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Disciplining Religion Workshop

8 November 2010, London

The Interdisciplinary Intellectual

Tullio Lobetti (SOAS)

Multidisciplinarity has become a familiar concept in the field of the Study of Religion, and

hardly any conference or workshop announcement is now published without this appealing

tag. Different disciplines interacting together around a common theme can certainly provide a

better picture of a composite and three-dimensional phenomenon such as Religion.

Multidisciplinarity is, however, not always followed by interdisciplinarity, as the

methodological interaction between scholars of different specialities can be indeed very

limited, not to say inexistent. A central issue undermining such interaction can certainly be

the high degree of specialisation now required by the various disciplines, whose articulated

vocabulary, techniques and taxonomies make them resilient to critical investigation by an

outsider. It is unlikely that this could be amended by inviting scholars to become experts in

more than one area, as this would require an uncommon intellectual effort and attitude and

probably more than the average human lifespan. This does not imply, however, that an

individual researcher cannot become familiar with those portions of the methodology typical

of another discipline that can help his or her current research. This can perhaps upset the

purists of the various disciplines, but particularly nowadays students seem in fact to be prone

to mix methodologies borrowed from the different disciplines (anthropology, history,

philosophy etc.) more or less freely, and it should not be forgotten that these people will

indeed be the scholars of the future.


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Interdisciplinarity seems thus to be evolving not only as a form of interaction

between the existing experts of different disciplines, but also as a new way of intellectual

cultivation for young scholars who apparently find the boundaries of the single disciplines

too limited for such a wide field as the Study of Religion(s). Stimulating as it may seems,

this tendency is not without risks. An off-handed attitude in the mixing of different

methodologies can result in a methodological libertinism that can eventually make the final

research sloppy and insubstantial. It is thus important to ponder if a golden mean can exist

between the expert who knows all about almost nothing and the polymath knowing almost

nothing of all, and to investigate to what extent such figure can represent an ideal

compromise for those involved in our field.

In this paper I would like first to address the tension between a strictly disciplinary approach

to the Study of Religion and what we may call the interdisciplinary approach, not as a

difference in the use of a certain research methodology (or a set of them) but rather as the

tension between two different philosophies that may underlie the attitude of the intellectual

agents involved in the process of knowing: the pursuit of a Philosophy of Knowledge and of

a Philosophy of Wisdom. This dichotomy has been developed by Nicholas Maxwell, the

creator of the idea of Philosophy of Wisdom, in order to stimulate a revolution in the

academia (Maxwell 1984), but here I am also borrowing these two categories in a rather

decontextualised form as key-words to indicate different epistemologies. Wisdom is meant

by Maxwell as the pursuit of knowledge in relationship to the actual life of human beings and

of what is of value (Maxwell 2007: 78). Albeit what is of value may remain a rather

unclear category, this concept of wisdom is necessarily tied with the idea that no knowledge

can be severed from the presence of the knowing subject - in this case human beings. In this


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sense the human being becomes not only the agent of the pursuit of knowledge, but it is

central to it. For Maxwell, this is a central ethical issue for the existence of academia itself:

We need a new kind of academic inquiry that gives intellectual priority to our problems of

living--to clarifying what our problems are, and to proposing and critically assessing the

possible solutions (Maxwell 2008: 2). Maxwell articulates a variety of arguments in support

of his idea, which can certainly sparkle very different kinds of reactions in his readers. The

concept ofPhilosophy of Wisdom can however also be used as a valid tool to critically re-

interpret many of our most deep-rooted conceptions on the way(s) of achieving knowledge,

the relate methodologies, and the final purpose of study and research.

Strict disciplinary approach seems to understand the pursuit of knowledge in

analytical terms, literally by breaking down a phenomenon in its basic constituent and

producing sets of repeatable and comparable data about each of these constituents. A multi-

faceted reality such as Religion, is in this case treated like a three-dimensional solid that, for

its very nature, can only show a limited amount of its faces to the observer. For instance, one

face is the historical character of religious movements, another face their anthropological

implications and yet another is constituted by doctrines, myths, and dogmas. Treating religion

as system made up by the mere composition of its axiomatic elements is comparable to

turning this three-dimensional conceptual object to focus on only one of its many faces, and

then concentrating our analytical gaze on it. This process of analysis and disciplinarisation of

the subject of enquiry does not necessarily follow hierarchical terms. There is indeed no

reason to think that any of the specialists in the various disciplines possess a better analytical

capability than the others, as no face of the conceptual solid is more important than the

others: historians, anthropologists, philosophers etc. appear all equally skilled, trained and

motivated, and all their contributions are equally important for the understanding the field. In


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this model, the different disciplines are thus better understood as different interpretation of

the nature of the same object, and all the disciplines can easily be considered equivalent and

coexisting in balance.

When disciplines are understood as different modes of enquiry, however, there is

often the temptation to organise them in multilayered hierarchies. It is indeed the taxonomy

of such hierarchies that often constitutes the subject of the debates around the validity and

efficaciousness of specific disciplines to describe a certain phenomenon, and it is not

surprising to see such debates influenced also by contingent fashionable trends. Moreover,

nested taxonomies can easily appear inside the same discipline, and fragment the analytical

discourse further. In my opinion, this is a problem of peculiar importance especially in the

field of the Study of Religion(s), in which the proximity to a specific phenomena often

corresponds to an increased distance from the idea of religion itself, even considering its

well-known conceptual limits.

This kind of analytical approach is reflected in the tendency of many disciplinary

intellectuals to specialise further inside already well specialised disciplines. It is the case, for

instance, of area-study experts, who can be historians, anthropologists, philologists

specialised in a single geographical area (religion of China, Japan, India) which can in turn

become smaller and smaller through geographical or historical systemisation (religion of

ancient China - Buddhism in ancient China etc.). When we reach such levels it might indeed

be legitimately to argue if, for instance, a philologically-oriented translation of a medieval

Japanese Buddhist text dealing mostly with issues of lexicon and grammar can be still

considered as being Study of Religion, or if it belongs to an entirely different field in

language studies.

In this sense the disciplinary intellectual displays a form of deterministic scientific


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will for knowledge: The proper aim for rational enquiry is to acquire knowledge about the

world, objective knowledge of truth (Maxwell 2007: 21). This attitude is however

problematic for all scientific disciplines now, particularly in the wake of the developments of

quantum physics, and moreover it is sadly forgetful of one of Karl Poppers most important

lessons: In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in

so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality, which for our field (and perhaps

humanities in general) may be re-formulated as each epistemology must contain a critique to

itself. A discipline without epistemological critique necessarily ends up - perhaps

surprisingly - in being self-referential. When axioms (or, perhaps better, pseudo-axioms) are

formulated to serve a self-contained system, they will certainly end up in matching the

system perfectly, but they cannot be shared anymore with other systems. It is for instance the

case of key terms in the various disciplines, which are easily understood and applied inside

they respective discipline dialectics, but are problematic to share with others - even if the

signs employed are identical. For instance, the verbal sign Nature has a very different

meaning for a theologian, a philosopher, an anthropologist, a biologist.

This has also been the fate of natural sciences, where reason and analytical procedure

are uncritically applied to the explanation of all natural phenomena. What masks the

circularity of Natural sciences epistemologies is the fact that reason and analysis are

treated since the Enlightenment as natural ways to understand reality (and the human

experience) and do not only belong to any form of specifically academic discipline or

methodology anymore, but are the pseudo-axiom around which modern identity itself is

formed. This is why reason appears to be an axiomatic tool in regards of the widest possible

analysable system (Nature) - because the world which it is supposed to analyse (what we

consider to be objective reality) has been built around this very pseudo-axiom and thus


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justifies it entirely.

Strict disciplinarily as a way to know the truth in a scientific sense appears to me to be

painfully outdated because apparently unaware of this tautology, rather than because its

methods have been superseded by new ones.

The interdisciplinary intellectual thus should not be characterised merely by a

different approach or methodology - as this would eventually become a discipline in itself -

but rather by a different aim and by a more radical epistemological self-critique. Earlier on

we said that the interdisciplinary intellectual is looking for wisdom, and here wisdom is

meant as the pursuit of knowledge in relationship to actual life an of what is of value

(Maxwell 2007: 78). The pursuit of an interdisciplinary approach to the Study of Religion is

then not necessarily motivated by the shortcomings of the single disciplines, but mostly by

the will to start a much-needed revision of what knowledge itself means.

Employing a more critical - but perhaps more honest - attitude in reconsidering the

agents pursuing knowledge, knowledge itself appears not as the objective knowledge of the

truth, but rather as an enquiry in human epistemological ways. A strict disciplinary approach

- considered as a means to approach the objective truth in the closest possible way - thus

strikes me as being very unrealistic, as it implicitly assumes that human epistemological

means can be funnelled inside linear self-contained streams, while producing a knowledge

which is valid per se - even when severed from the knowing subject. However, no human

being has a single-disciplined approach to reality, as there is no such thing in my opinion as a

disciplined epistemology: disciplines are in this sense more similar to academic rituals

structured to privilege or highlight a certain level of perception over the others, in a

perceiving subject who however cannot be disciplined in the same way.


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Postulating interdisciplinarity as a mere coalescence of funnelled streams cannot

solve the aforementioned problems, and will produce only a mixture of different rituals

which will eventually lose their individual purposes. The interdisciplinary approach to a

certain field of study - in our case Study of Religion - should rather be the result of a more

critical epistemological attitude, and of a more humanist conception in regard of the

possibility of achieving knowledge of any subject. This is indeed the attitude of

contemporary science, particularly physics, where now the world is the world that we think

(Hawking 1988) rather than the objective set of mechanically interrelate phenomena of

Newtonian determinism.

The choice of an interdisciplinary approach as a form of intellectual self-cultivation

is then not simply a critique of the existent disciplines, but something much more radical. It is

the expression of the Zeitgeist of the contemporary post-modern period, where the though has

become weak(Vattimo 1983) and it is not a legitimate periscope for the pursuit of any truth

anymore, least the ultimate tool of enquiry for science or metaphysic, but rather a vessel for

our very human doubts. An interdisciplinary cultivation of ones intellectual self expresses in

this sense the will to cultivate our inclination for ethics whilst neither restoring metaphysics

nor surrendering to the futility of a relativistic philosophy of culture (Vattimo 1989).

So, what must be done in practical terms? It might be possible that for once the best

course of action may be to do nothing. I am very sceptical of the possibility of outlining

interdisciplinarity as a precise curriculum of academic training or as a research

methodology, since this is very likely to eventually become ritualised as well and become just

another discipline. On the other hand, it is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain the

separate self-subsistence of the various disciplines, and this is certainly adamant for the Study

of Religion field. Methodological disciplinary boundaries seem indeed to be already


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crumbling by themselves as a reflection of the mutated spirit of the times. The right course

of action may be in this case simply not to oppose the intermingling of disciplines and the

leaking of methodologies and approaches from one discipline to the others to serve now-

outdated rituals. The most efficacious way to do so is perhaps to interpret interdisciplinarity

as the result of a meta-pedagogical attitude, having as its aim wisdom as outlined earlier on,

and being driven by the constant critique of ones epistemology. This does not preclude of

course the cultivation of a specific discipline, but only helps individual intellectuals to

accepts the gift of other knowledge from colleagues with different specialisation, without

being embroiled in taxonomical debates over the better suitability of a certain discipline

over another.


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Works cited:

Hawking, Stephen.A Brief History of Time, Bantam Press, 1988.

Maxwell, Nicholas. From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution in the Aims and Methods of

Science, Blackwell, Oxford, 1984.

Maxwell, Nicholas. The Human World in the Physical Universe: Consciousness, Free Will

and Evolution, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, 2001.

Maxwell, Nicholas. From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the

Humanities, 2nd edition, revised and enlarged, Pentire Press, London, 2007.

Popper, Karl. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Basic Books, New York, NY, 1959.

Popper, Karl. Conjectures and Refutations, Routledge, London, 1963.

Vattimo, Gianni.Il pensiero debole, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1983.

Vattimo, Gianni.La societ trasparente, Garzanti, Milano, 1989.

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