Relativ-ism, plural-ism, modern-ism, secular-ism — these are agendas, characteristic to the ethos of the present age, which we must resist accommodating or tacitly embracing in our thoughts, plans, and decisions; such resistance depends on carefully cultivating our core commitments and pruning the habits that express those commitments.
Relativ-ity, plural-ity, modern-ity, secular-ity — these are brute facts, descriptive of the reality of the present age, which will provide friction and resistance to our thoughts, plans, and decisions unless we deliberately shape our plans and decisions to them; such shaping depends on carefully observing how these facts work in and on us and our neighbors.
Polanyi has the rationalists’ number, a decade before Foucault et al:
I do not suggest, of course, that those who advocate philosophic doubt as a general solvent of error and a cure for all fanaticism would desire to bring up children without any rational guidance or contemplate any other scheme of universal hebetation. I am only saying that this would be what their principles demand. What they actually want is not expressed but concealed by their declared principles. They want their own beliefs to be taught to children and accepted by everybody, for they are convinced that this would save the world from error and strife. In his Conway Lecture of 1922, republished in 1941, Bertrand Russell revealed this in a single sentence. After condemning both Bolshevism and clericalism as two opposite dogmatic teachings, which should both be combated by philosophic doubt, he sums up by saying: ‘Thus rational doubt alone, if it could be generated, would suffice to introduce the Millennium.’ The author’s intention is clear: he intends to spread certain doubts which he believes to be justified. He does not want us to believe the doctrines of the Catholic Church, which he denies and dislikes, and he also wants us to resist Lenin’s teaching of unbridled revolutionary violence. These disbeliefs are recommended as ‘rational doubts’. Philosophic doubt is thus kept on the leash and prevented from calling in question anything that the [sceptic] believes in, or from approving of any doubt that he does not share. … Since the sceptic does not consider it rational to doubt what he himself believes, the advocacy of ‘rational doubt’ is merely the sceptic’s way of advocating his own beliefs.
— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy, 297
Ultimately, I do want to tell people to please try and chill out, yes. No, I don’t think AI Jesus is about to come and initiate the Rapture, and the desire for that to be true seems to be derived from very naked psychological needs. We live in a mundane world, a world of homework and waiting for the bus and sorting the recyclables and doing the laundry and holding your shirt over your nose when you enter a public bathroom and trying to find a credit card that offers a slightly better points program. It just keeps going, day after day after grinding day. You never get removed from it, never escape it. And yes, there’s transcendence and beauty and fun and satisfaction and growth and meaning, all of it! But you find that all in the mundane, generally; those few who spend their lives in a state of constant stimulation and novelty, well, God bless them. Most of the time they didn’t get there through their choices but through random chance. I’m saying all of this because I think a lot of people spend their time yearning for some great fissure in their lives where there’s a massive and permanent division between the before and the after, and all of this AI stuff is giving rational people an excuse to be irrational. (Of course, this is the number two fantasy behind the great American civic religion, “Someday, I’ll be a celebrity.”)
You have to imagine a life you can live with, where you are, when you are. If you don’t, you’ll never be satisfied. Neither AI nor anything else is coming to save you from the things you don’t like about being a person. The better life you absolutely can build isn’t going to be brought to you by ChatGPT but by your own steady uphill clawing and through careful management of your own expectations. You live here. This is it. That’s what I would tell to everyone out there: this is it. This is it. This is it. You’re never going to hang out with Mr. Data on the Holodeck. I know that, for a lot of people, mundane reality is everything they want to escape. But it could be so much worse.
I’m continuing to be amazed by the depth and prescience of Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge. Here is a sequence of quotations from (really, the bulk of) chapter 8, “The Logic of Affirmation,” section 12, “The Fiduciary Programme”:
The critical movement, which seems to be nearing the end of its course today, was perhaps the most fruitful effort ever sustained by the human mind. The past four or five centuries, which have gradually destroyed or overshadowed the whole medieval cosmos, have enriched us mentally and morally [TC: morally? somewhat dubious] to an extent unrivalled by any period of similar duration. But its incandescence had fed on the combustion of the Christian heritage in the oxygen of Greek rationalism, and when this fuel was exhausted the critical framework itself burnt away. [pp. 265–66]
We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of the idiom and of a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded community: such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely for our mastery of things. No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework.[p. 266]
Our mind lives in action, and any attempt to specify its presuppositions produces a set of axioms which cannot tell us why we should accept them. Science exists only to the extent to which there lives a passion for its beauty, a beauty believed to be universal and eternal. Yet we know also that our own sense of this beauty is uncertain, its full appreciation being limited to a handful of adepts, and its transmission to posterity insecure. Beliefs held by so few and so precariously are not indubitable in any empirical sense. Our basic beliefs are indubitable only in the sense that we believe them to be so. Otherwise they are not even beliefs, but merely somebody’s states of mind. [p. 267]
[We] can voice our ultimate convictions only from within our convictions—from within the whole system of acceptances that are logically prior to any particular assertion of our own, prior to the holding of any piece of knowledge. If an ultimate logical level is to be attained and made explicit, this must be a declaration of my personal beliefs… An example of a logically consistent exposition of fundamental beliefs is St. Augustine’s Confessions. Its first ten books contain an account of the period before his conversion and of his struggle for the faith he was yet lacking. Yet the whole of this process is interpreted by him from the point of view which he reached after his conversion. He seems to acknowledge that you cannot expose an error by interpreting it from the premisses which lead to it, but only from premisses which are believed to be true. His maxim nisi credideritis non intelligitis [“unless ye believe, ye shall not understand”] expresses this logical requirement. It says, as I understand it, that the process of examining any topic is both an exploration of the topic, and an exegesis of our fundamental beliefs in the light of which we approach it; a dialectical combination of exploration and exegesis. Our fundamental beliefs are continuously reconsidered in the course of such a process, but only within the scope of their own basic premises. [p. 267]
[The] greatly increased critical powers of man… have endowed our mind with a capacity for self-transcendence of which we can never again divest ourselves. We have plucked from the Tree a second apple which has for ever imperilled [sic] our knowledge of Good and Evil, and we must learn to know these qualities henceforth in the blinding light of our new analytical powers. Humanity has been deprived a second time of its innocence, and driven out of another garden which was, at any rate, a Fool’s Paradise. Innocently, we had trusted that we could be relieved of all personal responsibility for our beliefs by objective criteria of validity—and our own critical powers have shattered this hope. Struck by our sudden nakedness, we may try to brazen it out by flaunting it in a profession of nihilism. But modern man’s immorality is unstable. Presently his moral passions reassert themselves in objectivist disguise and the scientistic Minotaur is born. The alternative to this, which I am seeking to establish here, is to restore to us once more the power for the deliberate holding of unproven beliefs. We should be able to profess now knowingly and openly those beliefs which could be tacitly taken for granted in the days before modern philosophic criticism reached its present incisiveness. Such powers may appear dangerous. But a dogmatic orthodoxy can be kept in check both internally and externally, while a creed inverted into a science is both blind and deceptive. [p. 268]
Recall: this work was written at the same time as Gadamer’s Truth and Method and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and predates by over two decades MacIntyre’s trilogy that runs from After Virtue through Whose Justice? Which Rationality? to Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Those works, of course, have immense value in their own right (though I am beginning to suspect that Kuhn ought to be read as basically a special case of Polanyi). Yet it is remarkable how many of their core insights are anticipated here and elsewhere. MacIntyre’s “there is no rationality that is not of some tradition”? Here it is. Gadamer’s “the Enlightenment instilled an unjustified prejudice against prejudices”? Bingo. Kuhn’s recognition of regnant scientific “paradigms” that depend largely on the standards of scientific satisfaction in a given period, rather than the totality of available evidence? Ding, ding, ding. It’s all in here, folks, at least in highly compressed form.
Of course, Polanyi’s prose — which I am finding far slower even than MacIntyre’s — is a real hindrance to his reception. (The above quotations, some of which are remarkably snappy, are not exactly representative!) But in my own fields of theology and biblical studies, I cannot help thinking that discussions of method and comparison of different works which do not attend to these core insights amount only to so many exercises in wheel-spinning. Such exercises, at best, may result in a good workout — but at the end you are still sitting in the same place you were, with a great deal of sweat and exhaustion but no forward progress to show for it. Is forward progress then possible? That is the burden of the final chapters of Personal Knowledge.
The key question for critics of “theological interpretation of Scripture”: Does “non-theological interpretation” of Scripture exist? It is normally claimed that the historical-critical mode of interpretation, in opposition to various religiously motivated modes, provides a set of “scientific” tools to establish the original meaning of the text in question (or the meaning now hidden underneath numerous redactional layers), so as to lay a surer foundation for future reflection upon the text. (Set aside, for a moment, the recognition that rather than producing a unified, scientific account of the Bible’s meaning and origins, the historical-critical mode has provided only a far more fragmented and scrambled picture, or rather set of pictures, than existed in the supposedly pre-critical age.) Essential to this mode is the assertion (which, at a certain level, I accept without controversy) that the history of a text’s, or idea’s, development and effects is absolutely critical to understanding its meaning. Now turn this question to the historical-critical mode itself. It has a history, and a distinctly theological history at that. Its developers and proponents had beliefs, complex beliefs indeed, about God, the Church, the Bible, and the like — living when and where they did, how could they not? Those beliefs affected their work, as their work affected their beliefs, in a constant hermeneutical spiral, affecting the directions given to their intellectual passions and the sorts of resolutions they found satisfying — how could they not? Can the historical-critical mode — or any mode of interpretation of a text which confronts one with questions about God (and is there any text which does not?) — really then be called “non-theological”?
I’m quite enjoying the early pages of (the first volume of) Tom Greggs’ Dogmatic Ecclesiology. But unfortunately he has not managed to transcend the post-Barthian theologian’s penchant for the occasional syntactical monstrosity:
But simultaneously, we must recognize that from the side of the created history and time which God has put in place, there is no God aside from the God who is known within the spatiotemporal boundedness of creation—no God aside from the God of the church. God as God self-determines Godself for creation is God in God’s eternal being, known in God’s revelation to the life of the church. This is not because of an overemphasis on the created order over against the sheer magnificent plenitude of God’s being, but because, in the sheer magnificent plenitude of God’s being, God has determined Godself for all eternity to be for creation and to be the God who makes Godself known as being pro nobis for the world by being pro nos within God’s community of the church.
Oof. I mean, it’s comprehensible, if you read it a few times. But should we need to? Perhaps it is fitting that attempts to say meaningful things about the inner life of the Holy Trinity tend to stretch human language beyond not only its metaphorical but also its syntactical capabilities.
(And while there — this is the exact sort of sentence that convinced me, when starting grad school, that capitalizing grammatically masculine pronouns for the Deity was a far preferable solution than the “Godself” locution.)
No knock on Greggs’ book. I’m sure there’s not a modern theologian who has avoided this problem. But it’s representative.
A great analysis by Polanyi of the cultural structure that maintains (or at least maintained) Marxism:
This is the characteristic structure of what I shall call a dynamo-objective coupling. Alleged scientific assertions, which are accepted as such because they satisfy moral passions, will excite these passions further, and thus lend increased convincing power to the scientific affirmations in question—and so on, indefinitely. Moreover, such a dynamo-objective coupling is also potent in its own defence. Any criticism of its scientific part is rebutted by the moral passions behind it, while any moral objections to it are coldly brushed aside by invoking the inexorable verdict of its scientific findings. Each of the two components, the dynamic and the objective, takes it in turn to draw attention away from the other when it is under attack.
We can see that this structure underlies also a logical fallacy exposed by the academic critics of Marxism, and explains why the fallacy survives its exposure. The critics say that no political programme can be derived from the Marxian prediction of the inevitable destruction of Capitalism at the hands of the proletariat. For it is senseless to enlist fighters for a battle which is said to be already decided; while if the battle is not yet decided, you cannot predict its issue. But within a dynamo-objective coupling, the logical objection against using a historical prediction as an appeal to fight for the certain outcome of history no longer arises. For the prediction is accepted only because we believe that the Socialist cause is just; and this implies that Socialist action is right. The prediction implies therefore a call to action.
— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy, 230–31
… I suggest that an ecclesiology of brokenness is the only “right” ecclesiology for our pluralistic time, when the strengths of other Christian communions and the weaknesses of our own no longer can be ignored. The way toward Christian unity, then, may be, not through defending the uniqueness of our own particular strands of the Christian tapestry, but rather through admitting their limitations and seeking theological solutions from threads other than our own.