The Contemplative and Post-Materialist Awakening in Future-Oriented Humanities
The Human Condition in the 21st Century
Some months ago I wrote a proposal in response to a call for program chairs in a European think tank. It was passed over, but it details a possible way forward for the humanities in their current crisis.
Dear Selection Committee:
I am writing in response to your call for program chairs in the 2024-2025 academic year at [your institute]. Because of the unique opportunity this call opens for theorizing the future role of the humanities in STEM-dominated universities and the workforce, I have developed a proposal for chairing a program at [your institute]. The program’s name is: “The Contemplative and Post-Materialist Awakening in Future-Oriented Humanities: The Human Condition in the 21st Century.”
The current funding crisis affecting the humanities at universities across the globe evidences not merely a shift toward technological education. It also displays a turning of attention by many humanists from the humanities as sources of wisdom and well-being to legitimate concerns about the oppressive ideologies conditioning these disciplines and their privileged academic locations. Also weakening support for the humanities is reliance by defenders of the humanities on the increasingly impotent argument that the humanities are valuable independent of their direct economic utility. A more useful approach, and one that relies on the inherent resources of the humanities themselves, is the evocation of an imaginary where the time-tested universal practices and wisdom of the humanities are deployed against technocratic insensitivity to humane values and against ideological demands for higher education to focus on job skills alone. Instead of repeating old arguments and rationales for the humanities, a better approach is to discover a new theoretical, or metaphysical, grounding for the humanities. Such a metaphysics must be sufficiently ample to undergird the humanities, science, technology, and business in a widely plausible view of human and ecological flourishing. Its development may be the best way forward out of the current crisis in the humanities.
An intriguing sign that the humanities can innovate out of their current crisis is the rise of contemplative studies and contemplative sciences centers at leading research universities. Inspired by contemplative practices and insights, these trans-sectoral initiatives link the humanities, the sciences, and professional disciplines in mutual projects of imagining and practicing a wider human and global future. Because contemplative studies and contemplative sciences seem poised to open pathways to a contemplative metaphysics, I propose to engage a trans-sectoral team of experts in a program aimed at spurring a contemplative and post-materialist awakening for future-oriented humanities. Central to this awakening is the articulation of a contemplative starting-point for the post-materialist metaphysics of the future.
As evidenced by my CV, I remain active as a researcher, although I am now retired from university teaching. I continue to publish articles and book chapters based on conference presentations, and my fourth academic book, Reviving Intellectual Intuition in Metaphysics: Contemplative Philosophies and Being, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in December 2024. It is dedicated to the fortunes of intellectual intuition in Anglophone and Germanophone philosophy since Kant.
My research and publications seek to overcome the conflict between religious exclusivism and religious pluralism without appealing to inadequate forms of religious essentialism (e.g., perennialism) and without surrendering the search for contemplative universals (see Pluralism: The Future of Religion, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). In recent publications I have suggested that a set of contemplative universals underlie global contemplative experience. To support this claim, I draw—without reductionism—on findings in the emerging field of contemplative neuroscience (see Yoga, Meditation, and Mysticism: Religious Universals and Contemplative Landmarks, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).
The search for contemplative universals has led me into fundamental research in metaphysics. In Reviving Intellectual Intuition in Metaphysics: Contemplative Philosophies and Being, I range through metaphysical and antimetaphysical thought in Anglophone and Germanophone philosophical traditions since Kant, as well as in Asian philosophies and ancient and medieval European philosophies. This allows me to raise questions about the possibility and practice of contemplative metaphysics as a method, alongside logic, mathematics, and science, for probing being.
These strands of research synergistically blended in my Templeton World Charity Foundation grant project. In this two-year, $215,000 project, I led a global team of ten colleagues to create an online course called Wisdom from World Religions. This course explores themes central to the humanities in light of the world’s religions and current research in neuroscience, psychology, mindfulness, yoga, and meditation. (Here is link to an archived version of the course.)
My scholarly work has been interdisciplinary from the beginning, drawing together research in global religious and philosophical thought, comparative mysticism, comparative religion, anthropology, the cognitive science of religion, contemplative neuroscience, and the philosophy of religions. As an active researcher working at the intersection of metaphysics, spiritual religion, and Asian philosophical thought, I would find [your institute] a congenial location to collaborate with new colleagues on crucially significant intellectual projects because concrete actions can be taken there to advance the contemplative overcoming of the materialist captivity of the humanities and the sciences.
Thank you for considering my proposal.
The Contemplative and Post-Materialist Awakening in Future-Oriented Humanities: The Human Condition in the 21st Century
Project Rationale
Defenses of the humanities as enhancing personal development or equipping students to be creative thinkers in the workforce have failed to stem the rapidly increasing reduction of funding and termination of programs in universities across the world.1 Students, parents, and employers are demanding that universities provide education aligning more directly with STEM skills requisite for the contemporary workforce.2 Against such pragmatic demands, views of the liberal arts as forms of cultural enrichment appear as elitist and esoteric luxuries.
Without a basis in the humanities, however, technical education is not broad enough to develop thought-leaders equipped to envision a sustainable human future oriented, for example, toward the UN’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals.3 As more than merely physical beings, human beings are interwoven in social, biological, and planetary networks extending beyond the physical aspects of the natural world that are researched in the natural sciences and exploited in technological development. Essential to human well-being and to our impact on other species and the biosphere is the recognition that human beings also participate in an immaterial dimension of existence. This first-person realm of values and wisdom, which is not reducible to or visible to the third-person methods of the natural sciences, is the natural domain of study for the humanities.
The Background of the Current Crisis in the Humanities
Besides the pressure exerted by pragmatic administrators, the humanities have been partially complicit in their own decline.4 In the last generation, there has been a widespread turning away in the humanities from the exploration of the arts, literature, and philosophy as means of human inquiry and guidance. Beginning in the late twentieth century as the postmodern turn against metanarratives,5 it has deepened into the current situation where many practitioners of the humanities have shifted their focus from the humanities as potential sources of human flourishing to metatheoretical methodologies grounded in materialist and critical-theoretical perspectives. But the gain in understanding the often oppressive, colonialist, gender-biased, and racist substructure of these disciplines does not require their loss as arenas of wisdom and ethical insight. Mounting a multi-pronged hermeneutics of suspicion against the false universals and elitist concerns of the pre-critical practice of the humanities is now an uneliminable aspect of humanistic enquiry. When revived after these critical interrogations through a chastened return to their irreducible practices and indispensable norms,6 the humanities are better prepared now than before to answer—and with greater relevance than science and technology alone—questions about the cultural and spiritual future of humanity and the planet as a whole.
This criticism is not intended as a defense of the entrenched privileges and cultural power of the traditional elites that once widely supported the humanities. Instead, it is a call to the humanities to once again engage the wider spiritual life of humanity as it displays itself in literature, the arts, philosophy, and spiritual forms of religion. So engaged, the humanities can lead the way in creating a sustainable value system for the twenty-first century. For this to happen, however, practitioners of the humanities must challenge the intellectual captivity of advanced global societies within the narrow worldview of scientistic materialism and consumer capitalism.
Toward a Resolution
Deeper than the issue of funding in the current crisis7 in the humanities is their failure to continue drawing upon their own resources in modeling ways of flourishing that address the full scope of human experience.8 The project described in this proposal will explore the deeper, metaphysical sources of the decline of the humanities. The academy has shifted toward physicalist ontologies abetted by irrealist antimetaphysical discourses. In this metaphysical void, the synergistic force of physicalist science, morally mute technological development, and the amoral imperatives of production and profitability have claimed the role of the production of values once held without challenge by the humanities, the arts, literature, the law, and religious institutions. Despite its prowess in describing and controlling physical reality, natural science as such does not possess the conceptual tools needed to chart a metaphysics, including a physicalist one. Metaphysics is the prerogative of philosophy, and a central assignment for a future-oriented philosophy is discerning the outlines of a postmaterialist metaphysics. This can serve as the ground plan for a post-materialist awakening within future-oriented humanities.
One challenge to this awakening is the ongoing resistance to universalizing discourses in the academy. Formerly a quest grounded in the values of the Enlightenment, the humanistic search for universal values has in recent decades been dismissed as promoting harmful and self-serving essentialisms.9 But the currently canonical stress in the humanities on the local at the expense of the universal, while necessary for a time to overcome outmoded universalist conceptions, has also undercut the quest for genuine commonalities between cultures and societies. (One model for a renewed universalism is my attempt in Yoga, Meditation, and Mysticism: Religious Universals and Contemplative to overcome inadequate forms of essentialism, e.g., perennialism, in religious studies while not surrendering the search for religious and contemplative universals.10)
Negotiating the Crisis
Before this universalist project can make meaningful progress, however, the practice of metaphysics, which, whether acknowledged or not, underlies all other discourses, needs to be extracted from the physicalist framework in which it has operated for nearly a century in Anglophone philosophy. Key here will be the development of a contemplative metaphysics grounded in the revival of contemplative practices, which open vistas of freedom and creativity unguessed by instrumental reasoning. Future-oriented humanists who are recovering from materialism through inner contemplative probing will be positioned to rediscover the perennially vital sensitivities cultivated in poetry, philosophy, and artistic experimentation.
One project suggesting that the humanities can innovate in the face of their current crisis is the fruitful trans-sectoral research inspiring the rise of contemplative studies and contemplative sciences centers at leading research universities.11 These novel initiatives link the humanities, the sciences, and professional disciplines in a mutual project of imagining and practicing a wider human and global future inspired by contemplative practices and insights. At the forward edge of knowledge in these contemplative centers, the sciences, the humanities, the arts, and the professions are encountering each other as partners instead of competitors for institutional resources. As a result, familiar binaries such as mind and body, natural and supernatural, self and other, objective and subjective, and third person and first person perspectives are dissolving in light of newly invigorated contemplative visions of personal, communal, and ecological well-being.
These programs allow faculty, students, and staff from the whole spectrum of academic, scientific, artistic, and clinical disciplines to develop the contemplative dimensions of their disciplines. Formerly, contemplative disciplines were mostly nurtured in spiritual and religious settings. Because they are common human capabilities with decisive roles to play in heightening human spiritual and ethical consciousness, however, contemplative studies and contemplative sciences programs are reconceiving the humanities, the sciences, and the professions as methods of promoting universal well-being. As the vast and rapidly growing body of studies dedicated to mindfulness and other contemplative practices clarifies,12 fostering contemplative capabilities moves people to become more caring, courageous, creative, and committed in implementing personal and social change.
These unprecedented initiatives are shifting older academic and scientific imaginaries by integrating the reservoirs of traditional contemplative wisdom with the techniques and knowledge of the humanities, the scientific laboratory, the practice studio, spiritual movements, and clinical settings. In these varied activities, contemplative researchers and practitioners are furthering their knowledge and practice in light of a multidimensional vision of the sciences, the arts, and the humanities as multiple avenues to flourishing, well-being, and health. This proposed project is thus not only of academic or scientific interest. Its ultimate aim is the cultivation of contemplative thought and humane practices in order to foster human wellbeing and the wellbeing of the biosphere.
Project Activities
Articulate a postmaterialist metaphysics as a basis for future-oriented humanities
Analyze the effectiveness of contemplative studies and contemplative sciences programs as catalysts for renewing the humanities
Create a model for integrating contemplative practices into humanistic research
Show how a contemplative humanities can support a post-materialist view of human and ecological flourishing.
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See, for example, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/us/liberal-arts-college-degree-humanities.html; https://uniavisen.dk/en/timeline-13-cuts-to-danish-humanities-since-2011/; https://hechingerreport.org/rural-universities-already-few-and-far-between-are-being-stripped-of-majors/; https://www.chronicle.com/article/citing-unprecedented-financial-challenges-miami-u-tells-low-enrollment-majors-to-change; https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/education/humanities-courses-under-threat-from-the-chorus-of-philistines-20210721-p58bmd.
See Paul Reitter Paul and Chad Wellmon, editors, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
Markus Gabriel, Christoph Horn, Anna Katsman, Wilhelm Krull, Anna Luisa Lippold, Corine Pelluchon, and Ingo Venzke, Towards a New Enlightenment: The Case for Future-Oriented Humanities (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022), 36.
Gabriel, Horn, Katsman, Krull, Lippold, Pelluchon, and Venzke, Towards a New Enlightenment, 16.
The current crisis in the humanities echoes earlier crises that have attended the humanities since their birth, Reitter and Wellmon, Permanent Crisis.
Gabriel, Horn, Katsman, Krull, Lippold, Pelluchon, and Venzke, Towards a New Enlightenment, 31, 50-7.
See Kenneth Rose, Yoga, Meditation, and Mysticism: Religious Universals and Contemplative Landmarks (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).
The originating project is sponsored by Brown University, https://www.brown.edu/academics/contemplative-studies/ and https://sites.brown.edu/britton/. A robust program has established itself at the University of Virginia, https://csc.virginia.edu/. A current European initiative is https://mindandlife-europe.org/community-of-contemplative-education/.
For a metastudy of studies of mindfulness meditation, see Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body (Avery, 2017).