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A Continental Philosophy of the Academic Study of Religion

2024; Wiley; Volume: 50; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/rsr.17263

1748-0922

Kevin Schilbrack,

Religious Education and Schools

TOWARD A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES: ENECSTATIC EXPLORATIONS. By Jim Kanaris. Albany: SUNY Press, 2023. Pp. 210. Cloth: $99.00. Unlike traditional philosophy of religion, a "philosophy of religious studies" would offer philosophical reflection not on religious beliefs, practices, experiences, and institutions, but instead on how academics study such things. As an inquiry into inquiries, it might include the examination of what is involved in the scholarly practices of interpreting, explaining, defining, and comparing religions. It also might include the examination of our field's assumptions about the relationship between, for example, belief and practice, meaning and culture, history and tradition, or social forms and individual agency. Analogous to the more-established "philosophy of the social sciences," interest in this reflexive critique of the study of religions has been growing over the past decade or two. Jim Kanaris is a continental philosopher of religion who draws on Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and, above all, the Jesuit hermeneutical theologian Bernard Lonergan to develop his own position on the philosophy of religious studies. He is also the author of Bernard Lonergan's Philosophy of Religion: From Philosophy of God to Philosophy of Religious Studies (SUNY 2002), the subtitle of which includes one of the earliest examples of the phrase. In the book under review, Kanaris collects his recent essays on this emerging field (with the repetition one sometimes sees in such collections). As the word "Toward" in the book's title suggests, these essays do not offer a philosophy of religious studies; that is, they do not address the questions mentioned above, but they analyze what the foundations of what such a project should be. Kanaris calls his project a "propaedeutic" (x, 5, 122) and a "precondition" (132) that prepares one for but does not yet tackle an examination of the tools used specifically in religious studies (135). The book's central thesis is that many religious studies scholars think of what they do as the nontheological analysis of religion, but there will always be an engaged or personal dimension implicit in the assumptions that shape how they understand their object of inquiry and their relation to it. This means that normative commitments are always already operating in the field, and, in this sense, there is a form of academic or non-confessional theology that cannot be excluded from religious studies. Making engaged normative judgments—"theology," in this loose sense—is unavoidable, "an integral feature of language itself" (79). Therefore, Kanaris argues that the philosophy of religious studies can be "enecstatic." Building on Heidegger's discussion of the word "ecstasy" as etymologically an ex-stasis (i.e., a standing outside oneself), Kanaris adds the "en-" prefix to name the "in" feature of self-involvement. He often describes his enecstatic proposal through Heideggerian language: "The ecstatic essence of existence in ontotheology is properly speaking a standing out and does not contain the primordial significance of ecstasis understood ontologically, which is a 'standing-in' in the openness of Being, 'of enduring and out-standing this standing-in (care), and of out-braving the utmost (Being-toward-death)'" (13; also 123 and 136). Some may be put off by this way of writing, but Kanaris also describes his position in the traditional terms of philosophy as the love of wisdom: "Wisdom seeking meaning, truth, beauty, and practice is . . . part and parcel" of philosophizing about how we study religion (71). Put otherwise, the term enecstasis reflects the fact that Kanaris adopts Pierre Hadot's understanding of philosophy as a spiritual discipline as a legitimate foundation for the philosophy of religious studies (53–4). In a good analogy, he writes that an enecstatic approach sees the scholar of religion as simultaneously involved in religion, like "poets and fiction writers who teach English, . . . composers who teach music, . . . [and] clinicians who teach psychology" (19). Kanaris says that university students who assume that the study of religion requires them to leave their values at the door feel empowered by this alternative approach. There will be plenty of academics who continue to resist the proposal that the academic study of religion should include "theological" projects to improve the world or to improve oneself. Others will be sympathetic to Kanaris' argument that "religious studies involves or ought to involve more than historical and seemingly impartial social-scientific analysis" (25) and his defense of what I take to be a classical liberal arts position on the role of values in education. However, the sympathizers then have to ask: so, what norms should shape the academic study of religion? Kanaris' approach limits what he can say about what is good or bad for anyone other than himself. The primary normative task seems to be to "problematize" the assumptions operating in the field (7). The strategy is "to destabilize the discourse" (80). He denies that this Derridean strategy is simply "relativism to free us from logocentrism" (80), but he uses the verb "disrupt" more than a dozen times. However, the sympathizers' question remains: we should problematize, destabilize, or disrupt the discourse—in the service of what? Given his reticence to speak of "the good," Kanaris can only say that enecstatic approach leads "in different directions" (72). The answer will be "determined by personal interests" (123). He has a paragraph detailing how each scholar "will have to decide for herself" (75; repeated word for word, 113). Enecstasis means that people must "personalize [the study of religion] for themselves. That is why I give so much traction to the notion of singularity" (xiv). I am one of the sympathizers. Whether or not one calls it "theology," Kanaris is right that the work of a scholar of religion, no matter how scientific, will be governed by implicit norms, and it can be important to bring those norms to light. Kanaris is also right that the norms operating in a study of religion, no matter how scientific, will be "subject-constituting" in that they shape the life of the scholar, and it can be important to ask what kind of subject is being constituted. But one cannot identify the norms that deserve to be disrupted unless one has a sense of what a good norm looks like. It seems that Kanaris has his own views of the norms that he thinks should govern the academic study of religion. At one point, he says that a scholar's normative commitments can "become a potentially cancerous metaphysics that metastasizes into [a research program]" (4). What Kanaris personally wants to disrupt is the view that "equates knowledge with science and analytic philosophy" (8). But he does not give any reasons for these preferences. Perhaps, given his understanding of deconstruction, he cannot. Kanaris recommends Derrida's reflections on religion as a resource for a philosophy of religious studies, in particular, the claim that a sense of obligation and responsibility is "at bottom . . . an act of 'religion,' an act of faith" (83). This "pure act," the "universal and transrational" form of faith, "falls in the interstice, the χώρα, between belief and knowledge" (81). Given this "paradoxical and idiosyncratic" (xiii) understanding of a philosophy of religious studies, it is no surprise that Kanaris never argues that others ought to accept his proposal. As he puts it, enecstasis simply "provides the parameters" for asking normative questions, not for how to answer them (147). Enecstasis is not concerned with the "what" of what we should take as true, but only with the "how" of how we embrace or reject our views (77). This diffident aspect of his proposal is problematic. I do not think that one has identified a legitimate question unless one also has some criteria for what the answers should look like. I do not think that one can embrace or reject some set of views independent of what one takes as true. For this reason, I hope that Kanaris presses on past the propaedeutic stage. A vision of religious studies as a field in which each scholar pursues their own personal, singular, or idiosyncratic values does not sound like a collaborative intellectual project, and an educational institution will want those within it to be able to explain why their work is valuable to more than just themselves. The question of the place of "theology" in the academic study of religion has been a tricky one to answer. It is clear that Kanaris is not arguing that our multidisciplinary field needs to make space for a Christian or some other confessional theology, and he does not show any interest in appeals to the supernatural. Kanaris' proposal is his response to what he justly calls "the 'hard problem' of self-reflexivity in religious studies" (29), that is, the problem of how to reconcile (1) the scholar's commitment to objectivity regarding the facts studied with (2) the scholar's unavoidably value-laden judgment of why studying religion is a good thing to do. (For a rich book on precisely that issue, see ethicist Richard B. Miller's Why Study Religion? [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021].) This hard problem is still with us. The danger with Kanaris' proposal, however, is this: many of us will agree that the study of religion includes the pursuit of normative goals, but if we lack any shared criteria for how to pursue them well, then we have not reintroduced an academic theology at all but merely a confessional one.