Seeing, Saying, And Being the Gestalt: Continuing Investigations on Wittgenstein and Polanyi on the Concept of the Person‪.‬

In 'Wittgenstein and Polanyi on the Concept of the Person', (1) Philip A. Rolnick raises issues of central philosophical importance. The nature of the world, the nature of the person, how the person knows the world, itself, and others, and what it can say about what it knows, are all embedded in his discussion. (2) The issues that I take up here are, first, whether or not there exists, for Wittgenstein, such an entity as a person, whom we might legitimately have conceptions about; second, if there is such a person, whether or not we can say anything about it or how we know it without 'gassing' nonsense; and third, what challenges Wittgenstein presents for Polanyi's epistemology and conception of the person. If we take seriously Wittgenstein's anti-objectivism and Polanyi's own emphasis on the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge, there will certainly be limitations on discussing the person that will not apply to ordinary objects and actions. This is to be expected to the extent that we mean to express a concept that captures our first person experience of the world rather than a third person description of it. The radical inexpressibility present in Wittgenstein's thought leads immediately to apparent shortcomings that Polanyi's concept of the person militates against, but Polanyi's approach also appears to draw us into quandaries that Wittgenstein avoids.