Paths to the Personal

The author is an emeritus professor of religious studies and a practising Quaker who has engaged deeply with a number of radical 20th-century thinkers in his own quest for understanding and wisdom. The early Network member Max Payne who wrote frequently in these pages was taught chemistry by Michael Polanyi at the University of Manchester in the 1950s. Polanyi is more famous as a philosopher, and his Gifford Lectures Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy exerted a considerable counter-influence to disembodied logical positivism. For Keiser in his first semester at Yale Divinity School, the encounter with Polanyi proved decisive, based on the argument that all knowing, including scientific knowing, is personal. On his subsequent journey, he comes across H. Richard Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mircea Eliade and the lesser-known figures of Bill Poteat, Stanley Hopper and Fritz Buri as 'thinkers on the way to post-critical and theopoetic depths.' The basis of post-critical thought is that 'the being of the self is larger and deeper than our mind's reason, and is reason's foundation.' (p. 5) In Polanyi's terms, this means that the critical reasoning of Descartes and Kant 'are in fact sustained upon and activated from the tacit dimension.' The Cartesian split alienated us from both body and world.

The word theopoetic from Hopper focuses on linguistic and religious aspects of the tacit dimension, especially metaphor, myth, story and symbol where the rationalistic ego-self speaks a literalistic language. In this context, personal knowledge sees the self as 'embodied agency, unconsciously committed, relational, linguistic, and creative in all knowing, doing, and being.' (p. 8) The province of religion is the depth of the tacit dimension and the self's relatedness to others in lived experience. The author goes on to situate himself within the modern world but explicitly beyond the Cartesian split that implicitly structures much of modern consciousness. He draws on key concepts from the thinkers already referred to above to elaborate his philosophy, while grounding it in Quaker practice of silent expectation, 'passive attentiveness' and existential trust.

The various chapters provide in-depth coverage of Augustine, phenomenology as post-critical and as a philosophical foundation for peace making, a post-critical perspective on psychology addressing Freud, the theology of Tillich, Niebuhr and Buri, and post-critical and theopoetic dialogue in Poteat, Hopper and Polanyi. Throughout, there is a focus on the inward depth dimension, our sense of belonging and rootedness so absent in our time and which was also explored by Simone Weil. Here and theopoetically, '"God" becomes the name for the reality we experience as Presence, the Whole in which we live, and move, and have our being, elusive encompassing Mystery, not a Supreme Being separate from our tacit depths, an independent Subject we think about it and believe in.' (p. 239) For Polanyi (p. 283), direct contemplation removes the veil of conceptual frameworks in an experience of immersion. Both Wallace Stevens and TS Eliot articulate this sacred indwelling in their mature work. This profound study draws readers 'to dwell in and live from Mystery… within the net of being' that surrounds and pervades us – 'stillness, mystery, presence, creative surge, opening to the currents of love so that we may live fittingly – 'justly, compassionately, abundantly.' (p. 326) Quite so.