"If we treasure our own experience and regard it as real, we must also treasure other people's experience"
About this Quote
To value your own experience as real commits you to valuing the experiences of others. John Charles Polanyi, the Canadian chemist who shared the 1986 Nobel Prize for revealing how molecules collide and react, presses an ethical and epistemic reciprocity: you cannot claim authority for your perceptions while denying others the same dignity. Doing so would shrink reality to a private enclave and make conversation impossible.
The line resonates with Polanyi's public life as a scientist engaged in peace, human rights, and the responsibility of knowledge. It also echoes a family inheritance; his father, Michael Polanyi, argued that all knowing contains a personal, tacit element. If knowledge always bears the imprint of the knower, then listening across differences is not a courtesy but a necessity for getting the world right.
Treasure does not mean uncritical acceptance. It means taking experiences seriously enough to inquire, test, and integrate them into a shared picture. Science embodies this stance: results gain strength when they are reproduced by many labs, and anomalies are treasured because they may reveal a deeper pattern. Patient-reported outcomes, field observations by non-specialists, and indigenous ecological knowledge expand the empirical base, not by suspending standards but by widening what counts as relevant evidence.
The principle is equally urgent in public life. Democracies depend on citizens who can acknowledge the reality of harms and hopes they have not personally endured. Without that imaginative discipline, debates harden into accusations of unreality. Treasuring others' experience is the precondition for resolving conflict through reason rather than force.
Polanyi suggests a way to hold firm to truth without collapsing into relativism: start by granting that other people inhabit a real world too, then use shared methods, critical scrutiny, and empathy to build common ground. The payoff is both moral and practical. Knowledge deepens, communities cohere, and reality becomes larger than the view from any single vantage point.
The line resonates with Polanyi's public life as a scientist engaged in peace, human rights, and the responsibility of knowledge. It also echoes a family inheritance; his father, Michael Polanyi, argued that all knowing contains a personal, tacit element. If knowledge always bears the imprint of the knower, then listening across differences is not a courtesy but a necessity for getting the world right.
Treasure does not mean uncritical acceptance. It means taking experiences seriously enough to inquire, test, and integrate them into a shared picture. Science embodies this stance: results gain strength when they are reproduced by many labs, and anomalies are treasured because they may reveal a deeper pattern. Patient-reported outcomes, field observations by non-specialists, and indigenous ecological knowledge expand the empirical base, not by suspending standards but by widening what counts as relevant evidence.
The principle is equally urgent in public life. Democracies depend on citizens who can acknowledge the reality of harms and hopes they have not personally endured. Without that imaginative discipline, debates harden into accusations of unreality. Treasuring others' experience is the precondition for resolving conflict through reason rather than force.
Polanyi suggests a way to hold firm to truth without collapsing into relativism: start by granting that other people inhabit a real world too, then use shared methods, critical scrutiny, and empathy to build common ground. The payoff is both moral and practical. Knowledge deepens, communities cohere, and reality becomes larger than the view from any single vantage point.
Quote Details
| Topic | Respect |
|---|
More Quotes by John
Add to List
