William H. Poteat and Michael Polanyi

This essay provides a timeline charting contact between Michael Polanyi and William H. Poteat. We trace the contours of the intimate, multifaceted, and mutually influential friendship of Polanyi and Poteat which developed over more than twenty years. This historical record of contacts between Michael Polanyi and William H. Poteat portrays their close, multifaceted, and mutually influential relationship. There were more contacts and a deeper relationship between Poteat and Polanyi than we had recognized prior to undertaking this study. Much more can be learned about their mutual influences. The new Poteat archival collection of letters, drafts, and unpublished manuscripts in the Yale Divinity School Library (YDS) will make further exploration possible. Below we suggest that the nature of Polanyi’s influence on Poteat began to change in 1968. Poteat’s subsequent inquiry and quest take him in directions he believed moved far beyond and beneath the “grand program” of Polanyi with which he was closely associated earlier. We welcome reactions, corrections, and additions to the narrative which we have here pieced together. Tradition & Discovery: The Journal of the Polanyi Society 42:1 19 1952: Poteat discovers early philosophical writings of Polanyi The discovery, in 1952, I think of early ‘philosophical’ writings of Michael Polanyi—the first I remember, was “The Stability of Beliefs” in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, later to be incorporated, as a section, into Personal Knowledge—accredited and greatly enriched the context within which initially to obey my own intimations (PM, 6). Poteat’s incorporation of Polanyi’s discussion of an exchange between an Azande witch doctor and a scientific agronomist in the Duke Divinity School class “Christianity and Culture 16,” some 15 years after 1952, showed Polanyi’s influence on Poteat’s teaching. Breytspraak vividly recalls several class sessions spent unsuccessfully trying to convince Poteat, role playing the Azande, of the truth of the scientific approach contra his obviously erroneous Azande view of how the world works. Whether there were any references to Polanyi in this vigorous exchange is a detail now unclear, but the illumination of the stability of beliefs made a profound and lasting impression. 1954: Poteat publishes “The Open Society and Its Ambivalent Friends” The first published evidence of Polanyi’s influence on Poteat appears in Poteat’s 1954 review article “The Open Society and Its Ambivalent Friends” in The Christian Scholar (included in PP). The essay sharply criticizes Popper’s ideas as presented in the new revised and expanded second edition of The Open Society and Its Enemies. In a short reference to Polanyi without citation, Poteat approvingly notes Polanyi’s notion of “fiduciary foundations.” This phrase is not in “The Stability of Beliefs” but “fiduciary foundations” does appear twice in LL, once in a reference to the end of “the critical enterprise” and the new emerging intellectual period, “the post-critical age” (109). Popper’s critical rationalist ideas about an Open Society suggest he does not recognize the importance of fiduciary foundations. Poteat’s reference to Polanyi without citation seems to assume his readers are familiar with Polanyi and suggests that he has already incorporated some Polanyian ideas into his own perspective. Other sections and themes in Poteat’s essay on Popper seem compatible with and may be influenced by Polanyi, but Poteat’s own critique of “Cartesian anthropology,” “deracinate, critical reason,” and absolute distinctions between facts and norms is also made from the standpoint of “Incarnation faith.”

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• The Logic of Liberty; Reflections and Rejoinders.

  Edwin N Garlan, Michael Polanyi•The Journal of Philosophy•1953

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