Toward the Recovery of Common Sense in a Post-critical Intellectual Ethos

The modern critical tradition’s strategy for defeating the demon of self doubt and securing certainty, as Hannah Arendt has written, restricts serious candidates for belief to those whose conditions of truth can be rendered wholly immanent to focal consciousness within a point of view that is simply taken for granted. Thereby it forecloses the possibility of recognizing the partiality of its own perspective vis-a-vis that of others, taking into account the relevant perspectives of other persons, and reaching any kind of sense in common between perspectives. The institutionalization of this strategy in 20th century academic life is amply and insightfully documented in Bruce Wilshire’s Moral Collapse of the University. Michael Polanyi, in his writings, adumbrates a post-critical intellectual ethos in which the making of sense in common between persons of differing perspective is central to the enterprise of teaching, learning, and research. Key elements of such an intellectual ethos are articulated and explored. My remarks here grow out of nearly a quarter century of wrestling with what Polanyi referred to by the phrase, “towards a post-critical philosophy,” in the sub-title of Personal Knowledge. Polanyi’s words imply that he was seeking to articulate a post-critical philosophy, and that implication I have no wish to deny. However, it seems clear that it was not just toward a post-critical philosophy that Polanyi was aiming. Just as much or even more so, I believe, Polanyi was seeking to articulate a vision of a post-critical intellectual ethos, a context and style of intellectual life, a “convivial order,” that would be free of the inordinate critical passions and objectivist epistemology that plague the modern critical ethos and render it so problematic and unconvivial. I should make plain at the start that my interest here is less with what Polanyi has said and written than with the enterprise with which I understand Polanyi was engaged and with which he solicited others’ engagement: namely, fostering the emergence of a post-critical intellectual ethos. My shift of emphasis from “a post-critical philosophy” to “a post-critical intellectual ethos” is meant to broaden the focus from the individual knower in the abstract to the knower in community with other knowers, and from a specific philosophical viewpoint that may or may not be shared by other philosophers to Polanyi’s account of what it means to indwell a given theoretical framework alongside of others who may happen to indwell quite distinct theoretical frameworks. It strikes me that most scholarship on Polanyi has focused on the former to the relative neglect of the latter, with the result that little of Polanyi’s work has been used to illuminate our own lives in the academy and the roles that