Science Quote by Michael Polanyi

Enlightenment, in Polanyi's hands, isn’t a hero’s march toward clarity; it’s an acid bath. “Process” matters here: not a single discovery, but a long, cumulative machinery of critique that keeps running even when we wish it wouldn’t. Philosophic and scientific “enlightenment” doesn’t merely add knowledge; it changes the rules of legitimacy. Claims once sheltered by the category of faith are forced onto a different stage, where they must perform under cross-examination, evidence, and doubt.

The shrewdness is in “shaken the stability.” Polanyi avoids triumphalist language. Shaking implies disorientation, not liberation. He’s diagnosing a cultural condition: modernity’s most prestigious tools (reason, science, critical philosophy) don’t just attack superstition; they destabilize the social and psychological infrastructure that makes shared belief durable. “Held explicitly” points to public, confessed commitments - creeds, doctrines, civic religions - the kind that organize institutions and moral life. When those are weakened, the vacuum doesn’t automatically fill with better ideas; it often fills with anxiety, cynicism, or politicized substitutes.

Contextually, Polanyi was writing in the shadow of the 20th century’s ideological catastrophes, when “scientific” worldviews were routinely conscripted into certainty-making projects. As a scientist-philosopher, he also resisted the fantasy that science is purely formal and impersonal. The subtext is a warning: if enlightenment erodes faith without acknowledging the tacit, trust-based foundations of knowledge itself, it can leave a society both skeptical and strangely gullible - hungry for new absolutes, because the old ones no longer hold.