Review of Jeffrey Kripal's Superhumanities

The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities. Jeffrey J. Kripal. University of Chicago Press, 2022. 256 pages. $35.00 hardcover; ebook available. The Superhumanities marks a turn in Jeffrey Kripal’s oeuvre from the exploratory and theoretical to envisioning the future possibilities and implications of his work for the academy. This text serves as both a summation of this prolific scholar’s past contributions and a transition to his upcoming historical trilogy on the paranormal and science in America, suggestively and collectively named the Super Story Trilogy. The Superhumanities, then, is in some sense a charter for moving the humanities in a direction wherein such explorations are critically examined, appreciated, and integrated. Or, as Kripal writes in the Introduction, “This book is. . . about why a strong and unapologetically comparative study of extreme and often culturally anomalous human experiences. . . must be central to the transformation of the humanities” (7, original italics). The Superhumanities begins with a short Prologue and Introduction that frame the text as a series of essays while offering the reader some biographical information and anecdotes about Kripal’s specialization in the history of religions and its overall significance. He further flips the script, noting how the current project of decolonization “simply turns everyone else into some pale reflection of the Western academy.” As an alternative, he offers the superhumanities as a means to decolonize reality itself, bringing about “ontological shock” (15). Chapter 1 traces the evolution of “legitimate science fiction” from the history of religion to the superhumanities. Kripal here provides a quick overview of how the idea of the superhuman or “human as two” formed the center of Christianity, African traditions, ancient Egyptian, Greek, Sufi, Buddhist, and subsequent hermetic traditions that gave rise to the humanities themselves. In his “queering” of accepted history through a focus on the “magical,” Kripal lays the historic groundwork to explicate his superhumanities or a recovery of “the fantastic but forgotten dimension of the humanities, which consists of the catalytic presence of altered states of mind and energy that have driven the creative process” (55). The superhumanities are “reflexive—bringing into existence what they are about” (64). After a brief example of Hindu thinking about the nature of the self as two (a real ego and an illusion or manifestation of the One reality), Kripal suggests that the contemporary humanities’ attempts to prop up identity and the self is precisely part of the problem. Chapter 2 is both an investigation into the response of the academy to the superhumanities as Kripal envisions them and a historically-framed rejoinder of the same. Centered around the academic truism, “the truth must be depressing,” he deconstructs deconstruction, advocating for a hermeneutics of trust. Surprisingly, Kripal makes his case through a re-reading of Nietzsche’s mystical experience and William James’ psychical research. He ends the second chapter with a gesture towards co-creative, ontological pluralism based on Richard Shweder’s work, while, typically, claiming a via media between that and ontological atheism. Here Kripal could have and perhaps should have engaged more deeply with Jorge Ferrer and Jacob Sherman’s work on participation as dialogue partners (The Participatory Turn, 2007)—a work he acknowledges in the notes of his earlier works, Authors of the Impossible (2010) and Secret Body (2017). Chapter 3 explicates Kripal’s “apophatic anthropology” that appears as a through line in much of his work, that is, the human as two. By this, he means that a human “can know reality in two very different ways,” namely through common and indirect ways using the senses, and in more direct ways, through direct revelation to consciousness. He traces this anthropology through precedents in various religions, details the destructive nature of forgetting this truth in the academy, and highlights some Western academics who tried to foreground it. Afterwards, he examines the ideas of the human as two and the supernatural through a historical genealogy of Christianity and its lasting, but waning, intellectual impact. Given this chapter’s focus on Christianity and the supernatural, one wonders why there is not more engagement with contemporary Pentecostalism. Kripal then turns to look at Theory as Two in chapter 4. Here he seeks to show the occluded side of critical theory, demonstrating the precedents, origins, and contemporary salvos of the superhumanities. In doing so, he interacts with psychoanalysis, critical race theory, ecocriticism, and queer postcolonialism. Since he personally knows most of the authors he considers here, those personal relationships help frame his sympathetic and admiring tone; he acknowledges his own debt to their work. In the Conclusion and Epilogue, Kripal once more makes his clarion call for the necessity of studying the supernatural and allowing it to decolonize the current nihilism-producing ontology within the humanities. These particular sections are accreted with reflexivity, modeling the type of humility necessary to move forward with such an ambitious project. Kripal’s privileging of the comparative method, however, often downplays if not rescripts what experiencers themselves say about their extraordinary experiences. These new scripts are then recruited to support the human-as-two thesis. It seems quite reductive to explain all paranormal and miraculous accounts as some type of latent human power—a kind of Feuerbach on steroids. I’m not sure why Kripal entirely eliminates the possibility that the gods have ontological status not of our making, despite his gesturing toward ontological pluralism. It’s always and only us (or the “universe”) in his view. This book clearly is written for an academic audience and is probably best suited for faculty and/or graduate students hoping to become faculty in the humanities. The decision of publishers to use endnotes instead of footnotes is baffling—especially for readers who want to immediately access the sources for extraordinary claims without digging through the back of the book. Additionally, the complete lack of a collected bibliography means one has to sort through said endnotes for an overview of the sources. This inconvenience makes it difficult to enact what the text hopes to accomplish. The volume at least has a helpful index. Benjamin D. Crace, Independent Scholar