True knowledge is always outside of you

When you master riding a bicycle, you achieve the high standard of not knowing what you are doing.

This is the insight of the chemist turned philosopher -- and sometime in that process he turned Christian as well -- Michael Polanyi.

When you are expert at doing something -- like baking a cake, playing the piano, raising a family -- when you are an expert at doing X, you forget the recipe for doing X. In fact, if asked to sit down and write out the recipe, say, for playing the piano well, not only can you NOT write down how to play the piano well, even if you could, that expertise is not transmittable by recipe.

Polanyi is the one who coined the term "tacit knowledge." When you know how to do something tacitly, you can do that thing without thinking about it.

Like riding a bicycle. Like swimming. Like speaking in your native language. (If you speak a second language, it is your second language precisely because you have to think about the words before saying them).

The point is this: daily life is filled with examples of tacit knowledge. We do many things -- and do them quite well -- without ever having to stop to think about how to do them.

Polanyi says we fill our world with extensions of our interior self -- because we are skillful in tacitly handling all sorts of actions in the world we live in; in the world we make.

Polanyi calls this indwelling.

Indwelling.

When someone in-dwells his surroundings, the knowledge inside of him has gone outside of him, and has filled the world around him.

His knowledge has filled the world around Him.

Logos2Go

Habakkuk 2.14 For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 1962), 59: "Tools ... form part of ourselves, the operating persons. We pour ourselves out into them and assimilate them as parts of our own existence. We accept them existentially by dwelling in them."