The Superhumanities

Earlier this year, we launched the Galileo Commission Call for a Renaissance of the Spirit in the Humanities, which is exactly what Jeff advocates here in his brilliant new analysis that makes for required reading. The humanities are still dominated by an inadequate and oppressive metaphysical materialism with its trajectory towards the post-human or the trans-human, rather than arcing toward the superhuman, the state of mind corresponding to superconsciousness as experienced by all the great sages and prophets in every tradition and characterised in the West as gnosis: the highest form of direct knowing and the true end of philosophy. The fundamental issue is ontological as well as epistemological, deriving from lived experience as demonstrated by examples in Jeff’s previous book The Flip. The title of this review is also indicative of its thesis, that ‘there is something cosmic or superhuman smouldering in the human’ – our core identity as transcendent divine spirit is exactly that, while the second element is the empirical and socially constructed ego self. This empirical self is taken to be the only reality and object of study within the contemporary humanities, who follow Kant in asserting that we ‘do not and cannot perceive or know things as they really are.’ (p. 97) Yet the experience of non-dual gnosis contradicts this premise, since ‘the nous is both the organ that perceives reality and reality as it really is. It is what it knows, and it knows what it is.’ (p. 46)

Jeff begins by explaining the origin of this study, before moving on to the history of religions as a case study for the superhumanities, then the resistant immunological responses of the intellectual and academic body, followed by his thesis on the human as two in terms of an apophatic anthropology, with a corresponding theoretical approach rewriting the real. His style is accessible, even lapidary in its concise economy of expression. He asserts that there is in fact no religion without the dimensions of the miraculous and the transcendent in developing our innate capacities. These capacities that are fully realised in the sage were articulated in the Hermetic Italian Renaissance that marked the birth of the humanities. Modern scholars like Wouter Hanegraaff understand this point: he writes that enlightened teachers directly know/experience ‘the supreme universal Source of Light and Life’, which is in fact the ultimate end of human existence – we are already that, even if we don’t realise.

Emerson certainly did, as also Friedrich Nietzsche and William James. They engaged in ‘a radical new order of knowledge of an empirical-imaginal nature,’ (p. 62) anticipating disciplined reflexive practices that can lead to an evolution of consciousness. This is articulated, as Jeff suggests, in the non-dual teachings of Nisaragatta Maharaj, which are grounded in the Self as Atman and which would regard ‘humanist assumptions about identity and embodiment as simply mistaken forms of ignorance (avidya) and illusion (maya)’ (!!). (p. 69) Liberation is from the person by realising that you are not a person, but a temporary embodied manifestation of one underlying permanent Reality (p. 71).

Modern materialism is in fact a colonisation of the humanities by disenchanted European epistemological traditions and metaphysical assumptions. The upshot is to reduce the self to the social, moral and political by means of what Jeff calls a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ rather than of trust. He quotes Rita Felski on the limits of critique with its ‘near total dominance of disenchantment, deconstruction and denial’ (p. 81) representing the academic predominance of left-hemisphere functions. He goes on to a detailed discussion and, indeed, a re-visioning of Nietzsche by emphasising his work on spiritual evolution towards the superhuman rather than his undoubted influential contribution ‘to relativist, perspectivist, or anti-foundational modes of knowledge’ (p. 85). Nietzsche ‘claimed to experience the real outside any and all a priori categories.’ (p. 99) Similar insights are articulated in Hegel and James; here is Hegel writing that unbroken continuity is the essence of being and that ‘we are literally in the midst of an infinite, to perceive the existence of which is the utmost we can attain.’ (p. 106). Likewise, James postulated a metaphysical ground of manyness-in-oneness.

The human as two represents the subject/object split of ordinary human experience, but, crucially, this split *‘can be transcended in extraordinary human (or nonhuman) experience’ (italics in original). Gustav Fechner, Charles Taylor and Schopenhauer make a similar case – ’we continue to exist only as the one* eye of the world that gazes out from all cognising creatures.’ (p. 123) – Jeff also quotes Al Ghazzali and Suhrawardi as well as mystics in the Christian tradition. However, modern biblical criticism has been a force in denying the miraculous by embracing a reductive humanism and ignoring such sources as Herbert Thurston’s documentation of exactly such miraculous phenomena. Jeff’s rewriting of reality discusses the five humanist critical traditions of psychoanalysis, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and eco-criticism. He points out an unconscious logic that ‘blocks every attempted expression of the superhuman’, a logic that contributes to the role of the Academy with respect to our present crises around meaning and truth in its failure to engage with the full range of human experience. (p. 121) The Network and Galileo Commission seek this engagement as part of ‘an insurrection of suppressed knowledge’ – we need an ontological insurgency and metaphysical rebellion to ‘challenge and transform our cultural imaginations, which have been running on mechanistic and materialistic assumptions about a “dead” natural world that is there for our economic gain and exploitation.’ (p. 201)

This ultimately involves de-colonising reality itself and enlarging our understanding of human identity, and hence of meaning and purpose. This is a major and indeed essential cultural enterprise, and this book is an extraordinary tour de force to this end. The stakes could not be higher and the way ahead is clear, as indicated by the superhuman. Agnosticism is simply inadequate, since we need to ‘make a different claim on the real… the refusal to do ontology is itself a surrender to the present reigning ontology.’ (p. 221) We ourselves embody this superhuman evolutionary possibility in realising ourselves as co-creative expressions of the same super-presence – both immanent and transcendent. Metaphysical reconstruction is nothing less than an evolutionary imperative in our time.