I. You Know More Than You Can Tell

“We can know more than we can tell.”

The Tacit Dimension appeared in 1966, developed from Polanyi’s 1962 Terry Lectures at Yale. That brief statement near its beginning can change our stance toward knowledge.

You recognize a face. You can pick it out from a thousand. But you can't say how. You can't produce a list — the angle of the nose, the distance between eyes, the arc of cheekbone — and say "that's why I recognized you." Your knowing exceeds your words.

You ride a bicycle. You can do it. But you can't precisely describe what your body is doing. Merleau-Ponty, in the previous essay, said the body knows before concepts. Polanyi draws the line here: what the body knows but concepts can't say is not the residue of knowledge. It is the foundation.

His strong claim is that even explicit knowledge relies on tacit understanding. Not every obscure feeling counts as knowledge. Rather, no explanation fully contains the capacities needed to understand and use it.

“The earth revolves around the sun” is an explicit proposition. We can explain revolution, space and motion further. Yet any explanation still needs someone able to read a diagram, grasp relations and use words in the world. The question is not whether explanations matter, but what makes them intelligible.

II. From Chemistry to Philosophy

Polanyi was an unusual man.

Hungarian Jew. Spent years in Berlin as a physical chemist, researching crystal structures and reaction kinetics. A first-rate scientist — not "decent," genuinely important.

Later he turned increasingly toward knowledge and society. Leaving the laboratory did not mean leaving science behind.

He lived through two world wars. He watched European civilization collapse. He asked himself: why? Why did we destroy Europe?

One response was to question a dangerous ideal: if only what eliminates personal judgment can be reliable, how much room remains for an actual scientist? This does not make a mistaken philosophy the sole cause of Europe’s catastrophes.

He criticized the ideal of knowledge as an entirely impersonal record, with intuition, trust, commitment and judgment treated as impurities. That ideal troubles not only morality and aesthetic discernment; it misdescribes science itself. Data do not choose their own questions or evaluate their own promise.

When respect, judgment and commitment are dismissed as “merely subjective,” they can lose their standing against power. But the reverse would also be wrong: sincere conviction alone does not establish authority. Human judgment needs a place, and responsibility for being mistaken.

Polanyi is doing more than finding something kind to say about intuition. He wants to preserve the person who cannot be erased from knowing. Scientific objectivity need not require a researcher to pretend not to exist; moral judgment need not disappear because it cannot become a mechanical procedure.

III. Subsidiary and Focal Awareness

One of Polanyi's core concepts: subsidiary awareness and focal awareness.

Reading this essay, you attend to its meaning while relying on familiarity with letters, grammar and context. These are not necessarily unconscious; they function as clues through which meaning is reached. The chair’s pressure and noises outside may be mere background. Not everything outside the center of attention is subsidiary awareness.

The key relation is from–to: attending from particulars to a whole. You may examine a detail in its own right, but its role changes. The former focus does not automatically become subsidiary, nor are the two levels unable to participate together in knowing.

On a bicycle you attend to the road through continual adjustments of balance and force. Commanding every adjustment individually can interrupt a practiced rhythm. Yet training may analyze movements and reintegrate them into fluent riding. Paying attention to the body does not inevitably make you fall.

Recognizing a face, you attend through its features to the person, not through a checklist of separate measurements. Studying the nose in isolation temporarily reorganizes your attention. It does not make the whole person permanently vanish.

Polanyi gives this structure wide scope. It does not mean that subsidiaries are forever unsayable while the focus is always expressible: a face we recognize may itself resist description. The distinction concerns their roles in knowing, not a fixed boundary between the sayable and the unsayable.

IV. Gathering Seventeen Essays

Now look back at the preceding seventeen essays.

Comte sought dependable laws. His floor in this series warns against a closed conception of knowledge; it should not compress his entire work into a rejection of everything inarticulate.

Polanyi turns us toward another layer: even a written law requires judgment to recognize, understand and use it. The law cannot perform that work by itself.

Popper’s demarcation of science by falsifiability does not deny imagination in discovery. Polanyi invites us to linger over “there may be something here”: not yet a testable proposition, perhaps, but a way toward one. Intuition cannot sign off the eventual test.

Dirac’s sense of beauty could guide equations without guaranteeing their truth. Beauty, deduction and testing work together; they need not be fixed forever into one subsidiary–focal pairing.

Qu Yuan’s poetry does more than convey propositions; it gives direction. A line may stop you before you can explain why it matters.

Fichte’s argument about the I can be explained. Assuming responsibility for one’s activity is not accomplished merely by memorizing it.

McClintock’s feeling for an organism grew through long practice and returned continually to evidence. Her discovery did not wait for sixty completed years before jumping out of a feeling.

Weil wrote about practicing attention. Reading the instructions does not ensure that we have made room for the person before us.

Thatcher had to judge which costs could be borne. The difficulty of explaining judgment exhaustively never exempts a politician from giving the public reasons.

Nāgārjuna does not strip away a shell to reveal a mysterious remainder. Emptiness itself must not become another substance. The reminder here is not to mistake our last word for the end of inquiry.

Woolf writes moments of being. Her work brings us close to a tear in the cotton wool without supplying a recipe that will reproduce the moment.

Yukawa investigated nuclear forces through images and mathematics. Tossing a ball can illustrate exchange; it is not an established account of the discovery’s inspiration, nor an image that predicted a particle on its own.

Arendt asks when people stop their inward conversation. Being able to say “I am thinking” does not establish willingness to examine one’s judgments.

Murdoch lets a kestrel interrupt self-absorption. We can explain why attention matters without guaranteeing that following the same steps will make us genuinely see tomorrow.

Khaldun’s asabiyya must be discerned through shared experience, relations and action. A group’s felt atmosphere may offer clues, or may mislead through excitement and propaganda.

After Vygotsky, later writers used scaffolding to describe certain forms of support. When to release the bicycle seat requires attention to this child’s response, not merely an age chart.

Strawson analyzes concepts we already know how to use. Articulating their structure does not create all the capacities of shared life from scratch.

Merleau-Ponty asks how a hand reaches for a cup. The movement can be studied without waiting for the study to finish before a first reach.

Seventeen essays are not seventeen witnesses that whatever cannot be said must be right. They show explicit knowledge happening within lives. What Polanyi helps gather is the life that must not be discarded as leftover material.

V. The Cognitive Cycle

The next step belongs to this series’ reading of Polanyi. The cycle described here is not presented as his own formulation.

Knowing needs both experience and the expectations and capacities we bring to it. Calling an acquired intuition a priori would confuse what we learned previously with what is independent of experience in the philosophical sense.

Observation and data are not the enemy. The problem is requiring every judgment to become a freestanding datum before it may contribute. You may then lose the ability to decide where the next data should be sought.

The reverse is equally closed: using a preconception to trim experience and discarding whatever does not fit. A map may guide the journey; it cannot command the landscape to match its lines.

Cognition is a cycle.

Experience explores. You observe, gather materials and encounter what differs from expectation. These materials are not interpretation-free stones, yet they can still resist your existing ideas.

Judgment organizes. Patterns, directions and promising questions emerge through experience. You do not add truth from nowhere; you sketch a provisional map.

Existing understanding guides the next encounter. Returning with a map, you know which differences may deserve another look.

New experience tests the direction. You discover what the map omitted, or that the route was mistaken. The map must change.

Round after round: experience explores, judgment organizes, understanding guides, experience tests again.

Neither side permanently rules while the other merely supplies material. One brings contact with the world; the other gives that contact direction. Direction must answer to the world in turn.

McClintock moved among sustained observation, practiced technique, sensitivity to anomalies and genetic analysis. Discernment brought questions forward; experiments and records made them answerable to other investigators. She did not first intuit with closed eyes and then obtain a confirming microscope image.

Dirac’s case needs distinctions too. Training and mathematical judgment guided the equation; negative-energy solutions were consequences of reasoning, not a new experimental observation. Discovery of the positron supplied another level of empirical testing. Distinguishing these stages keeps the cycle from becoming a slogan that fits anything.

Discoveries often grow through such exchanges. No revolution of the cycle guarantees one, and not every investigator follows the same route.

VI. Another Meaning of "We Know More Than We Can Tell"

Back to the opening sentence.

"We can know more than we can tell."

This is usually understood as: some knowledge is inarticulate. Tacit knowledge. Bodily knowledge. Intuition.

But after seventeen essays, the sentence acquires a deeper meaning:

What resists telling may be more than something not yet expressed: it may be a capacity that makes expression possible. Discernment cultivated in experience can guide the next look. Some of it may later be articulated, without all of it fitting inside a manual.

Tacit understanding is one hinge of the cycle just described. With data, you must still discern what they indicate; with theory, you must still judge how it bears on this case. Intuition, experience and orientation help connect them—and remain corrigible.

Personal Knowledge (1958) had already pursued this question. Personal does not mean a private preference masquerading as truth, nor does subjective experience automatically mean unreliability. Knowing involves a living person’s participation, skill, commitment and judgment while seeking truth valid beyond that person.

Nobody can learn to ride for you. Copying a conclusion will not give you McClintock’s discernment or Dirac’s mathematical judgment. Yet bicycles fall, experiments fail, and equations meet recalcitrant facts. Personal participation does not abolish a world capable of saying no.

Personal knowing need not oppose the pursuit of objectivity. Polanyi asks us to acknowledge that the journey toward objectivity still requires someone actually to make it.

VII. Direction Without Destination

Kant proposed a concept: purposiveness without purpose (Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck).

In aesthetic judgment we can experience fittingness without first specifying a purpose the object serves. A flower need not justify its usefulness before appearing beautiful. It is not traveling toward a secret destination.

This suggests an analogy for inquiry: a route feels worth following before its outcome can be fully stated. It is an analogy, not an identification of Kant’s aesthetics with Polanyi’s account of knowledge, and not a claim that all tacit knowing lacks a definite goal.

When McClintock proposed genetic transposition, its molecular mechanisms had not been fully worked out. She had concrete questions and goals, but not all the answers later research would develop. Direction can precede a complete explanation.

Qu Yuan knew which way to walk — "the road ahead is long and winding; I shall search high and low" — but he didn't know where he would end up. Direction present. Destination absent.

Having direction without a settled endpoint is no failure. Closure threatens from either side: accumulating materials while refusing judgment, or forming a judgment that will no longer listen. You can travel with a question and change it along the way.

Between direction and destination, leave room for understanding not yet fully articulated. Not immunity from testing, but a chance to develop into something that can be discussed further.

VIII. The Bridgehead

Now invite Polanyi onto this series’ imagined bridge. You might not notice him at first.

Not because he's unimportant. Because he looks too ordinary. A medium-built old man. Unremarkable clothes. None of Fichte's urgency, Thatcher's heels, Nāgārjuna's stillness, Qu Yuan's wet robes.

He steps onto the bridge. He doesn't look around. He doesn't search for a spot. He walks directly toward — you don't know where, but he does. He has direction. No destination. But direction.

He passes Comte. Doesn't stop. Doesn't rebut. Just walks past. As he passes, his foot lands on the grout Comte poured. Beneath the grout, cracks. He knows. He doesn't need to say.

He passes Popper’s line without erasing it. On one side are testable claims; around them are the conjectures and skills that bring people to such claims. Neither side is automatically true. But drawing a boundary for science need not throw every other part of knowing into the river.

He and Dirac exchange a glance. Beauty’s contribution to reasoning may resist exhaustive description. Equations still require working through; facts still need checking. A person’s vision participates without signing the result on the world’s behalf.

He passes McClintock. She's crouching, looking at corn. He crouches for a moment and looks. Not at the corn. At how she looks. Her posture, her focus, the interface between her body and the maize — this is personal knowledge. Nobody can do this for her.

He passes Weil, who is not hurrying to possess what she sees. There is a posture worth reading alongside his work, but she is not “pure subsidiary awareness.” A subsidiary with no attended-to whole is not his from–to relation.

He passes Vygotsky; the child is walking beside him now. He smiles. Doing together, demonstrating, speaking and easing support at the right time can help a capacity become the child’s own. The hand is not language’s enemy.

He passes Strawson's relaid floor. His foot lands on it. The floor isn't perfect. But the foot on it knows: good enough. That "good enough" judgment — inarticulate. But the foot knows.

He passes Merleau-Ponty. Neither needs to claim to have said everything the other meant. One brings embodied life into view; the other asks how tacit integration sustains knowing. Neighboring paths still have something to discuss.

He walks to the very back of the bridge.

He turns to face everyone.

He says one thing. Not something deep. Not a new theory. A sentence you already knew but had never heard quite this way:

“The things you can state—laws, boundaries, equations, concepts—do not float alone. They pass through your body, experience, judgment and relations with others. What cannot be fully written down need not be discarded as residue; it may be the capacity that makes those statements possible. Personal participation does not cancel objectivity. It asks someone to answer for a judgment.”

Then he says one more thing — not his own words, but a sentence that grew from seventeen essays' arc:

“Do not let experience abolish judgment, or judgment seal experience shut. Experience explores, judgment organizes; understanding guides, experience tests again. A cycle of understanding and knowledge. You are inside it, never a nameless eye outside.”

He is finished.

He takes something from his pocket. Something small. You can't quite see it. Perhaps a crystal — he did crystallography. Perhaps a button. Perhaps a grain of sand. It doesn't matter. What matters: he is holding it, you can't see its details, but you know it's in his hand.

Inarticulate. But there.

He extends his hand. Palm up. The thing sits in his palm.

Your turn.^[1][2][3]

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · Great Lives