The Genealogy of Poteat’s Philosophical Anthropology

Abstract

In this chapter, I want to explore the genealogy of Bill Poteat’s reflections on what he calls “the radix of all meaning and all meaning-discernment, namely, the tonic and ductile mindbody ingenuously dwelling in its world.”1 He was brought to this concept of the mindbody via a radical critique of the dualisms that have long since dominated modern Western intellectual culture. Poteat’s critique was informed by a number of other critics. These interlocutors sort out into two overlapping yet discretely separate lists: 1) philosophers/cultural critics, of whom in addition to Michael Polanyi, there are Blaise Pascal (the critic and opposite of the animus horribilis, Descartes, of whom more later), H. Richard Niebuhr, Soren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Ricoeur, just to cite a few, and 2) several writers/poets, especially Albert Camus, Elizabeth Sewell, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Walker Percy.