In the English language, the prefix super- basically means “above” or “beyond.” A supermarket, for instance, comprises a dry goods store, a butcher’s shop, a bakery, a deli, and more. A supermarket is super because it is larger and more encompassing than any of those smaller shops. The superhumanities, as described by Jeffrey J. Kripal in The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, and New Realities, are likewise above and beyond the ordinary application and norms associated today with the humanities.
An initial question confronting readers is what, exactly, makes the humanities super. As traditionally defined, the humanities comprise humanistic disciplines (such as history, literature, language, and philosophy) that study human achievement, broadly understood. More recently scholars in the humanities are engaged primarily in a far-ranging, all-consuming critique. Such a one-sided, dour emphasis on critique, Kirpal argues, obscures precisely what is super about the humanities: the experience of particular humans, us, you, and I. The humanities become super when we start to pay attention to the resplendent diversity of humankind without limits.
The richly detailed, multi-layered argument made in The Superhumanities resists easy summation. For this reason, I intend to provide a brief synopsis of Kripal’s overarching argument and then highlight two key points.
Following a short preface and big-picture introduction, Kripal develops a genealogy of the superhumanities (spoiler alert: they’ve been hiding in plain view all along), which he supplements with a five-point description (chapter 1). He discloses the mechanism responsible for obscuring the superhumanities: the collaboration between science and the humanities that aimed originally at quashing the authority of religion, especially the sociological and epistemological forms of Christianity (chapter 2). Kripal then sketches his understanding of the superhuman, the “Human as Two,” provocatively arguing that the Christian tradition is key to grasping the whole of the superhumanities (chapter 3). Finally, he demonstrates one way of practicing the superhumanities—a practice he dubs “theory as two” (163)—as a means of “ontological insurgency” (chapter 4) (209). The conclusion tidily wraps up his argument, and a brief epilogue serves as a bridge to his next book, which is also the first volume of his Super Story trilogy.
The first point I wish to examine concerns the boundary separating the humanities and the superhumanities. When we approach this boundary from the side of the academic humanities, we encounter a breaking point, a structure designed to contain and exclude. Kripal criticizes much of the scholarship and teaching that goes on in the academic humanities for its dreary, one-sided emphasis on critique and accompanying debunking attitude (see 77–84, in particular). This boundary from the side of the superhumanities, however, provides a meeting place where criticism and theory encounter empirical-imaginal ontology. Here we find a structure analogous to the Daoist idea of free and easy wandering.
This use of boundary-as-meeting-place is important because Kripal is not simply calling for the humanities to be relabeled (he makes this point clear in his five-point description of the superhumanities [54–67]). The prefix super- should be read as a fingerpost pointing at “a fantastic but forgotten dimension of the humanities,” an aspect he goes on to gloss in terms of “the catalytic presence of altered states of mind and energy” (55; emphasis in original). “Catalytic presence” points to the power released in experiences of “altered states of mind and energy,” and it can be understood in two senses.
The first is reflexive: deep humanistic study—reading, writing, and dialogue—can produce or “conjure” (14) changes in the person studying, changes over and above the acquisition of facts or literacy regarding a particular text. One well-known example of this is the capacity of literary fiction to cultivate empathy in readers. Likewise, Kripal contends, studying superhumans (as is often done in religious studies) can actuate becoming what we already are. The second sense of “catalytic presence” points to the action of study and inquiry into “new realities,” into the realms of superhuman consciousness, as being “both an expression and advance of this superhuman consciousness: that consciousness is evolving itself in and through such work” (109; emphasis in original). Thus, “catalytic presence” names the release of powers resulting from altered-state experiences. For this reason, the superhumanities are energized by the ongoing catalyzing of human experience, a dynamic process Kripal describes as the “evolution of consciousness coded in culture” (64).
My second point concerns the Human as Two, which Kripal characterizes as “fundamental” to the superhumanities. Key to this idea is the claim that human beings can experience and know reality in two very different modalities. The first is the everyday experience of negotiating the world indirectly by means of different biological and cultural tools, such as the senses, language, and social interaction. The second is the extraordinary experience of being thrown directly into reality (Kripal calls this immediate immersion “rare but real revelations of consciousness”). Consciousness in this second modality is not restricted to the “socialized body-brain” of the first, but appears to be identical with or the source of the “larger biocosmic environment, which is alive” (119; emphasis in original).
Kripal describes the Human as Two as an apophatic anthropology that “fully recognizes and affirms all that can be said and understood with our present modes of knowledge . . . but also recognizes and affirms a basic unsaying (apo-phasis) or supernature that can never be fully said, much less understood and defined” (120; emphasis in original). The Human as Two provides the structure, and the superhumanities provide the means by which these two human dimensions can be related—but, importantly, the connections are meeting places, not points of containment and exclusion. Kripal provides examples of the Human as Two drawn from sources as varied as Arthur Schopenhauer and the Marvel comics character Dr. Strange.
Kripal has written a brave, exciting book that rewards thoughtful discussion, reflection, and engagement. The Superhumanities is a book that changes minds, a book that changes lives. It is, indeed, a book for anyone who is ready to wake up to the divine within.
Stephen Dawson is an associate professor of religious studies and chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Lynchburg.
Stephen Dawson
Date Of Review:
July 31, 2023