Michael Polanyi (1891 to 1976), a Hungarian-born British chemist turned philosopher, meant by tacit knowing the large part of what we know that we cannot put into words, or in his phrase, “we can know more than we can tell”. Skills, recognitions and the judgement of experts rest on clues we are aware of only in the background, and such knowledge passes from person to person mainly by example and practice, not by rules. In shamanic practice, most journeying works through a kind of just knowing what is there, and shamanism, like Polanyi’s skills, is learnt by doing it.
Who was Michael Polanyi? #
He was born in Budapest on 11 March 1891 and qualified there in both medicine and physical science. He made his name as a physical chemist in Berlin, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, and left Germany in 1933, when the Nazis came to power, for the chair of physical chemistry at the University of Manchester.1 In 1948 Manchester gave him a chair in social thought in place of his chemistry chair, and he spent the rest of his life on philosophy. His Gifford Lectures of 1951 and 1952 became Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (1958), and his Terry Lectures at Yale became The Tacit Dimension (1966). He moved to Merton College, Oxford, in 1958, and died on 22 February 1976.2
What is tacit knowing? #
Knowing that runs ahead of what we can say. The core of it fits in one line from The Tacit Dimension, “we can know more than we can tell.”3 Recognising a familiar face, keeping balance on a bicycle or sensing that something is wrong all happen long before anyone could list the clues they rest on, and often the clues could never be listed at all.
Polanyi described two kinds of awareness working together. We attend focally to the thing we are concerned with, whilst being aware, only in the background, of the clues, skills and tools that let us grasp it. That background awareness is the tacit part, and he held that all knowing has it. Explicit knowledge always rests on a tacit base that cannot be fully put into words.4 He saw the person as part of every act of knowing, and so the idea of knowledge as wholly detached and impersonal was, for him, mistaken. Discovery in science, too, was charged with personal commitment, and science was never value-free.5
How is tacit knowledge passed on? #
By example and practice, as from master to apprentice. “An art which cannot be specified in detail cannot be transmitted by prescription”, in the words of Personal Knowledge, and the apprentice picks up the rules of the art without consciously learning them.6 Rules can help, but they do not determine the practice of an art. A society that wants to keep such knowledge alive has to keep the relationships and traditions that carry it.
His ideas reached well beyond philosophy. The historian of science Thomas Kuhn acknowledged his influence, and borrowed his phrase ‘tacit knowledge’ for the way scientists learn their field by working through shared problems, describing it as knowledge “acquired through practice and that cannot be articulated explicitly”.7
How does tacit knowing connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
First, in how journeying works. Many people expect journeys to be visual, and struggle when they are not; often they are in fact journeying, but dismissing the non-visual things that are happening. When a journey stalls, turning the attention to another sense, asking what can be smelt, heard, tasted, sensed or intuited, usually starts it again.8 Most people’s journeys are not very visual at all, and much of the time there is simply a sense of just knowing what is there, that over there is an oak tree, and beneath it a wolf. See What state of consciousness is used in journeying, and do journeys have to be visual?
The same kind of knowing shows in finding a Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer. One of the signs is that you just know, with a recognition, a rightness, like something clicking into place.9 Nothing is worked out step by step, and no list of reasons would capture it.
Second, in how shamanism is learnt. Shamanism cannot be learnt from a book, and in truth it cannot be learnt from a human teacher either. The only way to learn it is by actually doing it.10 An apprentice in a hunter-gatherer tribe would have learnt from the spirit guides, and alongside them a body of knowledge passed on orally by the shaman.11 That knowledge is information, whether spoken or written, and sits alongside what is learnt directly; Polanyi’s point about arts carried by practice and example matches the doing more than the body of knowledge.
Third, in grokkingGrokking. Understanding a being from the inside out (the word is Robert Heinlein’s): deep, embodied, experiential knowing rather than intellectual knowledge. Its two shamanic routes are shapeshifting and dieting. Read the full answer. To grok something is to understand it from the inside out, by becoming it, in a journey by shapeshifting or through shamanic dietingDieting (shamanic). Ingesting a tiny amount of a plant, mineral or other being and observing its effects on body, mind and dreams over hours to weeks: one of the two routes to grokking a being. Homeopathy’s ‘proving’ is a modern reinvention of it. Read the full answer, and noticing what happens in body, feelings and mind.12 Knowledge supports this, as knowing that birds have hollow bones helps in becoming Bird, but the knowing that results is not a list of facts.13 See What are grokking, dieting and research in working with the Peoples?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On whose knowing it is. Polanyi’s tacit knowing is human knowing, rooted in skill, perception and the traditions of human communities, scientific ones above all. The just knowing of a journey is a knowing of what is there in the shamanic realms, Animals, Plants, Stones and GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this, beings with their own lives. And knowing how to be what one is, is not only a human gift. Every animal, plant and stone just knows what it is meant to be: once they have learnt from their mother, bears just get on with being bears, turtles hatch just knowing how to be turtles, and oak trees get on with being oak trees. Humans are the exception, with a unique ability to become lost, and so hunter-gatherers looked to the other Peoples for guidance.14
On faith. Polanyi held that personal knowing has a faith-like structure, a commitment that goes beyond what can be proved.15 Shamanism is about direct personal experience, and not about an act of faith; what the realms are like is found out by journeying.16 The two meet in refusing to treat detached, explicit proof as the only real knowledge, and part company over whether trust or experience comes first.
How was Polanyi received? #
Unevenly. Academic philosophers sometimes passed him over as too wide-ranging and not specialised enough, and much of his following came from outside academic philosophy.17 Others took his ideas in many directions, into the history of science through Kuhn, and into education and the study of professional skill, where writers such as Donald Schön developed his idea of knowing in action.18 Where Karl Popper concentrated on how theories are tested, Polanyi concentrated on how discoveries are made and how expert judgement, or connoisseurship, works.
