Overcoming the scientistic imaginary

Charles W. Lowney

pp. 143-168

in: Charles W. Lowney (ed), Charles Taylor, Michael Polanyi and the critique of modernity, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

Lowney uses Taylor's Sources of the Self and A Secular Age to chart the development of two key ideas, the "buffered self" and an "immanent frame," that contribute to the 'scientistic imaginary" and shape how moderns understand themselves and the world. Following Taylor, Lowney sees that Modern epistemology and its correlative cosmic imaginary put a "closed spin" on a shared immanent frame. This spin closes off moral sources of meaning in contemporary thought. Lowney shows how Polanyi's epistemology of tacit knowing in science provides a new framework for both scientific and moral thought. He discusses the structure of tacit knowing, which integrates consciousness with experience and overcomes the buffered self; and emergent being, which provides a new way of understanding the relation between transcendent levels and their "immanent" subsidiary conditions. Lowney shows how Polanyi's ontological and epistemic structure mobilize against dualisms and the analytic reductivism of scientism. The substance dualism of Descartes turns out to be a misunderstanding of the subsidiary-emergent relation and an illusion generated by the from-to structure of consciousness.

Cited authors

Descartes René