
all its evils, more free and more humane than any that had existed before.”177 The existence
of such a society, however, relied on contradictions between the precepts of modern science
and their application; once these contradictions were worked out, we would lose even the
173

Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 970.

174

Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 971.

175

Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 971.

176

Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 971.

177

Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 972.

48
language by which to understand them. Polanyi explains, “The fall from such greatness to the
disasters of our own time was due to the gradual sharpening of an internal contradiction that
had until then remained latent. The scientific enlightenment had released an unlimited
passion for moral progress, but it also undermined the very foundations of moral
principles.”178 People, weakened by scientific skepticism, became more likely to adhere to
radical revolutionary movements, which were no longer viewed as immoral but rather
amoral. This “moral inversion,” as Polanyi calls it, allowed for the most heinous atrocities
humankind has ever witnessed: “Violence was deemed then to be the only rational and honest
political action. This was not to use violence in the service of moral ideas, as the French
Revolution had used violence; it was to convert moral ideas into brute power.”179 In other
words, violence became purposeless.
In light of this moral inversion, stemming directly out of the modern scientific
worldview,180 Polanyi proposes a new theory of knowledge. The newness of which lies in its
articulation rather than practice. “The very act of perception,” states Polanyi, “involves
participation.”181 Thus, all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is and must be
personal. The depth of participation varies and demarcates the different levels of man’s
existence. Polanyi divides man’s existence into four distinct levels: the vegetal, the
sensorimotor, the intelligently perceptive and operational and the level of thought and
178

Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 972.

179

Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 973.

Polanyi addresses the defender of modern science: “Many people will listen impatiently to the
kind of account I have given of the scientific outlook’s destructive powers and will brush me aside
with the answer that these destructive influences of science arise only from abuses of science. I reject
this kind of evasion. It is true that no one ever applies strictly the atomic conception of the universe in
his own daily experience. When Jacque Monod, great molecular biologist and Nobel Laureate, insists
in his inaugural address to the Collège de France that we may regard the works of Shakespeare as the
random product of atomic agitations, he does not postpone his recognition of Shakespeare until this
atomic understanding of his work will be available. No scientist refuses his affection to his family
from disappointment because he cannot see them as atomic aggregates” (“Science and Man,”
975-976). The point is that even the scientist, who believes in upholding the principles of modern
science, in practice, transgresses them. This, however, does not offer a vindication of this viewpoint.
On the contrary, it sharpens the critique.
180

181

Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 975.

49
language. It is the lowest level, the vegetal, which “harnesses the laws of inanimate
nature;”182 however, it too is not determined by these laws but rather emerges at its boundary
line.183 As we move up the successive levels, posits Polanyi, “the depth of our participation
increases.”184
Culture is the name given to the highest level of existence, i.e., that which we bring
into being through human thought and language. An individual is rooted in his specific
cultural context, which shapes his mind.185 “However original and daring a great man’s
thinking may be,” writes Polanyi, “it remains rooted in the framework that first shapes his
mind.”186 All attempts to ‘free’ man from this context and determine the laws of thought
through science fail; they end in the kind of moral ambivalence characteristic of the twentieth
century, or artificial morality characteristic of the twenty-first.187 It is not the loss of the
moral sense that we need fear, for it is embedded in our humanity, but rather the loss of our
awareness of this sense. As Polanyi remarks, “The ethical problem of our age is not to secure
morality against moral indifference. Moral passions abound: our problem is to protect them
against a supermorality that channels their fervour into moral inversion.”188 To do so, we
must recognize that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, requires commitment, lest
we commit in ignorance. To trust in the scientific method and proclaim the discoveries of
science as ‘true,’ are moral claims. In other words, scientific knowledge is not indifferent to
man, or, perhaps, man is not indifferent to scientific knowledge. If Polanyi is right, then the
182

Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 974.

183

See Polanyi, “Emergence,” The Tacit Dimension, 29-52.

184

Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 974.

See R. P. Doede, “Polanyi on Language and the Human Way of Being Bodily Mindful in the
World,” Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical, 30, no. 1 (Jan., 2004), 5-18.
185

186

Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 975.

187 Apparently AI

is having significant influence on our decisions—of course, this claim overlooks the
obvious fact that AI is designed and used by human beings. Nonetheless, the risk to our moral sense is
real. See Josh A. Goldstein et al., “Generative Language Models and Automated Influence
Operations: Emerging Threats and Potential Mitigations,” (2023), DOI: arXiv:2301.04246v1.
188

Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 975.

true

“menace”189

50
we face today is a lack of self-awareness; it is not so much our method, but

rather our evaluation of method that we need change. Polanyi concludes, “we must now build
up a truer world view in which the grounds of man’s moral being can be re-established. For
this alone can save modern man from the alternatives of blind violence and paralyzing selfdoubt.”190

ii. Authority, Tradition & Conscience
In order to forge a new worldview, we must recognize science as an activity
practicable only through faith, in which judgement and conscience play decisive roles.
Scientific inquiry is not strictly rule-governed, but rather it is guided by the scientist’s
judgement,191 itself developed through tutelage and acceptance of scientific principles. “To
speak of science and its continued progress,” writes Polanyi, “is to profess faith in its
fundamental principles and in the integrity of scientists in applying and amending these
principles.”192 The danger we face in the twentieth century and beyond is the paralysis of our
critical faculties.193 Man, no longer at the helm of science, appears to be pursuing an
untethered ship, following a sporadic course. Hence, we see the advent of ideology and the
demise of true science. This is the “philosophic corruption” to which Polanyi alludes.194
It is a misconstrual of science to take its findings as the fruit of direct observation; in
other words, scientific propositions are by no means obvious from observational data, which

189

Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 975.

190

Polanyi, “Science and Man,” 976.

“The rules of scientific inquiry leave their own application wide open,” writes Polanyi, “to be
decided by the scientist’s judgement” (Science, Faith and Society, 14).
191

192

Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 16.

Polanyi in Science, Faith and Society, quotes the Hungarian Communist, Nicolas Gimes, who
describes Stalinism as “the outlook which poisoned our whole public life, penetrated the remotest
corners of our thinking, obscured our vision, paralyzed our critical faculties and finally rendered
many of us incapable of simply sensing or apprehending the truth” (18).
193

194

Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 18.

51
needs to be interpreted. How we interpret data is not determined by the data; here the
scientist must rely on the principles of science. Polanyi writes, “The part of observation is to
supply clues for the apprehension of reality: that is the process underlying scientific
discovery. The apprehension of reality thus gained forms in its turn a clue to future
observations: that is the process of underlying verification.”195 That conception of reality is
most accurate which proves most fruitful; not, however, because it is fruitful, but rather
because of that which is discovered in its fruitfulness. “Verification,” writes Polanyi, “rests
ultimately on mental powers which go beyond the application of any definite rules.”196 In
Kantian terminology, there is “free play of the imagination;” in this the scientific is closely
related to the artistic, they are both creative. The creation is affirmed by what is; our
expressions of the world are not unrelated to the impressions it inflicts upon us.197 In method,
it is true, that science and art diverge; however, in this they are one: they both aim at truth
and in different ways reach it.
The weight of personal judgement upholds each scientific proposition, which could
never be reached without the discerning power of judgement.198 Thus, the scientist is already
involved in the reality he attempts to discover; otherwise he could not discover it. “[F]ar
from being neutral at heart,” writes Polanyi, “[the scientist] is himself passionately interested
in the outcome of the procedure. He must be, for otherwise he will never discover a problem
at all and certainly not advance towards its solution.”199

195

Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 29.

196

Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 29.

Polanyi writes, “All these processes of creative guesswork have in common that they are guided
by an urge to make contact with a reality, which is felt to be there already to start with waiting to be
apprehended. That is why the egg of Columbus is the proverbial symbol of great discovery. It
suggests that great discovery is the realization of something obvious; a presence staring us in the face,
waiting until we open our eyes” (Science, Faith and Society, 35).
197

198

See Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 30-1.

199

Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 38-9.

52
Conscience, in this case, scientific conscience, is the appropriate guide to judgement.
According to Polanyi, conscience is the arbiter between “unfettered speculation” and
rigorous rule-fulfillment.200 Conscience is not innate; we are not born with a conscience,
scientific or moral. Rather it is developed under legitimate authority; hence the apprentice or
student learns from his master. Of course, good judgement is not a matter of teaching but
learning. Learning is never blind: it aims at something, and this it can only do if there is a
discernible aim. “Any effort made to understand something,” writes Polanyi, “must be
sustained by the belief that there is something there that can be understood.”201 Ultimately,
the authority to which the student of science submits is the authority of what is real; his
mentors are only intermediaries, which support him, not unlike the parent who supports an
infant learning to walk. What Polanyi seems to overlook here, whilst emphasizing the
authority of reality in the natural sciences, is that all methods of inquiry ultimately derive
their authority from that which is real; the only exception is perhaps religion, which derives
its authority from the supra-real (depending, of course, on how we define reality).
At any rate, the scientist, when he becomes a student of science, adopts a tradition;
the beliefs of which he will never be able to exhaust through personal verification. He must,
therefore, trust others committed to the same principles and purpose. As Polanyi writes,
“[Scientists] are speaking with one voice because they are informed by the same tradition.”202
Prior to the rigorous verification which determines scientific ‘truth,’ all scientists commit to a
belief in the principle of verification. It is only by committing to a set of principles that man
—regardless of vocation—is able to navigate reality. The novice must accept the authority of
his superiors, not because superiority determines intellectual capability—the novice might

“Unfettered intuitive speculation would lead to extravagant wishful conclusions; while rigorous
fulfillment of any set of critical rules would completely paralyze discovery. The conflict can be
resolved only through a judicial decision by a third party standing above the contestants. The third
party in the scientist’s mind which transcends both his creative impulses and his critical caution, is his
scientific conscience” (Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 41).
200

201

Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 44.

202

Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 52.

53
come to surpass his superior—but because in submitting to the master he submits to the
tradition.203 The authority that governs science is of a general nature, which, as Polanyi
writes, “assumes that individual members are capable of making genuine contact with the
reality underlying the existing tradition and of adding new and authentic interpretations to
it.”204 Thus submission to scientific authority does not thwart progress; rather it engenders
progress.205 The scientist, in submitting to the scientific tradition, internalizes the voice of
this tradition, which is refined by personal experience—this is conscience.206

iii. Judgement & Responsibility
Polanyi acknowledges that comprehensive knowledge of man is impossible, for every
attempt to explicate such knowledge adds to it, ad infinitum.207 Polanyi distinguishes
between the explicit and tacit dimensions of knowledge, where what we hold to be true is
explicit and that we hold it to be true is tacit. In other words, although our beliefs can be
made explicit, we cannot always make explicit the reasons for these beliefs. He continues to
argue that “tacit knowing is in fact the dominating principle of all knowledge, and that its

“Scientists must feel under obligation to uphold the ideals of science and be guided by this
obligation, both in exercising authority and in submitting to that of their fellows, otherwise science
must die” (Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 54).
203

204

Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 59.

Even break-throughs or “revolutions” are dependent upon the tradition they defy; these are
perhaps liminal cases—the scientist who makes a revolutionary discovery shows the constraints of
the dominant paradigm.
205

Cf. Arendt on conscience in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Arendt
cautions against the danger of conscience: “[Eichmann’s] conscience was indeed at rest when he saw
the zeal and eagerness with which ‘good society’ everywhere reacted as he did. He did not need to
‘close his ears to the voice of conscience,’ as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but
because his conscience spoke with a ‘respectable voice,’ with the voice of respectable society around
him” (126). Conscience is derived from the common world; if enough “respectable” people are
convinced a wrong is a right, conscience hardly proves to be a check upon the public. In other words,
for Arendt, we need a better guarantee than conscience.
206

207

Michael Polanyi, The Study of Man, (Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1963), 12.

rejection … automatically involve[s] the rejection of any knowledge

whatsoever.”208

54
This is

because all explicit knowledge is undergirded by unarticulated or latent clues and
assumptions, which are unspecifiable, either because they are unknown or because
specification deprives them of logical coherence.
Latent learning, the ability to use these clues to carry out certain operations, is
common to animals and man; however, what gives man advantage over animals is his ability
to articulate or to make explicit209 his latent knowledge; man exhibits far greater interpretive
capabilities by virtue of his ability to make what is latent explicit. This explicit dimension of
knowing, although rooted in animal capacities, enables him to encounter and in some cases
create a higher reality; thus, not only is man the master of his universe, he is the only creature
to have a universe. However, it also opens the door to greater error; as Polanyi correctly
identifies, “there is … a new risk involved in travelling by a map: namely that the map may
be mistaken.”210 We, today, find ourselves in such a predicament, where the map we are
travelling by is mistaken. The map, in this case, is a representative of the higher reality man
cultivates through his explication; it is this reality, or at least the ordering of this reality,
which Polanyi calls into question.
Polanyi suggests understanding as the basis of all human knowing; we may know
because we seek to understand, namely, to organize or reorganize our experience to make
sense of it. “Modern science disclaims any intention of understanding the hidden nature of
things;” writes Polanyi, “its philosophy condemns any such endeavour as vague, misleading
and altogether unscientific.”211 The proponents of this view do not recognize, however, that
any such philosophy presupposes more than bare scientific fact—it presupposes
understanding or judgement. Polanyi accounts for this error: “It is permitted this
inconsistency because its ruthless mutilation of human experience lends it such a high
208

Polanyi, The Study of Man, 13.

209

It is not for nothing that Tallis calls man the “explicit animal.”

210

Polanyi, The Study of Man,” 15.

211

Polanyi, The Study of Man, 20.

55
reputation for scientific severity, that its prestige overrides the defectiveness of its own
foundations.”212 We must change our ideal of knowledge, argues Polanyi, and reinstate the
subject as an active participant in human knowing, rather than an incidental entity. By doing
so, we acknowledge all knowledge as personal: “The participation of the knower in shaping
his knowledge, which had hitherto been tolerated only as a flaw—a shortcoming to be
eliminated from perfect knowledge—is now recognized as the true guide and master of our
cognitive powers.”213
Parallel to his distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge, Polanyi introduces
the distinction between focal and subsidiary awareness; we are focally aware of whatever we
consciously perceive or are attentive to, whereas we have subsidiary awareness of all the
particulars that account for the object(s) of our focal awareness. For example, I am focally
aware of the subject matter I am discussing; I have subsidiary awareness of the device I am
using to transcribe my thoughts, the words that comprise their content; furthermore, the
letters that comprise the content of the words; moreover, all the requisite definitions and
usages which allow me to formulate my thought, and many other such particulars that are
necessary for intelligible and thoughtful discourse; not to mention anything of my situational
particulars (e.g., the movement of my hands, the seat supporting me, the floor beneath my
feet, etc.). From this rudimentary example, we see that the range of subsidiary awareness is
much wider than that of focal awareness; accordingly, so is the range of tacit knowledge
compared to explicit knowledge. If we fail to acknowledge or willfully ignore the debt owed
by explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge, then we are likely to mistake the nature of
knowledge.
The proponents of modern science commit this error when they mistake attempts at
understanding the universe to be absolute descriptions. Hence they rush to the conclusion
that man is a collocation of atoms (or subatomic particles); and yet, in an ironic turn of
thought, believing that the ground of existence has been found, they attempt to understand
212

Polanyi, The Study of Man, 21.

213

Polanyi, The Study of Man, 26.

56
man as a collocation of atoms. Meanwhile, they seem to forget that the description
“collocation of atoms” was ever only discernible because man sought to understand his being
prior to this discovery. Polanyi states, “you cannot discover or invent anything unless you are
convinced that it is there, ready to be found.”214 Much earlier, Saint Anselm of Canterbury
had expressed the same sentiment: “Unless I believe, I shall not understand” (fides quaerens
intellectum).215
“Subsidiary awareness is a dwelling of our minds within the subject of which we are
subsidiarily aware,” writes Polanyi, “and an articulate framework is therefore accepted
ultimately as a happy home for our understanding; it is the soil on which our understanding
can live and grow, while satisfying ever further its craving for clarity and coherence.”216 This
framework, we might suppose, is at least slightly different for each individual, given the
deeply personal nature of knowledge; however, there are common features by which general
frameworks can be discerned. For instance, we might speak of a scientific framework, i.e.,
one adopted by scientists. This is not the framework under attack, although this does not
exonerate the contemporary scientist who has forgotten that his discoveries are after all ways
of understanding the world. What might appear to be a discrepancy, upon closer inspection,
proves to be nothing of the sort; the point is that the scientist has beliefs unrelated to his
vocation—he holds beliefs as a man as well as a scientist.
It is a common feature of the articulate frameworks of modern men to hold science as
truth, and thereby divest truth of value, in so far as science is understood to be valueless.
Polanyi argues against this claim:
The moment the ideal of detached knowledge [is] abandoned, it [is] inevitable that the
ideal of dispassionateness should eventually follow, and that with it the supposed
cleavage between dispassionate knowledge of fact and impassioned valuation of beauty
214

Polanyi, The Study of Man, 35.

Saint Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogian, translated by Thomas Williams, (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing, 2001), 6. Although made popular by St. Anselm, the origin of this quotation is from an
old translation of Isaiah 7:9. In Proslogion, St. Anselm is quoting St. Augustine.
215

216

Polanyi, The Study of Man, 32.

57
should vanish. A continuous transition from observation to valuation can actually be
carried out within science itself, and indeed within the exact sciences, simply by
moving from physics to applied mathematics and then further to pure mathematics.217
We articulate our frameworks, according to Polanyi, through acts of discernment or
judgement, which would be impossible without valuation; in so far as scientific knowledge
requires judgement, it assumes valuation. Facts alone cannot be composited purposefully, nor
do they have any meaning in themselves.
Rather than degrade science, this realization exalts it; science becomes a truly human
endeavour, which is inherently meaningful. Following what has been said, if we recognize
our hand in shaping scientific knowledge, we must take responsibility for it. This
responsibility is both individual and collective: individual in so far as each person is
responsible for the views he affirms or denies; collective in so far as the individual belongs to
a world and owes something to his fellow beings, i.e., those dedicated to the same cause. For
instance, a scientist has a responsibility not only to discover truth but also to reveal it.218 The
mutual respect arising between responsible individuals working together is the very basis of
encounter: “This is to say that when we arrive at the contemplation of a human being as a
responsible person, and we apply to him the same standards as we accept for ourselves, our
knowledge of him has definitely lost the character of an observation and has become an
encounter instead.”219
We choose ideals to guide our judgement; scientific inquiry is no exception. There are
certain criteria taken for granted, criteria, which are derived without use of the scientific
method. These first principles are evaluative; in choosing them, one says, ‘I prefer this way
of looking at the world rather than this other way.’ Foremost, as Polanyi writes, “We need
reverence to perceive greatness.”220 This is true of the historical and scientific method: to
217

Polanyi, The Study of Man,” 38.

218

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 321.

219

Polanyi, The Study of Man, 94-5.

220

Polanyi, The Study of Man, 96.

58
understand we need respect that which we encounter. Respect, in Heideggerian terms, is
shown through thinking, i.e., by letting being disclose itself to us; or, as Polanyi puts it, by
responding to the intimations of a hidden reality. Only through such disclosure do we
encounter a reality other than ourselves.
iv. Truth & Commitment
Truth, says Polanyi, is the “rightness of an action.”221 It is, in other words, the
affirmation of a commitment we have made. To understand this definition we must briefly
look at the structure of commitment. Commitment implies an active, personal involvement in
the world we inhabit and come to know. Polanyi is careful to distinguish the personal from
the subjective: “the personal is neither subjective nor objective. In so far as the personal
submits to requirements acknowledged by itself as independent of itself, it is not subjective;
but in so far as it is an action guided by individual passions, it is not objective either. It
transcends the disjunction between the subjective and the objective.”222 The chief difference
between the personal and the subjective223 is the universal intent of the former: whereas the
subjective refers to that which is experienced by the self, the personal refers to belief formed
in response to such experience, which, and this is the essential point, aims at a universal
“vision.”224 To simplify the matter somewhat, we may say that seeing always implies a seer.
As Polanyi writes, “No one can know universal intellectual standards except by
acknowledging their jurisdiction over himself as part of the terms on which he holds himself
responsible for the pursuit of his mental efforts. I can speak of facts, knowledge, proof,
reality, etc., within my commitment situation, for it is constituted by my search for facts,
knowledge, proof, reality, etc., as binding on me.”225 One cannot, as it were, step outside this

221

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 320.

222

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 300.

223

In my own use of the terms, I have sought to include the personal in the subjective.

224

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 301.

225

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 303.

“commitment situation,” in so far as it is presupposed in the fabric of

belief.226

59
Nonetheless,

he can be dishonest about his commitments.
Such dishonesty haunts pure objectivism or empiricism and results in the “objectivist
dilemma,” which implies a correspondence of subjective belief and objective fact without
allowing for a legitimate relation between the two.227 Polanyi believes that the dilemma can
be overcome through recognition of the commitment structure of personal knowledge, which
affirms the “impersonally given.”228 Our knowledge of the world is never completely
objective nor subjective, for if it were wholly objective we could never come to know it, and
if it were wholly subjective, there would not be anything to know. The objectivist position, as
Polanyi realizes, leads to epistemic and metaphysical nihilism: if one does not accept that we
are “committed from the start,” then he remains unable to commit at all.229 A commitment
situation, wherein and whereby we engage with the reality we seek to know, allows us to
speak of fact and belief in the first instance. However, personal knowledge or intuitions
cannot be reduced merely to “regulative principles,” in the Kantian sense, i.e., to beliefs that
must be assumed but cannot be verified, for, in assuming them, we tacitly acknowledge their
truth.230 Our failure to make explicit to ourselves that we always depend upon tacit
assumption, inhibits our understanding of the structure of knowledge.

See Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 303-6. Polanyi argues that facts can only be established through
personal convictions, or “fiduciary passions,” which reach beyond the merely subjective; without
these passions or convictions, we are left with “alleged” and not “accredited” facts (facts can only be
accredited through personal involvement).
226

227

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 304.

228

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 302.

Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 82-3. It is worth quoting Polanyi in full: “[E]ach of us must
start his intellectual development by accepting uncritically a large number of traditional premises of a
particular kind; and that, however far we may advance thence by our own efforts, our progress will
always remain restricted to a limited set of conclusions which is accessible from our original
premises. To this extent, I think, we are finally committed from the start; and I believe that this should
make us feel responsible for cultivating to the best of our ability the particular strain of tradition to
which we happen to be born.” This, however, does not deny the fact that insofar as our initial
commitments are open to reality, we may critique or perhaps even reject these commitments.
229

230

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 307.

60
Our fundamental misunderstanding of how scientific inquiry is conducted, as an
impersonal and objective pursuit, changes our criteria of judgement. Since we do not think
that the scientist is personally involved in what he discovers, we are less willing to question
his expertise because it appears to us beyond dispute. In a sense, it is beyond dispute; we
cannot problematize scientific discovery without reducing it to the merely subjective. The
scientist in his discovery is committed to a tradition of thought and only therein should
correction or alteration be sought. However, the failure to recognize the scope of tradition,
and the consequent generalization of scientific findings to every aspect of existence, requires
a stronger check on the scientist than would otherwise be acceptable. Moreover, because the
scientist’s failure to acknowledge his agency in shaping the world he discovers has led to an
indefinite suspension of such agency, we need reconsider the tradition to which we submit.
In the first chapter, I suggested that the modern thinkers whom we identify as the
progenitors of this tradition should not be held entirely culpable, for, as Polanyi writes, “The
implications of new knowledge can never be known at its birth.”231 I stand by this claim;
however, this should not offer an excuse to abandon truth in the name of tradition.
Ultimately, through our commitment to a universal reality, to wit, a reality “existing …
independently of our knowing it,”232 we submit ourselves to the phenomenological clues
which lead us there. Today, a different set of clues is available to us; we must faithfully
follow where they lead, whilst recognizing that these clues are operative only within a given
framework.
“To affirm anything implies … an appraisal of our own art of knowing,” suggests
Polanyi, “and the establishment of truth becomes decisively dependent on a set of personal
criteria of our own which cannot be formally defined.”233 Therefore, truth as the “rightness of
an action” amounts to a deliberate step towards a reality we envision. Our decision to take
such a step depends on a preexisting guide or map we create for ourselves based on what is
231

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 311.

232

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 311.

233

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 71.

61
given to us. As such, the verification of truth presupposes criteria which are already held to
be truthful. Thus, whilst the affirmation of what is real may be explicit or formalizable, the
criteria underlying this affirmation are decidedly not. However, for this reason, and contrary
to contemporary scientistic tendencies, we must recognize that tacit criteria are operative in
our pursuit and understanding of reality or truth.234 Establishing contact with hidden realities
demands a “passionate contribution of the person” through “hazardous” intellectual
commitments that are “no mere imperfection but a vital component of his knowledge.”235
This is the basis for Polanyi’s claim that “we can know more than we can tell.”236 Objective
theories of truth imply that we can only know in so far as we can tell. In a word, they deny
the dimension of subsidiary or tacit knowledge, which, as Polanyi argues, is the basis of all
knowing.

Précis
In this chapter, I venture further into Polanyi’s thought with the aim of demonstrating
that the scientific worldview is a cultural phenomenon and, therefore, irreducible to the
scientific, that is, presumably the most fundamental levels of our existence. Moreover,
because the scientific worldview cannot be exhausted through scientific categories, it cannot
therein correction or emendation offer; the moral checks or restraints we place upon science
are not the fruit of scientific inquiry. However, a failure to recognize the internal
contradictions of this worldview has led to what Polanyi calls a “moral inversion;” and he,
not unlike Heidegger, argues that we need to rethink or reimagine this worldview to
accommodate science as a legitimate way of human knowing, i.e., as a personal and
committed means of knowing.

234 As

Polanyi observes in The Study of Man, “The ideal of a knowledge embodied in strictly
impersonal [explicit] statements now appears self-contradictory, meaningless, a fit subject for
ridicule. We must learn to accept as our ideal a knowledge that is manifestly personal” (27).
235

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, xxvii.

236

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 4.

62
Polanyi justly recognizes the role of authority, tradition and conscience in scientific
practice. In adopting the scientific vocation, the scientist submits to the authority of the
scientific tradition. This does not mean that he cannot challenge the operative beliefs of this
tradition but that he can only do so from within this tradition, which, in actuality, is rife with
unacknowledged guidance by conscience and fiduciary commitments. Ultimately, this
tradition, like every other, draws its legitimacy from the reality it attempts to disclose. The
scientist, thus, has a responsibility, according to Polanyi, not only to discover hidden reality
but to share his discovery.
Polanyi argues that the structure of all knowledge is thus personal in so far as we are
always already involved in that which we seek to know. Furthermore, we are interested in the
reality we discover. Hence, he defines truth as the “rightness of an action.” The question we
need ask is whether or not the commitments the scientific worldview demands are faithful to
the reality it reveals. Answering this question in the negative, this chapter makes way for a
different, more hopeful account of science, specifically, and human knowing, generally.

IV. The Tacit Dimension
i. The Structure of Human Perception: The “From-To”
Polanyi reimagines the structure of thought as a from-to; all thought, he maintains, is
rooted in factors prior to thought, which cannot always be made explicit. The structure of
thought is derived from that of perception, which begins from the body and moves to the
world; as such, our bodies are tacit in all knowledge of the world, as they are always
subsidiarily involved. For instance, as I attend to the tree in front of me, I am not aware of
my body; however, without my body, I could not perceive the tree. Attention may be called to
the body; I may feel an ache in my shoulder from carrying a heavy load; my feet may be sore
from walking. These are instances where I can make what is tacit explicit. There are others,
which I cannot: exactly how I identify what is before me as a tree is unknown to me; the
descriptive criteria are posterior to the encounter and not anterior. In all tacit knowing, writes
Polanyi, “we attend from something to something else; namely, from the first term to the

second term of the tacit

relation.”237 As

63
the ultimate ‘from’ is identified as the body, the ‘to’ is

the otherness mediated by our body.238 I do not feel the separation of the from-to, but
phenomenologically the two terms are present as one in all encounters. Accordingly, Polanyi
identifies the ‘from’ as the proximal term and the ‘to’ as the distal. “Our own body is the only
thing in the world which we normally never experience as an object,” writes Polanyi, “but
experience always in terms of the world to which we are attending from our body.”239
Polanyi distinguishes between the functional, phenomenal, semantic and ontological
structures of tacit knowing.240 We move from the particulars to the comprehension of their
joint purpose; this is the functional structure of tacit knowing. Our awareness, however, is
always directed away from the particulars; and, as such, it is only through the distal term, or
the terminus, that I come to recognize the proximal. “We may say,” writes Polanyi, “that we
are aware of the proximal term in an act of tacit knowing in the appearance of its distal term;
we are aware of that from which we are attending to another thing, in the appearance of that
thing.”241 We discover meaning in the relation of these terms. However, meaning is
antecedent to either term; or rather it is this very structure, in so far as we can only identify a
‘to’ if some clue guides our perception. “All meaning tends to be displaced away from
ourselves,” writes Polanyi.242 We must not take this to mean that meaning is itself at a
distance; in other words, we must avoid defining meaning as an object. Rather, meaning is
inherent to the very structure of perception, which seeks because there is something to be
237

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 10.

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 29. “Because our body is involved in the perception of objects, it
participates thereby in our knowing of all other things outside. Moreover, we keep expanding our
body into the world, by assimilating to it sets of particulars which we integrate into reasonable
entities. Thus, do we form, intellectually and practically, an interpreted universe populated by entities,
the particulars of which we have interiorized for the sake of comprehending their meaning in the
shape of coherent entities.”
238

239

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 16.

240

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 3-25.

241

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 11.

242

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 13.

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found. This is its semantic structure, from which the ontological emerges as relation between
the comprehensive whole and its particulars.
The way in which we get to know the world is from our bodies. This is true not only
of our own appendages, which reach out and touch, taste, see, hear, smell the world, but also
that which we take up as our own. In Heideggerian terminology, objects that are ready-tohand become a part of our body and, therefore, proximal. “[W]hen we make a thing function
as the proximal term of tacit knowing,” writes Polanyi, “we incorporate it in our body—or
extend our body to include it—so that we come to dwell in it.”243 Indwelling, as discussed by
Polanyi elsewhere, is necessary to all comprehension; we must learn to occupy the
circumstances of our study. As such, indwelling is a kind of empathy. However, Polanyi
cautions, “Indwelling, as derived from the structure of tacit knowing, is a far more precisely
defined act than is empathy, and it underlies all observation.”244 It is more precise perhaps in
as much as it applies even where empathy seems misplaced; for instance, in scientific
observation.
Vital to indwelling is what Polanyi calls “interiorization,” namely, the ability “to
identify ourselves with the teachings in question, by making them function as the proximal
term of a tacit moral knowledge, as applied in practice.”245 Scientists, particularly scientists
of a common discipline, interiorize certain common principles or beliefs, e.g., Darwinian
evolution, from which they attempt to understand the world. It should be obvious that
indwelling is only possible through comprehension, for only thence emerges a situation,
which we might occupy; the loose particulars, of themselves, are not sufficient to give rise to
a world or a worldview.
If we acknowledge the tacit dimension of knowledge, then the stated aim of modern
science, namely of attaining impersonal, objective knowledge, is “self-defeating.”246 Recall
243

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 16.

244

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 17.

245

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 17.

246

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 20.

65
here the structure of knowing; without prior guidance, we are blind. Polanyi gives the
example of a frog: science, if it adheres to its strict aim of objective knowledge, cannot
account for a frog, much less tell us what a frog is; its physical and chemical make up is
irrelevant so long as they are not tacitly integrated into a focal individuation. We can identify
the frog only through tacit knowing; it is only because we commit to certain criteria that the
frog appears to us.247 These criteria must not be construed as arbitrary, for “[t]hought can live
only on grounds which we adopt in the service of a reality to which we submit.”248 We see
because there is something to see; our ways of seeing are shaped by personal experience,
which is always situated and relational.
Polanyi illustrates the same paradox regarding knowledge, which Plato encountered
in the Meno: one cannot search for what he knows—assuming all knowledge is explicit—or
what he does not know: in the former case because he already possesses the object of his
search and in the latter because he does not know the object of his search. Polanyi resolves
the paradox by acknowledging the tacit dimension of knowledge: “we can have a tacit
foreknowledge of yet undiscovered things.”249 This is because we know things that we
cannot tell. Reality impinges upon us without our explicit knowledge of its content; the
content is only made explicit through discovery, but, even so, the process of explication is not
always made explicit, nor are the further consequences of the discovery, that is, the tacit
dimension is never effectively eliminated.250

The same is true of the ‘exact’ sciences: “a mathematical theory can be constructed only by
relying on prior tacit knowing and can function as a theory only within an act of tacit knowing, which
consists in our attending from it to the previously established experience on which it bears” (The Tacit
Dimension, 21). In other words, it is operative within a context.
247

248

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, xix.

249

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 23.

In Polanyi’s words, “It appears, then, that to know a statement is true is to know more than we can
tell and that hence, when a discovery solves a problem, it is itself fraught with further intimations of
an indeterminate range, and that furthermore, when we accept the discovery as true, we commit
ourselves to a belief in all these as yet undisclosed, perhaps as yet unthinkable, consequences” (The
Tacit Dimension, 23).
250

66
Our drive toward truth is motivated by a hidden reality, which intimates to us some of
its secrets. We can know these intimations only through our own initiatives, through a
commitment to truth, but truth is validated through an external objective.251 “The discovered
is filled with a compelling sense of responsibility for the pursuit of a hidden truth,” writes
Polanyi, “which demands his services for revealing it.”252 Responsibility and truth are but
two aspects of commitment: “the act of judgment is its personal pole and the independent
reality on which it bears is its external pole.”253 Science, however, is dishonest about its
commitments, “for you cannot express your commitment non-commitally.”254
Reality, as Polanyi discusses elsewhere,255 is stratified; there are higher and lower
levels of reality corresponding to our perceptual structure of knowing them. “The two terms
of tacit knowing, the proximal, which includes the particulars, and the distal, which is their
comprehensive meaning,” explains Polanyi, “[constitute] two levels of reality, controlled by
distinctive principles.” The upper level principles (e.g., of reason) rely upon the laws
governing the operations of lower levels (e.g., neurophysiology), but the upper level
principles are not fully explicable by those lower level laws.256 In other words, whilst each
successive level is based upon the one immediately below it, it is not thereby determined.
Polanyi provides the reader with several examples.257 For instance, the game of chess is rulebased, i.e., there are rules of chess, however, these rules do not determine how a game of
chess is to be played. I may study the rules of chess more closely than a chess master, and I
251 A claim

I might contest. Does this resurrect the age-old problem between the objective and
subjective? I think not; for the source of truth is subjectivity, reaching toward an objective. The
emphasis should not be upon the explicit ‘there’ but rather the implicit ‘here’ that is presupposed.
252

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 25.

253

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 87.

254

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 25.

255

See chapter III, sec iii.

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 34. Polanyi envisions “a picture of the universe filled with strata of
realities, joined together meaningfully in pairs of higher and lower strata” (The Tacit Dimension, 35).
256

257

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 30.

67
should not be a better player for it if I cannot learn the application—the ‘how’—of these
rules. The application itself is not rule-governed but rather imaginative: it must tacitly attend
from the infinite particulars informing the situation to the focal goal of winning the game.
Only if I learn to imaginatively engage with these particulars can I hope to become a master.
Similar examples may be given for construction and speech;258 imagine trying to write a
sentence merely from the rules of grammar.259 The principle remains the same even in
biological science: “If we then apply the principle that the operations of a higher level can
never be derived for the laws governing its isolated particulars,” writes Polanyi, “it follows
that none of these biotic operations can be accounted for by the laws of physics and
chemistry.”260
Scientistic thinking is, thus, sustained upon a delusion. The stated aim of pure
objectivity and the further commitment to the simplification of all physical matter to quanta
is not only unrealizable but also self-defeating. I need not rehearse why this is so. However, it
is important to understand that many modern scientists, and society at large, misunderstand
the true aim of science, which, despite this confusion, is maintained in practice. For instance,
writes Polanyi, “While the declared aim of current biology is to explain all the phenomena of
life in terms of the laws of physics and chemistry, its actual practice is to attempt at
explanation in terms of a machinery, based on the laws of physics and chemistry.”261 The
distinction, here, is nuanced, especially for the modern thinker, who is accustomed to the

258

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 35.

Talbot’s understanding of meaning and accuracy as polar contraries is helpful here: accuracy is our
attempt to tease out the tacit and render it explicit; to the extent that we succeed in doing so, we call
some thing or method accurate. However, meaning resides in the tacit—it is the air we breathe.
259

260

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 37.

261

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 38.

68
same deceptions as the scientist. The mechanistic, as Polanyi discusses elsewhere, is not
reducible to the physical or chemical; purpose is inherent to mechanistic comprehension.262

ii. The Promise of Phenomenology
The significance of Polanyi’s perceptual structure is twofold: foremost it implies that
we are active participants in the cultivation of knowledge; more importantly, however, it
signifies that we can be such participants because there is a reality for us to participate in.
Submission or resignation, in this sense, is not passive; we must actively allow what we
perceive to enter and alter our being. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests, “We must not
wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we
perceive.”263 In a word, we do not start from a point of ignorance, but from a privileged
position of knowledge, for to be is to know. It is, of course, incumbent upon us to deepen and
refine our knowledge; however, the rudiments are given to us through our perceptual
capabilities. Phenomenology begins at this rudimentary stage, with a basic presumption of
aboutness.
Acknowledgment of world also requires acknowledgment of other beings: being-inthe-world implies being-with. This is the basis of meaning. Notwithstanding the critique of
psychologism, Husserl’s presentation of meaning may be viewed as relational: meaningful
discourse is facilitated through a meaning-conferring act and a meaning-fulfillment act.264
For instance, this reflection is a meaning-conferring act; I am using a medium known to my
reader (the question we need address is how is this medium known) and myself to express
something. I rely on this medium to intimate my inner experience to the reader, who,
although unable to share the experience, forms an outer percept of it. Meaning is only
Polanyi, Science and Man, 970. Here, too, Polanyi addresses the issue: “Physical and chemical
investigations of a machine are meaningless, unless undertaken with a bearing on the previously
established operational principles of the machine” (The Tacit Dimension, 39).
262

263

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xviii.

Edmund Husserl, “Essential Distinctions,” in The Hermeneutics Reader, edited by Kurt VollmerMueller, (New York: Continuum, 1985), 175.
264

69
consummated when the reader understands this expression, to wit, when corresponding
intuitions are motivated by certain utterances, or, in other words, when the reader grasps the
conceptual essence of the utterance.
Essence, in this case, cannot be divorced from existence; only through experience are
we able to grasp the essence of a thing, which is no more a product of the mind than it is an
objective feature of the world. It is rather the antecedent relation of mind and world that
allows us to speak of essences intelligibly. Merleau-Ponty observes, although
phenomenology is the “study of essences,” it is “also a philosophy which puts essences back
into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from
any starting point other than that of their ‘facticity’.”265 The error of idealism and realism is
essentially the same: they begin with either mind or world and fail to relate them.
Phenomenology promises to overcome this difficulty, if only we succeed in shedding
our old ways of thinking, which are persuasive because they are rooted in experience. The
proponents of realism exhibit bravado at facing things as they are, regardless of how they
might affect man. Scientific inquiry is appealing because it promises to present things in their
truest form—as impersonal and unrelated to man. The disadvantage of such knowledge
should be obvious: if scientific knowledge, of itself, is unrelated to man, it is also irrelevant
to him. As Polanyi shows, however, scientific knowledge is not impersonal. On the contrary,
the kind of objectivity scientific inquiry demands is only possible through a deepening of our
subjectivity; only a well-formed and skilled judgement is capable of the depth of thought,
which loses sight of itself. Even so, the thinker who refuses to acknowledge the true nature of
knowledge is deceived; to know is primarily to understand and science offers no exception.
Science is not a direct representation of world, as Merleau-Ponty observes:
Science has not and never will have, by its nature, the same significance qua form of
being as the world which we perceive, for the simple reason that it is a rationale and
explanation of the world. … Scientific points of view, according to which my existence
is a moment of the world’s, are always both naïve and at the same time dishonest,
because they take for granted, without explicitly mentioning, it, the other point of view,
265

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, vii.

70
namely that of consciousness, through which from the outset a world forms itself round
me and begins to exist for me.266
This is more or less the same point Polanyi makes when he argues that science explicates but
a stratum of reality, which undergirds the strata that lie above it: “The true knowledge of a
machine which we have on the upper level is the understanding of a purpose and of the
rational means for achieving it;” writes Polanyi, “while the knowledge of its physical and
chemical topography is by itself meaningless, for it lacks any conception of purpose or
achievement. It becomes meaningful only when oriented towards establishing the material
conditions for the success or failure of a machine.”267 We do not start from the bottom, as it
were, but rather reason our way to it; as such, knowledge of the physical and chemical
composition of an object does not bring one closer to things as they are than does knowledge
of its comprehensive function—they are different ways of understanding the same thing.
However, we must allow that successive levels are increasingly meaningful. Thus,
history, as a relatively high level of reality, is much more meaningful than science, although
it is not nearly as accurate. In either case, we use our judgement and commit to a certain way
of looking at the world. According to Polanyi, we are free—he accounts for “biological and
cultural rootedness”268—to choose our criteria of judgement; and because we are free to do
so, we are also responsible. Freedom, in this case, is not under threat from physical
determinism. On the contrary, the position of the determinist presupposes freedom;269
without the use of judgement, we could not conclude that physical laws determine physical
events, i.e., that there is a cause for every event—we could not even formulate physical laws.
The distinction between action and event is moot in so far as an event is perceptible only

266

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, ix.

267

Polanyi, The Study of Man, 52.

268

Polanyi, The Study of Man, 89.

Marcel makes much the same point when he says that determinism and free will are not mutually
exclusive; they are addressing different phenomena (Faith and Reality, 113).
269

71
because we act upon nature; conversely, perception is the very background against which
action stands out.
Thus, we are responsible for all of our ideal constructs: the theories and sign-systems
we develop, both those which elucidate truth and which obscure it, are, most importantly, our
own. Selfhood, properly understood, always implies a sense of responsibility. We must not
forget that our boat is tethered; and that the only reason we are able to construct any system
is because it is so. In other words, freedom is meaningful only in so far as it is limited.
In the last three or so centuries, philosophers have worked tirelessly to make a science
of philosophy270 namely, they have incorporated dissection, a breaking down of wholes into
parts, as a valid and useful technique. The result has been a series of unimportant
philosophical discoveries, which have no more relevance for the philosopher when he leaves
his office—today, we must admit, the philosopher is confined to his office—than for the
common man. This is because it is not the task of the philosopher, not his primary task, at
any rate, to analyze, but rather he must understand—and to understand he must experience.
“Our relationship to the world, as it is untiringly enunciated within us,” writes MerleauPonty, “is not a thing which can be any further clarified by analysis; philosophy can only
place it once more before our eyes and present it for our ratification.”271

iii. The “Absent” Body: Hidden Modes of Knowing
We have been unable to avoid—on the contrary, in many instances, we have wholeheartedly
accepted—John Locke’s unwitting designation of philosophers as the “underlabourers” of science.
Quoted in Steve Fuller, The Philosophy of Science and Technology Studies, (Abingdon: Routledge,
2013), 48.
270

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xx. Similarly, Stephen Talbott quotes Owen
Barfield, “While meaning is suggestible, it ‘can never be conveyed from one person to another. …
Every individual must intuit meaning for himself, and the function of the poetic is to mediate such
intuition by suitable suggestion’” (“Can We Transcend Computation?, The Future Does Not Compute,
(Sebastopol: O’Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1995), 307). Consider also Kierkegaard, who says, “Ask
yourself, and keep on asking until you find the answer, for one can recognize a thing many times and
acknowledge it, one can want a thing many times and attempt it, yet only the deep inner movement,
only the indiscernible motions of the heart, only these convince you that what you have recognized
‘belongs unto you’ that no power can take it from you; for only the truth that edifies is truth for you.”
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, translated by Alastair Hannay, (London: Penguin, 2004), 608-9.
271

72
Drew Leder, in The Absent Body, argues that “[h]uman experience is

incarnated,”272

that is, we cannot experience without the porous body which allows us to encounter the
world. Adopting Polanyi’s perceptual structure as a “from-to,” and acknowledging his debt to
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Leder argues that the body is a definite ‘from’—a finite
view point that cannot be effaced, although it is prone to disappearance. Leder differentiates
between three modes of being: ecstatic, recessive, and dys-appearing.273 In the first, our body
appears as a body; it stands out against the background of the world.274 In the second, our
body recedes, or falls away, from the perspectival arc, as we perceive otherness. In the final,
our body reappears as a consequence of disease or distress; this second order absence is the
presence of the ailing body. The historical “misreading” of the body’s first-order
disappearance leads to Cartesian dualism, which, although supported by our experience, fails
to account for bodily awareness in the first instance.275
The ‘from’ and the ‘to’ are non-coincident, i.e., one cannot be at once the perceiver
(subject) and the perceived (object); e.g., at a determinate spatiotemporal location, the left
hand can either seize the right or the right can be seized.276 Thus, bodily absence is
coincident with worldly engagement, e.g., the failure to “see the seeing” when looking at an
object.277 The absence is a consequence of two different kinds of disappearance, namely,
focal and background.278 Focal disappearance occurs when the body is so outwardly engaged
272

Leder, The Absent Body, 1.

273

Leder, The Absent Body, 11-102.

Bernhard Waldenfels describes Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as essentially structural: “The
decisive condition for the appearance of something is the fact that something stands out against
something else. Thus, figure and background embody a primordial difference; formlessness, which
can only be thought as a limiting experience, would not be raw chaos, but rather a monotony which
would transform seeing into not seeing.” “Perception and Structure in Merleau-Ponty,” Research in
Phenomenology, vol. 10 (1980), 24.
274

275

Leder, The Absent Body, 132.

276

Leder, The Absent Body, 15-7.

277

Leder, The Absent Body, 14.

278

Leder, The Absent Body, 26.

73
as to disappear. The related phenomenon of background disappearance refers to the
disappearance of bodily regions peripheral to the focal origin of sensorimotor engagement.
These disappearances (or non-appearances) explain the so-called “absence” of the body;
however, absence, understood correctly, argues Leder, implies presence: “The notion of being
is after all present in the very word absence. The body could not be away, stand outside,
unless it had a being and stance to begin with. It is thus never fully eradicated from the
experiential world.”279 In other words, experience (or consciousness) is embodied. The body
is the terminus of all experience: the ‘here’ around which all ‘theres’ are situated.280
Conversely, the basis for all experience is the body’s ecstasis, i.e., when the body ‘stands
outside’ and engages with the world.281
This understanding of experience, as essentially and existentially embodied, opens up
a new mode of knowing; it also renders illegitimate epistemic concerns regarding the body’s
existence. In other words, Cartesian worries about bodily existence are moot. Leder writes,
“The experience of corporeal deception is possible only because the lived body, through its
perceptual and symbolic powers, is an open horizon of further disclosure and truth.”282
Embodiment is not only a means of disclosure and deception; rather it is a means of
deception only because it is the means of disclosure. We call worldly objects into doubt only
if there is, at first, a world in which objects appear. This appearance, argues Leder, with
considerable debt to Polanyi and Merleau-Ponty, presupposes embodied engagement. To
perceive otherness is to be involved with it—and this entails significant risks.

iv. Meaning
The tacit dimension provides the necessary unity to lived experience; if we were to
subject every aspect of our experience to rational scrutiny—an impossible condition—we
279

Leder, The Absent Body, 22.

280

Leder, The Absent Body, 13.

281

Leder, The Absent Body, 34 & 37.

282

Leder, The Absent Body, 134.

74
would not have grounds for experience in the first place. The unity of experience is
incumbent upon a world not wholly articulated. The immediacy of meaning frustrates our
ability to render it explicit; each attempt at explication presupposes criteria that must remain
tacit. In this sense, meaning is pre-theoretical, for every theory, which is but a name for a
way of seeing, presupposes a seer. What he sees is inevitably delimited by his vantage point;
in other words, all theoretical projections find their source in an inarticulate unknown.
Obscurity, thus conceived, is not the antithesis of accuracy but rather its birthplace. Not least
of the modern crises arise from our unmitigated desire to make all experience explicit; this
we accomplish with the rigour of rational scrutiny, and at the expense of meaning.
Stephen Talbott suggests that meaning (or expressiveness) and accuracy (or
computation) are not antithetical, but rather they co-exist in creative tension as “polar
contraries.”283 The weakening of either pole suggests a weakening of the entire field. This
insight, however, is contrary to modern sensibility, which conceives of all reality, including
ourselves, as essentially computational. Thus, we are predisposed, argues Talbott, to answer
the question of meaning through the computational register, for we have already accepted the
criteria that determine our answer.284 Here, the reader should recall Heidegger’s
understanding of the essence of mathematics (or computation) as the always-already-known:
the totalization of accuracy, at the expense of meaning, frustrates all encounter, which is the
basis of reality; and so, as Talbott warns, if we accept this totalization, “we run the risk of
becoming, finally, absolutely clear about nothing at all.”285 This is the consummation of the
so-called “one-sidedness” of computation (or scientific thinking) to which Talbott and
Heidegger refer.286 If we go the way of accuracy alone, as modern science does, then we

283

Talbott, “Can We Transcend Computation?,” 289.

284

Talbott, “Can We Transcend Computation?,” 288.

285

Talbott, “Can We Transcend Computation?,” 295.

286

Talbott, “Can We Transcend Computation?,” 283.

75
must face an increasingly meaningless

world.287

Of course, as Talbott recognizes,

meaninglessness can no more be absolutized than accuracy, for it amounts to the same
thing.288 Hence what we experience today is not a complete loss of meaning, but rather a
continual losing of it.
It is no surprise that our attempts to recapture meaning today are also cast in the
computational mould. This explains the excitement accompanying recent innovations in
Artificial Intelligence. Although Talbott’s book is dated in some respects, his interpretation of
the computational threat remains relevant: the increasing sophistication of our machines
beyond mere syntactical systems, as meaning-bearing entities, can never be fully realized, for
the simple reason that meaning must always be presupposed; it cannot spring from a purely
logical system (i.e., a computer). Talbott asserts that this would be akin to reproducing the
contents of a conversation after it had been reduced to its logical form.289 But this cannot be
done. Because we are not merely syntactical machines, our experiences, even in their most
abstracted forms, are always meaningful. The greater the degree of abstraction, the more
difficult it becomes to distinguish the particularity from which it arises; and so we mistakenly
believe in the promise of pure abstraction, which reaches its highest pitch in modern science.

Talbott writes, “The drive for logical precision consumes and destroys itself if it does not remain
in creative tension with something else. Furthermore, because our culture, with its scientific and
technological mindset, tends strongly to vest authority in the logical and quantitative processes of
thought, the ‘something else’ remains obscure and mysterious—always suspect to the properly toughminded investigator. What results is a compulsive striving toward a kind of absolute vacuity. There
are many symptoms of this striving, the primary one being the entire history of modern science.
Having started out to explain the world, we find ourselves now (in the ‘hardest’ of sciences—physics)
struggling to figure out what our most sophisticated equations mean—if they mean anything at all”
(“Can We Transcend Computation?,” 295).
287

288

Talbott, “Can We Transcend Computation?,” 290-1.

289

Talbott, “Can We Transcend Computation?,” 315.

76
The true risk, according to Talbott, lies not in the kind of machinery we may devise—
in a sense, our innovative powers are unlimited290—but rather that we may become enslaved
to these innovations through a series of misunderstandings. He warns, “[I]t may be we who
are approaching the status of robots rather than robots who are approaching human status.”291
Creatures of habit, we have become accustomed to living in abstractions; however, we fail to
observe that these abstractions supervene on a particular, bodily existence. The seemingly
absent body is endangered because we think it no longer necessary; other material will serve
just as well, or even better. The tragic error lies in this self-misinterpretation—the danger in
our ability to make it true.
The technological threat encroaches upon us because of our unwillingness, and, to
some extent, inability, to rethink our ways of thinking.292 The relentless pursuit of precision,
or explicitness, cannot return us to a more meaningful world. Furthermore, this one-sided
thinking frustrates our attempts to create new meanings, which are born from experience and
not analyses. Meaning, as Talbott, Leder, and Polanyi acknowledge, must be intuited.
However, in a world where intuitions have become sterile, we stand condemned to live out
the logical implications of modern rationality; even the language of disputation is an

Talbott elaborates, “[W]e are creating intelligent devices possessed of ever increasing cleverness.
We can carry this process as far as we wish. It is a process without limits, and yet with radical limits.
On the one hand, there is no meaning we cannot implant within the computers, so long as we are
willing to identify the meaning with a set of precisely elaborated logical structures. On the other hand,
however complex and intricate the elaboration—however many layers we construct—the computer as
a computational device remains outside the living polarity of truth and meaning. Within the breathing
space between these two facts there is doubtless much we can achieve with computers if, recognizing
their peculiar nature, we make them the servants of our meanings” (“Can We Transcend
Computation?,” 328). See also, 314.
290

291

Talbott, “Can We Transcend Computation?,” 319.

George Grant writes, “As moderns we have no standards by which to judge particular techniques,
expect standards welling up with our faith in technical expansion.” “In Defence of North America,” in
Technology and Empire, (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2018), 23. He makes much the same point
in “A Platitude,” wherein Grant writes, “It is difficult to think whether we are deprived of anything
essential to our happiness, just because the coming to be of the technological society has stripped us
above all of the very systems of meaning which disclosed the highest purposes of man, and in terms
of which, therefore, we could judge whether an absence of something was in fact a deprival”
(Technology and Empire, 123).
292

77
acquiescence. To point out the contradictions entailed in modern science, in a sense, is to
give in to the paradigm; as Talbott states, “contradictions are artifacts of the analytical stance
itself.”293 The only way out is to, once again, become receptive toward a transcendent reality,
that is, to entertain the possibility of hope.

Précis
In the penultimate chapter, I take a close look at the structure of perception and how
this informs our understanding of knowledge as personal. Like Heidegger, Polanyi posits a
relational structure to perception, which he describes as a “from-to.” This structure facilitates
understanding of Polanyi’s distinction between the explicit and tacit dimensions of
knowledge: because perception presupposes not only something perceived but also a
perceiver, and because these two points cannot occupy focal awareness simultaneously, there
is a hidden component to our perceptions and by extension to thought. As I show in the third
section of this chapter, with the help of Drew Leder, this hidden component, or “the absent
body,” offers a better explanation for the seeming cleavage of thought and body than those
substantivist accounts provided by modern (closeted dualist) thinkers.
In the third chapter, I noted Polanyi’s signature claim: we always know more than we
can tell. This is because explicit knowledge supervenes on the tacit; an effective elimination
of the tacit would also deprive us of the unity of our experiences which gives life meaning.
The so-called promise of phenomenology is that it allows us to readjust our epistemology to
account for the tacit dimension; it admits that we are always already involved in the reality
we attempt to explain. On the other hand, scientific thinking can only acknowledge the
explicit or formalizable aspects of reality.
Talbott’s understanding of meaning and accuracy as “polar contraries,” i.e., as
mutually dependent concepts, is helpful in showing how the elimination of the tacit would
also eliminate the unity of our experiences and the meaning of our lives by underscoring the
danger of scientific thinking, which aims to totalize accuracy and therefore deprives reality of
293

Talbott, “Can We Transcend Computation?,” 305.

78
meaning. Of course, this can never be fully accomplished; however, our commitment to the
scientific worldview, certainly forces us to live as if it were, depriving us of hope that is
essential to our humanity.

V. Hope
i. Decluttering the Road
The last four chapters have worked to clear away the dust settled upon our ways of
thinking, to make way for a more expansive understanding of our being. In the first chapter, I
gave a brief intellectual history of modernity, which seemingly closed us off from genuine
encounter. Consequently, with the aid of Heidegger, Arendt, and Polanyi, I explored the
metaphysical and political dimensions, by no means exhaustively, of “scientism.” In the third
and fourth chapters, Polanyi was the dominant voice: through him I both critiqued the
conventional assumptions about science and provided insight into a more humane science.
Now, I look to Gabriel Marcel, a truly hopeful thinker, who may inspire us to become,
however dimly, aware of the implicit dimensions of our being. The fact of the matter is that
so long as we are human, hope persists. However, standing on the threshold of post- or subhumanity, we can no longer take for granted the hopefulness that is our being.
Although this study is entitled “Recovering Hope in an Age of Despair,” I have said
little thus far, explicitly, of either. Much of the confusion which ensues from the claim that
modern scientific thinking leads to hopelessness results from the undeniable fact that most
scientists are expressly hopeful, but what they mean by hope differs fundamentally from
hopefulness in an absolute sense. Marcel in his essay, “Sketch of a Phenomenology and a
Metaphysic of Hope,” distinguishes between “I hope” and “I hope that.”294 The difference is
that one relies on the temporally (or causally) determined chain of events: I hope that
tomorrow I will finish my paper because I have worked on it today for several hours. In this
case, the end is dependent on the means. This is an example of “I hope that,” i.e., the kind of
Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator: Introduction to the Metaphysic of Hope, translated by G. S. Fraser,
(South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2010), 26.
294

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hope scientists qua scientists usually express. It is hope that human life will not only be
prolonged but improved through scientific discoveries.295 My intent here is not to question
this kind of hope; I am sure the scientist is as hopeful, maybe even more so, than other
people. However, the scientist, through the narrow strictures of rationalistic thought, seems to
deny the possibility of hope in any other sense. Hope in an absolute sense, argues Marcel,
places a demand or an expectation on the reality we envision and, through this expectation,
involves us in this reality; we give something of ourselves to this reality and it, in turn, gives
something to us.296
The rationalist believes that such mystical notions of hope run contrary to
experience.297 However, writes Marcel, “The truth is much more that hope is engaged in the
weaving of experience now in process, or in other words in an adventure now going forward.
This does not run counter to an authentic empiricism but to a certain dogmatism which, while
claiming to be an experience, fundamentally misunderstands its nature, just as a cult of the
scientific may stand in the way of living science in its creative development.”298 This is
precisely what Polanyi argues: scientific discovery relies on experiences science cannot fully
explain. For Marcel, Polanyi, as well as Arendt, creation or innovation is a breach of causally
determined events; it is an assertion of human freedom, the possibility of the unexpected.299
It is also an assertion of hope, which is essentially an unjustifiable belief on the “ground of
facts.” Through hope, as Marcel writes, “I receive, I pocket in advance, I take a certain
One could argue, keeping in mind what Polanyi has to say, that even scientific discovery relies on
hope in an absolute sense—on that which is wholly other.
295

296

Marcel, Homo Viator, 37 & 52. Cf. Polanyi on commitment (chapter III, sec. iv).

Experience, as Marcel observes, may be construed in at least two senses: “On the one hand there is
an established and catalogued experience in the name of which judgements are pronounced by the
pronoun ‘one.’ On the other hand there is an experience in the making which is only possible
precisely when all the other kind of experience has been set on one side, even if finally and after
having been dully desiccated, it is given a place in the herbarium of universal wisdom. It is quite
evident that hope is intimately bound up with experience in the second sense and perhaps it might be
claimed that hope is its spring” (45; emphasis added).
297

298

Marcel, Homo Viator, 46.

299 Arendt,

The Human Condition, 178.

percentage, on a given fact which is to come, and is quite literally credited to

me.”300

80
Hope,

then, is prescientific; to reduce it to the computational register is to eliminate it. Hope
informs our existence at a higher plane.
The ambiguity of existence—both the word and what it signifies—interests Marcel,
and far from attempting to eliminate it through rigorous analysis, as had been the wont of
philosophers until the nineteenth century, he maintains it; revives it even to the extent that it
has been reified through linguistic and conceptual categories. Marcel urges the listener or
reader, however the case may be, to construe his lectures301 as a search or investigation rather
than a system. For philosophy, he writes, in fellow-feeling with Merleau-Ponty, is “an aid to
discovery rather than a matter of strict demonstration.”302 Thus, he summarizes his purpose
in delivering these lectures: “to recapitulate the body of [his] work under fresh light, to seize
on its joints, its hinges, its articulations, above all to indicate its general direction.”303 Marcel
compares the pursuit of philosophy to an open road; if so, it is his self-chosen task to
declutter the road.
The method of Marcel's search draws attention to the nature of truth. By this change
in method, we are compelled to question the value of scientific thinking, which attempts to
systematize; in the natural sciences, the scientist begins with a testable hypothesis, derived
from observation (itself a value laden activity), and through experimentation draws
conclusions, thereby creating a system of knowledge; pure science (mathematics) begins
with a foundational principle, an axiom, and thereon builds a system. In either case, this
system building is so fully engrossed with the task that it takes no note of the architect or the
builder. To be more explicit: scientific thinking is self-forgetful. Ironically, in its attempt to
penetrate material or physical reality, science moves increasingly closer to ideality, that is,
300

Marcel, Homo Viator, 37.

In Marcel’s Gifford Lectures, delivered in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1949 and 1950, one receives an
overview of his philosophical thought; what is perhaps best described as a philosophy of existence.
These lectures were later published in two volumes: Reflection and Mystery and Faith and Reality.
301

302

Marcel, Reflection and Mystery, 2.

303

Marcel, Reflection and Mystery, 3.

81
pure abstraction. It incessantly cuts and breaks apart until the object of its study is no longer
meaningful; moreover, it reckons that the discovery, yielded by breaking apart, as it were, is
done without reference to a whole. This is a misreading of science, as well as human
experience, albeit one justified by the dissimulation inherent to our being in the world and to
the “house of being,”304 language. However, whilst language enables and enriches our
experience, it is not an adequate substitution for it. In other words, whilst reality is
linguistically mediated, it is not reducible to language.
Marcel acknowledges the limitations of language, which swell up as a barrier
between man and world; language, when misunderstood, clogs receptivity; laden with
preconceived ideas and theories, we lose our sense of the ontological, to wit, we no longer
feel the exigency of being. In his second lecture of the series, Marcel refers to a “broken
world;” a world that, despite the growing ties of commerce and communication, feels
disjointed. “We live today in a world at war with itself,” writes Marcel.305 The principle
cause306 of war is misunderstanding. By rethinking some overwrought, and yet integral,
concepts, such as transcendence, experience, participation, receptivity, Marcel attempts to
alleviate at least some of this misunderstanding; he lifts the fog of war, which has grown
almost opaque in our age, to give a glimpse of truth. Truth he symbolizes as a light, which
cannot be viewed directly, without afflicting blindness, but must be mediated through
worldly furniture, the stuff that makes a human world.307
Marcel writes, “[T]ruth is not a thing; whatever definition we may in the end be
induced to give to the notion of truth, we can affirm even now that truth is not a physical
object, that the search for truth is not a physical process, that no generalizations that apply to

Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, edited and translated by David
Farrell Krell, (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 193.
304

305

Marcel, Reflection and Mystery, 23.

306

One can hardly resist scientific language.

307

Marcel, Reflection and Mystery, 62-3.

physical objects and processes can apply also to

truth.”308

82
The trouble with science is that it

thinks the truth is out there; and, as Marcel discusses, the scientist lacks all humility in so far
as he believes that some day, with sufficient scientific progress, he will be in possession of
this truth.309 However, only a world-alienated ego-centrism can give rise to such a view,
which thinks truth a matter wholly indifferent and yet equally accessible to all human beings.
Consistent with our chosen theoretical framework, this view of truth is inconsistent with how
we feel.
Marcel pays close attention to feeling and experience: to experience is to transcend
experience; to feel is to transcend whatever sensation occasions it. This is perhaps what
Marcel has in mind when he describes mystery as a problem whose data “encroaches in on
itself.” We cannot view experience as a problem in so far as we are always experientially
involved, i.e., there is no way to reflect upon experience without experiencing and thereby
transcending the object of reflection. Both to feel and experience are active modes of
perception; they require our participation and do not merely happen to us. Marcel rejects the
misunderstanding of sensation as a transmission between an emission post and a reception
post; this picture of sense experience is deprived of the dynamicity inherent to existence.
Nonetheless we accept it; “we cling to the physical picture,” writes Marcel, “because science,
by definition, cannot transcend the limits of the physical picture.”310
Our mostly successful attempts to ignore the exigencies of being and transcendence
have resulted, not only in a diminishment of our subjectivity and consequently intersubjectivity, but also that of critical thought. Blind to the values that underlie scientific
inquiry, we unquestioningly accept whatever results such inquiry yields. In other words, we

308

Marcel, Reflection and Mystery, 19.

The sentiment is aptly captured by the late computer scientist, John McCarthy: “the only reason
we have not yet succeeded in formalizing every aspect of the real world is that we have been lacking
a sufficiently powerful logical calculus” (quoted in Talbott, “Can We Transcend Computation?,” 317).
This is but one of countless examples.
309

Marcel, Reflection and Mystery, 119. The very conceptualization of world as picture is thoroughly
modern; see Heidegger, “Age of the World Picture.”
310

83
no longer possess (or exercise, which practically amounts to the same thing) that discerning
power, the truly human faculty, of judgement. This should come as no surprise when
philosophers as well as scientists work to efface the distinction between conceptual
(philosophical) and empirical (scientific) knowledge, subsuming the former under the latter.
In this view, philosophy loses the power to correct the conceptual errors of science; on the
contrary, philosophy must be verified through the scientific method. Consequently, we are
left not only with impoverished philosophy but also impoverished science: the failure to see
that “the community of minds”311 precedes scientific inquiry undermines the practice of
science. Marcel warns that “if the conclusions [of scientific inquiry] are logical, it may be
that the role of the free critical thinker in our time is to swim against the current and attack
the premises themselves … [for] there do exist ranges of human experience where a too
literal, an over-simplified way of conceiving the criterion of universality just cannot be
accepted.”312 We must learn to resist the current of the time, to assert our freedom as
responsible citizens of the world, for, as Kant so long ago argued, the only way to prove our
freedom is to practice it.
The trouble today is that the critical spirit is “vanishing away;”313 and, without it, we
remain helpless to change the direction of our world, which, with every passing day, seems to
be a little less ours. He, who accepts the postulates of modern science, almost cannot help
world alienation in as much as science demands objectivity; the scientist looks at specimen in
the laboratory, not at beings in their native situation.314 Human beings, in this case, are no
exception; the cadaver of man is dissected with equal disinterest as the transmission of an
automobile. This is because science teaches us to look at them similarly; the only difference
is that one is natural and the other artificial. Scientific methodology engenders the belief that
311

Tallis, Aping Mankind, 340.

312

Marcel, Reflection and Mystery, 11.

313

Marcel, Reflection and Mystery, 147.

See Walker Percy, “The Loss of the Creature,” Message in A Bottle, (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1989), 59-63.
314

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we experience from the outside: the experiment is conducted on and not from within.
However, this is contrary to human experience, which emanates from the inside out; we
cannot experience from the outside without reifying experience, and we cannot transcend
experience in so far as transcendence, in any meaningful sense, is only the deepening of
experience. “It is the very nature of our situation that it can be grasped only from within its
own depths. But at the same time,” writes Marcel, “in a world like our own, which is
becoming more and more completely subjected to the domain of objective knowledge and
scientific technique, everything, by an almost fatal necessity, tends to fall out as if this
observation of our situation from the outside were a real possibility.”315
Thus we find ourselves in our present situation: devoid of hope, in the death throes of
despair. The height of tragedy is that most of us cannot even articulate this despair, much less
account for it; some of us, it is true, are diligently working to find out the causes of our
problem but this only a step farther toward the darkness that blinds us. What we need do,
instead of attempting to penetrate objective reality to reveal the secrets of the world, is
become receptive to the presence of being to understand the secrets of our hearts, to wit, we
must discover the depth of existence and move from the inside out. By this change in stance
we gain a different prospect of truth, one that is much more promising. “[E]very society,”
writes Marcel, “pronounces a sentence of doom or acquittal on itself according to the throne
of state which it reserves, both within itself and high above itself, for that Truth which is not
a thing, but a spirit.”316 It is for us to live out the truth; and, not, as it were, to become the
people who “bowed and prayed / to the neon God they made.”317

ii. Presence; or, the gift of being

315

Marcel, Reflection and Mystery, 203.

316

Marcel, Reflection and Mystery, 216.

Simon & Garfunkel, “The Sound of Silence,”Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. (New York: Columbia
Records, 1964).
317

85
Marcel writes, “I concern myself with being only in so far as I have a more or less
distinct consciousness of the underlying unity which ties me to other beings of whose reality I
already have a preliminary notion.”318 The question of being, for Marcel, is really a question
of beings, in so far as there is no Being in which we, as beings, partake; to pose the question
in such terms is to imagine an unrealizable view point, which, properly speaking, is no point
at all. What seems obvious in theory, in part due to its cultural prevalence, is in reality not
only unrealizable but also deeply deceptive; the objective, as I have already said, is only an
aspect of our subjectivity. At any rate, despite its deceptive nature, the ideal of objectivity is
telling of our ways of knowing, valuing, and being.
Marcel, like Heidegger, draws a distinction between being and existence. Quite
literally, to exist means “to emerge, to arise.”319 The existence of a thing is very different
from that of a being; whilst it is true that both are present, at least in a sense, to us, only the
latter is subjected to various ‘happenings’; nothing, strictly speaking, happens to a thing, for
motion, even in the remotest sense of the word, presupposes subjectivity or interiority.320
Thus, Marcel questions the existence of a thing: “It is true that the thing which has been
destroyed, or taken apart, or reduced to dust, has ceased to exist, but in the deepest sense of
the word, has it ever existed?”321 If existence implies interiority, which, as we have
established, is wholly alien to thinghood, then certainly not. However, this requires us to
rethink our concept of ‘thing’, for surely it seems strange to argue that things do not exist;
what is it, then, on which I type? If it were merely fictive, then these words could never
appear before you. Once again, we seem to answer the question: to deny the existence of
things is not to deny things, but only the existence of things qua things; in other words, it is
not the same as denying that things exist for us. Hence, writes Marcel, “paradoxical [as] it
318

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 17.

319

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 30.

Marcel writes, “They [accidents to the body] happen to a certain living somebody; nothing could
possibly happen to a mere thing, because it has no interiority, no life of its own, it is ownless” (Faith
and Reality, 25).
320

321

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 25.

86
may seem, as soon as I can say of the garden, ‘it no longer exists’, then there is a certain
sense in which it still is.”322 As Rilke writes, “We are the bees of the invisible. We madly raid
the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”323
The difference between existence and being is the same as that between the visible
and the invisible: my existence stands out, whereas my being withdraws. There is a
phenomenological “gap” between my being and me, writes Marcel; I simultaneously feel the
presence and distance of my soul.324 This is the space consciousness occupies. In Sartrean
language—although one cannot imagine Marcel would be too amenable to its use—it is the
nothingness through which our being moves. Consciousness, fundamentally, is an awareness
of our possibilities as possibilities. I am indebted to Heidegger for the insight that we may
speak of our possibilities, only if there are possibilities yet unrealized; this gap holds the
unspoken possibilities. Marcel ends the chapter wondering at the assertion, ‘I am’, which is
uttered by most modern thinkers with defiance and yet which cannot be anything the ‘I’ gives
to himself, rather it is a gift. Thus, cautions Marcel, “it [should] be whispered humbly, with
fear and wonder.”325
The presence occasioned by my existence cannot be explained through function; it
must be encountered.326 Functionalism is a problem bordering upon disease, which affects
not only our ontology but also our politics. The source of the problem is ontological or rather
the lack of the ontological exigency, which, in the most fundamental sense, is our being.
Numb to the ontological sense, we misinterpret politics. “The modern worship of state,”
322

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 28.

323

Quoted in Marcel, Faith and Reality, 28.

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 31. He writes later, “The possibility of this gap between me and myself
seems to be implied in what I am, and it is a thing which I must face. In truth, however, the more I
look at it, the more I face it, the more do I get beyond the opposition between the two” (126). I must
encounter myself. There is another gap, of a religious nature, which is not our business to fill: “Grace
will appear before conversion as an incomprehensible power which may perhaps operate, but may
also fail to intervene (133).
324

325

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 32.

326

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 33.

87
writes Marcel, “is simply one aspect of the extension which is really pathological in its
extravagance. The deadly boredom we find in the countries which are stricken by this cancer
is bound up with a corresponding weakening of the sense of being, and with an increasing
disappearance of joy.”327 The transference of the mechanistic understanding of the world to
the state and then to man is detrimental, albeit logical.328 Today we are left only with
inanimate knowledge, in which feeling and being expires.329 Thus, what we lose is value or
quality; in an impersonal world, all values are ultimately quantifiable and therefore not
properly speaking values. Marcel states, “being cannot … be indifferent to value.”330 This is
because existence is more than crude data; it is, as Marcel describes, something against
which data is hurled.331
Marcel touches upon the difficulty of reflection: “The peculiarly disconcerting nature
of our inquiry rests upon just this point, that when we speak of being, we cannot but project
before ourselves some sort of schema—however abstract it may be—and yet at the same time
we must free ourselves from this very projection, we must recognize and expose its illusory
nature.”332 In other words, being cannot be caught under the net of theory; when we attempt
to think being, we transform being into some thing it is not. We must acknowledge that there
are limitations to thought. Language is also deceptive, in so far as being is never general but
always particular. On the contrary, language speaks only in generalities.
Marcel, Faith and Reality, 38. There is a host of thinkers that may be cited here for their
reflections on boredom, but none more incisive than Kierkegaard, for whom boredom is a way of
being in (or attuned to) the world. See William McDonald, “Kierkegaard’s Demonic Boredom,”
Essays on Boredom and Modernity, edited by Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani, (Leiden: Brill
Academic Publishing, 2009), 61-84. See also Walker Percy, who explores the Kierkegaardian notion
of boredom tragicomically in his satirical “last self-help book,” Lost in the Cosmos, (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 173-89.
327

328

See Arendt on truth and logic in chapter II.

Marcel quotes William Ernest Hocking: “All positive feeling … reaches its terminus in
knowledge” (Faith and Reality, 41).
329

330

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 44.

331

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 44.

332

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 47.

88
Being of the other becomes intelligible for us, not through reflection or language, but
rather through love. “[W]e give them being, we acknowledge them as being,” writes Marcel,
“only from the moment when they become for us, in no matter what degree, centres or focal
points, when they evoke in us a reaction of love and respect.”333 A being, says Marcel,334 is a
constellation and not a totality; it is not a mere aggregate of parts, but a discernable, and yet
unstable, whole. Perhaps more important to consider is the attitude we take toward other
beings, which, for Marcel, must be that of love and respect, for only in this posture do we see
the other as other and affirm his being: “from the moment when my affirmation becomes
love, it resigns in favour of that which is affirmed, of the thing which is asserted in its
substantial value.”335 Conversely, if I look at another without love, he becomes for me a
thing; the affirmation of its existence is merely an affirmation of myself. This captures the
essence of the critique Marcel levels against Sartre, who cannot maintain the relation
between ‘I’ and ‘thou’—likely because Sartre misunderstands what it is to love.
The rejection of encounter is a deliberate silencing of being, which is only revealed
through presence. It is perhaps true that the Sartrean man is condemned to be free, although it
is a self-condemnation; through envisaging consciousness as oppositional, through
misunderstanding freedom as absolute and, consequently, our life as our own, Sartre
degrades both human being and human freedom. He cheapens freedom, as Marcel observes,
“by putting it on every stall.”336 By the same stroke, he calls upon man to practice his
freedom; however, without realizing that freedom becomes impracticable when divorced
from necessity. We are only free because we are not always free.337

333

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 57.

334

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 57.

335

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 62.

Marcel, “Existence and Human Freedom,” in The Philosophy of Existence, translated by Manya
Harari, (Providence: Cluny, 2018), 93.
336

Contra Sartre: “Man cannot be at times free and at other times a slave: either he is always and
entirely free or he is not free at all” (quoted in Marcel, “Existence and Human Freedom,” 86).
337

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“The essential question,” according to Marcel, “is whether this philosophy is not
heading for the abyss into which the forces of self-destruction threaten to drive our
unfortunate race.”338 I believe this question has been sufficiently answered.339

iii. Technics; or, the loss of the ontological sense
In “On the Ontological Mystery,” Gabriel Marcel discusses the difference between
problem and mystery, and our increasingly diminishing sense of the ontological and,
consequently, our own subjectivity. Man, argues Marcel, has been reduced to his functions,
that is, our humanity has become a mere doing rather than being (see chapter two). This
conclusion is supported by man’s objective existence: “Travelling on the Underground,”
reflects Marcel, “I often wonder with a kind of dread what can be the inward reality of the
life of this or that man employed on the railway—the man who opens the doors, for
instance, or the one who punches the tickets. Surely everything both within him and outside
him conspires to identify this man with his functions—meaning not only with his functions
as worker, as trade union member or, as voter, but with his vital functions as well.”340 We
must recognize, however, that such is his condition only to a certain way of looking; we
may reduce a man to his functions only if we look upon him as a thing, an object rather
than a fellow human being.341 Marcel identifies this way of looking with a “degraded
rationalism,”342 which seeks to reduce all existence to cause and effect.
Existence so viewed, however, ceases to be existence in as much as existence implies
awareness of a presence; for somebody to exist he must be present for another somebody.
Existence, so understood, is not a problem but rather a mystery, to wit, “a problem which
338

Marcel, “Existence and Human Freedom,” 92-3.

339

See chapter I, sec. iv.

Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” in The Philosophy of Existence, translated by
Manya Harari, (Providence: Cluny, 2018), 7.
340

341

See discussion of Descartes in chapter I, sec. ii.

342

Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 9.

90
encroaches upon its own data, invading them, as it were, and thereby transcending itself as a
simple problem.”343 In other words, whereas problem deals with objective data that precludes
involvement, for example, in the case of scientific inquiry, mystery presupposes involvement.
This is a difficult distinction to maintain; as Marcel observes, “in reflecting on a mystery we
tend inevitably to degrade it to the level of a problem.”344 However, rather than dissolving the
distinction, this difficulty gives us good indication of the difference between problem and
mystery: problems arise in reflection, when we deal with static words and images; on the
other hand, we enter into mystery through direct experience. Roughly, this parallels the
distinction between the epistemological and the ontological; perhaps our only epistemic
access to mystery is through the ontological; if so, the converse is true of problem, we are
capable of experiencing problems in so far as we have predetermined epistemic criteria.
Marcel writes, “To postulate the meta-problematical is to postulate the primacy of being over
knowledge (not of being as asserted, but of being as asserting itself); it is to recognize that
knowledge is, as it were, environed by being, that it is interior to it in a certain sense.”345 If
this is the case, then mystery must take precedence over problem. “Being ‘involved’ is the
fundamental fact;” writes Marcel, “I cannot leave it out of account except by an unjustifiable
fiction, for in doing so, I proceed as though I were God, and a God who is an onlooker at
that.”346
However, such fictions are sundry and plentiful in philosophy. Especially since the
modern age, epistemological concerns have trumped the ontological; the resurgence of
ontological priority is developing but unlikely to take root. This is because of what Marcel
calls “dematerialized digestion;”347 without our awareness, the rational-scientific paradigm of
modernity has seeped into the very marrow of our bones, and only with great difficulty, in so
343

Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 16.

344

Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 16.

345

Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 15.

346

Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 17.

347

Marcel, Reflection and Mystery, 66.

91
far as reflection seems to strengthen it, can we successfully extract it from therein. The fact
that most of us are not aware of this “digestion” adds a further layer of difficulty; it is one
thing to ward against danger when one expects it, but quite another when one must guard
against an unknown danger. Marcel has something like this in mind when he speaks of the
loss of the ontological sense; we can no longer sense being because we have accepted the
fiction that our only access to being is through the scientific method.
This is the seed of despair, according to Marcel:
From this standpoint [namely that of the functional], despair consists in the recognition
of the ultimate inefficacy of all technics, joined to the inability or the refusal to change
over to a new ground—a ground where all technics are seen to be incompatible with
the fundamental nature of being, which itself escapes our grasp … It is for this reason
that we seem nowadays to have entered upon the very era of despair; we have not
ceased to believe in technics, that is to envisage reality as a complex of problems; yet
at the same time the failure of technics as a whole is as discernible to us as its partial
triumphs.”348
We must resist the urge to look for causes; the inability to change over to a new ground stems
from a false intuition arising from our current situation. In a word, we are deceived; there are
no finite number of causes for this devastating and detrimental effect—to phrase the matter
thus is to entangle ourselves further in the problem rather than casting it aside, as we need do.
Legitimate channels of hope are blocked in so far as we look to our own technics to
escape our despair. Marcel writes, “the only genuine hope is hope in what does not depend on
ourselves, hope springing from humility and not from pride.”349 Hope becomes viable for us
in so far as we open ourselves to the influx of presence, that is, to the possibility of genuine
encounter. “A presence,” writes Marcel, “is a reality; it is a kind of influx; it depends upon us
to be permeable to this influx, but not, to tell the truth, to call it forth.”350 For to call it forth
transgresses the principle of fidelity; true creativity, on the other hand, is faithful to what

348

Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 28-9.

349

Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 30.

350

Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 37.

92
is.351

“When I say that a being is granted to me as a presence or as a being,” continues

Marcel, “this means that I am unable to treat him as if he were merely placed in front of me;
between him and me there arises a relationship which, in a sense, surpasses my awareness of
him; he is not only before me, he is also within me—or, rather, these categories are
transcended, they no longer have any meaning.”352 Hope lies in our ability to transcend the
(supposed) limitations of the self, for to be a self one must always be in the presence of
another; to this otherness selfhood is moored. Here perhaps we have the best defence against
the proponent of functionalism, which cannot rely on the self without presupposing otherness
and therefore allowing hope to enter through the back door.
Of course, his despair does not diminish in so far as he denies the presence of hope.
“The capacity to hope diminishes in proportion as the soul becomes increasingly chained to
its experience and to the categories which arise from it,” writes Marcel, “and as it is given
over more completely and more desperately to the world of the problematical.”353 Thus, hope
is recovered only with the realization that true selfhood exists in relation with otherness; and
otherness can only be encountered through participation or involvement—one cannot view it
from a distance.

iv. Testimony
In very basic terms, testimony is an assertion of belief; it is an affirmation of some
thing or, more significantly, being that exists; and, if it exists, it exists for me. Marcel
distinguishes testimony from observation: I can only observe that which is directly before
me, but not in any way with me or through me; an observation, in theory, by me or another
person so situated is indistinguishable (pure observation is impossible; we always transgress

351

Cf. Polanyi on “creative reorganization,” The Study of Man, 24-5.

352

Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 38.

353

Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 43.

93
the limit of observation into testimony in so far as we are involved with what we

observe);354

on the other hand, when I testify, I affirm that this is only in relation to me—as Marcel
writes, “the witness always conceives of himself as standing in the presence of someone.”355
This is one aspect of testimony, i.e., that I affirm the existence of another being; the
other, equally as important, is that I make this affirmation, in other words, I testify, in the
presence of another. “[T]estimony is given before a transcendence, perhaps even before
transcendence itself,” writes Marcel.356 This is because when I testify I acknowledge that I
am more than myself and thereby transcend myself; I am receptive to otherness. Marcel
continues, “[T]estimony is based on fidelity to a light or … to a grace received.”357 I imagine
Abraham Heschel has something like this in mind when he speaks of the relation between
man and God: just as man stands in need of God, God stands in need of man; only through
man’s celebration of God—through his receptivity of the light—does God exist for man.358
Accordingly, testimony is not self-motivated; I cannot testify to that which is absent
—at least not before having perceived its presence. Testimony, then, is a gift; I testify to that
which is given unto me. It is not only a gift I receive but also a gift that I give, in so far as
each gift is a testimony of how I feel about the receiver. “The gift,” writes Marcel, “if it is
really a gift, is not just one more thing added to his possessions; it exists in another
dimension, which is that of testimony, since it is a gage of friendship, or of love.”359 The
depth of reality is dependent upon our experience; we may only skim the surface, if we
choose, or plumb the depths of our mysterious being—but, in either case, we must remember,
the choice is ours.
Kierkegaard’s Judge puts it more succinctly, “There is something treacherous in wanting only to
observe” (Either/Or, 385).
354

Gabriel Marcel, “Testimony and Existentialism,” in The Philosophy of Existence, (Providence:
Cluny, 2018), 102.
355

356

Marcel, “Testimony and Existentialism,” 102.

357

Marcel, “Testimony and Existentialism,” 107.

358

Heschel, Who is Man?, 110.

359

Marcel, “Testimony and Existentialism,” 111.

94
“Whatever its ultimate meaning,” declares Marcel, “the universe into which we have
been thrown cannot satisfy our reason, let us have the courage to admit it once and for all.”360
The best we can do is to affirm truth by living it; we must not expect to exhaust truth. All
attempts to do so alter truth into that which it is not, in so far as truth, by its very nature, is
inexhaustible; the scope of truth is narrowed to better fit a theory or system without realizing
what is left out. This is nothing short of mutilation; man is a bad-handed butcher, who, in
cleaving his meat, cuts himself too. Thus, reflects Marcel, “to think, to formulate, and to
judge is always to betray.”361 For whatever we (re)produce in our reflection is a diminution
of what is.
We are taught to make a habit of this betrayal from a very young age; each reprimand
of childhood acts as a constraint to future receptivity. We are taught to be cautious of our
judgement, for, lacking the proper expertise, we are likely to err; judgement is the right of
specialists, we are but receptacles into which their findings are poured. Reflecting on his
scholastic experience, Marcel remarks, “[The system] totally ignores the facts and
particularly the modes of human growth.”362 We are taught to observe life without living;
what, one might ask, is the use of that? Only upon asking the question does he realize that he
must unlearn all that, up to this point, he has so painstakingly attempted to learn; and, then,
he must take upon himself the burden of disburdening others. The realization is this: we do
not begin from without but from within: “the undertaking ha[s] to be pursued within reality
itself, to which the philosopher can never stand in the relationship of an onlooker to a
picture.”363
Human experience is infinitely deep and infinitely complex; once aware of the
mystery of being, we must initiate others into it, without ourselves losing awareness of it; for,
360

Marcel, “Testimony and Existentialism,” 135.

361

Marcel, “Testimony and Existentialism,” 124.

362

Marcel, “Testimony and Existentialism,” 121.

Gabriel Marcel, “An Essay in Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of Existence, (Providence:
Cluny, 2018), 139.
363

95
it seems, when we move to explain, we forget to experience and thereby lose the source of
the mystery.

v. The Mystery of Being
There are, roughly speaking, two ways of being in the world: one involved and the
other uninvolved. Of course, we are never really uninvolved, only deceived into thinking we
are so. In the technological age, man is losing his capacity to participate because he has
convinced himself of the impersonal nature of knowledge; he is an onlooker rather than a
participant in the world he studies. This has led to a diminishing sense of the ontological. In
the modern world, man becomes a thing; and a thing is incapable of participation or
involvement. In Heidegger’s terminology, a thing has no possibilities. It also has no beliefs,
no faith.
Faith is openness to the other; it is invitation to come into my being. It is the basis of
intersubjective reality. Today, we are, for the most part, faithless. Goethe writes of modern
men, “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has
attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”364 This sentiment is echoed in Marcel,
who writes, “the specialist as such ceases to behave as one being open to another being; to
benefit a technique he betrays intersubjective reality.”365 Indeed, only a nullity remains for
the faithless, who know not how to receive otherness; the specialists—a species unique to the
technological age—cannot encounter reality, but only dissect it.366

364 Although

most often ascribed to Weber, this quotation originated with Goethe. Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe quoted in Anthony Giddens, “Introduction,” The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism, by Max Weber, (London: Routledge, 2001), xix.
365

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 83.

The scientist, observes Percy, is only concerned with specimen; however, once we start thinking in
terms of species, “[t]hen there are no more individuals but only specimens.” Percy, “The Loss of the
Creature,” 58.
366

96
The trouble with this attitude is not in its operative mode; Heidegger argues that the
sciences must operate in their sphere of “one-sidedness” if they are to operate at all.367
Rather, the trouble lies in the totalization of this one-sidedness, or, as Marcel puts it, in the
“metaphysical justification” for this attitude.368 It might be appropriate to think of some
things as such; however, it is grossly inappropriate to subsume all reality into the attitude of
the specialist. Effectively, what this attitude accomplishes is subjective isolation: reality
becomes cognitive. The implicit irony of all modern scientific endeavours consists in the fact
that the drive to penetrate external reality terminates only in internal verification (this should
have been obvious since Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human
Knowledge).
“[I]f there is no sign of conversion,” writes Marcel, “the technocratic craze will
gradually succeed in drowning every feeling for values.”369 The technocratic craze results in
social paralysis,370 for, without value, man ceases to act. It is unlikely that man will reach this
extreme; in fact, it is impossible, in so far as man is only so long as he values and therefore
acts. Without action, properly speaking, man relinquishes claim to that title. Thus, it is not the
complete lack of action we have to fear, but rather the degradation of action to function.371
The conversion must, of course, be of a religious nature; however, understood in a
wide sense. It is not necessary to believe in this god or that, merely to recognize the
possibility of transcendence, which, according to Marcel, is realized through prayer. Prayer is
an affirmation of the transcendent; I make an appeal to the wholly other, thus affirming its
presence. The emphasis is not on the appeal itself, whether it is granted or not, but what it

367

Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 33.

368

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 87.

369

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 99.

“It is beyond the power of science to tell us whether it is right or wrong to increase the
population;” writes Marcel, “it will only be able to remind us that unless certain economic conditions
are fulfilled, over-population can become a grave social danger” (99; italics added).
370

371

See discussion of Arendt on action in chapter I.

97
may accomplish indirectly.“[I]n the whole history of philosophy,” reflects Marcel, “there has
been no more tragic error than that of trying to think free will in its opposition to
determinism; in reality it lies in a completely different plane.”372 It is only through reducing
freedom to the technological plane that we have endangered it; freedom, correctly
understood, suffers no risk from physical determinism. On the contrary, the theory of
determinism, in so far as it is a theory, affirms free will. It is helpful to refer to Polanyi’s
stratification of reality here, for, in effect, Marcel is arguing the same: there are different
planes of existence; moreover, the higher plane, e.g., that of freedom, is incommensurate
with the lower. What is detrimental is the ill-aligned comparison, which deceives one into
thinking that the two are mutually exclusive. In truth, they refer to very different aspects of
reality. So it is that we are deceived to our ways of being in the world.
“The less men are thought of as beings in the sense which we have already tried to
define,” writes Marcel, “the stronger will be the temptation to use them as machines which
are capable of a given output.”373 We see this prophecy has come true: the ontological sense,
wherever it is felt, is thought to be an encumbrance, something to overcome or eliminate. We
are hastening our pace toward a technocratic future partially because we are convinced of our
being as fundamentally technological;374 also because we think it an improvement. Ironically,
by the same path, we are moving farther and farther from that which allows us to speak of
improvement.
However, the hopefulness inherent to our being negates the finality of this situation.
Hope requires an ontological renewal.375 “To hope,” writes Marcel, “is to carry within me the
private assurance that however black things may seem, my present intolerable situation
372

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 113.

373

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 148.

“Hence it is,” writes Marcel, “that those minds which have progressively lost any capacity for
reflection and who have no suspicion of what faith can be, have a way of looking at things which is
so consistent that it does indeed become reality for them” (Faith and Reality, 149).
374

Marcel writes, “man should rediscover the sense of the eternal, and withstand those who would
make his life subservient to an alleged sense of history” (Faith and Reality, 165).
375

98
cannot be final; there must be some way

out.”376

The way out is through the “exigence of

transcendence,” to realize man is more than himself—in Pascal’s words, “man infinitely
transcends man”377—he carries within himself intersubjectivity.378
Marcel concludes with an ominous projection, “we are heading for catastrophes even
more terrible, even more uprooting, than those which many of us have witnessed during the
last thirty-five years.”379 Our age affirms its truth. The reason, however, is not a superstitious
fatalism—where we are is not inevitable; nonetheless, we are here. We are here because we
failed to understand the essence of modernity. Arendt is right: the root of evil is
thoughtlessness; we are here because we were—and are—thoughtless. The only way to
reverse the “deterioration of the human species”380 is to efface the gap between faith and the
“spirit of truth,”381 to realize that truth always requires commitment, to wit, a submission to
what is—this is an act of faith.
Marcel entreats us to open ourselves to the light and let it pour in—

Précis
In this final chapter, I have sought to show how scientific thinking, in so far as it
problematizes all aspects of our being, blocks all legitimate channels of hope. According to
Marcel, hope requires encounter with that which is wholly other and this cannot be
accomplished through reflection, description or representation. The scientific schematic

376

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 160.

377

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1958), 121, aphorism 434.

378

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 161.

379

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 166.

380

Marcel, Faith and Reality, 185.

“…there is a connection which it is the philosopher’s duty to underline with the utmost emphasis,
the connection which binds together faith and the spirit of truth. Whenever a gap begins to open
between these two, it is a proof either that faith is tending to degenerate into idolatry or else that the
spirit of truth is becoming arid and giving way to ratiocinative reason” (Marcel, Faith and Reality,
177).
381

99
imagines the world as a collection of objects, or rather facts; in so doing, it negates presence
in so far as presence presupposes interiority. As Marcel argues, things, strictly speaking
objectified things, do not have presence, although they are present to us. The only way to
recover hope in the techno-scientific world, which objectifies all being, is to reinvigorate our
atrophying ontological sense. We must do this by reaffirming the ultimacy of mystery in the
human world wherein realities that cannot be captured by our concepts are recognized as
legitimate. Only thereby will we be open to acknowledging and testifying to the
inexhaustible realities embodied in ourselves, others, and beyond. Only by accepting that
reality is not a closed system, can we remain available to a hope that is unquenchable and an
inexhaustible world wonder.

100
Epilogue: A Magnificent Failure
A rather glaring objection awaits us, voiced perhaps most succinctly by Paul
Feyerabend: “the people who say that it is science that determines the nature of reality
assume that the sciences speak with a single voice. They think that there is this monster,
SCIENCE, and when it speaks it utters and repeats and repeats and repeats again a single
coherent message. Nothing could be further from the truth. Different sciences have vastly
different ideologies.”382 And, again, he writes, “So you see — the sciences are full of
conflict. The one monster SCIENCE that speaks with a single voice is a paste job constructed
by propagandists, reductionists and educators.”383 To clear myself of this charge—for neither
of the three appellations, propagandist, reductionist or educator, is particularly tasteful to me
—I should state that whilst the sciences show great diversity in terms of content and even
method, there is an unacknowledged similarity, not just in the sciences, but in all systematic
undertakings of modernity, which I have called scientific thinking. This identifies the
insatiable drive for greater clarity at the expense of meaning; it, also, demarcates the onesidedness of modern humanity. I have chosen to call this drive “scientific” because, along
with Heidegger, Arendt, and others, I see this as the essence of modern science.
Feyerabend imputes the scientific principle of “unity behind the variety of
experiences” to Thales.384 Accordingly, this would antedate the rise of modern science to
antiquity. Now, this is not the claim I have made herein; however, I suggest early on that the
argument can be generalized to Western rationality. I believe the seed of modern science was
present in the schism of idea and appearance. But this is an overly simplistic statement; there
are various other occurrences, for which we must account. Our modern notion of progress,

382

Paul Feyerbend, The Tyranny of Science, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 55.

383

Feyerbend, The Tyranny of Science, 56.

384

Feyerbend, The Tyranny of Science, 16.

101
argues George Grant, could not have developed without the advent of

Christianity.385

Our

construal of time as linear is a Christian inheritance and presupposed in the notion of
progress. Whether we have truly progressed is an open question.
At any rate, my presentation of the subject matter, which, in a wide sense, may be
said to be an approximation of a philosophy of science, diverges from its most famous and
notable proponents. Not because I presume I know more or better than they—this illusion, if
I harboured it, would be easily dispelled—but because, unlike them, I am not critiquing the
methodology or methodologies of science. What the scientist does in his laboratory, I leave to
him, so long as it stays in his laboratory. However, when his practices inevitably affect the
outside world, when I am told, somewhat patronizingly, that my experiences are but an
illusion that ultimately signify nothing; moreover, when I see my fellow beings accept this
explanation, I am unwilling to sit hand on hand. This illustration is misleading: it is untrue
that the scientist begins in the laboratory; on the contrary, my argument rests on the fact that
scientific thinking begins outside. Our sciences are the product of a deeply rooted
predilection for scientific thinking.
In this work, I have tried to better understand what this means—I say I have tried to
understand rather than explain, for it would be contrary to my purpose to do otherwise. I do
not imagine that I have done a very thorough job; there are many holes which I leave for
abler minds to fill. As for myself, I only hope to count this as a “magnificent failure,” as
William Faulkner once remarked of his extraordinary novel, The Sound and the Fury. He
meant by this not a failure of prodigious proportion, but rather a failure that still won some
consolation by what it had achieved.
One of the hardest things to reflect upon is reflection itself, for it requires a mental
agility of which few are capable. Our ways of thinking are rarely subjected to thought;
Reflecting on the notion of progress, Grant writes, “The influences shaping the modern spirit have
been too diverse and subtle for any ease of intellectual relation or facile categorizing. Nevertheless, in
its moral connotation there is nothing more important to its understanding than to recognize how the
Christian idea of history as the divinely ordained process of salvation, culminating in the Kingdom of
God, passes over into the idea of history as progress, culminating in the Kingdom of Man.” George P.
Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), 61.
385

102
nonetheless, they are the very means through which we come to the world—or the world
comes to us. To understand our way of thinking is perhaps the single most important
intellectual task that lies before us. I have attempted just this task. Admittedly, at times, I
have been passionate beyond academic convention, but conscience here is a better guide than
convention. Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “[T]o the hard of hearing you shout, and for the
almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”386 Louder I cannot shout, and more
startling figures, in an academic work, I cannot draw. I hope this work meets with eyes which
not only see, but refine.

Mystery and Manners, edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, (New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux), 1969, 34.
386

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