The Central Question

The central question of my intellectual life, since I first began to think for myself with any credible degree of sophistication (i.e., when I began to read Kierkegaard around age 16), has been this: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem (and, by the same token, Ctesiphon with Yathrib)?

For Tertullian--who first posed the question (as a rhetorical exercise, more or less)--the presumptive response was negative: Athens has nothing to do with Jerusalem. And yet, had this been the case, biblical religion would never have evolved much beyond its origins as a priestly cult of sacrifice. The prophetic (i.e., ethical) tradition would have emerged regardless, but the intellectual hunger that eventually gave birth to the natural sciences would have gone unsatisfied. So we would have had a world in which priest-craft promised magic and redemption, moral conviction thundered, and nature was analyzed and, in part, harnessed--without reference to ethics or culture.

This is the world to which we seem to be, at present, reverting.

I find this world to be a dangerous place, because it is filled with certainties that resist all nuance and attempts at mediation and translation across the boundaries that separate priest from prophet, prophet from scientist, and scientist from priest. It is a world without poets and musicians: a world without humanists and the humanities.

Jerusalem without Athens and Yathrib without Ctesiphon are walled cities whose inhabitants are smug, self-satisfied, blind know-it-alls. Such a world is easily divided against itself; it invites conflict and fratricide.

The central question of my intellectual life has been, and remains, how do we avoid creating such a world?

My answer: we must insist on making room for the posing of this question not, as Tertullian did, as a mere exercise in rhetoric with a pre-determined answer, but as humanists have done since the beginnings of Mesopotamian civilization: as a challenge to our creativity, a spur to the imagination, and a call to lives of study and deliberation. Humanism does not provide answers to this question, it is itself an answer to this question.

Tillich's Ontology Re-Visited

In a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1951, Paul Tillich attempted to demonstrate that "Biblical religion" is not only compatible with ontological speculation, it presumes such speculation. Tillich chose this subject in an effort to answer the charge of his critics that "theology has to restrain itself from using philosophical terms" [see Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, vii].

Such charges are not unique to Christianity, of course, nor are they of recent vintage: Tertullian's rhetorical question, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" has been periodically posed by the Muslim and Jewish critics of their respective philosophical traditions and, in Tillich's hands, Christian theology was always deeply philosophical in method and tenor--so much so that Paul Kurtz chose to include a chapter on Tillich in his 1966 "sourcebook" American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century.

What interests me about Tillich's reply to his critics is the indirect light it sheds on certain aspects of the Islamic tradition and, in particular, upon Muslim pietism (i.e. tasawwuf). Indeed, I read Tillich's text as a superb introduction to what tasawwuf became as it moved from the "edge" of the ever-evolving tradition (a social, not geographical, location) to its "center" by the 12th century of the Common Era (for this use of the terms "edge" and "center" see Richard Bulliet's Islam: The View from the Edge).

Tillich began his lectures by defining his terms: the phrase "'biblical religion' stands for two things: divine revelation and human reception" (21). Where the latter aspect is concerned, "biblical religion belongs to the whole history of religion. Everyone who knows something about the historical settings of biblical religion knows how much they were influenced by the surrounding religions and how many analogies can be drawn between biblical and other religions" (ibid). What Tillich appears to be pointing towards here is the socio-historical and cultural contexts from which biblical literature emerged. Marshall Hodgson's notion of an Irano-Semitic civilizational complex relieves Tillich's conception of some of its inherent ambiguity, but more can be done. Biblical literature includes the Bibles that have come down to us from Jews and Christians (inclusive of canonical and extra-canonical materials as well as exegetical works on the same). As artifacts of the history of Ancient to Late Ancient Near Eastern religiosity, these texts are cousin to Mesopotamian locative epic (e.g., Gilgamesh) and Persian utopian prophecy (e.g., the teachings of Zarathustra). But they are more than that: for critical textual analysis has repeatedly demonstrated the "incestual" relations between and among these cousins. "Influence" is too weak a metaphor for the relationships that obtain.

As divine revelation, on the other hand, biblical religion purports to put human beings into an intimate relation with a non-human being and yet does so, as Tillich attests, in an indelibly personal way. The catalytic conflict of Tillich's book arises out of the apparent contradiction between Biblical "personalism" and the impersonal philosophical category of Being that Tillich derives from the Greeks--as substantially mediated (without direct acknowledgment) by Martin Heidegger's Being and Time.

For Tillich, these two aspects of biblical religion are not, in fact, contradictory but only apparently so; they stand in dialectical relationship to one another:

Wherever the divine is manifest, it is manifest in "flesh," that is, in a concrete, physical, and historical reality, as in the religious receptivity of the biblical writers. This is what biblical religion means. It is itself a highly dialectical concept. (5)

The impersonal philosophical category of Being invites "metaphysical speculation"--a phrase that Tillich dismisses as "black magic" (8). He wants to avoid metaphysical speculation and prefers to speak of "ontological analysis" which, in his usage, has the character of Husserlian phenomenology: "one has to look at things as they are given if one wants to discover the principles, the structures, and the nature of being as it is embodied in everything that is" (ibid).

This locution, however, suggests that "being" is something that is distinct from "everything that is"--a highly contestable claim.

In any event, it would seem that the distinction between "being" and "everything that is" has already been suggested by the title of this series of lectures: Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality--with "ultimate reality" as a synonym for "Being Itself."

Anyone who wishes to study this subject must first reconcile herself to the discomforting fact that it is the search itself that may be studied; "Being Itself," on the other hand, remains, paradoxically, both ready-to-hand as (Heidegger would say) and perennially elusive.

As mentioned above, it is as an unwitting introduction to tasawwuf or "Muslim pietism" that Tillich's book fascinates. I first began to read Tillich in the mid-1970's and often wondered how, or in what sense, he really functioned as a Christian theologian. His continued eccentricity in that role (his "edginess" in Bulliet's terms) is unfortunate in my view. Would that Tillich's evolving understanding of Christianity (and its place among the religions of the world) had become central to Christian thought and practice! But he was a man out of time. One can only speculate what creative course his thinking might have followed had he lived to converse with such University of Chicago luminaries of Islamic Studies as Marshall Hodgson and Fazlur Rahman.

Islam, no less than Christianity and Judaism, is biblical religion. The Qur'an and Hadith literature do not disqualify Islam from being part and parcel of biblical religion any more than the Mishnah and Talmuds disqualify Rabbinic Judaism from that distinction or the New Testament and decrees of Church councils or the writings of the Church Fathers disqualify Christianity.

Tasawwuf or Muslim pietism is the Islamic expression of the "search for Ultimate Reality" and, at the very heart of tasawwuf is tawhid: both the affirmation of the uniqueness and divinity of "Reality" or "Being Itself" and, at the same moment, the confession of one's desire to be made "whole" through some sort of "mystical" union with that unique and divine Reality. Tillich's statement that human beings belong to the power of being from which they are separated (12) sounds remarkably (or, perhaps, unremarkably) like statements one finds throughout the literature of Muslim pietism--from al-Junayd to al-Hallaj, from al-Qushayri to Jalaladdin Rumi, etc.

Indeed, a deep engagement with the literature of tasawwuf might well have enabled Tillich to resolve certain confusions in his thinking. For example, he insisted on the philosophical character of his "ontological analysis," distinguishing it from the "saint, prophet, and poet" by its thorough "cognitive function." At the same time, however, Tillich insisted that his philosophy was "existential"--a disposition he described as a "rare union of passion and rationality" (20). Had he been exposed to the work of the Egyptian philosopher A. R. Badawi (a near contemporary), he might well have reconsidered his position on the matter (see, e.g., Badawi's "Les points de recontre de la mystique musslmane et de l'Existentialisme" 27 Studia Islamica (1967), 55-76). Tillich's existential philosophical theology stands out like a white raven in Christian intellectual circles; among devotees of tasawwuf, however, it would have found both a corresponding tradition and community.

Unversed in the literature of tasawwuf, Tillich gamely attempted to "achieve a synthesis between ontology and biblical religion," i.e., to reinvent the wheel, as it were, and create a Christian version of tasawwuf from scratch (27). In order to accomplish this objective, he recognized that he had to reconcile the anthropomorphic biblical god with his own Hellenized conception of "Being as such." His Protestant pre-commitment to biblical religion, however, limited as it was to the canonical text of the Bible, put him at an immediate disadvantage: for YHWH/El is in many respects a trickster deity--one moment jealous and angry, loving and clement the next (30-31). This may be contrasted with Allah, on the other hand, who is not presented in Muslim sources with quite the same level of emotional volatility. Be that as it may, the "stumbling block" of personalism is present to all varieties of biblical religion: Tillich had his work cut out for him in any case.

The move that Tillich makes is predictable and yet fresh: for it reminds us of the organizing principle behind all theo-logizing: the marriage of the personal biblical god with the Greek notion of the Logos. The Johannine community of the primitive Jesus movement asserted the identity of theos and logos in the symbol of the Christ. Despite the problems that arise when such an assertion is applied to an historical personage (i.e., Rabbi Jesus), Tillich seized the opportunity that the Prologue to John's gospel presented him for creative thinking. The result was a Christology that bears a striking resemblance to Muslim Christologies of 'Isa ibn Maryamah, Kalamat Allahi wa Ruh Allahi wa 'l Masih (see especially the pioneering work of Mahmoud Ayoub and also Tillich, ibid., 38-39).

Indeed, I would argue that the gap between a Christology such as one finds in Paul Tillich (and possibly Hans Kung) and the Muslim Christologies articulated in tasawwuf differ not in kind but in scope. Muslims avoid speaking of "incarnation" (hulul) because of its association with a Christian dogma that, historically, divided Christians from Jews and Christians from one another. One of the goals of Muhammad's movement was to mitigate the effects of Christologically-driven sectarianism (see Fred Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, Harvard, 2010). At the same time, Muslim pietists wished to achieve a kind of "incarnationism" (call it "Divine manifestation" in the human being) through emulation of Prophetic example (the life of Muhammad) and "Christ-like" ascetic practices. Where Christian dogma elevates a single individual to Divine status (Rabbi Jesus), tasawwuf democratizes the Divine presence--though not without insisting that this "democratization" of the "franchise" be limited through a combination of meritorious effort and Divine grace.

A few years after delivering his lectures on Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, Tillich preached a sermon in which he argued that the Christian kerygma comes down to this: an invitation to "participate" in what he called "the New Being" which is "manifest" (I think it significant that he did not say "incarnated") in "Jesus who is called the Christ" (see Paul Tillich, The New Being, New York: Scribner's (1955), 18). Reading this sermon in the light of the study of Muslim pietism, one finds it difficult to distinguish Tillich's notion of the Christian kerygma--the possibility of participating in a New Being, an "ontological event" towards which one must direct "passionate and infinite longing" (19)--and the tawhidic teleology of tasawwuf.

At the Tillichian edge of Christian theology, biblical religion can find a balm for some of its self-inflicted wounds.

Being and Nothingness

"Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being--like a worm." Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, 56.

Being "calls" to us from non-being, but only in the most attenuated sense. Apprehending what is (or appears to be) opens the door to speculation as to its negation and/or what it occludes or lacks. The perception of depth or three dimensionality creates expectations of surplus: what is inside or lies on the other side of this object? The "encounter" with absence spurs the imagination: it is the impetus of the fictional mode we call "metaphysics."

Ontological speculation involves the testing of our perceptual limitations: it is an exercise of human freedom--the freedom to interrogate our given environment and to discover (or invent for it) new interiors and new surfaces. Every exercise of human freedom is, ipso facto, an instance of human freedom--evidence that human beings are, despite all circumscription, in some genuine sense, free.

In what sense? Here, Peter Berger demonstrates himself an acute interpreter of Sartre:

"... the dramatic model of society at which we have arrived now does not deny that the actors on the stage are constrained by all the external controls set up by the impresario and the internal ones of the role itself. All the same, they have options--of playing their parts enthusiastically or sullenly, of playing with inner conviction or with 'distance,' and, sometimes, of refusing to play at all. Looking at society through the medium of this dramatic model greatly changes our general sociological perspective. Social reality now seems to be precariously perched on the cooperation of many individual actors--or perhaps a better simile would be that of acrobats engaged in perilous balancing acts, holding up between them the swaying structure of the social world" (Peter L. Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 138).

Every exercise of hermeneutics offers an opportunity to enact human freedom. Likewise, every deviation from the script of one's social role opens new possibilities in a given life.

Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing may also come from something and, from that "somethinged" nothing, may come something new.

From Kenneth Burke to Peter L. Berger

"The general perspective that is interwoven with our methodology of analysis might be summarily characterized as a theory of drama. We propose to take ritual drama as the Ur-form, the 'hub,' with all other aspects of human action treated as spokes radiating from this hub. That is, the social sphere is considered in terms of situations and acts, in contrast with the physical sphere, which is considered in mechanistic terms, idealized as a flat cause-and-effect or stimulus-and-response relationship. Ritual drama is considered as the culminating form, from this point of view, and any other form is to be considered as the 'efficient' overstressing of one or another of the ingredients found in ritual drama. An essayistic treatise of scientific cast, for instance, would be viewed as a kind of Hamletic soliloquy, its rhythm slowed down to a snail's pace, or perhaps to an irregular jog, and the dramatic situation of which it is a part usually being left unmentioned" (Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3rd edition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973, 103).

Kenneth Burke published the first edition of The Philosophy of Literary Form in 1941. In 1963, a young sociologist by the name of Peter L. Berger (b. 1939) published his thoroughly (but perhaps unknowingly) Burkean Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective (New York: Doubleday). Fortunately, I read Berger long before I read Burke--for Burke's labyrinthine and neologism-filled writing style can make reading him quite a struggle. Berger's books (I've read and re-read at least a half-dozen of them over the years) made the assimilation of Burke's Dramatism fairly effortless. Moreover, his work with Thomas Luckmann on the social construction of reality provided a foundation for the sociological perspective I adopted as an undergraduate and have never abandoned.

The move from Ontologism to Dramatism (accomplished by Burke and further articulated by Berger--following not Burke, I take it, but Erving Goffman) involves a Wittgensteinian asceticism that requires resolution to maintain. The call of Being buzzes incessantly in one's ears (witness Heidegger). But, as Wittgenstein taught us, the sheer mystery of Being eludes all speech. And while it is difficult to reconcile oneself to apophasis in matters that one considers to be of paramount importance, the alternative is, more often than not, sheer muddle.

Dramatism does not eliminate Ontologism: it preserves it through the description of setting or scene. Thus preserved, Being is relegated to Michael Polanyi's "tacit dimension." The effort to make the tacit explicit is a critical one; it is also, as Wittgenstein remarked, "like trying to repair a spider's web with one's fingers."

Wittgenstein felt that Tolstoy was less successful in communicating his own apprehension of the tacit dimension when he attempted to make it explicit; some things, he thought, were better left unsaid. In a letter to Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein had this to say about Tolstoy's late novel Resurrection:

"You see, when Tolstoy tells a story he impresses me infinitely more than when he addresses the reader. When he turns his back to the reader then he seems to me most impressive ... It seems to me his philosophy is most true when it's latent in the story" (Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, OUP, 1984, p. 97).

Peter Berger's Dramatism suggests that the attribution of metaphysical properties to socially constructed identities (e.g., "white," "black," "male," "female," "Jew," "Gentile") is fraught with peril: "all such appellations become exercises in [Sartrean] 'bad faith' as soon as they are charged with ontological implications" (Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 157). I could not agree more.

Nevertheless, Berger stops short of adopting Wittgenstein's Tractarian admonition "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." He does not banish the posing of metaphysical questions--for to do so results in an unwitting acceptance of the answers that our socially constructed reality provides--and this, for Berger, is to arrive at "bad faith" from a different direction. The posing of "metaphysical" questions, i.e., questions designed to interrogate the inevitability of the inherited status quo, is to exercise one's freedom. And to exercise one's freedom is, to borrow from Aristotle, to actualize a metaphysical potentiality (see Invitation chapter 6).

This view is similar in tenor to Tolstoy's death-bed assertion that "God is not love, but the more love there is, the more man reveals God, the more he truly exists."

The conversion of the potential into the actual, of fiction into fact, is the ineluctable and ethically charged "call of Being."

Despite our best intentions, we often find our way back to Heidegger. Berger's use of the German philosopher, like Sartre's, was both skillful and sparing. Would that we all had such tact!

The Dark Side of Dramatism

Kenneth Burke's Dramatistic mode of analysis will always face stiff resistance--even from those whom it might benefit--because, in the shadows of this way of thinking, lurks a (further) Shakespearean apprehension:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. Macbeth 5:5.

What the French playwright and humanist Albert Camus termed "lucidity," i.e., the ability to grasp, without flinching, the human condition as theater and, therefore, in all likelihood, as a "tale told by an idiot," is simply too much for most people to bear.

Burke was able to parry the breaking of this absurd dawn throughout his long life by means of intense intellectual work punctuated by equally intense bouts of binge drinking.

Tolstoy's well-known aversion to Shakespeare was a complicated affair, but one suspects that he sensed how full acceptance of the Bard into his consciousness would court the temptation to suicide--already fierce within him.

In the final analysis, however, Tolstoy's "solution" to the "problem" of finding meaning in meaninglessness was to harness the vocabulary of theism in a manner not unlike Camus's vocabulary of nature. There is a sobriety about the resolutions of both men that reflects a Dramatistic apprehension of the human predicament.

Ethically, speaking, both men reached the conclusion that, if this life is but a series of acts and scenes, let us learn to play our parts (conduct ourselves) with grace, decorum, courage and, above all, candor.

The "dark side" of Dramatism ensues when one is blinded by the light.

Kenneth Burke's Socio-Poetics: From Ontologism to Dramatism

When Michael Polanyi remarks that "Our believing is conditioned at its source by our belonging. And this reliance on the cultural machinery of our society continues through life" [Personal Knowledge, 322], one is entitled to ask: to what do we belong? From Polanyi's statement, it seems obvious that we belong to some sort of "cultural machinery." But what is that? The best answer that occurs to me is Shakespeare's:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages...
[As You Like It, II: VII].

The "seven ages" referred to in these lines are seven discrete stages of an individual life (from cradle to grave) outlined by the Bard in the lines which immediately follow. But that individual drama is played out in the course of a larger and more elaborate tragi-comedy--and it is the latter that Polanyi most likely had in mind when he spoke of "cultural machinery."

As an epistemologist, Polanyi's main task was to efface the Cartesian divide between mind and body. Yet he gestured repeatedly to the fact that embodied minds are also participants in social groups. This brings us full circle to Slavophile "ontologism": the assertion that there exists an "organic togetherness in cognition" that has to be accounted for [see the post of 3-18-12, below]. How best to do this? I suggest that we let the master metaphor of the drama be our guide. And if we do that, then we must find ourselves, sooner or later, confronting the genius of Kenneth Burke:

"People are neither animals nor machines (to be analyzed by the migration of metaphors from biology or mechanics), but actors and acters. They establish identity by relation to groups (with the result that, when tested by individualistic concepts of identity, they are felt to be moved by 'deceptions' or 'illusions,' the 'irrational'--for one's identification as a member of a group is a role, yet it is the only active mode of identification possible, as you will note by observing how all individualistic concepts of identity dissolve into the nothingness of mysticism and the absolute). If you would avoid the antitheses of supernaturalism and naturalism, you must develop the coordinates of socialism--which gets us to cooperation, participation, man in society, man in drama" [Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, Berkeley: University of California Press (1973), 311].

Just as the individual mind is not divorced from an individual body, so individual bodies are not divorced from the collectivities in which they are embedded. Therefore, what an individual knows, or thinks she knows, is "conditioned at its source" by her belonging to a particular society and its culture. And, like the individuals who comprise them, societies enact dramas--indeed, they are dramas in which individuals (themselves elaborate sub-plots) play evolving roles.

Burke preserved Slavophile communalism and organicism but discarded Slavophile metaphysics and mysticism. In this respect, his thinking mirrored Tolstoy's quite effectively.

Slavophile "Ontologism" Re-visited

There is what I would term a "deep structural" similarity that obtains between the Slavophile emphasis upon "that realm of interior, pre-conscious, instinctual access to truth called 'intuition' or, in religious experience, 'faith' ... not faith in the sense of belief in clearly defined dogmas or propositions, but a kind of knowledge which precedes any abstract thought or 'reason'" [See Russian Philosophy, vol. 1, edited by James M. Edie, James P. Scanlon, and Mary-Barbara Zeldin; with the collaboration of George L. Kline, Chicago: Quadrangle Books (1965), 161-162] and, say, Sherman Jackson's notion of "Black Religion" as "a spontaneous folk orientation" upon which one constructs the architecture of a religious tradition and that serves to ground and inform an individual's understanding and expression of that tradition (in Jackson's case, Sunnism--see Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican, Oxford, 2005: 31-32).

Both point to what philosopher Michael Polanyi referred to as the "tacit dimension" of human cognition [See Michael Polanyi's books Personal Knowledge, The Tacit Dimension, and Meaning (co-written with Harry Prosch), all published by the University of Chicago Press]. Frustrated by the "failure of the positivist movement in the philosophy of science," Polanyi attempted to work out a "stable alternative" to Positivism's "ideal of objectivity" [Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, Chicago (1966), 25].

For Polanyi, all knowledge is "personal," which is to say (somewhat crudely) that the element of human subjectivity cannot be eliminated from human cognition--nor should it be. For if there were no subjective element in human cognition, there would be no genuine interest in anyone obtaining new information about the world. The desire to know engenders acts of self-assertion: an exploration of experienced phenomena in an effort to account for them in some way:

The sight of a solid object indicates that it has both another side and a hidden interior, which we could explore; the sight of another person points at unlimited hidden workings of his mind and body. Perception has this inexhaustible profundity, because what we perceive is an aspect of reality, and aspects of reality are clues to boundless undisclosed, and perhaps yet unthinkable, experiences [ibid, 68].

Or so we presume. This presumption constitutes what Polanyi called "the metaphysical grounds which underlie all our knowledge of the external world" [ibid].

We must be careful here and not mistake metaphysical propositions for indicative postulates. Since Plato (or perhaps Parmenides), it seems, we have been confused about the grammar of our articulate traffic with the world. Metaphysical propositions are not indicative postulates but subordinate clauses expressed in the subjunctive mood. Metaphysical speculation is a form of inquiry into possibility or potentiality. It inspires scientific exploration but is not, itself, scientific exploration, nor may it be permitted to substitute for scientific exploration.

That said, we must be equally mindful that we do not attempt to eliminate our embodied subjectivities (i.e., our personality, our humanity) from our science. This is the nature of the Cartesian error that has impoverished our thinking for the last 500 years.

Linguistic confusion and an over-zealous ascetic reductionism are the tragic hallmarks of Western rationalism--the "fly-bottle" that Tolstoy's disciple, Ludwig Wittgenstein, aimed to help us escape from. We have yet to find our way.

Polanyi's notion of "personal knowledge" and H. Gene Blocker's article "The Truth About Fictional Entities", The Philosophical Quarterly (Vol. 24, No. 94, January 1974, pp. 27-36) suggest fruitful approaches for making our escape--on Blocker, see the post of 02-12-12 (below).

Tacit thought "forms an indispensable part of all knowledge," therefore, "the process of formalizing all knowledge to the exclusion of any tacit knowing is self-defeating" [Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 20].

But what is it that we "know" tacitly? Polanyi writes: "Our believing is conditioned at its source by our belonging. And this reliance on the cultural machinery of our society continues through life" [Personal Knowledge, 322]. Such "accidents of personal existence" may have the effect of reducing "all our convictions to the mere products of a particular location and interest." However, they may also serve as "concrete opportunities for exercising ... personal responsibility" towards the claims we take to be both justified and true [ibid].

Polanyi regards the latter approach as one's epistemological "calling." It is a calling to make tacit knowledge explicit and, in the event, achieve epistemological candor--such as the kind modeled for us by Sherman Jackson and the Slavophiles.