Volume 19, Issue 1, 1992/1993
Allen R. Dyer
Pages 31-38
Polanyi and Post-modernism
Post-modernism is receiving much attention, but it is often seen as merely an extrapolation of modernism. Michael Polanyi’s post-critical epistemology offers a useful way of understanding post-modernism. The modern objectivism of critical thought leads to a dead-end dehumanization. Polanyi offers a recovery of the human dimension by demonstrating the ways in which all knowing, especially scientific discovery, requires human participation. An analogy is drawn with post-modern art and architecture, which similarly attempt to recover the human form and traditional or classical ornamentation in a way which goes beyond the sterile abstractness of modernism.