WISDOM touch with these altered states. Trauma, illness, danger and death also sometimes constitute major openings to the superhuman dimensions of who and what we already are. What would it mean to reimagine the humanities as the superhumanities? The humanities are already the superhumanities. That is, so many of our revered authors, artists and activists were drawing quite explicitly on these altered states and their gifts. What it would take to transform the present humanities into the superhumanities is a new way of remembering and focusing on those states and then cultivating them in the present and future. Why did the humanities come to exclude the study of “impossible” experiences? I think the humanities came to exclude these things for many reasons, some of them good. The 20th century, for example, saw a fairly dramatic turn to social, political and moral concerns, all of which are perfectly just and important. One underlying assumption has been that the vertical or “super” dimensions of human experience must be excluded or ignored to focus on these immediate concerns. I just think that is wrong.
FACULTY BOOKS
Now Reading The Superhumanities Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities Jeffrey J. Kripal University of Chicago Press, 2022
JEFFREY J. KRIPAL is convinced we’ve all had surreal, otherworldly experiences in our lives, but many of us are too embarrassed to talk about them. Academics, in particular, go out of their way to ignore the uncanny. Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice who has written extensively about such subjects, understands why. He knows firsthand that the social stigma is real. But he believes that humanities scholars are doing themselves — and all of us — a disservice by neglecting this immense part of what it means to be human. In his latest book, “The Superhumanities,” Kripal makes a case for bringing the fantastic back to academia. We spoke to him about what that would entail.
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RICE MAGA ZINE
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You argue that “there is something cosmic or superhuman smoldering in the human.” What do you mean by that? By the “superhuman,” I mean that human beings, and especially wildly creative intellectuals and writers, often experience altered states of consciousness and embodiment, which then result in new ideas and intellectual movements. These altered states are literally “super” in the sense that they transcend or go beyond our ordinary day-to-day thinking and functioning and are not arrived at only through logic or reason: They suddenly appear, and they appear as given. People who are more porous or “on the margins” are generally more in
The New York Times called you “a renegade advocate for including the paranormal in religious studies,” and you acknowledge in the book that you are an outlier. Fair assessment? Yeah, I feel like an outlier often, but I doubt I really am. I always get the question, “How do you deal with the pushback?”, to which I always reply, “What pushback?” I think intellectuals and scientists are often in the closet on this one. That is, they know perfectly well that these extraordinary things happen. They just do not want to sound like the tabloids. And young people, especially young intellectuals, are very interested in exactly this material. The human has always been, and will always be, the superhuman. That’s my deeper point. — JENNIFER LATSON
PHOTO BY JEFF FITLOW