Saving remnant.(Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing)(Book review)

Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing, by Mark T. Mitchell (ISI, 215 pp., $15)

THE boulevard leading into Dachau from Munich is now called the Max Born Strasse. It is named after one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the 20th century, Max Born (1882-1970), a German Jew who taught in Frankfurt and Gottingen (1919-32) and then in exile in Britain (1933-53), before returning to Germany. Born, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1954, had worked alongside and trained several other Nobel physicists in Germany in the interwar years. Looking back across his career and the tragic history of modern Europe, he wrote in 1965: "I am haunted by the idea that this break in human civilization, caused by the discovery of the scientific method, may be irreparable." He went on to say that "the political and military horrors and the complete breakdown of ethics which I have witnessed during my lifetime may be ... a necessary consequence of the rise of science." He concluded: "If this is so, there will be an end to man as a free, responsible being." A tragic outcome to modern scientific progress is here envisioned by one of the greatest of modern scientists.

We are enormously indebted to three polymathic, polyglot, Hungarian emigre intellectuals for illuminating this tragic intellectual-moral terrain over the last century: Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), and Stanley Jaki (b. 1924). If Born's gloomy prophecy is to be avoided, their works as well as their life stories need to be widely known and meditated, for they provide a potential "saving remnant" in a world of vast intellectual destructiveness, folly, and fecklessness: the somnambulist, sorcerer's-apprentice world of modern specialization, "value-free" science, and postmodern skepticism and immoralism.

Drawing upon the recently published definitive biography of Polanyi--Michael Polanyi: Scientist and Philosopher, by the late William Taussig Scott and Martin X. Moleski, S.J.--Mark T. Mitchell's volume in the ISI "Library of Modern Thinkers" series is an outstanding brief introduction. Polanyi started out his mature life as a brilliant physical chemist in Hungary, serving in World War I as a medical doctor. He lived through both the Communist Bela Kun regime and the fascist, anti-Semitic Horthy regime in Hungary before fleeing to Germany, where he met and befriended Max Born, among other distinguished scientists. Like Born a Jew, he was fortunate enough to be able to emigrate to Britain in 1933: He was invited to occupy the chair of physical chemistry at the University of Manchester. Unlike many of his colleagues and friends (and his brother Karl), Polanyi from early on was not only anti-fascist but anti-Communist. The brief Kun regime in Hungary and then several invited visits to lecture in the new Soviet Union in the 1920s and '30s gave him the opportunity to see Communism close up and to talk with such high-ranking Bolsheviks as Nikolai Bukharin, the chief Communist theoretician after the death of Lenin and the demotion of Trotsky.

Polanyi was astonished and appalled by the philosophical and ethical ignorance and arrogance of self-styled "scientific socialist" thinkers such as Bukharin, and of their English allies, especially prominent Cambridge Marxist scientists such as J. B. S. Haldane and J. D. Bernal. A sharp observer of "life on the ground" in the USSR, he noticed not only the epistemological poverty and brutal naivete of the utilitarian Marxist regime, but also its gross political tyranny and economic ineffectiveness. As a high-school student in Hungary Polanyi had been profoundly affected by his reading of Dostoyevsky, whose depiction of both Nietzschean immoralism and self-contradictory scientistic moral fanaticism was eventually to ripen in Polanyi's own work into a devastating, detailed critique of modernist epistemological and moral confusion. This critique would influence his fellow refugee Koestler, whose works affected the course of world opinion in the period during and after World War II.

Perhaps the most powerful and enduringly valuable of Polanyi's projects was to answer that terrifying vision raised by Max ...