4th Response....Enlightenment and Alienation

It was refreshing to read Colin Gunton's book and see him refer to Polanyi in a christian context. To see someone else come at his tacit knowing from an expressly "religious", or better, theological, view very much helped me to see more angles on Polanyi's epistemology.
I also enjoyed Gunton's discussion about the Enlightenment period. I had learned of the Enlightenment in my intro philosophy class in the previous semester, but, as we were trying to cram the ENTIRE history of philosophy into one semester, we only scratched its surface. I learned about who proposed what and how other responded, etc. But looking at it as a whole, as one movement, rather than as a bunch of individual philosophies really solidified in my mind how detrimental it was to our system of thought.
So, here's my response to Colin Gunton's Enlightenment and Alienation:

I find it ironic that the title of “The Enlightenment” was chosen for the period of philosophy to which it is attached. The course of thought from those involved served to so separate man from the world that he is in, that it seems, and admittedly in retrospect, it would more properly carry a title of a more negative connotation. Having gone through a history of philosophy class last semester, I had a general idea of who said what and the basic trends in this time period, but seeing it as Gunton laid it out impressed upon me just how severe and detrimental the separation of reason and perception has been. It so drastically separated the knower, man, form the known, the world in which he is in, including its Creator. In reading the history of the so-called Enlightenment then moving on to the “dissenting voice” of Polanyi, I drew a parallel between Polanyi and Martin Luther. Both offered a view that was directly opposite of the common belief of the time, and both did so in earnest hope for the salvation, of one sort or another, of mankind.
The more I read of the Enlightenment, the more I began to see it for what it really was, what those that propagated it were attempting to do, consciously or not. The main drive of the Enlightenment was to destroy the covenant between God the Creator and man, His creation. This task was attempted through two primary strategies that, though seemingly in opposition to each other, fought toward the same goal. Gunton makes mention of both of these strategies as presented by two of the era’s noted philosophers. “From Hume, on the helplessness of the mind to understand nature by means of concepts not directly derived from sense; and from Kant on the need of the mind to impose upon nature a conceptual pattern and thus compel nature to come to order,” (Gunton, 45). Here we see that Hume has taken to relieving man from his covenantal role on grounds of ignorance. How can man be responsible for and in something that he cannot know, or even be aware of? If we, as man, cannot know then we cannot be a part of a relationship in which we are required to do so. On the other side of the coin we find Kant. He ultimately reaches the same end, although he attacks it from the other flank. When Kant says, as Gunton describes, that man compels nature to come to order, he is ascribing deity to the individual. Each man, in Kantian order, is, in essence, his own God as it is the individual that brings order to the universe. So, we see that Kant supported the same claim as Hume, that man cannot be part of a covenant with a Creator God, howbeit not because of man’s ignorance as Hume surmises, but, oppositely, that man himself is the creator, or at least master of creation. Both men, and those that supported and/or followed their line of reasoning (ironic) have endeavored to reason away their responsibility and accountability to God.
Thankfully, this line of thought, though potent and still lingering in our culture today, did not go unchallenged. The ideas of the Luther-esque figure of Polanyi are described by Gunton in this way: “We stand neither god-like over the material world, as the rationalism of the Enlightenment has encouraged us to think, nor at the mercy of something of something utterly different and incomprehensible, as some forms of existentialist reaction to rationalism may suggest,” (Gunton, 48). It is a direct refutation of the ideas presented and bolstered in the Enlightenment. Polanyi’s idea of tacit knowing directly and fiercely attacks the separation of the knower and the known by saying that, indeed, man is not only able, but is in fact obligated, to contact the world around him and through doing so come to know it. It is obvious how, in contrast to both Hume and Kant, Polanyi not only allows for but supports man’s covenantal relationship with a Creator God. Both Kant’s and Hume’s ideas, and those of others of the same bent, are fundamentally flawed in that they assume that it is man’s responsibility to uncover the world, to determine what the world is. Gunton comments on this in response to a writing of Marjory Grene. “Thus when we are enabled to grasp the order that is in the creation, whether in simple perception or in the higher flights of scientific discovery, it is because something is given to us, not simply because we grasp at it,” (Gunton, 51). The world, and all things that can be known, have been given to us to be discovered, to be known. Again, denying this denies God who has created and given them to us to reveal Himself.
Some of what Gunton says found a warm welcome with thoughts I have had after previous readings. “To put it in theological language,” Gunton says,” we can say that Polanyi’s view reminds us of the eschatological dimension of human knowing; that we live in time, not in eternity when ‘we shall know as we are known’. Those who live in time are those who live under the promise that what they are doing is not pointless or absurd, but will be seen in its full significance only from its end,” (Gunton, 51). Remember my circle? Seeing the end changes the road to it.