The Body Has Reasons by culture context

The Body Has Reasons: Tacit Knowing in Thinking and Making Author(s): Mari Sorri Source: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), pp. 15-26 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3333264 Accessed: 17/02/2009 01:43 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=illinois. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

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The Body Has Reasons: Tacit Knowing in Thinking and Making MARI SORRI

An examination of the works of a number of thinkers who have shown interest in this topic proved singularly unrewarding.1 The approaches to this topic that I studied tended to be overly intellectual and not concrete enough; making, as contrasted to thinking, was not taken seriously as a cognitive activity. These thinkers basically held on to the traditional dichotomy drawn between these two human phenomena based on the duality between mind and body introduced by Plato and elaborated by the remainder of Western philosophical activity. They assumed that all knowing is essentially mental in nature, that even such judgments as are made in artistic creation really happen in the mind of the maker and are merely given shape by the body in the work of art itself. Being both a thinker and a maker myself, I find this traditional posture toward knowing in fiaking, and toward the role of the body in cognition, flatly untrue. With respect to the making with which I am involved, that of ceramics, my body frequently knows more than my mind can explicate. In such cases the cognitive process does not arise and develop from the mind to the body, but the other way around. Clearly some other approach to this topic must be found, one which will do justice to the facts known experientially by every person engaged in creative activity. In this article I shall explore a philosophical approach that strikes me as especially promising. In his major work, Personal Knowledge:Towarda Post-Critical Philosophy,2 and in many other books as well, Michael Polanyi sets forth an enlightening and thorough theory of cognition that overcomes the traditional dichotomy between mind and body. He maintains that all human cognition is to a large extent bodily in nature, acquired through a kind of absorption, as it were, and known in a way that largely escapes articulation by the knower him- or herself. The first section of this article will analyze Polanyi's theory of "tacit knowing" by examining it in relation to cognition in general. In the second part I shall show how his theory may be applied to ceramics in particular and to artistic creation in general. MariSorri,a full-timeceramicartist,is an adjunctprofessorof philosophy and art at TheCollege of SaintRose,Albany.She is coauthorof A PostModernEpistemology. Vol. 28, No. 2, Summer1994 JournalofAestheticEducation, ?1994 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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I 1. The first of Polanyi's insights that needs explication is the distinction between focal and subsidiary awareness. He maintains that in all human endeavors we are aware of others subsidiarily. We are focally aware of that to which we are directing our attention and subsidiarily aware of those things that we are directing our attention from or through. By way of illustration, you the reader have been focally aware of the meaning of what you have been reading just now, while being only subsidiarily aware of the kind of type that is being used to print this text. The task of hitting a nail with a hammer might be even more illuminating of the two kinds of awareness. In order to do the job successfully it is necessary to attend focally to driving the nail into the board, while only subsidiarily attending to holding the hammer in one hand and the nail between the fingers of the other hand. One will surely miss the nail, and perhaps hit a finger, if this vectorial direction gets reversed. The focal and subsidiary dimension follows a vectorfrom the subsidiary to the focal. Furthermore, the poles of this continuum are mutually exclusive. This means that one cannot be both focally and subsidiarily aware of the same thing at the same time. However, relative to context one can shift from being subsidiarily aware to being focally aware, and vice versa, of the same thing. My own awareness of the fact that my knees are stiff from sitting too long in one position cannot be part of my subsidiary awareness once I have directed my attention to it. It is now in the foreground or at the focus of my attention. In order to push it back into the background of subsidiary awareness, I must intentionally or unintentionally shift my focus to something else. Polanyi summarizes the two kinds of awareness and the relationship between them in the following way: When we are relying on our awareness of something (A) for attending to something else (B), we are but subsidiarily aware of A. The thing B to which we are thus focally attending, is then the meaning of A. The focal object B is always identifiable, while things like A, of which we are subsidiarily aware, may be unidentifiable. The two kinds of awareness are mutually exclusive; when we switch our attention to something of which we have hitherto been subsidiarily aware, it loses its previous meaning.3 2. The second major distinction at the heart of Polanyi's thought concerns the dimension of human activity. He maintains that all human activity lies somewhere on a continuum between the poles of bodily activity and conceptual activity. Purely bodily activity, for example, is nonverbal in nature, while purely conceptual activity is essentially verbal in character. It should be obvious, however, that the vast majority of human activity is a mixture of these two polarities. In fact, since humans are embodied beings, no activity could be absolutely conceptual in nature, having no bodily

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aspect to it. We cannot leave our bodies behind, as Plato and his intellectualist lineage hoped. The opposite is naturally true as well; it is inconceivable that human life could exist without mental activity of some sort. Of course, there are some situations when we seem to abandon either our mind or our body. For example, in cases of extreme bodily pain or pleasure we seem to "lose our minds," while in the case of a brilliant mathematician on the verge of discovery even the most pressing bodily needs and functions can be entirely forgotten. Normally speaking, however, human activity is clearly a thorough mixture of these two factors, and even the extreme cases eventually yield to the presence of both. An important point that needs to be made in this connection is that all human activity involves the making of judgments. Both conceptual and embodied activity entail discrimination and decision, the crucial features of judgment making. This does not mean, however, that the mind makes the judgments in both cases. For example, in activities such as running, which is admittedly closer to the bodily pole on the activity continuum of human experience, we make judgments continuously. This is especially true when one is running cross-country or running in winter on icy or snowy sidewalks. One's body makes constant adjustments in avoiding rocks, jumping over snow banks, treading carefully on ice, and so forth. Such judgments can be made by the body while the mind is concerned about something else altogether, such as the conversation one is having with a running mate. In these cases we normally speak of our mishaps as resulting from errors in judgment. 3. A third distinction that is central to Polanyi's thought is that between different kinds or dimensions of cognition. Human knowledge, according to him, can be either explicit or tacit in character. When we ask a person such questions as "What time is it?", "What is the capital of Finland?", or "When did Columbus sail the ocean blue?" the answer constitutes a form of explicit knowledge, knowledge that can be articulated conceptually. We all remember from mathematics classes in school that we did not get credit if we were not able to write down the complete formula or distinct steps of the solution to a given problem. It did not make any difference to the teacher if we insisted that we do in fact know or understand the solution even though we cannot put it into words or equations. Explicit knowledge is, after all, explicable, and we are so familiar with it as such that it is generally thought to be the only kind of knowledge there is. Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, involves the kind of knowledge that we cannot fully articulate. In Polanyi's words, "We always know more than we can tell." Knowledge of a skill is an obvious example of tacit knowing. We can be said to know how to ride a bicycle if and only if we can, in fact, ride one. Indeed, a highly theoretical person who can produce the mathematical analysis of bicycle riding but who cannot actually ride a bicycle

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cannot be said to know how to ride a bike. Therefore, having explicit knowledge of a skill is neither sufficient nor necessary for tacit knowing. We need not be able to explain how to ride a bicycle in order to be able to ride it, and being able to explain how to do it does not entail that one can actually do it. As Polanyi says, tacit knowledge is "indeterminate in the sense that its content cannot be explicitly stated."4 Cognition, according to Polanyi, itself constitutes a continuum between the two poles of tacit and explicit knowing. The cognitivity dimension of human experience comes about as a result of the interaction between the two other dimensions already discussed, those of awareness and activity. Both of these dimensions of human existence can be spoken of as continua running between two polar extremes. The awareness continuum extends from the subsidiary pole to the focal pole, while the activity continuum runs from embodied activity to conceptual activity. If we set these two dimensions in relation to each other as intersecting perpendicularly, the corresponding sets of poles can be thought of as interacting with each other so as to form the two poles of this third continuum of cognitivity. Tacit knowing, then, arises out of the interaction between subsidiary awareness and bodily activity, while explicit knowledge is the result of focal awareness interacting with conceptual activity. There are two further aspects of the relation between explicit and tacit knowing that are important to take note of. First, tacit knowing is not only a legitimate form of knowing, but it is a more fundamental, more primordial form of cognition than is explicit knowing, since the latter can and must arise out of the former, but not vice versa. The vectorial structures of our awareness and activity necessitate a corresponding direction to the cognition dimension of human experience. Second, although in many instances what is known tacitly can be focused on explicitly, as when a pianist articulates how the keys are to be manipulated when playing a certain piece of music, not all instances of tacit knowing can be so explicated. Polanyi explains both of these points in the following manner: Things of which we are focally aware can be explicitly identified; but no knowledge can be made wholly explicit. For one thing, the meaning of language, when in use, lies in its tacit component; for another, to use language involves actions for our body of which we have only a subsidiary awareness. Hence, tacit knowing is more fundamental than explicit knowing; we can know more than we can tell and we can tell nothing without relying on our awareness of things we may not be able to tell.5 4. How then is tacit knowing obtained? We all know rather clearly, one presumes, how explicit knowledge is acquired. We learn such things from reading books, listening to and taking notes from people who have explicit knowledge of specific subjects. Learning in schools is made up of gathering various kinds of information through the interaction of our focal attention

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and our conceptual techniques. Acquiring tacit knowledge, however, does not result from the transferring of data from one mind or book to another or from tracing the logic of a syllogism. Rather, it arises from and through what Polanyi calls "indwelling," or the active engagement of the body with the factors comprising our subsidiary awareness. Indwelling is a kind of empathetic participation in whatever it is that one is learning. It is crucial to learning by example, to learning through trial and error, and to learning through the process of apprenticeship. In order to learn a tacit skill, be it various forms of connoisseurship, learning to diagnose an illness, or to read x-rays, it is often necessary to submit to authority. As Polanyi says, "The hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another."6 Advanced chess players, for example, learn by repeating the games and moves that chess masters have already played. A novice learns to cook by imitating the steps and procedures of an experienced chef. Even learning to drive a car with a standard transmission involves a kind of play-acting, pretending to be an accomplished driver. Here the learner "mimics" other drivers, shifting his or her focus from one task to another and back again, all the while relying tacitly on previously acquired bodily skills. The learner sits in the driver's seat and starts pretending, as it were, "dwelling in" the mechanics of the car and its various parts. Little by little the steering wheel, the gearshift, the gas and brake pedals as well as the clutch, become instruments for achieving the driver's purposes rather than mere objects to be manipulated. She indwells them as extensions of her body and eventually is able to focus on things entirely removed from the procedure of driving, such as her conversation with a fellow traveller. 5. As one indwells the various dynamics involved in a given skill, one goes through a series of "integrative acts." An integrative act, according to Polanyi, is a process through which a person tacitly grasps the full meaning or "Gestalt" of a process or task; it is a kind of bodily "Aha-experience." Such acts or experiences are to be distinguished from the inferential reasoning processes of explicit knowing. Here one integrates into a meaningful whole previously unrelated factors or tasks, as when putting together a picture puzzle. For instance, in the case of a medical student learning to read lung x-rays, she learns to see the individual darkened areas as part of an overall pattern by being exposed to many such x-rays in the presence of and in conversation with an experienced specialist. In this kind of integration of formerly meaningless and random particulars into a recognizable disease pattern, the student will most likely not be able to pinpoint exactly when it was or how it was that she was able to master the skills involved, nor will she be able to explicate any formulas for so doing. However, she can be confident, as can we, in saying that she now knows how to read x-rays.

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It is necessary, of course, for the learner acquiring tacit knowledge to practicecontinually the integration of the parts into a whole in order for this integration to become a reality. Integrative acts do not take place in a vacuum; one learns to swim by swimming. As Polanyi states with respect to medical learning: "Only clinical practice can teach [a medical student] to integrate the clues observed in an individual patient to form a correct diagnosis of an illness."7 So far we can say, then, that tacit knowing is the result of the interaction between bodily activity and subsidiary awareness. It is the basis for all explicit knowing, which in turn arises out of the interaction between focal awareness and conceptual activity. Tacit knowing is acquired through the process of indwelling, which produces a series of integrative acts that give rise to a comprehensive grasp of that which is being cognized. It remains to be asked, finally, how one confirms or disconfirms claims of tacit knowing. 6. It is relatively simple to tell whether or not a person has explicit knowledge of something. Explicit verification is generally a matter of giving the right answer to a specific question. This is not the case, however, with tacit knowing. With tacit knowing it is a matter of demonstratingthat one knows or has a given skill or knowledge; it is a matter of showing, rather than telling, that one knows. For example, how do we decide whether or not a person knows how to ski? The person must be able to ski and actually to do so. A more difficult question is, How well does a person need to ski in order to be called a "skier"? Here we have the tricky task of deciding what the appropriate criteria are and when they have been met. Even more difficult is the issue of deciding who decides on these questions themselves and on what bases. Is it a matter, as in the case of diagnosing an illness, of being right 50 percent of the time or 67 percent of the time before one can be said to be a skier or to know that such a person is a skier? The difficulty here is that there are no explicit criteria to be applied in cases of tacit knowing. On the contrary, with respect to tacit knowing the judging is and can be done only by those persons who have been accepted as authorities in the appropriate field of concern. Such "experts" constitute the ongoing community of those who know and care about such matters. The tacit knowledge of such experts cannot be confirmed through any "litmus paper" tests, and hence the criteria involved necessarily remain open-ended and flexible. The knowledge involved, however, is nonetheless real and trustworthy. In few if any fields is it possible to replace the judgment of the community of authorities with objective criteria. Such experts do, to be sure, regularly disagree among themselves, but a consensus generally and eventually prevails. The lack of objective standards in such cases does not leave the question of the criteria for tacit knowing in a "subjectivist predicament." Polanyi addresses the issue in this way:

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What then can we do? I believe to make this challenge is to answer it. For it voices our self-reliance in rejecting the credentials both of medieval dogmatism and modern positivism, and it asks our own intellectual powers, lacking any fixed eternal criteria, to say on what grounds truth can be asserted in the absence of such criteria. To the question 'Who convinces whom here?' it answers simply "I am trying to convince myself." ... we must accredit our own judgment as the paramount arbiter of all our intellectual performances.8 Convincing oneself necessarily involves making a claim for truth with what Polanyi calls "universal intent." One makes a claim to knowledge with the intention that it will be accepted as true by those who know and care about the issues and realities involved. The claim aims at being true universally, not merely for me here and now. Thus knowledge in the tacit dimension is mediated through the confidence and judgment of the individual as a member of a broader, truth-seeking community. As Polanyi puts it: "The freedom of the subjective person to do as he pleases is overruled by the freedom of the responsible person to act as he must."9 II It is time now to see how Polanyi's theory of tacit knowing can be applied to artistic creation in general and to ceramics in particular. In my view, the kind of knowing that takes place in artistic making seems to have all the characteristics of the tacit dimension of cognitivity as presented by Polanyi. The basic experience of knowing something tacitly, of knowing more than one can tell, is frequently reported by artists when they are asked to speak about their work. Let me now speak more specifically and personally about tacit knowing in the arts as it is manifest in the process of making ceramics. Perhaps the best way to proceed is to follow the step-by-step outline that I used in the first part of this essay. First, then, I shall discuss the two kinds of awareness involved, second the two kinds of activity, and third the two resulting dimensions of cognitivity. Next I shall explore how artistic knowledge is acquired through indwelling and integrative acts, and finally how knowing in art/ceramics is confirmed. 1. Since the general point has been affirmed that artistic knowing is basically tacit in nature, it might seem that an artist can be aware only subsidiarily. However, an artist is always aware both focally and subsidiarily. The question now becomes, What are the specific objects of these two kinds of awareness? What does a painter focus on when painting, and what sort of things are being relied on in the background? The success of a work depends on the artist being aware of the right things in the appropriate mode of awareness. It will not do, for instance, for a painter to be focally aware of how to hold the paintbrush. Likewise, it will not do for an artist to

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be focally aware of the overall effect rather than the specific features of the work in progress. In making ceramics I have gone through a process of first being highly focally aware of many things simultaneously and then of having these same things gradually slide into my subsidiary awareness. As I was first learning to throw on the potter's wheel I had to be focally aware of everything. What was the correct position of the hands? What was the correct speed of the wheel? How much forward pressure of the left hand and how much downward pressure of the right hand was appropriate when centering a lump of clay on the wheel head? When to add more water before the dryness of the hands would drag on the clay and throw it off center? All these factors and many more are part of the focal awareness of the beginning potter. At first it seems as if there is absolutely nothing in one's subsidiary awareness. One almost feels that even the normal subsidiary awareness that one enjoys of his or her own body is now being made focal. For example, it used to happen to me regularly that the little finger of my left hand, which works on the inside of the pot, would somehow stick out when I was concentrating on pulling the wall of the pot up. This would create a groove on the floor of the pot, even to the point of breaking it altogether. Then I learned to focus on my little finger as well and to keep it bent and out of the way. Since it is impossible to center one's focal attention on many things at once, it is inevitable that the beginner will actually become a bit awkward with normally simple tasks. Little by little these multiple foci become part of the experienced potter's subsidiary awareness. Then it is possible to shift one's focus to the shape and design of the piece and to be but subsidiarily aware of such things as the speed of the wheel and the moisture of the clay. Now it is possible to focus on the functional and aesthetic qualities of the work, such as the strength of the handle, the shape of the spout, and the relation of the foot to the overall lines of the pitcher. 2. Polanyi describes the human activity dimension as being a bipolar, vectorial continuum. The direction of the vector is from the bodily activity pole toward the conceptual activity pole. Purely bodily activity, it will be recalled, is characterized as nonverbal, while conceptual activity is primarily verbal in nature. In addition, all activities, whether bodily or conceptual, involve the making of judgments. It will be helpful to have this summary of the activity dimension in mind during the following discussion of its operation in the process of creating pottery. Human activity in the making of ceramics is both bodily and conceptual in character. However, the bodily aspects seem to overshadow the conceptual. One of my pottery teachers said to me once that if you can ride a horse you can throw a pot. I did not quite understand the comparison at the time, especially since I cannot ride a horse. Now, however, I think I understand what she meant. To be a potter one must be in touch with one's body, must

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feel at home in it, in order to be able to extend it outward and use it as a tool. One situation where the body needs to be used instrumentally, as a tool, is when one is centering a lump of clay on the wheel. Learning how to center is for all beginners both the hardest and most important skill to master. If the clay is not centered properly, nothing of any significance can be accomplished. Another facet of bodily activity and judgment in ceramics is what I experience as a dialogue taking place between my body and the clay. This tactile dialogue happens all the time in the process of pulling up the walls of a cylinder. What takes place is actually a three-way conversation between the two hands that work opposite each other and the clay being sandwiched between them. The fingers get "messages" from the clay as to how hard they can press the clay in and up. If the fingers press too hard, the wall becomes too thin at the bottom and cannot bear the weight of the top. Then either the bottom collapses or the top gets separated from the rest of the pot. Both bodily and conceptual activity in ceramics involve the making of judgments. As was mentioned earlier on, it is important to acknowledge that judgment making is not the sole prerogative of the mind. Thus bodily judgments are every bit as cognitive as mental ones are. There are many examples of the body making judgments in ceramic activity. For instance, when throwing a slab of clay by hand, the grip of the fingers on the edge of the slab of clay must be both very gentle and very firm. If you hold on too tightly, you will rip the thin clay sheet, while if you hold on too lightly, the clay will wrinkle when it hits the table. Here the fingers themselves must learn to know the precise force of the appropriate grip. The body also makes a judgment when picking up a freshly thrown bowl off the wheel head. It is so easy to press too hard and alter the rim so much that it stretches and loses its form. I have found that the less you allow your mental, conceptual judgments to participate in this process, the better off you are. It is best to trust your body's ability to make the correct judgment when it comes to these kinds of tasks. 3. Another way to speak of bodily judgment making is to say that the body knows what to do in these situations. This brings us to Polanyi's third distinction, that between the two poles of the cognitivity dimension, namely explicit and tacit knowing. With respect to cognition in ceramics, it seems to me that the emphasis is on the tacit end of the continuum. This, in fact, appears to be quite logical, since it turned out that the kind of awareness which predominates in creative activity is subsidiary in nature, while the kind of activity is essentially bodily. As we saw earlier on, tacit knowing is the outcome of the interaction between bodily activity and subsidiary awareness. In tacit knowing one knows more than one can tell. In ceramics this is very true. Potters are constantly doing things that they cannot fully explain.

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This is frequently quite frustrating to both the teacher and the student of ceramics. Very often as a teacher one ends up making only negative comments to students about their work because it is impossible to articulate positively how something is to be done. The fact that tacit knowing is never fully articulable is clearly manifest in the process of centering clay on the potter's wheel, for there is no way to say how this is done. A potter simply comes to know when and how centering takes place. In between articulable formulas of explicit knowledge and almost completely nonverbal tacit knowledge in ceramics, as in other forms of making, there is a middle ground of cognitive activity. This partly tacit, partly explicit knowing is, appropriately enough, partly articulable. The sort of language used in this middle-ground range tends to be metaphoric in nature. Here knowers are forced to speak indirectly rather than directly, because subsidiary awareness does not submit to conceptual precision. One finds oneself saying things like, "Try to think about it like this ...," or "Think of it as if...." In my own work I find myself looking for images that will say what I want to say without actually saying it. For example, in teaching to use a trimming tool it has proven helpful to say to a student that she needs to think of her right hand and arm as an extension of the tool. In other words, the right hand should be used as if it were not able to do anything on its own, it needs to be guided entirely by the left hand. Also, when using a tool to make surface incision decorations on a freshly thrown pot, it is helpful to think of the pot as a balloon. You cannot poke at the pot, and you cannot push too hard on the walls, since to do so would break the surface tension of the pot, even as it would break that of a balloon. 4. Learning such skills as centering, pulling, and trimming, learning to judge when the "greenware" is ready for firing, or learning to know when the flame of the reduction firing is the proper color are all achieved through indwelling, through immersing oneself in the particulars of one's subsidiary awareness by means of bodily activity. This, in turn, gives rise to a series of integrative acts, which yield increasingly more comprehensive knowledge of the making of ceramic art. Typically, the novice first puts herself in the learning situation and begins by imitating the teacher, that is, she starts behaving as if she already knew how to make pottery. Little by little, after much practice and repetition, the student comes to grasp some aspects of the given skills, that is, integrates individual particulars of the processes involved into meaningful wholes. After a series of such integrative experiences, one acquires the skills in their totality. After even further practice, the newly acquired skills become part of the person's bodily cognition and can properly be said to indwell the learner, who has now become the knower. 5. In art the concept of beauty or of the success of a given work plays an important role. Learning to know when an object of art is truly good is, at best, extremely difficult. We cannot list a series of requirements that, if met,

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will guarantee that a work is beautiful. The skill of being able to know when an artwork is good or bad is also learned tacitly through practice and the process of integration. It may be said that the success of a sculpture of a human body, for instance, is ultimately known by means of a kind of bodily indwelling. Thus we may say that we know the successful posture of a sculpture empathetically in our own bodies. Rhys Carpenter claims that this kind of knowing also takes place in appreciating architecture, perhaps even more so because we can actually go inside the space enclosed by a building, which we cannot usually do with sculptures. This kind of knowing from the inside is also apparent in ceramics. The successful pot somehow resonates with one's body. When a pot has good "posture," the prehender seems to stand straighter as well. You can almost feel the strength or weakness, the heaviness or fragility, the gracefulness or "stumpiness" of a ceramic work in your own body. In fact, often one tends to use his or her own posture or the feel of one's fingers against themselves as a guide, through indwelling, for evaluating a particular work. 6. The above account explains something of how confirmation takes place on the individual level with respect to a work of art. At a more general level, it can be said that such subjective confirmation is not sufficient in the broader world of the arts, for here one must also seek some degree of public affirmation in order to develop as an artist. Necessarily, then, an artist creates with the intention that what is created will work intersubjectively, if not objectively, not merely subjectively. In fact, at the most basic level, in order for a work to be understood, let alone appreciated, it must, in Polanyi's words, "claim universal validity for the personal self-set standards which it obeys."'l Art is, after all, a social as well as an individual enterprise. As is the case with the confirmation of any claim to tacit knowing, the decision concerning the acceptance of a work of art as successful is an openended and flexible one. The judgment of the experts may be different at different times, and the criteria for judging works of art can be only loosely identified, leaving a good deal of room for expectations and innovation. In such a context it is necessary to stress the notion of universal intent in order to keep the whole process from sliding down the slippery slope of subjectivism. It is this universal intent, or search for shared truth, that is the sign of the relative staying power of an artistic achievement. In conclusion, Polanyi's theory of tacit knowing has turned out to be a very helpful and right-headed tool in the exploration of cognition, both in the mode of thinking and in the mode of making. By construing human cognition as a continuum between tacit and explicit knowing, and by thus integrating the crucial dimensions of mind and body, Polanyi has created an epistemology that both negates the traditional dichotomy between mind and body and avoids the pitfalls of the modern separation between thought

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and action. Furthermore, by maintaining that tacit knowing is more fundamental than explicit knowing, Polanyi promotes intuitive and creative activity in the making process to a level that it does not usually enjoy in philosophical circles. In the foregoing pages I have attempted to demonstrate how fruitful his approach is when applied to the making of ceramics in particular. One thinker who may be interpreted as having anticipated Polanyi's insights is Blaise Pascal, when he suggested that "the heart has reasons which reason knows not of." For the purpose of this essay, I take the liberty of adapting Pascal's statement to read: "The body has reasons ...."

NOTES 1. Rudolph Arnheim, VisualThinking(London:Faberand Faber,1969);Andrew Harrison,MakingandThinking(Indianapolis:Hackett,1978);CarlR. Hausman, MetaphorandArt (Cambridge,U.K.:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1989);and V. A. Howard, Artistry: The Workof Artists (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989).

2. MichaelPolanyi,PersonalKnowledge (New York:Harperand Row, 1964). 3. Ibid.,Preface. 4. MichaelPolanyi, KnowingandBeing,ed. MarjorieGrene(Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress, 1969),p. 141. 5. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge,Preface.

6. Ibid.,p. 53.

7. Polanyi, Knowing and Being, p. 125. 8. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge,p. 265.

9. Ibid.,p. 309. 10. Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning(Chicago:University of Chicago Press,1975),p. 102.