30. THE STRUCTURE OF
KNOWLEDGE CREATION
THE DISCOVERER WORKS IN THE BELIEF THAT HIS LABORS WILL PREPARE HIS MIND FOR RECEIVING A TRUTH FROM SOURCES OVER WHICH HE HAS NO CONTROL.
Polanyi talked about “the advancement of knowledge that cannot be achieved by any application of explicate modes of inference, however diligent” or “by the diligent performances of any previously known procedure.” Polanyi calls this “heuristic inquiry.” Heuristic derives from the Greek heuriskein, to find or discover. The “nature of discovery” – knowledge creation – is the root subject that animates Polanyi’s philosophy.
In his three books, Polanyi wrote about the path anyone – scientist, creative artist, entrepreneur – takes in the process of actualizing a hidden potential or creating new knowledge. I say “anyone,” because over the last thirty years, I’ve conducted in-depth interviews with over 100 entrepreneurs and innovators in commerce, science, economics, education, government, and nongovernmental organizations, and I know that these discoverers would all recognize Polanyi’s description as applicable to their own inner states, the actions taken from these states, and the results achieved.
I read Polanyi’s beautiful words with great care because they describe exactly what it feels like to discover new knowledge. To clarify my own thinking, I summarized Polanyi’s description of this path into six stages:
1. Solitary Intimations Arise
The process of discovery begins almost indiscernibly as solitary intimations of a problem to be discovered. These are faint voices from within – an “un-specifiable impulse” in which one senses a problem others do not notice as even existing. Bits and pieces are sensed, offering faint clues to a hidden potential. These are only fragments of a possible coherent whole that guide the sensing of the problem and the decision to inquire.
2. Emergence of Heuristic Passion Driven by Universal Intent
The initial vague intimations give way to a firm decision by the discoverer to inquire. This develops into a calling, a heuristic passion that is driven by universal intent, the act of surrendering to something greater than oneself. The choice to take this journey is an existential choice – the discoverer becomes fully committed to the undertaking as an aspect of reality. The stakes are high. Great hazards lie ahead in the risk of time, money, personal prestige, the loss of one’s self-confidence, and the risk of defeat. “The discoverer has chosen to stake, bit by bit, his entire professional life.” In the face of this peril, the discoverer crosses the threshold engaging his destiny, his “vital design,” what he is here in this world to do. He undertakes this passionate pursuit of a hidden meaning, guided by an intensely personal foreknowledge of this hidden reality.
3. Surrender and Sense of Service
The discoverer seeks to detach from his or her current knowing in order to access more deeply what is seeking to manifest. This is a process that must continue throughout the journey. The lonely discoverer is “continually drawn to surrender false knowledge” in order to access more deeply what lies beyond current understanding. The whole undertaking is in the nature of what Polanyi calls a fiduciary act. The choices made in the cause of the inquiry are responsible choices:
His vision of the problem, his obsession with it, and his final leap to discovery are filled from beginning to end with an obligation to an objective properly called external. His acts are intensely personal acts, yet there is no self-will in them. Originality is guided at every stage by a sense of responsibility for advancing the growth of truth in men’s minds. Its freedom lies in this perfect service.
4. Indwelling as a Dynamic Force of Comprehension
The discoverer works in the belief that his labors will prepare his mind for receiving a truth from sources over which he has no control. He works night and day in “intense, absorbing, devoted labour,” immersed in the experience. He lives in the undertakings, surrendering himself to the work, absorbed in the inherent quality of the experience for its own sake, dwelling within a framework of inherent excellence. “We dwell in the hope that we may, by the grace of God, be able somewhere, somehow, to do that which we must, but which we can at this moment see no way to do….”
5. Retreat and Sudden Illumination: The Gift of Grace
“(T)he quest is brought to a close after a quiet interval (when the efforts of the imagination are at a rest), by a sudden illumination which offers a solution for the problem. Such an event is purely spontaneous and so may be called the work of a ‘concluding intuition’…. (T)here is always the same story over again….” Polanyi says it is axiomatic that true discovery is not a strictly logical performance. There is a gap between the antecedent knowledge from which the discoverer started and the consequent discovery at which he arrives. “Illumination” is the leap by which the logical gap is crossed – “ … here we have, in paradigm, the Pauline scheme of faith, works and grace. The discoverer works in the belief that his labours will prepare his mind for receiving a truth from sources over which he has no control. I regard the Pauline scheme, therefore, as the only adequate conception of a scientific discovery.” Such illumination may come as a surprising confirmation of a theory during the course of pursuing possibilities suggested by existing knowledge. It may also come while pursuing radically novel discoveries that depart in some deep sense from what went before. In either case, once having received such illumination, “ … I shall never see the world again as before. My eyes have become different; I have made myself into a person seeing and thinking differently.”
6. Testing and Verification
Such a “flash of triumph” usually offers no final solution, “but only the envisagement of a solution that has yet to be tested…. Thus, both the first active steps undertaken to solve a problem and the final garnering of the solution rely effectively on computations and other symbolic operations…. However, the intuitive powers of the investigator are always dominant and decisive.”
There is a singular power in Polanyi’s description of discovery. The process rests on a clear view of how the universe works: innovators have the power to actualize hidden potentials in the universe, but they must be guided by “an intensely personal foreknowledge of this hidden reality.” Every step of the process depends on this “personal foreknowledge” that the solution exists, but is not yet known. The discoverer’s worldview is paramount. They see the universe as Bohm and the scientists at Princeton and Pari see it: a world made up of the explicate order (what is already manifest) and the implicate order (that which lies hidden and unmanifest). It is the implicate order (the Source) that holds infinite potential – the hidden possibility or solution that is being sought.
This principle was explicitly pointed out to me at Princeton. The second of Jahn and Dunne’s six features, “Enabling Enhanced Communication with the Source,” is the requirement that the participants shift the context of the task at hand from one that seems “impossible” to one of “attainable possibility.”