MICHAEL POLANYI And The STUDY GROUP for FOUNDATIONS of CULTURAL - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

MICHAEL POLANYI

And The STUDY GROUP for FOUNDATIONS of CULTURAL UNITY and the STUDY GROUP on the UNITY of KNOWLEDGE

What Were the Study Groups?

• Some 21 gatherings of interdisciplinary elite and rising intellectuals

across North America and Western Europe between 1965 and 1972.

• All Funded by the Ford Foundation
• Originally an attempt to encourage a movement based on Polanyi’s

revolutionary philosophy

• The goal of spreading the “gospel of Polanyi” diminished in

importance as the groups evolved

• The meetings later became forums for significant exchange in key

areas of social science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of art, philosophical biology, and other areas.

• While Polanyi’s direct influence on the Study Groups diminished
• ver time, the influence of his experience in these groups can be

seen in major areas of his late thought.

Key Players Some of Whom You May Already Know

• Michael Polanyi
• Marjorie Grene – moves from Ireland to

University of California Davis in July 1965 Important in B1 but will become the key leader as the SGFUC and SGUK evolve

• Edward Pols
• Sigmund Koch
• George Gale

Michael Polanyi/ Marjorie Grene

• We have all read Polanyi’s “generous”

acknowledgement of MG’s role in writing of Personal Knowledge: “Our discussions have catalysed its progress at every stage and there is hardly a page that has not benefited from her criticism. She has a share in anything that I may have achieved here.” PK xv.

• If you immerse yourself in these materials, you will

find yourself wondering if similar comments would be sufficiently generous – before our story ends Grene will be the primary force and lead contributor to this remarkable project that started with Polanyi as the foundation and center of the effort.

Edward Pols (1919 – 2005)

• Harvard B.A. English and

PhD Philosophy

• Philosopher
• Poet
• Named Kenan Professor of

Humanities in 1975

• Intelligence Officer in WWII

who went back to Pentagon in Korean War

• Six books including Radical

Realism 1992 which won an award from the American Society of Metaphysics

A Bowdoin Colleague on Pols’ last book of poetry

• He put Remembrance of Things to

Come together in the last year of his life. I saw successive drafts of

• it. It contained twenty-one poems

in all, ten of them constituting a connected sequence of vignettes, "War's End, World's End." The sequence spans a little more than a year of his life-May, 1944, a month before D-Day, to July, 1945, when the last allied troops, Lieutenant Edward Pols among them, withdrew from eastern Germany and the Iron Curtain descended.

Polanyi on Reading Pols (1964)

I had a valuable experience reading at last the Recognition of Reason by Edward Pols, and meeting the author . . . It is amazing [that]Pols has duplicated the fundamental ideas of Personal

• Knowledge. His back-ground (sic) was entirely

different than mine, with no science to speak of and a great deal of philosophy I lack. His idiom is also quite different, yet everything he says can be translated into my formulations. November 6, 1964 :Polanyi to Gelwick (Polanyi went to Bowdoin to lecture in October 1964 and met Pols)

Sigmund Koch 1917-1996

Koch Became a Major Figure Some quotes from the WEB:

Sigmund Koch was one of the premier scholars

• f psychology

Sigmund Koch (1917-1996) was one of the twentieth century's most penetrating and wide-ranging critics of the scientistic ambitions

• f psychology.

??Do his later writings reflect his strong allegiance to Polanyi in this period?? Koch will forever be remembered as a maverick who helped move psychology out from being dominated by behaviorists to a discipline that looked at human mentality and functioning from a multitude of viewpoints.

Related Career Highlights

• Koch completes PhD at Duke in 1942
• Stays at Duke until 1964…Full Professor
• Joins Ford Foundation as Director of Humanities

and Arts from 1964-1967

• Goes to Texas as Full Professor
• Moves to Boston University in 1971 where he

remained until his death in 1996

• Numerous awards, President of several APA

Divisions, Major Publications

• A giant in the field and often one of its best critics

GEORGE GALE

• Distinguished Career in Philosophy and History of

Science

• Get a fuller picture from his web page at UMKC
• Hired by Marjorie Grene in 1967 to be executive

secretary for the SGUK

• Was simultaneously completing Ph.D. under

Grene’s direction

• Handled business affairs, helped with editing,
• ften slept on the couch of the hosting professor,

was intimately involved in many of the details from 1967 until 1972

Sources and Incubators of Study Groups in Polanyi’s Experience

• Groups such as Eranos, Mt. Pelerin Society
• The Moot
• CCF
• Conversations at Duke in 1964, particularly

with Sigmund Koch who moves to the Ford Foundation to be a program director for arts and humanities projects

CCF (one of many interesting related topics)

• Founded in Berlin in June 1950
• Writers, artists, philosophers, scientists from

21 countries

• Purpose: To combat totalitarian threats to

freedom of critical and creative thought wherever they might appear in the world.

CCF Continued

• Polanyi’s involvement begins January 1953
• Many relationships to his publications,

speeches, and activities

• In the mid-sixties environment, the CCF

experienced a fall from grace with the exposure of CIA funding behind its programs

• Mike Josselson is forced to resign as Executive

Secretary

Polanyi and CCF from Mullins’ Note

• Many of Polanyi’s shorter publications originate as CCF papers or

addresses and often were published in journals that were in fact subsidized at least in part by CCF funding. Eventually, Polanyi takes

• n a leadership role in the CCF. Polanyi was in fact a member of the

General Assembly (i.e., the governing board) of the CCF at the time that the revelations of CIA funding of CCF lead Mike Josselson to

• ffer his resignation. Scott and Moleski (267-268) report that

Polanyi seemed not to understand that Josselson’s role as an agent

• f a covert governmental agency from whom he acquired CCF

funding undercut the ideals of freedom which Polanyi and the CCF

• promoted. Polanyi seems to have been intensely loyal to Josselson

who was his friend of many years. Polanyi was one of the few governing board members who voted against accepting Josselson’s

• resignation. In October 1967, he resigned from the CCF board .

Abrupt Shift in late Fall of 1964: Koch says no Ford Money will be available if Polanyi’s CCF funding for secretary continues:

I am sorry that you apparently find such a constraint uncongenial, but it is an unalterable part of the framework in which I must

• perate… I shall quite understand (and

maintain the same high level of personal sympathy with the “movement”) if you decide to form the organization under their [CCF] auspices rather than ours. (Koch to MP, December 16, 1964)

Apart from this Project Polanyi’s CCF Involvement Continues

• Scott/Moleski discuss Polanyi and CCF at

various points

• Mullins note on the CCF Connection has even

more details

• Jumping ahead 3 years, when the CIA funding

was exposed and Josselson’s position is threatened, Polanyi writes an impassioned letter to Raymond Aron to try to save him

Polanyi to Aron on Josselson

• “Supposing Mike accepted to serve the C.I.A. after the war,

and supposing that this was wrong, it is our practice to victimize those who have erred, so as to be free from any blame that may be case upon them? Surely we have in our ranks many former Communists, who served Stalin, his murders and lies. We do not dream of reproaching them, nor does anybody demand that we do so…..

• But Mike’s past actions were, by contrast to those of former

Communists, not wrong at all. I would have served the C.I.A. (had I known of its existence) in the years following the war with pleasure. We were faced with a ubiquitous madness, supported by an empire and organized on conspiratorial lines.”

Polanyi to Raymond Aron May 9, 1967

Back to Ford Foundation Approval for Bowdoin 1 (B1)

• Pols, Polanyi, and Grene prepare proposal

with Polanyi leading the effort

• Polanyi apparently got Koch’s message about

cutting all ties between CCF and SGFCU.

• Bowdoin’s President Coles’ January formal

application letter is approved

• almost immediately…….

FORD Funding for B1

• Ford Foundation Grant 65-113 funding August 23-28, 1965

Bowdoin College conference

• -Grant proposal: written in the fall of 1965 by Polanyi, Grene and

Pols with considerable collaboration with S. Koch, who became Director, Program in Humanities and Arts at the Ford Foundation on October 1, 1964.

• -Submitted officially by President Cole of Bowdoin College on 18

January 1965.

• -Unofficial acceptance in Koch’s letter to Polanyi of 26 January

1965 that Bowdoin College working with the SGFCU would receive the $25,000 grant.

• Budget : (1) Travel of 15 European and 15 North American

participants--$16,000 . (2) Conference housing, food room was $2500. (3) Administrative costs $4500. (4) Contingencies $2000.

Proposal’s Descriptions of Purpose and Polanyi

• …”there is need for a deep-seated philosophical

reform – one that would radically alter prevailing conceptions of the nature of knowledge, or creative achievement in general, of the human agent that inquires and creates, and of the entire fabric of culture formed by such activities.”

• Identifies Polanyi as “perhaps outstanding among

the efforts of those who have essayed reassessment of the nature of knowledge.”

Purposes and Polanyi continued…

• Personal Knowledge “carries out what is perhaps

the most incisive and comprehensive critique of scientism in the history of thought”

• Others have independently made recent efforts

to scrutinize the “texture of our culture” and “the time has for some years been ripe for the establishment of closer communication among thinkers of this cast”

• “It would be both appropriate and strategic for

Polanyi to be the focal person in any venture that might try to bring about such communication.”

Polanyi to Pols on Planning the role of Philosophy at B1

[Planned conference B1] must not try to produce or even to pursue exclusively the outlines of a new philosophy. Only you and I have made this attempt and I think we would reap resistance and confusion if we tried to put it into the center of our discussion at the meeting of our conference.

(December 5, 1964, Polanyi to Pols)

Polanyi to Koch in undated letter in same period of B1 planning

If you want to revolutionize philosophy, you have one set of people who are dead against you, namely professional philosophers. To suggest to them that they should write off their professional work up to this day and learn to think in different terms is surely

• dangerous. And even should they wish to

follow you they would find their minds full of complex systems which would bar access to new ideas requiring a different approach.

Possible Names Considered

• Unity of Culture
• Something “darkly metaphorical”
• Something like Eranos on Mt. Pelerin
• Use the name of a constellation (Sewell)
• SG on the Order of Life and Mind (Pols)

SGFCU

Bowdoin College August 1965 and 1966 Five Day Meetings with about 25 Participants Organized by Polanyi, Pols, Grene, with considerable help from Sigmund Koch all of whom attend both meetings Three others participated in both meetings: Charles Taylor William Poteat Jerald Kindred

Some Other Participants at B1 or B2 whom you may recognize

William Scott Erwin Strauss Elizabeth Sewell M.H Pirenne John Silber Helmuth Plessner Donald Weismann M.R.A. Chance Eugene Wigner Barry Commoner Hans Jonas

• F. S. Rothschild

Iris Murdoch

• J. O. Baylee

Zdzislaw Najder

B1 Seems to Have Been Organized Around Polanyi’s Thought

• “Creative Imagination” was the featured paper

for the opening session and Polanyi outlines the theory of tacit knowing.

• “The problem of levels of existence” as presented

by Polanyi was Tuesday afternoon focus.

• Transcripts of discussion, narrative reports, and
• ther published papers confirm the centrality of

Polanyi’s ideas to the week’s discussions.

Assessments from Grene’s Narrative Report Submitted to Ford:

• “It seems to be agreed by all that the discussions

were extraordinarily fruitful, in that a great effort was made by all to bring out the convergences that are so often hidden by the languages of the several disciplines.”

• “As the week went on there was an increasing

and palpable sense, not so much just of agreement in differing fields, as of something very important that the whole procedure was building up to.”

Significant Outcomes of B1 Identified by Grene’s Narrative Report:

• Interdisciplinary contact
• Contact between men of distinguished

achievement in differing fields

• Strong display of kinship of philosophical,

scientific, and artistic problems

• Articulation of important ideas and problems
• Ideas about people with whom to discuss them in

the future – particularly important for the young participants such as Silber, Taylor, Lucas, and Klein.

Success of B1 Leads to B2 in 1966

• Again the Ford Foundation supports with $36,500

requested – we have no approval letter

• Similar format but new participants beyond

Polanyi, Pols, Grene, Koch, Poteat, Taylor, and Kindred

• Major papers by Commoner, Rothschild, Silber,

Lukacs, Holtsmark, Bayley, Bossart, and Murdoch

• Pols submits the Narrative Report to Ford

Monographs Related to B1 and B2

• The Anatomy of Knowledge (Papers from B1 and B2)
• Psychological Issues (B1 Papers and Edited Discussions)
• Intellect and Hope (Poteat and 5 other Contributors)

Relationship to SGFCU is not acknowledged in IH but the ties are clearly there, including Poteat’s essay “Myths,Hopes….”

• Knowing and Being (“Message of Hungarian..” and

“Life’s Irreducible Structure” and several other essays were presented in part and possibly revised because of B1 and B2.)

Success of B1 and B2 leads to a new grant proposal from Grene, Pols, Polanyi for SGUK

• $230,000 0ver five years
• Based at UC Davis (over Pols’ objections!)
• Expanded steering committee
• 19 new locations across North America and

Western Europe – often at universities

• Shorter meetings with varying numbers of

participants

• Topics and participants chosen as project

develops

SGUK Participants 1967 to 1972

• Charles Taylor Attended at least 11 Meetings
• Marjorie Grene 10
• Hubert Dreyfus

10

• Alasdair MacIntyre

7

• Marx Wartofsky

6

• Robert Cohen

6

• John Silber

4

Participants Continued

• Attended at least 3 Meetings:

Edward Pols, Sigmund Koch, Michael Polanyi

• Attended at least 2 Meetings:

Derrida, Putnam, Bermant, Stroud, Bever, Todes, Pribram, Wang, Prigogne, Gregory, Gunderson, Harre, Weismann, Arnheim

Total participants and list of some locations and topics

• At least 19 meetings across US and Western

Europe between 1967 and 1972

• Somewhere between 130 and 150 total

participants

• Some locations and topics included:

Locations Dates Topics

• MIT 1967 Artificial Intelligence
• Montreal 1968 Value Freedom
• Austin 1968 The (Ir)reducibility of Biology to

Physics and Chemistry

• Montreal 1968 The Programmability of Piaget
• Bellagio 1968 Art and Perception
• Davis 1968 The Logic of Conversation
• Austin 1969 Scientific Knowledge and Discovery

More Locations Dates Topics

• Berkeley 1969 Concepts of Mind
• Boston 1969 Scientific Discovery
• Rockefeller University 1970 Psychological Models
• France 1970, 1972 Cavell and Derrida on

Language

• Davis 1970 Historical and Scientific Explanation
• Boston 1971 Politics of Art
• Boston 1971 Comparative History and Sociology
• f Science

Other SGUK Activities

• SGUK center at Davis (Grene, Gale?, and others)

was responsible for editing and publishing the two volumes from B1 and B2 as well as significant work on Knowing and Being.

• Audio tapes transcribed? Other publications

collected? Does any of this remain at Davis?

• Documents mention two other volumes we have

not be able to locate

– Politics and Art (ed. Wartofsky) – Comparative History and Sociology of Science (ed. Cohen)

Polanyi’s role and significance declines even though Ford continues to think of it as “the Polanyi project.”

• Polanyi expresses dissatisfaction with Austin meeting
• Grene encourages him to skip Boston Meeting
• Polanyi attempts, unsuccessfully, to organize a

meeting on his theories of the decline of the West

• Polanyi only attends 3 meetings
• Yet Lowry (Ford Foundation VP) write Pols in 1970

and refers to “the Polanyi Project.”

Examples of interesting meetings, topics, participants

• Montreal on Piaget and AI (May 1968)

“Professor Piaget agreed again, and it became clear that he was full

• f good will but not really prepared to take sides in the debate”
• Berkeley Conference on Mind (August, 1969)

“The discussions, both formal and informal, added up to an immensely instructive and indeed unforgettable occasion” with “distinguished visitors from Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, and Edinburgh” (Among the participants were Gibson, Searle, Putnam, and the Rortys)

• Cavell and Derrida (France, 1970 and 1972)

Taylor gives a clear summary of the background of the different traditions informing their differences and agreements.

Areas in which later developments were potentially shaped by SGUK:

• Philosophies of Realism
• History and Sociology of Science
• Philosophy of Art; Art and Politics
• Philosophy of Biology
• AI and Philosophy of Mind
• Foundations of Language
• Engagement of Phenomenology with Analytic

Tradition and Convergences of Continental and Anglo-American Philosophy

Influence of these later meetings on Polanyi’s later thought

Significant themes and specific publications in Polanyi’s thought after 1965 were greatly influenced by his involvement in the SGFCU and SGUK including:

• Life’s Irreducible Structure
• Art
• Decline of West into Disasters of 20th Century
• Meaning

Polanyi’s Role and Influence Diminish

• Polanyi disengages from SGUK and focuses on

Meaning (lectures and eventually the book)

• Interesting that correspondence with Pirenne
• n art continues into 1974 --- well into his

cognitive decline

• Threads of influence of SGUK feed into his

focus on, even obsession with, Meaning as an attempt to write Volume II of Personal Knowledge

Polanyi fades, Grene fades, steering committee self-destructs, project runs out

• Texas contingent pulls out
• Pols resigns
• Grene is worn out and tries to move SGKU to

Boston and another administrator

• Grene correspondence includes several

references to fights among the steering committee

• Gale leaves?

Late Letter from Polanyi to Grene

In a way reminiscent of other Polanyi letters to Grene in the last six years of his life, Polanyi seems deeply appreciative of Grene, of their long and complex relationship spanning many joint projects, and at the same time he recognizes his own waning powers: I am grateful to you for your letters, even though your decisions have change in them in response to my strange project. In a way your acceptances have been a joy, but your refusals have been almost equally refreshing to my lacking faculties (Polanyi to Grene, November 27, 1970) We end our story here. There are many loose ends and much material with which to work in trying to tie things them together.

George Gale’s Recollections

(a note sent to HOPOS after Grene’s death)

• A propos of Marjorie Grene’s life, I’d like to say just a few words about a little-

known activity of hers that should be of interest to lots of folks.

• In early 1967, Marjorie and Michael Polanyi received a 5-year grant from the Ford

Foundation for a project they called “The Study Group on the Unity of Knowledge”. The goals of the Study Group were to combat what Marjorie called “crude reductivism” and positivism wherever they might be found. The group itself consisted of a dozen or so (the number varied) academics, mostly philosophers, who comprised the steering committee of the Study Group. Members of the first steering committee included (and I’m going from memory here, which, since I don’t trust it anymore, you probably shouldn’t, either) Marjorie, Michael, Charles Taylor, Lon Fuller, Noam Chomsky, Jacob Bronowski, John Silber, Edward Pols, and J.R. [John Randolph] Lucas. Later members included Bert Dreyfus, Robert Cohen, Marx Wartofsky, and Alasdair Macintyre. I went up to Davis in June 1967 to be Marjorie’s grad student and to run the business affairs of the Study Group as its executive secretary, which I did until the grant (and the money) ran out in 1972.

continued

• From September 1967 until the following May,

Marjorie visited at Texas, where John Silber was chair of philosophy. I held down headquarters in Davis while Marjorie was gone. Our

• rganizational meeting was held in the early

Summer of ’67 at the Salk Institute, which Bronowski directed at the time. This meeting set the tone for all subsequent meetings: meet in a room ‘on campus’ during the day, then on the first night meet at a member’s home for a reception, or, alternatively, in a restaurant.

continued

• The Study Group’s m.o. was to hold 4 meetings a year,

usually at the home campus of one of the steering

• committee. For example, meetings were held at MIT

(Dreyfus) on the possibility of artificial intelligence; BU (Cohen and Wartofsky) on the role of models in scientific theories; Montréal (Taylor) on teleology in science; Austin (Silber) on reducibility of biology to physics; Davis, on ethnomethodology in sociology, and narrative explanations in history and science; and there were other meetings that I just can’t recall the details

• f at the moment--with Prigogine re: “systems far, far

from equilibrium”, with Derrida in Paris re: narrative, and so on. (In order to save money for other, more important things, I usually slept on the host’s or one of their faculty member’s couch. Always an interesting experience for a grad student!)

continued

• Our biggest meeting was a week-long affair on the topic of

Concepts of Mind, which we held in a dorm at Berkeley during August 1969 [organized by Marjorie and Bert Dreyfus]. Everyone and anyone concerned with investigating mind was there, from the animal language people to the cog sci people to the artificial intelligence

• people. It was a simply amazing convocation of wildly

interesting people. (I figured out--with the help of one of the university accountants--how to take ‘refreshments’ off- budget, which allowed me to keep the floor’s lounge well- stocked 24/7. Some amazing, really amazing conversations took place there.) Some of the papers from that meeting were published as Interpretations of Life and Mind: Essays around the problem of reduction.

continued

• Marjorie’s enthusiasm and energy drove the whole
• enterprise. As did her interests: the emphasis inevitably

came down to a humanistic naturalism, a ‘wholism’ (although many a conversation was held during which this word was dismissed, but its underlying concept strongly upheld.) Of course Marjorie could be quite short at times. I have lively and vivacious memories of her getting quite loud and sharp during several of the meetings over the years when she either disagreed with someone vigorously,

• r simply couldn’t make out what they were on about—the

worst case of this latter was Garfinkel’s presentation on ethnomethodology in Davis. It took the full-court press of Charles Taylor and Alasdair Macintyre to convince her that there was ANYthing worthwhile going on there

continued

• Looking back on the whole experience, I would

have to say that the Study Group probably had its influences in various places in the struggles to move beyond positivism. Some very good thinkers gathered together, over the years, and thought some good thoughts. It’s a little- known episode in the history of the philosophy of science, but it would probably be worth someone’s time, sometime, to see what the Study Group was up to, and whether or not the Ford Foundation got their money’s worth out of it.