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William Poteat acknowledges a profound debt to Michael Polanyi, yet claimed not to be doing Polanyian scholarship. So what was the relationship of the former to the latter? Polanyian motifs important to Poteat include the fiduciary, creativity of knowledge, personal agency, critique of reductionism, and the confessional mode. In addition, Poteat goes beyond Polanyi in his rich humanistic background, his sense of the tragic, the need for a new language and method for philosophy commensurate with the dialectical nature of truth, the concept of “mindbody,” the centrality of speech/orality to human being. I begin with a paradigm of cognitive dissonance: in 1874, at the Paris studio of the photographer Nadar, a group of French painters ostracized by the art establishment exhibited paintings revealing a new approach to seeing the world. Louis LeRoy, the art critic for the weekly paper Le Charivari expressed the view of most of society by describing the show and its shared technique of “Impressionnisme” as “outrageous”— his judgment of works by the artists Manet, Pissarro, Degas, Renoir, Monet, and Cezanne. I suspect many people who read William Poteat’s work for the first time can sympathize with Louis LeRoy—the language, the syntax, the allusions and references Tradition & Discovery: The Journal of the Polanyi Society 42:1 35 are so far removed from their normal readings in contemporary philosophy that they find themselves thinking, if not saying, “Outrageous!” Those who know Poteat’s work have been sensitized to this problem by Poteat himself and the thinkers he studied. We see it in Kierkegaard’s “indirect method,” Wittgenstein’s acknowledgement of the strangeness of his work, Poteat’s own analysis of the residual Cartesianism of Popper, Freud, Steiner, and Percy, and in his repeated warnings that he is not doing philosophy in the usual way—and should not be read that way; indeed, he says at one point, “...dropping out is the most radical philosophical feat” and Poteat certainly “dropped out” of the professional guild of philosophy in many ways. So I begin by suggesting that one of the themes most to be engaged in understanding Poteat, one of the central emblems of his work, concerns how to read him: permeating everything Poteat writes about Michael Polanyi—and other topics as well—is irony, indirection, a double vision. As Poteat himself put it in a strange biographical note he wrote for Duke Divinity School in 1964: “The fact that I have said that all of this about myself is so, makes all of it to be somewhat less than so” (Poteat 1964, 51). Out of sympathy for a “first reader” of Poteat, however, let me introduce my essay in a more conventional way. As part of the focus on Poteat’s relation to Michael Polanyi, this article first surveys quite briefly those “places where Poteat chose to develop his own position in Polanyian language and structures,” in Diane Yeager’s words. It then turns to Poteat’s contributions to philosophy beyond Polanyi that are due to weaknesses in Polanyi’s approach, the radical implications of Polanyi’s thought which remained hidden for most readers, but which Poteat sought to excavate, and finally Poteat’s distinctive motifs which cannot be found in Polanyi’s work per se (Yeager 2008, 31-38). |
