"Michael Polanyi and his Political and Economic Writings." Dr.Richard Allen.
The best-known doctors and professors presented their work on the Michael Polanyi - Conference (pre-) thinker of liberalism in the 20th Century in the Theodor-Heuss-Akademie, Friedrich Naumann Foundation in Gummersbach FOR FREICHEIT. The Dr. Richard Allen published his Introduction work. " Michael Polanyi and his Political and Economic Writings." Dr. Richard Allen is english philosopher and editor of Appraisal.
Dr.Richard Allen.(IINews) - The best-known doctors and professors presented their work on the Michael Polanyi - Conference (pre-) thinker of liberalism in the 20th Century in the Theodor-Heuss-Akademie, Friedrich Naumann Foundation in Gummersbach FOR FREICHEIT. The Dr. Richard Allen published his Introduction work. " Michael Polanyi and his Political and Economic Writings." Dr. Richard Allen is english philosopher and editor of Appraisal.
20 Ulverscroft Rd, Loughborough in England. His Introduction: " Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was born in Vienna to liberal Jewish parents who then moved to Budapest. In his youth he joined movements for political reform but soon rejected schemes of wholesale change. He studied medicine but was more interested in chemical research. In 1914 he joined the Austro-Hungarian army as a medical officer. In 1918 he supported the creation of an independent Hungarian republic and served in the Ministry of Health, but moved to the university when a Communist regime took power.
Despite his refusal to serve in the Red Army, he incurred the disfavour of the next regime under Admiral Horthy and went to Germany to follow a career in physical chemistry, becoming in 1926 a full Professor at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. In 1933, when Hitler began to remove Jews from public positions, he finally accepted the offer of the Chair in Physical Chemistry at Manchester. Before then, he had begun to study economics in response to the great inflation and subsequent unemployment. On visits to the USSR he studied the workings of the Soviet economy.
Despite his refusal to serve in the Red Army, he incurred the disfavour of the next regime under Admiral Horthy and went to Germany to follow a career in physical chemistry, becoming in 1926 a full Professor at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. In 1933, when Hitler began to remove Jews from public positions, he finally accepted the offer of the Chair in Physical Chemistry at Manchester.
Before then, he had begun to study economics in response to the great inflation and subsequent unemployment. On visits to the USSR he studied the workings of the Soviet economy. In response to Communist demands for the planning of science to promote economic progress, he took up the cause of the freedom of science and of freedom in general, and began to publish articles on those topics and on a free economy in opposition to supposedly planned ones, some of which were republished in The Contempt of Freedom (1940).
Further articles on these themes were revised and published as The Logic of Liberty (1951), and before that, in Science, Faith and Society (1946), he had widened his concerns to some more general and deeper issues at stake, and in Full Employment and Free Trade (1945, 1948) he had set out his version of Keynes’ monetary theories and argued that in a depression the government should simply increase the money supply by running a budget deficit and not by spending money on specific projects, as was commonly advocated and practised.
In many of these and later publications, Polanyi begins with the example of science. For example, it is not and could not be centrally planned (a ‘corporate order’, like an army) but organises itself by the mutual adjustment of individuals and groups within it (a ‘spontaneous order’). Markets are deficient examples of spontaneous order for the participants do not aim at transcendent ideals, such as truth, and professional standards, as do scientists and judges.
Likewise ‘private’ freedom to do as one likes provided one does not interfere with the similar freedom of others, is less important than ‘public’ freedom to pursue such ideals and standards, as in general beneficence. Again, science is not a simple matter of observing facts and making inferences from them, for any set of observations can conform to an infinite variety of laws or formulae. Hence science itself rests upon faith and the individual and collective experience and judgments of scientists.
As a group they exercise a ‘general’ authority of upholding the current standards of scientific research rather than a ‘specific’ authority of upholding any particular theories, though they do and have to uphold the current body of theories until superior ones appear and are accepted. Polanyi takes these features of scientific research to be applicable to a free society, though, of course he recognises that every society has to use force at some point in order to protect itself and any freedom that it enjoys.
He takes science as a model not only because of his intimate knowledge of it but because it, and especially physics and chemistry, is also taken by what, in Personal Knowledge, he calls ‘Objectivism’ to be the realisation of its ideal of wholly impersonal and critically tested knowledge, uncontaminated by any ‘subjective’ input of the person knowing it. ‘Objectivism’ is a defining feature of the modern age.
For the rejection of the ‘specific’ authority of the Middle Ages resulted too often in the rejection of all authority, tradition and faith, and a demand for total ‘objectivity’ and thus impersonality. But an impersonal ideal of knowledge entails an impersonal and hence reductionist and materialist view of man, of persons, not guided by their own judgment, insight, conscience and commitment to truth, but as determined by external forces, such as their positions in the economic system and class interests as in Marxism, by their genes, sexual desires, and so forth. This becomes dangerous when joined with moral passions bequeathed by Christianity but now secularised.
For the objectivist and reductionist view of ourselves undermines our faith in justice and freedom, on the one hand, and, on the other, gives a unavowed moral force to ruthless revolutionary movements aiming at a total and reconstruction of society in the name of welfare to which all other considerations are ruthlessly subordinated. Hence in Personal Knowledge, and especially in the pivotal Chapter 4, Polanyi aims to show that the ‘personal co-efficient’, the full engagement of the person in his knowing, is essential to science and to all knowledge.
His most distinctive and important contribution is his analysis of all knowing and action as a from-to structure. That is, we attend from one set of things in order to attend to another. We thus have a subsidiary awareness of the former set as clues to the focal apprehension of the latter. Moreover, in using the former as clues, we are not focally aware of them at the time and may never be focally aware of them. For we know them primarily in use and not in attending to them: they are known tacitly and not explicitly. This is the ‘tacit integration’ of subsidiary clues into a focal whole.
It follows that all knowing is a skilful performance, something we do, using our experience and judgment, and without being able to say how we do it or, at least, only a little about it, just as we may not explicitly know any of the rules of our native language but can speak it correctly. Polanyi gives many examples of this. It also follows that what we know only tacitly can be passed to others only by them following the actions and judgments of a master and tacitly acquiring the rules that he himself may be unable to state, and so by tradition from one generation to the next.
Hence the person, faith, commitment, authority and tradition are restored to knowledge and action. The later papers in this collection will elaborate some of the social and political implications of this philosophy, which articulates the principles underlying Polanyi’s previous thinking on such themes." Dr. R.T.Allen Academic Qualifications: BA (Hons. 2/1) (Philosophy with subsid. History), University of Nottingham, 1963 M.Ed. (research) ‘Emotion and Education with special reference to D.H. Lawrence', University of Leicester (part-time) 1973 BD (Hons. 2/1) (external), University of London.
Ph.D. ‘Transcendence and Immanence in the Philosophy of Michael Polanyi and Christian Theism', (external), University of London, 1982 Teaching Posts in Higher Education: Lecturer, Education and Religious Studies, Loughborough College of Education, 1972-77 Senior Lecturer, Education, Sokoto College of Education, Nigeria, 1980-2 Senior Lecturer, Philosophy of Education, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad, 1984-8 Part-time Tutor, School of Continuing Education, University of Nottingham, 1988-2002. At the time, Dr. R.T. is pensioner. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rt.allen/ Natalia Eitelbach.
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Datum: 03.10.2011 - 17:03 Uhr
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