knowledge of its purpose.^78 Moreover, Polanyi noted the importance of a
‘personal coefficient’in science, such as‘the intuition of rationality in nature’
that forms an intrinsic part of scientific theory.^79 Polanyi concluded that since
‘personal participation and imagination are essentially involved in science as
well as in the humanities, meanings created in the sciences stand in no more
favoured relation to reality than do meanings created in the arts, in moral
judgments, and in religion’.^80 In short, the often-implied distinction between
meaning and function, between moral and instrumental reasoning, which
continues to drive the marginalization of the humanities is a historically
conditioned misconception about how human knowledge works.
Another way of reconciling the famed‘two cultures’of the natural and
human sciences is to reduceallhuman knowing to material causes with the
help of genetics and evolutionary biology. The well-known science writer
Daniel Dennett, one of the most vocal proponents of this solution, claims to
have broken the spell of belief in mystery or higher powers by which religion
and the humanities have been bewitched. In his typically reductive manner,
Dennett chides the ‘ardent anti-Darwinians in the humanities and social
sciences’for their‘fear that an evolutionary approach would drown their
cherished way of thinking—with its heroic authors and artists and inventors
and other defenders and lovers of ideals’. Such humanities types have falsely
believed, without any‘evidence or argument, that human culture and human
society can only be interpreted and never causally explained’. Dennett claims
to have shown, however, that genetic science can provide causal, quasi-
mechanical explanations for even our highest ideals and forms of social
organization.^81
As Barbara Herrnstein Smith has pointed out, however, Dennett himself
has provided no empirical evidence for hisfindings.^82 Moreover, Dennett’s
wholesale rejection of those humanities scholars who challenge totalizing
claims of evolutionary biology as‘ardent anti-Darwinianists’reveals his reductive
scientism. Dennett, according to Smith, represents‘science-exceptionalism that
makes everything subject to scientific explanation except science’, amounting
(^78) Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch,Meaning(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1996), 161ff.
(^79) Michael Polanyi,Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy(Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1958), 16.
(^80) Polanyi and Prosch,Meaning, 65.
(^81) All references in Daniel Clement Dennett,Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural
Phenomenon(New York: Viking, 2006), 188.
(^82) Barbara Herrnstein Smith,Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science
and Religion, Terry Lectures Series (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 140. Husserl had
already noted that scientists tend not apply the same strict demand of empirical verification to their
own presuppositions by which they judge all knowledge. See Edmund Husserl,Ideen zu einer
reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie[IdeenI] (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer,
2002), 38.
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