Jon Fennell

In Science, Faith and Society Michael Polanyi incisively examines the world of scientific practice. There is, he observes, much that a scientist takes for granted and seldom if ever doubts. Science rests upon agreement regarding fundamentals that is the product of training and other forms of initiation. Polanyi calls these fundamentals the “premisses” of science. Among the vital matters Polanyi examines under this heading is “primary education,” the early formative process by which a person becomes who and what he is. The importance of what Polanyi has to say about “primary education” ranges far beyond science. In his penetrating account of how a scientist is formed and then as a practitioner carries out his work, Polanyi appropriately emphasizes the role of conscience. Science, Faith and Society is a masterful account of character formation and moral education. What at first appears to be a detailed study of the prerequisites of science emerges as an extraordinarily insightful cautionary reminder of the necessary conditions for the preservation of a free society. At the heart of this process is cultivation of the moral imagination, the site of deep, life-defining beliefs that operate tacitly and possess only a circular justification.

In this chapter, Fennell looks at the social imaginaries that Taylor examines in Modern Social Imaginaries and A Secular Age. He offers an alternative imaginary built up from Polanyi’s understanding of sense-reading. Polanyi’s self-reflexive vision is grounded, but not foundational; it also re-introduces a role for faith in the discovery of knowledge. Fennell presents Polanyi’s wider vision of anthropogenesis as one that supports a free society open to discovering truths about reality. This vision also provides a means for religious thinking to be revitalized. Fennell acknowledges, with Taylor, that one cannot go back to the social and religious imaginaries of the past with their outmoded hierarchies, but he directs us forward toward responsible re-enchantment.