The Tacit Dimension by MICHAEL POLANYI - May 2009

University Of Chicago Press, May 2009. Paper Back. New. Michael Polanyi summarized his mature thought in Harvard University's 1962 Terry Lectures. The lectures, here reprinted in a sturdy hardbound volume, address the fundamental question: 'How can we understand any phenomena complex enough to be truly valuable?' One thinks of morality, love, and the sacramental life. Polanyi's answer -- surprising yet convincing -- invokes a tacit, unspoken and unspeakable, human facility that transposes our sensory perceptions into meaningful knowledge much as a blind man transposes the forces exerted by a cane on his hand into something utterly different: a picture of his nearby world. Polanyi's analysis eschews reductionism, elevates the person to the truly real, and advances a traditionalism that enjoins belief before knowledge. Finally, he warns against the twin fanaticisms of our time: an extreme lucidity that destroys what it seeks to explain and a moral perfectionism that degenerates into a struggle for political power. Polanyi's concise prose is challenging but well worth the effort. 108 pp.