Polanyi -- The Tacit Dimension

The Tacit Dimension

Michael Polanyi, Anchor Books, Garden City (1967)

I picked up this book some years ago at some used book store. I had run across references to Polanyi, I think, when I was working on my Master's in Teaching. He was a scientist who wrote about how people solve problems, 'problem solving' in the literature.

This is one direction my PhD work will be going, so I decided to look into this before I dig into the current literature on the matter.

Polanyi was an interesting guy. To illustrate, here's a little quote from the first page of the introduction:

I first met questions of philosophy when I came up against Soviet ideology under Stalin which denied justification to the pursuit of science. I remember a conversation I had with Bukharin in Moscow in 1935. Though he was heading toward his fall and execution three years later, he was still a leading theoretician of the Communist party.

'Heading toward his fall and execution.' Talk about an attention getter at a party.

For those in the know, Stalin is synonymous with state terror and Bukharin was a darling intellectual of the early party in revolutionary Russia. Polanyi was circulating in some tough circles.

From the tiny biographical note in the book:

Dr. Michael Polanyi was born in Budapest in 1981, and received doctoral degrees both in Medicine and in Physical Sciences from the University of Budapest. In 1929 hd was made a Life Member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry, and in 1933 was elected to the Chair of Physical Chemistry at the Victoria University of Manchester, England. He exchanged this Chair for a Chair in Social studies in 1948, and has lectured since then, as Visiting Professor, or Senior Fellow, at the universities of Chicago, Aberdeen, Virginia, Stanfard, and Merton College, Oxford. in 1965-66 he was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University.

I especially am interested in him since he was a practicing physical chemist—a hard scientist—who became absorbed in the question of how knowledge is built by humans. That is, he was a well-developed practitioner of a mathematical science looking inside, at how this business works.

Lermontov - The Rock Ledge (1841)

Through the night, a golden cloud lay sleeping

On the breast of a gigantic rock ledge.

In the morning, early, off she hurried;

Through the azure, carefree, she went playing.

But a trace of moisture was still clinging

To the wrinkled rock ledge. Old and lonely,

He stood there as though in sad reflection—

In the empty spaces softly weeping.

—translated by Guy Daniels, 1965, in 'A Lermontov Reader.'

Lermontov - The Angel (1831)

An angel was flying through midnight's deep blue,

And softly he sang as he flew;

The moon, and the clouds, and the stars in a throng

All listened: in heavenly song

He sang of the blessings of souls without sin

In the gardens of Paradise; hymns

To God the almighty he sang, and his praise

Was pure and completely unfeigned.

He carried toward earth, with its tears and its grief,

A soul just beginning its life;

And long, long thereafter the soul could still hear

The song he sang—wordless, but clear.

The soul languished long it is worldly attire,

Still knowing a wondrous desire;

And that heavenly music was never userped

By the wearisome songs of the earth.

—translated by Guy Daniels, 1965, in 'A Lermontov Reader.'

Lermontov

A Lermontov Reader, Edited and translated by Guy Daniels, Macmillan, New York (1965).

I picked up an old favorite of mine last night, a discovery from back in the old days of reading Russian literature, mainly up in Minneapolis, in my young twenties, while floundering as a Chem Physics student or an activist.

Among the big names—Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin—I would find references and seek them out in used book stores, and gathered quite a collection—maybe thirty books on a dozen different authors— some of which I read. Notable for me were Krylov and Lermontov. Lermontov is considered a 'romantic' poet; but what could that mean to someone?

I looked it up online right quick:

Of or pertaining to romance; involving or resembling romance; hence, fanciful; marvelous; extravagant; unreal; as, a romantic tale; a romantic notion; a romantic undertaking. [1913 Webster]—Dictionary.com, apparently quoting an old Webster's

What? I tried again:

4 a : marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized–Mirriam-Webster's Online Dictionary

Yuck. I could not survive as a literary critic. The little I've read of Lermontov I like because it gives voice to a tender homunculus I fancy is bound up in men, perhaps by artifice, perhaps by nature.

Below is an extraction of the Biographical Note at the front of the book.

Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov was born in Mosco on October 2 (O.S.) 1814. He entered Moscow University at age sixteen. Two year later, he suddenly left Moscow for St. Petersburg, where he enrolled in the Cavalry Cadets' School. He was commissioned 'ensign' in the Life Guard Hussars in 1834, and began, so it would appear to lead a rather dissipated life. In 1837, Pushkin was killed in a duel and the younger poet wrote his famous accusatory poem, 'Death of a Poet,' for which he was court-martialed and 'exiled' to the combat zone in the Caucasus. The rest of his brief life was a whirlwind of activity: constant quarrels with the authorities, banishments, feats of bravery in battles, fleeting love affairs, and (miraculously) intensive literary work. In the summer of 1841, less than four years after Pushkin's death, his rightful successor met the same fate: he was killed in a duel.