{{Multiple issues, {{refimprove, date=December 2014{{one source, date=December 2014
Receptivity, or receptive agency, is a practical capacity and source of normativity, discussed and developed in various ways by writers such as
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champ ...
Nikolas Kompridis
Nikolas Kompridis (; born 1953) is a Canadian philosopher and political theorist. His major published work addresses the direction and orientation of Frankfurt School critical theory; the legacy of philosophical romanticism; and the aesthetic d ...
, who has argued for its importance to democratic politics, romanticism and critical theory, the term has both ontological and ethical dimensions, and refers to a mode of listening and "normative response" to demands arising outside the self, as well as "a way by which we might become more attuned to our pre-reflective understanding of the world, to our inherited ontologies," thereby generating non-instrumental possibilities for social change and self-transformation.Nikolas Kompridis, ''Critique and Disclosre: Critical Theory between Past and Future'' (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 199-210.