Toward a Post-critical Literary Theory

This essay examines Meaning as Polanyi’s statement on aesthetics. The core of his aesthetic theory emphasizes the power of art to move the imagination. I examine metaphors he uses for this kind of movement—descent along a gradient, indwelling, and transcendence—and suggest implications for literary study. When Charles Taylor spoke to the Polanyi Society in 2015, Stanley Scott made the following observation during the Q and A session: “Polanyi’s idea of a tacit dimension strikes philosophy as a great revelation, and yet it’s sort of old news to poets, writers of scripture, prophets, who tend to speak not in what we today call the language of philosophy and science but in metaphor” (Lowney 2017, 45). He then suggested that understanding the tacit dimension “could be the very lynchpin of recognizing the point at which poetry, philosophy, and science connect” (Lowney 2017, 45). Scott’s comments struck me at the time as articulating something I had felt to be profound about Meaning. What follows is an extended response to Scott’s above observations. As I see it, in connecting poetry, science, myth, and politics, the “old news” faintly echoed in Meaning is that art adorns human life by figuring forth, drawing out, effecting potentialities of individuals and societies. In this way, Polanyi’s thought represents a bridge between earlier conceptions of poetry and new forays into cognitive features of literary experience. At a time when some literary critics are endeavoring to articulate a post-critical literary theory that would counterbalance critique, Polanyi’s views offer a way forward. Perhaps this is because Polanyi’s theory of aesthetics in Meaning—as Tradition & Discovery: The Journal of the Polanyi Society 45:1 © 2019 by the Polanyi Society 5 compiled and aided by Harry Prosch—is not an isolated inquiry relevant only to those of us interested in art; rather, it extends his theory of personal knowing by examining more closely what we mean when we talk about “reality” and by more deeply engaging with the problem of arbitrating between idioms of belief as we seek to distinguish between the real and the illusory. Polanyi’s contribution to the study of art in general and literature in particular is not simply that he offers additional commentary about aesthetic experience or our perception of the beautiful, but that he rehabilitates the notion that art and aesthetic experience helps us to make contact with reality. In other words, he shows us how aesthetic experience and aesthetic value cannot be separated from a tendency of the universe to evoke meaning from us. The Problem of “Aesthetics” One feature of Polanyian aesthetics in Meaning that stands out is its rejection of the common assumption that “aesthetic” is synonymous with “beautiful.” In the chapter on validity in art, he explains that the “cornerstone” of his aesthetic theory is not a beauty that merely pleases but “imaginative experience,” which we might say is a beauty that moves: Aesthetics has spoken through the ages of the harmony and beauty that please us in the arts. But other beauty can also please us. The intellectual beauty of a scientific theory is pleasing, and so is the beauty of a sunset or a woman; and the word ‘beauty’ is used today very freely to praise an ingenious invention, an elegant combination in chess, or a supreme feat of athletics. But these beauties hardly move our imagination, except in terms of special interests of a personal or professional kind. Beauty of this kind is really too harmonious for art, which depends for its self-assertion on bridging incompatible elements by the powers of its imaginative integration (106). The pleasure of undergoing an aesthetic experience is not mere delight at perceiving something harmonious but the pleasure of forming coherences of incompatibles: “To move a man aesthetically is to move his imagination to make such integrations” (106). The distinction here between pleasing beauty and imaginative integration is important. It shifts our orientation from aesthetics as the study of the beautiful—if by “beautiful” we mean something that evokes a particular kind of pleasurable sensation—to the study of that which moves us imaginatively. This aligns him with renewed attention to aesthetics and its recent broadening in scope from analysis of formal, sensual features of art to its embeddedness in larger sociopolitical conditions. For literary studies, the implication of this view of aesthetics is—to echo “what poets have always known”— that literature has the capacity to move us toward (or away from) the truth. This is not,