Post-critical

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Post-critical is a term coined by scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) in the 1950s to designate a position beyond the critical philosophical orientation (or intellectual sensibility). In this context, "the critical mode" designates a way of relating to reality that was initiated in the years preceding the Enlightenment period and since then has become the predominant intellectual mode of Modernity. (See below.) Polanyi's ideas in this regard were extended in the 1960s and thereafter by William H. Poteat (1919–2000), drawing upon and combining in new ways certain ideas of seminal critics of culture since the Enlightenment such as Pascal, Kierkegaard, Arendt, Wittgenstein (later works), and Merleau-Ponty. Those ideas were further extended by several of Poteat's students and by other members of the Polanyi Society.^[1]

As articulated originally by René Descartes,^{[citation needed]} and named much later, the critical mode of inquiry seeks to arrive at the undistorted truth by filtering one's encounter with reality through a lens of extreme suspicion and doubt. Since its emergence as the predominant epistemic paradigm of Modernity, the critical mode has been assailed by many thinkers, including those mentioned previously, for breeding a pervasive skepticism toward higher-order realities and ideals that contributes to an attitude of rootlessness, nihilism, and despair by disparaging meaning, purpose, and value so that they function only as arbitrary or evolved creations of the human mind. Those critics have noted the resulting idolization of reductionistic objectivity to such an extent as to naively overlook the presence of the observer from the observation, and to devalue subjective experience (as opposed to behavior) as a scientific concern.

Advocates of post-critical philosophy assert that the critical perspective, in its idolization of objectivity, tends to lose entirely the dimension of knowing that becomes available only through personal presence, "mindbodily" participation, empathy, caring, and thoughtful hospitality – all aspects of the profoundly personal phenomenon that Poteat and Polanyi refer to as indwelling. Their critique maintains that the critical mode devalues the sensitive and respectful interpretation that takes into account not only the relationship of what and how, but also the relationship of the knower and the known, leaving in its place a colorless, purposeless, meaningless, and exceedingly incomplete world of impersonal objects subject to unchecked manipulation. Further, by judging personal involvement in the process of knowing to be illegitimate, because it adulterates the objectivity of what is to be known, certain inherently personal features of that knowledge are abstracted, including most absurdly the presence of the subject who is doing the knowing, and who is indwelling the context and facts of that knowing. In their view, the critical mode of thinking operates under the unacknowledged presumption that only such a depersonalized relationship can result in unadulterated truth. As a consequence it is for the most part oblivious to the distortions attendant to such an impoverished and reductive relationship.

In the view of both Poteat and Polanyi, the term post-critical (as distinct from postmodern) designates a shift to a profound recognition of something quite different that is unrecognizable by the "critical" sensibility, yet vital to all genuine intellectual inquiry: a tacit methodological faith accompanied by an intellectual passion to discover truth and make sense of one's perceptions. To recognize and embrace this truth, Poteat claimed, requires not only an intellectual breakthrough but an existential transformation: from a detached, withdrawn attitude and withheld faith and passion to a pouring forth of one's personal presence, empathy, and creative powers into whatever field of inquiry beckons — actively reaching out to apprehend and indwell yet-undisclosed intimations of truth and reality.^{[citation needed]}

Instead of attending solely to the what of a topic (an item of content, a teaching, a matter to be subjected to intellectual mastery and critique as an indifferent object of thought), the shift to the post-critical perspective results in an awakening to a continuous awareness of the how of experience – specifically to the how of one's responsive relationship as a person in the world to that experience – to how one happens to be relating oneself to it. That how awareness is predominantly tacit and not articulable within one's mental monologue or otherwise, which causes it to be all the more potentially consequential to the process of knowing.^[2]

Poteat and Polanyi taught that moving beyond what they deemed the profoundly flawed mode of critical intellection and reflection that characterizes Modernity and predominates in the academic world requires a fundamental shift in sensibility and perspective to what they call a post-critical mode of being in the world. They understood the post-critical shift to be the essential antidote and natural successor to the critical approach to knowing and its tendency to lose track of the how of knowing while presuming a relationship of critical suspicion, guarded distance, and objectification to achieve "objective knowledge" from which personal presence and involvement are withheld.

An idea integral to Poteat's articulation of Post-critical philosophy, derived especially from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is the mindbody (a term he coined): persons are neither (simply) minds in bodies nor (simply) bodies with minds, especially not in the discrete form conceived by Descartes. Instead persons are mindbodies, both minds and bodies at once, one and the same, inextricable in every aspect, such that "mind" and "body" taken separately are seriously distorting abstractions from the whole person. According to Poteat, one's mindbody is one's place in the world, the "oriented whence" of all of one's activities and the place by means of which, and only in relation to which, all other places and things can make any sense at all. In other words, the mindbody is the sentient, motile, and oriented self – the active center of every person's life.