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Introduction: An Appreciation of Michael Polanyi
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11945 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1987 |
826 Words |
| Author
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Lee Congdon
Lee Congdon writes regularly on modern literature. He teaches
eastern European history at James Madison University. |
Consider, if you will, the parallel lives of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michael Polanyi. Both of these extraordinary thinkers were born in the Habsburg Empire to distinguished families of assimilated Jews. Both came to philosophy for reasons that were more personal then professional in nature. Both made their reputations in England and both presented brilliant arguments in defense of tradition. Yet while Wittgenstein has received wide recognition for his work, Polanyi is only beginning to attract the attention he deserves. It is with that in mind and with the hope of suggesting the range of his relevance that THE WORLD & I offers the following essays.
Born in Budapest in 1891, Michael Polanyi belonged to a family of intellectual "explorers," one of his favorite metaphors. His father, who was noted for his intelligence and strength of character, insisted that the children learn German and English as well as Hungarian. His mother presided over a salon that attracted the best minds in Hungary. His brother Karl, author of The Great Transformation, a seminal work of economic history, was an editor of Der Osterreichische Volkswirt in "Red Vienna" before emigrating to England. Late in life he accepted a call to Columbia University, where he continued to pursue his pioneering studies of ancient and primitive economies. His sister Laura devoted her considerable energies to educational reform, particularly as it related to increased opportunities for women. At an age when most people begin to slow their pace, she used her skills as a historian to demonstrate the trustworthiness of Captain John Smith's account of his adventures in Hungary and Transylvania, and hence his reliability in general. Only recently, Polanyi's son John received the Nobel Prize for chemistry, and his niece, Eva Zeisel, a world-renowned ceramist and industrial designer of tableware, was profiled in the New York.
As if his family's achievements were not enough, Polanyi received additional intellectual stimulus when, after the Great War, he emigrated to Germany and joined the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry. There he met Einstein and worked closely with other illustrious members of the "Budapest galaxy": Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and John von Neumann. When Hitler came to power, he moved on again, this time to England, where he began to think systematically about philosophical problems. He did so as a direct result of a trip to the Soviet Union in 1935. In a conversation there with Nikolai Sukharin, the Bolshevik theoretician who was soon to fall victim to Stalin's purges, he learned that under socialism "pure science" was fated to disappear. How could it be, Polanyi wondered, that a system that advertised itself as "scientific" could
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