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).
[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.
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Poteat claimed, requires not only an intellectual breakthrough but an existential transformation: from a detached, withdrawn attitude and withheld faith and passion to a pouring forth of one's personal presence, empathy, and creative powers into whatever field of inquiry beckons —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.
He had first encountered Polanyi's writing in 1952 through an essay called "The Stability of Beliefs" in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, which was incorporated into Personal Knowledge.
His first published use of post-critical appears to be in "Moustákas Within His Ambience" in Faith and Art 1:4 (1973), republished in The Primacy of Persons and the Language of Culture: Essays by William H. Poteat (1993).
[6] Prior to his encounter with Polanyi in 1955 Poteat had already a general idea of how to move beyond the critical mode, articulating it in a variety of terms and phrases.
Poteat employed a particular pedagogical approach to initiate this post-critical shift in his students that combined an ironic stance, whereby he deliberately made impossible any simple, straightforward taking in of what he might have to convey, with a skillful use of the Socratic method to question, draw out, and bring to light the implications of his students' own thoughts and ideas on the text under consideration and the issues it raised.
Usually these are profoundly confused books, for no author is so likely edifyingly to exhibit his or her embranglement in those very destructive conceptual dualisms which define Modernity as when he or she undertakes to bring them explicitly under attack.
Like any parasite, this essentially polemical convivium has battened on its host, hoping, not to weaken and eventually bring down, but, rather, modestly to change the universities in which it was formed and by whose sufferance it has lived.