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This essay develops aspects and implications of Poteat’s critique of the Enlightenment’s critical paradigm and development of post-critical thinking in dialogue with Pascal in his dissertation and four post-critical thinkers who figured prominently in his project: Kierkegaard, MerleauPonty, Wittgenstein, and Polanyi. Then it critiques from a Poteatian perspective the critical, dualistic, discarnate picture that still dominates the academy, especially attending to the cognitive science of religion. CSR involves both a reductive physicalism involving unconscious mental mechanisms and a re-inscribing of subjectivistic or mentalist (alleged) beliefs in disembodied supernatural and human spirits. This article will analyze the project of William H. Poteat’s career, especially as focused on the themes of embodiment and of the dualistic, discarnate Enlightenment “picture” of human nature and of reality that he found troubling and ultimately insane. This insanity results in the loss of conviction that life is worth living, as modernity’s controlling picture yields a subjectivism or mentalism—either absolutistic or relativistic—that sunders us from our bodies and our embodiment in the world or a physicalism leaving no place for the meaning or the sacredness of human and animal life. Focusing on several key themes/ideas/metaphors, it will make reference to his 1950 dissertation and to the ideas of four post-critical thinkers who figured prominently in Poteat’s teaching and scholarship. Graduate students in Religious Studies during my time there from Tradition & Discovery: The Journal of the Polanyi Society 44:1 7 1977 through 1981 referred to the following as Poteat’s “canonical” thinkers, as Poteat rotated four courses on these four: theologian Soren Kierkegaard, phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein, and philosopher of science and epistemology Michael Polanyi. I do want to emphasize that Poteat taught courses to other cohorts of his students on, and seriously engaged with, other post-critical thinkers. This piece will conclude with an application of Poteat’s concerns to the so-called “cognitive science of religion,” which has gained much currency in recent years. Before delving into the four post-critical thinkers, I will attempt to unpack some of the various but inter-related meanings of being “critical” in the Cartesian Enlightenment sense and by way of contrast of being “post-critical.” Descartes famously split the world into two radically, fundamentally different realities, thinking substances and extended substances. This dualism worked to discarnate human beings whichever pole one focused upon: 1) an internal pure mind unable to find any meaning in the world even as it pictured a god-like external and impersonal vision of things, or 2) a merely physical, spatial, externalized, objectified, de-personalized, machine-like body devoid of any meaning. Thus one absconds or absents oneself from one’s actual minded embodiment in the world. Either pole discarnates one from one’s living body that enacts and discovers meaning in the world. The specifically critical component of Descartes’ picture centers on the demand for certainty. For any belief to count as knowledge it needs to find explicit justification according to formal, reversible logic expressed in clear and distinct ideas. Indeed, one had an obligation to exert one’s utmost effort to doubt before believing anything. Relying acritically on any presumed knowledge was anathema. Given the split between mind on the one hand and body-world on the other and the demand for indubitable knowledge, finding truth and value—finding any meaning—becomes impossible. Plying the mind side of the divide, absolutistic beliefs about oneself or one’s group cannot legitimately withstand such scrutiny; plying the physical side, the critical gaze turns one into a robot. Nihilism results when one unflinchingly approaches the world through this Cartesian picture. To the extent one allows this picture to influence one’s day-to-day living, insanity will be the result. In his essay, “Being Post-Critical,” Dale Cannon notes several aspects of the term “post-critical,” including its opposition to the Enlightenment program. In being postcritical one rejects the Cartesian demand for explicit certainty. This rejection involves a paradigm shift that I will proceed to explicate. The post-critical paradigm refuses the Cartesian program of systematic doubt, where any and all truth and meaning must find explicit justification, must stand up to critical reflection. Instead, one recognizes that one always relies tacitly on knowledge not critically established, including one’s body, language(s), and traditions. I would note here that one’s language and traditions are not separate from one’s embodiment in the world, but function as aspects of that embodiment. Indeed, the post-critical paradigm asserts that there are some things upon which

Curing Dualistic, Disembodied Patterns of Thinking in the Academy