Polanyi’s book Meaning has continued to play on my mind since recently making a little book of drawings and my recent post The Lost Power of an Explicated Metaphor. Specifically, it’s his examples of skills that require a number of levels that have stayed with me (these he presents as indicators of how the mind-body problem is resolved), particularly his example of the hierarchical levels involved in the production of an oral communication.
In this example, Polanyi describes how such a communication requires a complex hierarchy that begins, at the lowest level, with phonetics (or it could be even lower than that, with phones). Words, in turn, are constructs of these phonemes. At the next level, combining the words into sentences requires use of a grammar. The sentences are subsequently fitted into a style (the next level) that best communicates the ideas. And then, the style of presentation serves the ideas, the content, that the speaker wants to communicate. As Polanyi says:
…the operations of a higher level cannot be accounted for by the laws governing the particulars, which form the next-lower level. You cannot derive a vocabulary from phonetics; you cannot derive a grammar from a vocabulary; a correct use of grammar does not account for good style; and a good style does not supply the content of an oral communication. (Polanyi’s italics)
Polanyi’s view is that any level controls the boundary conditions that are left undefined by the next lower level. “The mind relies for its working on the continued operation of physiological principles, but it controls the boundary conditions left undefined by physiology”.
The necessity that the boundary conditions limiting the operation of a set of lower-level principles must be different from these principles means that the mind can readily be understood to serve as a set of such boundary conditions for the laws of neurophysiology. Though rooted in the body, the mind is therefore free in its actions from bodily determination – exactly as our common sense knows it to be free.
Although the content of the chapter from which these quotes were taken (“Reconstruction”) is based on lectures given in 1969, the topic is for me high relevant today, as psychotherapy grapples with both neurophysiology and neuropsychology.
Let’s just not fall into the trap that there’s some causal relationship between the functions and behaviours of the lower level (neurophysiology) and those of the higher (mind) – “the operations of a higher level cannot be accounted for by the laws governing the particulars, which form the next-lower level”.
Here’s a drawing (Hierarchical Levels of an Oral Communication after Polanyi, pen and coloured pencil on paper, 18 x 30 cm) of the levels in Polanyi’s example. I’ve tried to depict something about the mysteries that take place, moment by moment, as we articulate, particularly when this articulation is part of a conversation with another. The energies within these repeated movements between levels I see as connected, as well, to a deeper level, a noumenal field from which the dyad in conversation arises.
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You raise interesting examples Reuben. I’m thinking of the Pollack we have in Canberra: Blue Poles. The thing for me is that it’s a whole, a Gestalt, and there’s a mystery about that gestalt that can’t be adequately defined by describing its constituents – be they at the level of gesture and drip or at the level of the materials involved. I see Polanyi as holding poetry and the arts in general in such high regard (equivalent to science) that deconstructive “explanations” will never define or explain a real work. Oh, the tag… thanks, will investigate.
“the operations of a higher level cannot be accounted for by the laws governing the particulars, which form the next-lower level”
This seems to apply to visual or art communication too, to a degree. But it makes me wonder… do you think that ’style’ can be content. When I look at Jackson Pollack it seems that the style and vocabulary, (drip, all-over etc.) IS the content. Also in some late Renaissance paintings the content became, for the artist, an excuse to exercise his style –which then was the ‘real’ or esoteric content. It seems that way with some speakers too who are said to “be all style and no content” but then isn’t style content? And that may apply to some writers too, like Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake. Or, what if an artist were to hang mirrors in gallery alla duChamp –what would the content of the mirror be? But I have a hunch that I’m way off on this one. Am I missing something?
And oh, ahem, btw, pssst –you’ve been tagged.:
http://headwrapper.blogspot.com/