The Revival of Realism and the Study of Religions

What will the academic study of religions look like in the future? My work in our multi-disciplinary field is philosophical, and my answer to this question describes what seems to me to be a rising development—if not a revolution—happening in philosophy. To appreciate the significance of this development, I want to put it in the context of the history of Western philosophy as a whole. One can consider Western philosophy's history in three stages. Many of the earliest Greek philosophers, even when their interests were not simply theoretical but also practical, understood the heart of their work to be figuring out the nature of things. As one example, Heraclitus speculated that, given that everything is constantly in a dynamic flux, the underlying principle of everything that exists must be fire. Democritus proposed that everything that exists is made up of atoms, tiny discrete particles whose different shapes determine the properties of the visible things in the world. Plato argued that the world as a whole must include not only material realities known through the senses but also invisible realities such as the form shared by two different horses that makes them both horses. My favorite example of an ancient Greek thinker who tried to figure reality out is Aristotle. Aristotle has books that are categorized today as paradigmatically philosophical—books on logic, metaphysics, and ethics—but he also wrote about the Milky Way, octopus sexual reproduction, and the constitutions of different cities. All of these thinkers were pursuing the question: what kinds of things make up the cosmos? In some cases, these philosophers speculated that the things that we can see are composed of realities that we cannot see, and, in some cases, they speculated about what everything that exists must have in common, and both of these two questions lead away from the empirical world. Even so, these philosophers were realists in that they understood themselves to be discussing the character of realities that they thought were independent of their inquiries into them. Aristotle, for instance, thought that the Milky Way was composed of stars much further away from Earth than the sun, octopi use one of their arms to reproduce, and the principles of a syllogism operate—whether or not he (or anyone else) had ever investigated these things. Aristotle and these other Greek thinkers thought that their statements about the world described discoveries whose truth did not depend on the discoverer. By contrast, a philosopher is typically described as "modern" when their work involves a shift to focus on the experiencing subject. This shift often challenged the realist assumption that the particularities of the investigator do not influence the nature of things in the world. Emblematic of this shift is René Descartes's argument that any idea one has about the things outside one's mind can be doubted. According to Descartes, I cannot be certain about the realities in the extra-mental world, not even about this coffee cup in my hand—not about even my hand. When I think that the coffee cup is in my hand, I may be hallucinating or otherwise in error; the only knowledge of which I can be sure is that I am thinking this. Aristotle said that metaphysics is "first philosophy," which is to say that knowledge of the nature of things is the basis for all other philosophical investigations. For Descartes, by contrast, our foundational knowledge is not of things but of our consciousness of things. From this model of knowledge as mediated by experience, George Berkeley drew the idealist conclusion that our ideas do not represent any things that exist outside the mind. Also emblematic of modern philosophers' turn to the experiencing subject was their growing attention to how the senses operate. For example, John Locke argues that, just as the color of an object only exists given the receptive structure of our eyes, many of the properties assumed to be qualities of the things in the world actually depend on how the mind receives them. To the extent that appearances are relative to the perceiver, the reliability of our experiences to give an accurate report of the nature of things in the world is put in question. (On the historical emergence of the idea of experiencer-dependent qualities, see Bolton 2022). David Hume argued, even more radically, that previous thinkers had underestimated how limited our experience of things in the world actually is. A person can see a lit match and then see burning paper, but one cannot see "causality" between them. For this reason, one cannot know that putting a match to paper causes it to catch fire; one can only know that the two events regularly happen in this order. To secure the claims about causality so central to science, Immanuel Kant sought to repudiate Hume, but his solution is also quintessentially modern. For Kant, causality is one of the general categories of understanding that our minds impose on every experience we have. Given the minds we have, this is the way that everything appears, but we cannot know whether, apart from these categories, the world is spatially, temporally, or causally organized the way it appears to be. The focus on the experiencing subject by Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant is sometimes described by saying that they displaced metaphysics as first philosophy and replaced it with epistemology. For many modern philosophers, this shift of focus led to skeptical questions about the nature—or even the existence—of the world outside the mind, the so-called "external" world. Even when modern philosophers are confident that knowledge of the extra-mental world is possible, however, they challenge the assumption that one's knowledge of the nature of things was independent of the structure of one's subjectivity. Kant argued that the categories of human understanding shape all of our experiences of the world. As a consequence, the classical pursuit of metaphysics—understood as knowledge of the nature of things independent of us—has to be reconceived, if not abandoned. But if the categories with which we experience the world are not part of the structure of human consciousness in general, but are instead historically and culturally variable, then what is understood as true of reality will differ from one time and place to another. This is precisely what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel argued: the concepts that shape what is taken as real in, say, ancient India are not the same as those shaping experience in Hegel's Prussia. In the twentieth century, this idea that the categories with which one understands the world vary by one's historical and social location made "the linguistic turn" so that the categories with which one thinks come from the language one speaks. Moreover, the meaning of the terms in one's language is not a product of the world (e.g., we have the term "whales" because there are whales). Rather, the meanings are the product of the play of relationships between them and how the terms are used by people in discourse. For many who read Saussure, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida, or Rorty, one's world depends on the concepts in one's language. The modern arguments that our access to the world is filtered by the categories in the mind are echoed by postmodern arguments that our access to the world is filtered by the categories in language. In their aversion to metaphysics, postmodern thinkers follow the modernist path. Nevertheless, the two differ in that carrying out the linguistic turn undermines the modernist hope to identify some experience of the world that is pure, unmediated, free of interpretation, or "given." As is commonly said, experience is always already constituted by discourse. Philosophy of language, therefore displaces epistemology as first philosophy as the central question for theorists becomes how discourse constructs one's world. From this place, metaphysical questions about the nature of things can look naïve. In light of this brief history, we can appreciate the potentially revolutionary development in contemporary philosophy to which I want to draw attention. Despite the modern and postmodern developments just described, we are now seeing a revival of realism. I take "realism" as the view that things are the way we understand them to be, independent of our inquiry into them. Thinkers in antiquity and the Middle Ages largely assumed this view. The modern recognition of the contribution to knowledge by the experiencing subject and the consequent displacement of metaphysics by epistemology challenged it; the postmodern turn to language then doubled down on the resistance to realist claims. But realism is returning. An important example of this "post-postmodern" stance is Donald Davidson. In his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association half a century ago, Davidson argued against what he called a contemporary "dogma," found in both empiricists and Kantians, that our mind possesses a conceptual scheme that filters our experiences of the world. A conceptual scheme, whether it is part of one's sensory apparatus or drawn from one's language, can generate skepticism that anyone can know what things are like apart from our concepts. Davidson's central argument is that we should drop the idea that our knowledge is "mediated" in this way. He closes his widely cited essay with these words: "In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false" (1974, 20). I see Davidson's essay as an early sortie in the revival of realism, and in the years since, there has been a steady reinvigoration of interest in metaphysics by analytic philosophers. For many, the desire to talk about things in the world is motivated by the recognition that there are problems in the world that cannot be solved by attention to concepts, language, or discourse alone, and many seek to identify the forces that explain real-world problems such as our overheating planet or political oppression. I expect that this ecological interest explains the burgeoning exploration of "assemblages," "hyperobjects," "networks," and other attempts to understand complex systems operating in the material world whose nature and effects are only poorly or partially grasped. Similarly, Sally Haslanger is an analytic feminist philosopher who writes from a liberationist perspective and argues that giving a social constructionist account of race and gender requires realism. (Dave Elder-Vass's The Reality of Social Construction 2015 argues this as well.) The title of Haslanger's Resisting Reality (2012) chides philosophers whose modern or postmodern assumptions have led them to think that we have no access to reality and who, therefore, resist the idea that we can identify forces in the world independent of us. Some of the developments in the revival of realism do not use the word "realism" in their name, but they insist on the importance and legitimacy of investigating the nature of things apart from what human beings have experienced or named. This includes the "new materialisms" according to which nonliving material entities are nevertheless "lively" in the sense of creating effects on their environments (Coole and Frost 2007; Bennett 2010), "new Aristotelianisms" that argue for a powers-based ontology that contradicts the Humean view that causal relationships are merely attributed by the mind (Greco and Groff 2007), and "new mechanical philosophies" that seek the mechanisms that explain events in the natural and social worlds, operating whether people know about them or not (Glennan 2017). Many of these movements draw on allies in the field of logic who have been developing accounts of abductive reasoning—inference to the best explanation—as a form of argument that goes beyond empiricist restrictions of logic to the methods of induction and deduction. All of them seek to understand how the world works independent of human observation, concepts, and discourse. The revival of realism is not only by analytic philosophers. Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor, two of the most influential philosophers in the last 50 years, working respectively in phenomenology and hermeneutics, co-wrote Retrieving Realism (2015), largely to oppose Rorty's rejection of metaphysics. There are several contemporary Continental philosophers, such as Catherine Malabou (2010), who protest anti-realist readings of Jacques Derrida and who argue for a deconstructive realism or deconstructive materialism. The central aim of the movement called Speculative Realism, associated primarily with Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux, is the critique of what they call "correlationism," that is, the view that access to reality is always correlated to (or mediated by) subjective experience so that making claims about what exists independent of human thought is closed down. The related position of Object-Oriented Ontology uses the term "object" for anything that exists (even, for example, a relationship between objects). Its proponents argue that an object always "withdraws" in that there is more to the object that escapes any experience of it; that is, the object has an existence independent of how it appears phenomenologically. François Laruelle's "non-philosophy" also rejects the correlationist view that thought determines objects and proposes instead a version of realism in which objects make themselves thought. Similarly, Maurizio Ferraris's "New Realism" (e.g., Ferraris 2014) seeks to un-do the philosophical confounding of the ontic sphere with the epistemic sphere, not just in regard to the nonhuman world but also of the social world. Like anglophone philosophers, continental thinkers today are increasingly arguing for the inescapable value of metaphysics. It is important to notice that the proponents of these contemporary realisms typically add an adjective to their name. For example, Roy Bhaskar (1975) includes the post-structuralist argument that all of our theories are social constructions, and so he names his philosophy of the natural and social sciences "critical realism." George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999) highlight the previously ignored role of the body in our investigations of the world by calling their philosophy "embodied realism." Karen Barad (2007) critiques the anthropocentrism that assumes that the majority of the world is composed of inanimate matter and, to foreground the fact that the extrahuman universe collectively gives rise to both human and nonhuman entities, she calls her philosophy "agential realism." Michela Massimi (2022) argues that our knowledge of the world is not mediated by a conceptual scheme, but it is nevertheless enabled and constrained by where one stands, and so she calls her philosophy of science "perspectival realism." To recognize the dependence of scientific inquiry on problem-solving and, therefore, on inquirers who are not neutral but interest-laden, Hasok Chang (2022) calls his philosophy of science "pragmatic realism." In all these cases, the authors are signaling that they are advocating for a version of realism that dialectically takes into account the modern attention to subjectivity and postmodern attention to discourse. Unlike the earlier views that one might call naïve realisms, none of the contemporary positions ignores the fact that what we know of the world is shaped by social, embodied, and linguistic structures. This revival is not your grandparents' metaphysics. It is too early to know what will become of these "post-postmodern" arguments. Perhaps some of them will come to reshape the field and others will succumb to objections. They are not all compatible with each other and so one cannot endorse them all. And it is a thorny problem to articulate how one can be both a realist about the independence of the world while still doing justice to the modern and postmodern critiques of that view (Schilbrack 2022). For example, I worry that the dependence of truth on one's conceptual scheme in Lakoff and Johnson (1999) may not be compatible with the realism they seek (Schilbrack 2014); the coherence theory of truth in Chang (2022) may have the same effect. Nevertheless, the number, depth, and sophistication of all these forms of realism is astounding. So we can begin to think about what this revived focus on the nature of concept-independent entities could mean for the academic study of religion. I want to give attention to the three areas where realism could make a difference for us: realism about the body, about the subject, and about groups. First, realism about the body. To be sure, over the past half a century, the shift of the attention to the body and to embodied social practices has become enormous in the study of social behavior generally and in religious studies in particular. Often, however, the focus has been on the body as a site of cultural inscription and on embodied social practices as the implement of that inscription. A realist about the body argues that the body is not simply a passive object but also has its own active effects on thought and culture. The forward-facing placement of our eyes on our head, our opposed thumbs, our bipedal vertical stance—these body facts influence how human animals cognize the world. In addition, human cognition extends out of the cranium as people count on their fingers, leave an empty bottle on the counter as a memory prompt to buy more, and, in myriad ways, take advantage of physical things in one's environment to create a livable niche. In another addition, people commonly divide human knowledge, beliefs, and problem-solving (such as steering a ship to port or deciding the fate of an accused person) among several people, each of whom only knows a fraction of what the group knows. To highlight the socially embedded nature of cognition, Shaun Gallagher and Anthony Crisafi (2009) speak of courts, hospitals, universities, governments, and so on as "mental institutions." In short, then, human embodiment can shape how people think about the world in multiple ways (see Newen et al., 2020). The questions for scholars working in the academic study of religion, then, are these: what contribution does the reality of human embodiment make to religious practices, beliefs, and institutions? What is the contribution to religion from the material culture of rituals, including architecture, implements, and art? (Morgan, 2021). How do we understand religious practice once we have dropped mind–body dualism and begin to see practitioners as minded bodies? Second, realism about the subject. Scholars of religion used to focus on the religious subject and, in particular, on the subject's religious experiences. Some individual's remarkable experience of the sacred was the seed, it was said, of the different religious concepts, stories, and practices that grew from it. In time, this individualistic and inner-focused phenomenological paradigm in religious studies was supplanted by a hermeneutic paradigm that treated a religion as a system of symbolic meanings and then, in turn, by a post-structuralist paradigm that focused especially on the deployment of social power (Bush 2014). To ask about the experiencing subject today can seem out of touch with the field. There are those today who propose that subjectivity is nothing more than an echo of social forces or a product of discourse. By contrast, a realism about the subject means that despite the ways that people are shaped by structures, norms, and discourses, the experiencing subject is an agent in the world, a source of effects that are possible only given their subjectivity. If this realism is accurate, then scholars have to attend to how subjects see things, how they make judgments, and what kind of capacities their participation in social structures, norms, and discourses gives them. A realist grants that subjectivity is shaped by the details of their nervous systems, social locations, and cultural expectations, but also insists that persons, understood as emergent complex systems whose choices make a difference in the world (Smith 2010). The realist about subjects includes the powers for experience, judgment, imagination, and other mental terms in their explanation of human behavior. The questions for scholars working in the academic study of religion, then, are these: what contribution does the mental life of persons make to their religious behavior? What experiences are promulgated in a religious practice? What judgments by the members of a religious group shape how they interpret, inculcate, or resist the values of the group? Third, realism about social groups. There are those who say that one should not reify abstractions and speak as if "Islam" or "Buddhism" names a monolithic entity, and this is absolutely right. A group is not a concrete entity, and there is no such thing as a group mind and therefore scholars should critique sentences like "Buddhism grew northward …" or, worse, "Islam believes…" Instead, we need to recognize the diversity under the label and speak of the concrete individuals who are, say, moving northward or believing something. However, recognizing that a religion is not monolithic does not yet answer the ontological question: what is a social group? There are post-structuralists who have said that a word for a social group does not correspond to an entity in the world but is instead simply a heuristic device. The group only exists in the minds of those who think this way, and it does not exist "out there" in the world. There are also methodological individualists who say that a group is shorthand for a set of individuals. Instead of having to list John, Paul, George, and Ringo, the name for the group enables us to speak of the four of them quickly. These two approaches agree that there is no other entity "over and above" the individuals in the group. For the realist about social groups, however, there is an ontological difference between a set of people gathered together only in one's mind (such as everyone with the letter T somewhere in their name) and a set of individual people who are acting in some way together (such as the British Parliament). For the realist, the form or structure that the individuals take in their relation to each other makes a difference to their behavior, and so the group is something over and above the individuals that constitute the group (Schilbrack 2023). Hand in hand with the revival of realism, there has been a recent explosion of interest in this topic of social ontology. The question for scholars working in the academic study of religion, then, are these: what contribution does the reality of the form or structure of the group make to religious behavior? How are shared religious intentions created and maintained? (Rota 2023). What is the contribution to religion of the relationships that weave people together into a group when those relationships are backed up by institutions, social roles, or merely shared commitments? In the 1990s, I wrote a dissertation on metaphysics and the study of religion, but I did not see any revival going on. On the contrary, 30 years ago, everything was said to be a social construction (Hacking 2000). Discourse was king. I remember that at my first job interview, I was introduced for my job talk with the words, "Please welcome Kevin Schilbrack. He thinks that metaphysics is possible." I thought that the arguments of those thinkers considered modern and those considered postmodern had permanently marginalized my Aristotelian interests in the nature of things. I did not get that job. Today, however, I think that many of us are working to sort out what it means to be post-postmodern (e.g., Storm 2021). I recently read a sentence describing a particular position as "firmly at the tail end of postmodernity" (Jones 2016, 5). That phrase gives me the image of watching an alligator walk past one's door. The alligator is almost gone now, but one can still see its tail receding. That image is how I think of the dominance of the linguistic turn in the academic study of religions. It is true that no religion would exist at all without discourse. Nevertheless, the future of the academic study of religions is not going to be simply the study of language. Instead, our understanding of religions will be re-rooted in a recognition of the effects on religions that come from the reality of our bodies, from the reality of minded persons who are both experiencing subjects and purposive agents and from the reality of norm-driven groups. That is to say, the future of the academic study of religions will be re-rooted in the non-discursive material world.