Post-Critical

Post-Critical is a term coined by scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi (11 March 1891 – 22 February 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 (19 April 1919 – 17 May 2000), a professor of philosophy and religion at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University, 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.

As articulated originally by René Descartes, 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.

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