Newbigin was a sharp but affectionate observer of Western culture, a highly educated insider with an extra layer of perspective that came from almost 40 years lived in India from 1936 to 1974.
Soviet leaders regarded science simply as a necessary tool for the implementation of their social planning. The idea that pure science should be practiced as an avenue to truth was dismissed as bourgeois nonsense. Science was a necessary instrument in the pursuit of power.
And it was obvious that the Russians were only pushing more logically in the direction that was being taken elsewhere. (Michael) Polanyi had to ask himself, “What are the grounds for believing that the findings of science are not merely useful but true?” In the attempt to answer this question, he came to the conclusion that we had been misled by the illusion of a totally objective knowledge.
If objectivity means that we must aim for the greatest possible truthfulness in our thinking and speaking about realities beyond our own minds, then of course it is a proper goal. But if it means that all subjective elements are excluded, then it is obviously absurd to suppose that total objectivity is possible; for, if there is no subject who knows, there is no knowing.
As we have seen, Polanyi used the term “personal knowledge” to designate a conception of knowledge as the responsible activity of a person who is required to make costly and risky commitments.
In the growing atmosphere of nihilism, Polanyi sought to reaffirm the possibility and the necessity that we should have the courage to confidently affirm beliefs which can be doubted; and he strived to show that the idea of a certainty which relieves us of the need for personal commitment is an illusion.
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… we are now entering a postmodern period, a time in which the seemingly assured assumptions we have inherited from the Enlightenment are being deconstructed. The assumptions of the modern scientific worldview can no longer be taken as secure foundations. Everyone recognizes that science works; it delivers desirable things. But we are left in a world which the Chinese writer Carver Yu has summarized in the phrase “technological optimism and literary despair.” Looking at contemporary Western society from his standpoint as a Chinese philosopher and theologian, he sees not only the unstoppable dynamism of our science-based technology but also the bleak nihilism and hopelessness that is reflected in the literature, art, and drama of our society.
Science combines to deliver an evergrowing abundance of things to have and to do, beyond all the dreams of earlier ages. It offers no guidance, however, on the questions of worth: What things are worth doing? What things are worth having? Perhaps the most poignant example of this tragic situation is the way in which the wizardry of satellite television is now employed to pour a cataract of trash into every living room [What would Newbigin make of TikTok?].
In the 28th chapter of Job, the glowing description of the marvels of human technology is followed by the haunting question: “But where shall wisdom be found?” This same question haunts us today. How can it become possible to affirm confidently as public truth the reality of those things which are not amenable to the tests Descartes laid down for certain truth? How can we speak confidently about truth, beauty, and goodness when we know that what we say can always be doubted?
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Polanyi points out that knowing is always part of a tradition. The mental activity involved in trying to make reliable contact with reality can function only by indwelling a tradition of language, concepts, models, images, and assumptions of many kinds which function as the lenses through which we try to find out what is really there.
The critical movement initiated by Descartes sought to subject all tradition to questioning and to build a structure of knowledge which would be accredited by pure unaided reason, having the precision and the certainty of mathematics. Polanyi says that the period following Descartes has been the most brilliant in all human history, but he also adds: “Its incandescence has fed on the combustion of the Christian heritage in the oxygen of Greek rationalism, and when the fuel was exhausted the critical framework burned away” (Personal Knowledge, p. 265).
This is why Polanyi describes his work as an attempt to develop a “postcritical philosophy” No one can deny the achievements of the critical period. But it was a mistake to suppose that the enterprise of knowing the reality of which we are a part can begin, so to speak, with an empty page, that it can take off from an act of pure thought.
With hindsight, it is now easy to see how many of the self-evident truths of the Enlightenment were self-evident only to those who were the heirs of a thousand years of Christian teaching. They were not self-evident to the peoples of, say, India or Africa.
The critical movement intended to clear the ground of beliefs and superstitions inherited from the past so that it could create a structure of indubitable truth; instead, the movement has ended by creating a vacant site into which new follies and superstitions are crowding…
Lesslie Newbigin – Proper Confidence (p. 58)
See also:
Lesslie Newbigin on man’s contradictions
Lesslie Newbigin on The Heretical Imperative