Taking Shape: on the Current Constellation of (Religious) Thought

After reflecting briefly on the specific context of contemporary religious thought, I will briefly outline these two broader developments within the academy, in hopes that a fuller understanding enables scholars and thinkers to better grapple with their own problems and agendas in light of broader academic and cultural realities. Finally, I will consider the threatened place of theory, which has been under attack both intellectually and institutionally. In contemporary religious (although not only in the field of religion) discourse, theory is subsumed into ethics, with both negative and positive implications. ↩︎

One of the intellectual shifts this journal marks is a transition from philosophical theology to cultural religious theory, which follows the development of cultural studies within the academy. Nonetheless, we require a translation or transformation of more classical models of philosophical theology into new configurations, rather than a simplistic abandonment of them. Utilizing the thought of Kant and Tillich as synecdoches for philosophy and theology, respectively, and then applying them to contemporary academic issues, provides a model for gaining insight into the overall project of philosophical theology, including its present viability. ↩︎

If philosophical theology has struggled as a coherent movement within the discipline of religious studies, a major reason is the domination of American academic theology by the Protestant seminary model, with the institutional result that if theology (or religious thought) is taught at all, it is taught in a confessional Christian manner, and nearly every Ph.D. program in theology in the United States is associated with a school of divinity. As a result, departments that have abandoned a seminary model and embraced a comparative world-religions curriculum almost universally ignore or denigrate theology. The result is that there is no place within the two competing models of academic instruction (secular and confessional) for critical and theoretical religious thought. For a brief period of time, philosophy of religion occupied such a role, but its dominance by analytical philosophy, and its disconnection from religious experience, led to its increasing irrelevance. ↩︎

This is an example of how the historical and social formations of a discipline pressure how it is studied, and work to favor or exclude certain methodologies and orientations, and this is true within the academy as a whole. The situation of religion shares some problems with the rest of the liberal arts, while of course possessing its own unique challenges. In the wake of Tillich’s correlation of theology with culture, if theology is to be or become academically viable, it must interface with the academic study of religion, and engage in theoretical and methodological debates without presuming to sublate them or imperialistically pronounce its own conclusions and agenda. Despite the fact that many of Tillich’s conclusions seem incredible or obsolete, his manner of opening theology up to other disciplines and ways of thinking provide a model for theology. Tillich’s theology, however, is more specific to the discipline of religious studies, whereas Kant’s philosophy is relevant to the entire academic enterprise. ↩︎

Kant’s conclusions concerning the conditions of possibility of knowledge of an object, while no longer credible in their stated form, provide a useful tool to reflect upon material conditions for thinking, or what Julia Kristeva calls hidden “protodoxic modalities” that shape discourse.[^2] In a broad social and economic sense, we can perceive a shift of resources away from higher education, at least by federal and state governments, and this pattern has persisted through times of both recession and recovery over the last thirty years.^[1] This rationing of resources has gone hand in hand with critical examinations and calls for justification of the value and the costs of higher education, in both cultural and financial terms. One result is a privileging of professional programs and curricula over less immediately economically useful and allegedly less practical liberal arts programs and knowledge. At the same time, in conformity with the development of a business model for colleges and universities, students become customers, and knowledge is expected to be delivered in more easily digestible and entertaining ways. Another result, coincident with a defense of liberal arts and humanities values and functions, has been a retrenchment in traditional and classical disciplines and methodologies that are easier to justify and defend, at the expense of more radical and experimental structures and forms of thought. Ultimately, a logic is established both externally and internally to disciplines which resorts to empirical and quantitative data as the only form of knowledge which can be perceived, counted and taught. Because the results of education must be able to be assessed, and because politically and economically the only viable measurements of educational value are statistical and quantitative, even so-called qualitative forms of knowledge must provide an account of themselves in quantitative terms. ↩︎

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant discusses the conditions of possibility of knowledge of an object. Ultimately, understanding works only in the realm of phenomenal appearance, leaving off access to things as they are in themselves. Understanding of objects by means of categories and concepts, however, does provide objective philosophical and scientific knowledge of such phenomenal objects. Kant secures the objectivity of phenomenal knowledge by cutting off access to things in themselves, which become unknowable. Subsequent Neo-Kantian epistemology, sometimes allied with British utilitarianism, allows for values to shape our manipulations of objects, but basically accepts Kant’s conclusions about scientifically valid knowledge of objects. Continental philosophy from Heidegger to contemporary forms of postmodernism, on the other hand, emphasizes the unknowability of objects in themselves, and the essential mystery of our knowing. Kant’s critical philosophy deals with the question of representation, but there is a bifurcation between the determinate representations of objects and the source or process of representing objects. Again, the former are seen as unproblematic, while the latter is inscrutable and inherently inaccessible to conceptual understanding. ↩︎

According to the new positivism that reigns in the contemporary academic world, knowledge must be quantitatively objectified, empirically and statistically, in order to count as knowledge. This logic is subtle and insidious, even if theoretically we know better. Since the source of knowledge is inaccessible, it does not count and cannot be counted. In accord with Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, the source of knowing and representing is understood in ethical terms, and human beings are seen as entities of moral value, as ends in themselves from a noumenal standpoint, although of course for practical purposes they must be treated as phenomenal means. Although for Kant reason was universal and singular, the individualism of Romanticism combined with Nietzsche’s perspectivalism leads to a subjectivization and relativization of humans as the source of moral value. This double logic works, in a schizophrenic fashion, because it allows us to function both as moral agents and as objects of representation. We always know that we are more or other than our representation(s), and to a great extent the term ‘other’ has replaced ‘object’ in many intellectual discourses, but what is crucial is that these representations continue to function and be counted in order to count as knowledge. The act of representing, although technically inaccessible, ceases to trouble us, despite the shadowy link Kant traces between the results of knowledge and the act of knowing that goes by the name of the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding, or alternatively, the transcendental imagination.[^4] ↩︎