Two Cultures Revisited: Michael Polanyi on the Continuity Between the Natural Sciences and the Study of Man

Keywords: Snow's problem, Michael Polanyi, the natural sciences, the study of man, continuity and distinction. Polanyi's response to Snow's problem is a two-step strategy. First, he undermines the supposed gap between the natural sciences and the study of man and establishes the continuity between them. Second, based upon what is achieved in the first step, he explores the distinctions between scientific and humanistic meanings. All this is achieved on the basis of his theory of tacit knowing. Three features of this theory merit attention: (1) the predominance of the participatory perspective; (2) the recovery of the hermeneutic dimension of science; and (3) the constructive use of Heidegger's " being-in-the-world. " The split of science from the humanities and fact from value is a prominent phenomenon in modern times. C. P. Snow addresses this issue in his famous article titled " The Two Cultures " based on his 1959 Rede Lecture. One philosophical version of " Snow's problem " is the discussion of the relation between the natural sciences and the social, human sciences. Polanyi's view on this problem is quite clear. He insists on the continuity between the natural sciences and the study of man. In holding this view, Polanyi finds himself at odds with both positivists and secessionists, i.e., philosophers like Dilthey, Wildelband, Rickert, and Collingwood, who advocated the secession of the humanities, and history in particular, from the domain of the natural sciences. In this essay, I will argue that, by working out a new epistemology, that is, his theory of tacit, personal knowing and an ontology of stratified reality, Polanyi overcomes the deficiencies of both the positivistic approach and the secessionist movement and undermines the supposed gap between the natural sciences and the study of man. Polanyi is in line with Snow in complaining about the gap between science and the rest of our culture, but he disagrees when Snow attributes the gap to specialization, which results in, for instance, literary people's ignorance of thermodynamics. Polanyi thinks that specialization is indispensable to the advancement of modern science and the rest of our culture. Rather, he sees the trouble in the modern understanding of science. In Polanyi's diagnosis, it is the modern understanding of science, which, having originated in the scientific revolution in the 17th century, gained momentum in the Enlightenment, and ultimately found its paradigmatic expression in positivism, is responsible for the gap between science and the …