ReligionWise

Discourse, Science, and Religion - Kocku von Stuckrad

• Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding • Season 2 • Episode 1

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This installment of ReligionWise features Kocku von Stuckrad, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

In this conversation, we discuss discourse analysis and its utility in the academic study of religion. In particular, we consider examples from Professor von Stuckrad’s two most recent books: The Scientification of Religion (2015) and A Cultural History of the Soul (2022).


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Chip Gruen:

Welcome to ReligionWise the podcast where we feature educators, researchers and other professionals discussing topics on religion and their relevance to the public conversation. My name is Chip Gruen. I'm the Director of the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding at Muhlenberg College, and I will be the host for this podcast. In this season two of ReligionWise, we will continue to consider a broad variety of religious and cultural beliefs and practices, and try to understand their place in the contemporary conversation. If you like what you hear, I encourage you to explore the 12 episodes from season one that are available in your favorite podcast app. Also, we would love to hear from you with your questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes. To reach us, please visit our website at religionandculture.com. There you will find our contact information and also have the opportunity to support this podcast and the work of the Institute. Today's guest is Kocku von Stuckrad who is professor of Religious Studies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. I first met Dr. von Stuckrad when Muhlenberg College was arranging a memorandum of understanding with the University of Groningen for student and faculty exchange and generally cooperate on joint ventures. At the same time, as I was getting to know him through those channels, I was also starting to use his work in several of my classes, and I just want to take a second to sort of share how instrumental his work has been. I teach a number of classes that serve as an introduction to comparative religions. Two that I'll mention, one is called Religion and Popular Culture. The other is called Animals and the Sacred. And in both of those courses, and even a few others, I start off with Kocku von Stuckrad on "Discourse." And one of the reasons I do that is because it serves as a really great starting point in thinking about topics of religion. So how I like to describe it is when we're talking about religion, what are we talking about? Or how do we talk about religion when we're talking about religion, and his discursive analysis. So in his two most recent book discursive "History of the Soul," the other is on the conjunction of the discourses of science and religion. He doesn't talk about what is the soul or what is science, but how we go about talking about those things and how we talk about those things, the narratives we build around those abstract concepts, hold power and hold influence on how we both navigate and describe our own world. So it becomes a really great starting point for thinking about any number of things that we've dealt with on other episodes of the podcast. So in addition to his thinking through the lens of discursive analysis, some of Dr. von Stuckrad's work, and some of his earlier work in particular, has to do with secrecy and histories of esotericism or discourses on esotericism. And I think it's a really interesting additional avenue of his work to think about the idea of public and private knowledge of religious systems that use discourses of privacy to enhance their own cachet, or credibility. And in particular, if we think about contemporary ideas about conspiracy and secrecy, that his work is really relevant to some of those conversations as well. So it's really exciting for me, to have this world renowned scholar of religious studies, one of the leading voices, not only in in Western Europe, but in global academic study of religion, to come and talk about this really important concept with us today. So Kocku von Stuckrad, welcome to ReligionWise Thanks for coming.

Kocku von Stuckrad:

Thanks for inviting me.

Chip Gruen:

So I wanted to sort of start off broad and then get a little bit more specific with our conversation today. And one of the developments I think in the study of religion and culture over the last I don't know decade you can you can correct me a couple of decades, I suppose, is the idea of discursive analysis and thinking about discourse. Now, we've all heard the word discourse before, but I've heard it used in the, I hesitate to say incorrect way, right? But as a synonym for conversation or a synonym for for talking generally, how do you understand this word discourse in your work?

Kocku von Stuckrad:

Yeah, you're totally right there. There has been a lot of discussion about discourse and also very different ways of doing the term both in their study of religion but also in cultural studies all over the place. Many people talk about discourse but there are very different different understandings involved there. And, and in the study of religion, and we can also use that same question for other things. We might be interested in science or law or whatever, it's the ultimate question is do you talk about the things themselves? Religion is something? Or are you talking about what people think religion is? So, do you talk about ideas about religion or science or law or whatever, what have you, and that is exactly what the difference is in the study of religion or in other disciplines as well. Between the discursive approach and other approaches, because discursive approaches are interested in discourses on something, and discourses on religion, what people think about religion, what, how do they define religion, so you don't come up with a definition yourself to start with, but you are interested in, okay, these people talk about religion in this way, and it's not spirituality, it's not science, it's something and, and you study how these uses are set up in a certain context. And what makes discourses interesting, it's not only the term or the language that you study, like in text analysis or something, but discourses are practices, that means that discourses also establish orders of knowledge and therefore they are also linked to some kind of hegemonial dimension. So what what is possible to think about religion, for instance, is a discourse, we cannot think maybe out of the box, you might say, but this is made mainly then kind of controlled or directed by knowledge that we just share through what we call discourses. And these are then also practices in the sense that what we think about the world, these orders of knowledge about the world are also legitimized, they are made plausible, because there is maybe there are churches, so that must be religion, or something that can be in architecture that can be disciplines at university about something that gives like legitimacy to something in a certain context. And these are all discourses on and if you study discourses, then you're interested in how orders of knowledge are set up. And these are shared basically, in a, in a group in a society in a large, large section of society. And they can also change, but they are basically shared opinions. And in this understanding of knowledge, opinion and knowledge is not not a big difference. So it's not about it's not about what is true knowledge, but what is kind of understood as reality, or as truth in a certain context. Sorry, for the long, long answer.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, no, no, that's good. And I want to push on a couple of things, because I know and I'm sort of torn as to whether to read your formal definition or not. Because I don't want to read your own work back to you. But there are a couple of aspects of it that I really want to push that I always call out to students that I'm reading this with. And I want to get your your take on on the relationship between the two. The first is the idea that these are social, right, so that if I'm just going through, okay, I've teased it, I need to read it now. So the formal definition you give in a couple places, is"Discourses are practices that organize knowledge in a given community. They establish, stabilize and legitimize systems of meaning and provide collectively shared orders of knowledge in an institutionalized social ensemble statements, utterances and opinions about a specific topic, systematically organized and repeatedly observable form of discourse." And the thing that I always point out to students is if you just go through that community, collectively shared, social ensemble, you know, that the idea of sort of group is so important here, right, to really, you know, to really emphasize what the anthropologist will call sort of a cultural component of discourse. So that's the one thing and then the other thing, and you don't use power in here. But I'll have you know, I group you with Asad sometimes on my syllabi, but you don't use power here, but the idea of legitimization, an organization and so forth. And so, you know, I want I would like to your take on, on the one hand, the idea of the communal aspect of this. And on the other hand that there is this cultural power, right, that is not 1984 authoritarian style power, but it is sort of the power of something that is in many ways ineffable the water that we, you know, that we that we drink the air that we breathe, that's all around us. Could you talk a little bit about the relationship between community and power there?

Kocku von Stuckrad:

Yeah, yeah, these are two very, very important components of the whole discursive approach. The one, like you said, it's, there is no discourse without groups, there is no discourse without kind of communication across individuals. So you can have individual experiences, all over the place, of course, but to talk about a discourse or meaningfully, to talk about a discourse, would need some shared understandings of something. So there must be a shared understanding, and that can be like Foucault talked about, that can be tacit knowledge, that can be something you don't realize, you think, for instance, that Christianity is better than Islam or something, or that magic is not as good as science, something like this, most people don't really think about it, but they still have certain understandings of of the world, in certain context. I mean, that in different countries that might be different, in different contexts might be different, but it's always the kind of understanding that is shared in a group context. And this is also these can be large groups like states, or like, like whole parts of nations and so on. So, these are very influential orders of knowledge that then also resonate with, with what these communities do, the papers, they read, the disciplines, they study, or whatever, is part of the sharing of certain understandings of, of the world. And a lot of research in discourse, researches also interested in power, like you said, And Foucault as well, what was one of that, and then part of the discursive approaches is even calling itself critical discourse analysis. And this critical discourse, inevitably, that is, this focuses particularly on the question, Who is behind whose interests are these these discourses serving, who is behind this, for instance, in the colonial context, you could say that colonizers were very interested in having certain understandings of religion over against any animism or magic which the indigenous peoples do, but they are not yet religious, they are not as civilized as we are. And that would be an example that discourse analysis would be very critical to kind of reveal the hidden power structures that are involved there. And that is one important aspect of it, but I would in my own work, I do not think that it is all about this, deconstructing and revealing of power structures, it is also just like, what the sociology of knowledge does, just describing what's going on what people think, and they are competing discourses may be and you can, you can reconstruct the history of a certain involvement or a certain discursive development. And these can change, depending on power relations, but not only.

Chip Gruen:

Yes, so I want to give just one I want to stay here, just one more minute and then I want to get into some more specific discourses that you deal with in your work. But I want to talk a little bit I've got two objections, one I'm going to share with you now, the other one I'm going to share share later on in the podcast, because it's, it's a little more, I don't know, a little more confrontational, I guess. But the first one is, you you refer to this actually, in your article, "Discursive Study of Religions - Approaches, Definitions and Implications," as the death and furniture argument or the death and furniture objection, and I will, I'll get you explain what that is. But I will say just in passing that I am guilty of this because when I'm teaching postmodernism, I very often will use a chair as my example of what do we perceive to be a chair or not. And of course, I'll hop up and sit on a desk or something and say, Well, is it a chair, then right and talk about it. So could you describe? So I'm guilty of the furniture part, not the death part. Um, but could you describe a little bit about the death and furniture objection?

Kocku von Stuckrad:

Yeah, I mean, that's this is part of a important discussion in the social sciences, in general, and in religious studies, as well about the level of constructivist elements in our in our theorizing, and then there are extreme poles, say that, that the realist pole would be set, okay, there is reality, and we can actually describe it. So a chair is a chair, right. And then there's the other extreme, it says there's, there's nothing can be taken for granted, take taken. for granted or taking the we can take nothing as real because everything is only socially constructed. And that would be the other extreme, like, if you sit on a table, then it's the chair. And, and these, these are the two extremes that are theoretically, and there are a few people who have this position. But the majority is somewhere in the middle. And discursive approach has certainly come out of this, this constructivist trend in the social sciences and the humanities, that was very, very dominant, since the 1970s, basically. Before that, it was more of a realistic thing. But the critical deconstruction or the construction of knowledge as socially shared and constructed, it's something that was a very strong paradigm in the in the, in the second half of the 20th century. And discourse research certainly comes out of that. And it's more interested in how people construct chairs, or religion or magic, rather than what this really is. I mean, we're not really interesting deciding for them. What if this is true or not? So there are less ontological kinds of statements in this. And that's, that's part of all these constructivist approaches. Let me say one interesting thing that has happened over the last 10, 15 years is that the pendulum is, is in the social sciences and the humanities is, is swinging a little bit to the other side again, and that comes with these new materialisms with these with these not necessarily realistic in the philosophical sense, we know about the true reality. But but there's a counter critique thing that, okay, you run into something and you bounce. So there's some, there's some resistance in the real world that that you cannot just construct. And there is some kind of level of ontology or reality out there that we have to take into account as maybe not exactly the thing that we can describe with our models of reality, but there's certainly we there that is robust in the sense that we cannot make up anything. And there is a kind of move also in discursive study of religion to say, Okay, how do we deal with what today often is called agency of the material world? How do we deal with kind of the world talking back somehow, the nonhuman world talking back to us, and how do we include that in our discursive analysis? And I think that is a very, it is, it is possible to include that, in discursive approaches, I don't think that is that we need to give up a discursive analysis. But it is interesting to, to see what happens when we include the agency of nonhumans, for instance, in our discursive analysis.

Chip Gruen:

So, I want to go back just just a little bit to put a finer point on something because you talk about sort of from the 70s on the postmodern turn, you mentioned Foucault, etc. And I think the majority of our listeners, whether they would put it in these terms or not, would probably be modernist in some way. Right. I think and actually, that's that that will end up being a question as well, right is how much of this is in the academy and how much of this does this trickle out into affecting, you know, public discourse as well as as well as academic discourses? But um, You know, when we think about modernism, you know, I like to think particularly about, you know, the turn of the 19th into the 20th centuries, where we had things like the examples I always used or something like encyclopedia companies going crazy, right? Wanting to do a compendium of human knowledge and put it in 26 volumes or what have you, and then be able to have it on your shelf. And know, you know, that this thing describes the nature of reality. Or the other one that I, that I point to is the American Kennel Club, right? In breed standards, it's the idea that, you know, a German Shepherd or something didn't exist, you know, as a breed until people decided to get together and decide what a real German Shepherd is, it's got to be this tall, and it's got to have this color coat, and it's have to have this disposition. But then it was sort of determined that this is now the nature of reality of that of that breed, you know, so that there's that modern, and I could mention things like the Miss America Pageant doing something very similar. But that's really kind of kind of gross, so I won't. But this idea of describing and cataloging sort of the perfect sort of specimen or exemplar of a thing, right is I think, at the heart to some degree of the modernist move, or, for example, the world's fairs or the world parliament of religion, like all of these things that are looking to catalog and put in one place, and then post modernism really turns that move on its head, but that modernism is still very much around in public come public conversation, right? People really do believe in the firmness of their own reality, I think in most, most cases, would you would you agree with that?

Kocku von Stuckrad:

I think that's a, that's an apt description of what's what's what was going on and what is still going on. And I think it is also interesting to see this as part of a larger development that has to do with what self work on what what does it mean to be modern, right. And it's in this cataloguing and this description and this organizing knowledge, objective knowledge about the world is is a kind of identity marker for for discourses on modernity, in the sense that everything is theoretically understandable about the world and we only have to look for it and then we find it and then we catalog it and also secure it somehow and control it. So, there are all these kinds of understandings of knowledge as and description as controlling something and being in power and so on. So, that is certainly part of the modernist, and also the understanding of what is the progress of modernity over against earlier periods. And that's also then linked to what what happened to religion or to metaphysics or to all to mysticism or all these things that are allegedly non describable in that exact sense, not you cannot set up an experiment for it and all these things. So there this reductionist approach to reality is not easily applicable to these phenomena. And that also changed the status of religion or the discourses on religion over the over against other other phenomena in the 20th century.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, and so Okay, let's so let's let's make the move into talking about particular discourses that you're interested in that you've you've published monographs on and and I'll start with the the first volume I want to talk about It's entitled "The Scientific... The Scientification of Religion - Historical Study of Discursive Change from 1800 to 2000." And in particular, I want to talk about what you describe, you know, sometimes as a discursive knot and tell me if you think that this a knot k n o t, right, like two ropes tied together, I always think of it in my mind like a braid like they're braided together. That science and religion right and and I think that a lot of us, you know, if we pay attention to public conversation or political conversation, that our, our culture our society, the dominant discourse, wants to view to some degree science and religion as being antithetical to one another, and that one should not use one in describing the other yet the cultural history that you do sort of describes that this wasn't always the case doesn't have to be the case. And, you know, may not actually be as good a description of reality as people think it is. So can you talk a little bit about the scientification of religion?

Kocku von Stuckrad:

Yeah, yeah, when one thing about this, this knot or the braid, discoursive braid, that it's a quite simple idea basically, that if you think of one thing, like religion, or like, whatever, the soul or something or nature or something, then then it does not really carry much meaning by itself, it only receives its meaning if you link it to something else, and that is that is what I call a discursive, knot so or what we sometimes call strands, discourse strands, and they are woven together or they meet or something. And these, these strands change over time, and like Islam and fundamentalism, that changed the whole understanding the origins of knowledge about Islam, if you link it to terrorism, if you link it to, like what Mozart did to, to opium, or to to the Haram or whatever, in Orientalist fantasy, it's a completely different order of understanding of order of knowledge of Islam, and none of that is the real Islam, but these are these are very powerful knowledge structures, and they come together in these kind of bringing together discursive strands like, like science and religion in the in the case you, you mentioned, and the interesting thing about the science religion dichotomy is that, that in the 18th 19th century, not many people talked about that, it was not, it was not a language that was actually used, even the English term scientist, as a kind of profession was first introduced into English language in around 1850. Before that, they were all different. They were scholars, or they were philosophers, or that that was a different language game, and therefore a different, there was no discourse on science and religion, because nobody talked about that. They there was discourse on religion, of course, but then that was linked to philosophy to metaphysics to all kinds of other other to knowledge about nature, maybe that later in the 20th century became science. So that's, that's one thing that I find interesting, if you look at these, look at these developments, and the scientification of religion has then several aspects, one is linked to the kind of emergence of all these academic professional disciplines that study religion, like the study of religion, obviously, but also anthropology, sociology of religion, then all these folklore studies, that all emerged, and Indology, tibetology, all these physiological, and this studies that all emerged at the end of the 19th century, and became legitimized knowledge, if you want, by by their kind of institutionalization, in universities. And the same is true for psychology, for instance, but also for theoretical physics or other sciences. So you have a kind of scientific occation of this knowledge about religion in very, very interesting ways. And it is not at that time, it was not necessarily the understanding that the more science you have, the less religion you'll get. So, that is that is something that basically came in more recent, recently in the middle of the 20th century with, with this very strong kind of behavioristic approach in this in the sciences, but also in psychology, and sociology, and so on. So the experimental focus that is only science is basically a method that we apply, and that is, that it's a method of experimentation. And if you don't have that experimentation, then there is no science. And, and that, of course, is bad news for everything that's religion, or metaphysics or philosophy or even quantum physics. And some, I mean, there are also problems with experimentation in some of the hard sciences. But, but these that was a kind of what you could call a decustomization somehow of science and religion, and that basically started this kind of conflict theory that there were already in the 19th century, there were people who thought about the conflict theory of science against religion, but that was one, one camp of many others. And there were also many, it was not determined yet how this will turn out. And many people till the 1920s and 30s, were interested in merging the sciences and the humanities. And they were looking for universal systems of knowledge and disciplines. And these were famous people I mean, like Carl Jung in psychology, for instance. But also, biologists like Ernst Haeckel, who looked for a bringing together scientific knowledge about the world with religious understandings of, of the cosmos. And this, this very strong dichotomy of science against religion was a paradigm that was actually not not very long in as a as a leading paradigm after the Second World War. And then soon, it also became critiqued as a sign because if you look at the real world, then you don't really see this strong, strong differentiation between religion and science. There are many scientists as well. I mean, Albert Einstein is a good example. Who said , Religion, is nature, right? I mean, he's, and he's, of course, a fiercely celebrated scientist so there's no doubt about that. But at the same time, he, he was one of the early, early representatives of nature based spirituality in the 20th century. And there are so many other examples of that as well.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, so you mentioned the word, spirituality. And I, I'd like to, I don't know, maybe it's my strange fascination with the turn of the of the 19th into the 20th centuries. But when you talk about that these were strands that were not always imagined as a dichotomy as a binary, I think of the development of the spiritualist movement, both both in the US and in Europe, right. And the idea that if you look at a lot of these people who are so keen to demonstrate the sort of the reality of a spiritual world or a spiritual presence or life after death, I mean, how many of them are scientists who are using their new their new toys, right, their are new instruments that had been developed for the purpose of studying the natural world, to also try to, to demonstrate, catalogue, prove the existence of a, of a spiritual world or something other than the material world. And I see also and if you could respond to that. And then also, at the risk of using sort of a Tyler Frazier-ism, there's kind of a survival of that. I mean, I think about, you know, from popular culture contemporary, like ghost hunting shows and things like that, where there's this idea that, you know, one needs to marry together, you know, scientific instruments in order to say something about about a non material world or a world beyond what we can see. So, I mean, so one, you know, is that the right track of development that I'm seeing there? And then and then two, is this a marginal thing? Or do you think that this in the public discourses, has got legs is going to continue to grow?

Kocku von Stuckrad:

I think that that is spot on, what you describe for for in both parts of the, of the question that you that you raised. And that's actually also what fascinated me, and that what what brought me to write this most recent book about the cultural history of the soul, because it's a cultural history, it's, you can also call it a discursive history. But that doesn't sell very so so we opted for cultural history, but it's not about the soul as such, and some readers are disappointed that they still don't know what the soul is at the end of the book, but it is the book about exactly what you what you describe that 100 years ago or 120 years ago it was there was a huge debate about what we today and people at that point already are called occultism. So there is there they are occult, which is just hidden the Latin word for hidden. So occultism is knowing is knowledge about the occult, the hidden powers of nature. And you may think of radioactivity, for instance, isn't called power of nature. We don't see it but it's very powerful. Magnetism, electricity, all these things that were discovered, or invented if you want, but but or were came into being somehow at the end of the 19th century, and people were fascinated. And that is also the kind of environment where spiritualism grew. And the interesting thing is that if you look at the first movement to set up psychology as a professional discipline at the universities, it is exactly this interest that that directed this these moves, people were interested in what you can do with your soul. How you can materialize something, can you get in touch with invisible layers of reality with with with dead people or with different civilizations somewhere? Or can you can your thoughts materialize in distant and activity and all these all these questions and the first experimentation that they did were with these psychics were with these kind of spiritualist, and they they were. So there was a long and very interesting discussion about that. And that was part of a larger frame, I think also in philosophy, that is the mind matter thing. And that was a major, major discussion at the point in art, in psychology, in physics, in how how, how is the relationship between the material world and the spiritual world, basically, and there were all kinds of different, different approaches. For an even in science, like the biologist I already mentioned, Ernst Haeckel, in his latest book 1914 was the title, the souls of crystals, kristall seelen, that's a book title, and that the you have to in the book title that he was a celebrated one of the leading scientists at the time. And he, for him, it was very clear that all crystals, all stones, not all stones, but crystals, and then he categorized all the different crystals had souls, so they were animated, and that this life was basically a component of material world. And that that was like that that's the second part of your question what. So we have this very, very strong and influential occult kind of occultism debate at the time. And I agree that continuites are much stronger than you might expect. Until today, and in my book, I have one important phenomenon I see as an important juncture between this and that is particularly in the US, it's a transpersonal movement, in the 60s 70s and 80s were, where these where these threats, or these discursive kind of entanglements were, were coming together. And that created what we now today call, or some people call the New Age Movement, for instance, where what mind and matter are thought together again, and we're Carl Gustav Jung, one of the heroes of the earlier period was revived and reapplied to questions of, for instance, nature and the cosmos as being alive and all these all these questions. So yes, I think that there is a strong continuity. And I think if you look at discourses about soul animism, so nature is animated which anima is the Latin word for word for soul. So in a discursive perspective, everything that is animated is about the soul. So it's a discursive, not that that links up with, with ideas about the soul, and that gives life so the life force in biology, for instance, 100 years ago, they were thinking about it, what what what is the inherent power of life that makes a tree grow? That's not just measuring the bark and that that's, that's not that's part of what we do. But the real interesting thing for many people is what drives this tree what what is the life power, the life essence in it and so on? And that that there's some continuity and what we see today, I think is a revival. Particularly when it comes to animated nature. If you look at the all these bestsellers about tree consciousness, like Richard Powers', "The Overstory" a Pulitzer Prize and everything. So there are so many phenomena that revive this kind of spiritualization of nature, even in the, what we used to call the hard sciences.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, and I would guess that particularly say, particularly in the US, I would guess that this gets supercharged, by sort of liberalisation of immigration laws in the United States in the 60s as well, right, that some of these ideas are sort of being reinforced by, you know, for lack of a more specific term, Eastern spiritual ideas.

Kocku von Stuckrad:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think what what you also see, and that's another dimension of scientification of religion, is that, that if you look at these new spiritualities, that come up in the context of what sometimes it's called the New Age movement, in Esalen, for instance, and basically in California, and from there spread out in other areas as well. Also, before that, before the 60s already in the 50s, and 40s I was already so it's about was not necessarily new thing. But there are new new practices and spiritutalities coming up. And what you see in some of these is a very strong influence of scientist. And so these are also scientifically informed new spiritualities. If you look, for instance, at shamanism, or paganism, or let's take shamanism, that if you look at all the major representatives still today, or since the 1970s, till today, have a PhD in anthropology, or have at least Master's in anthropology, or in religious studies, or sometimes psychology. And so these are, these are academic experts, some, then they explain to broader audience, and that adds legitimacy to what they say in a secular context. They know what they're talking about, and yet they are very into the spiritual dimensions and they want to so, so, it is even the case that science can and I include the humanities here, that secular science says, knowledge systems can produce new, new spiritual activities and convictions and practices. And the same is true even for the for for the hard sciences, if you look at quantum physics, for instance, the whole quantum mysticism that again, was very prominent in the, in the 70s, and 80s, in Esalen, and elsewhere. But and Fritjof Capra, for instance, who merged this quantum understanding, and he was also a scientist, but he was he spent time in, in in Asia, and in Japan to to learn the non western philosophies, like what you said. And that these are all examples of people who were breeding these discursive strands together somehow with their science and religion and spirituality. And that that was gave a boost to new kinds of identities. And what we see today, particularly and since 1990s, maybe with a change of ecology, and that has everything to do with climate climate crisis, of course, but so there's a sense of urgency of course, but at the same time, there is an interest in in a non reductionist body. And what Richard Powers describes in his novel for instance, "The Overstory," is something that is new forestry, and that is new biology that's non non non reductionist, more holistic, that that can easily be blended to understandings of tree consciousness, which is a huge boom, all over the place, that the trees are not only and other life forms as well are having their own intelligences. So they are animated, which is a discursive link between the soul and nature again, so they, they are somehow agents, they are persons, and there is a movement across the world to give personhood to nonhumans also legal standing like to rivers and, and forests and so on. So that I would think that is a new development. That's that's, that's quite influential in search, certainly not marginal, like you said, I think, Bron Taylor, it's hard to measure this kind of exact numbers. But I think there's a lot to say, to confirm what Bron Taylor calls it, the global greening of religion. That these, what I would do, I would call this as a growing discursive blend of nature and spirituality. And that even enters kind of political documents, like the UNESCO treaties and so on, where there's talk of kind of the, the age old veneration of the oceans, indigenous cultures, for instance, that is not that is not politics only, or science or you know, that, that is also very spiritual discourse that's going on there. And in a secular context, but but these are brought together somehow, and that is not, that does not represent a kind of dichotomy between science and religion anymore. This this is a mesh of, of identities that come together in very, very complex ways.

Chip Gruen:

So do you think? Do you think that these discourses, I mean, like, so for example, you mentioned your, "Cultural History of the Soul" and you make in the subtitle the distinction, Europe and North America from 1870, to the present? How much do you think the discursive, you know, arena, or the public discourse on these conversations is shared is similar in in Europe and in North America? And how much do I don't know, say, the rise of kind of an anti intellectualism in the United States make these different conversations?

Kocku von Stuckrad:

Yeah, I think there's there's both there's overlap. And there, there are differences. And overlap is certainly in these intellectual traditions that are shared. And also in you see, this also, in many biographies, actually, of migrants coming from, from Europe and then during the war are refugees and to, to the US, so you can certainly see some continuities there. And you can also see differences, like what you said that it is quite unique, US context with this with a political tradition with a cultural tradition and all that. And at the same time, you cannot also say there is one European tradition. I mean, there's, if you look at Europe today, there, it's a whole kind of patchwork of different, different understandings there. And if I would be hesitant, saying that, there is a European discourse, that is in a clear way distinct from the US. And there is when it comes to these spiritual practices, for instance, there's certainly a lot of overlap. In the sense that shamanism, for instance, in particularly in Western Europe looks, I mean, this kind of new shamanism looks very much like, like the US. I mean, it's also even imported from the US through the Michael Harner's. Foundation. And then it is it is makes in many other ways. The same is true for Neo pagan groups, for instance, where in where in Europe, particularly, but also in different ways that can be connected to old Celtic traditions in the UK, or to Viking traditions. And, and it's also used in in, in central Europe as a kind of identity marker that is pre socialist, but also pre Christian. So there is a kind of nationalist movement that goes that reconstructs this kind of roots of the almost völkisch way in some in some contexts. So there are all kinds of different ways of looking at that, but, but I think that these discursive worlds are very, very entangled, actually.

Chip Gruen:

So and I promised and I'm coming back to it, because I promised another objection. And so this is this is this is my object, not my objection, an objection that I've been thinking a lot about and, and actually, while it I want to frame it in reference to the methods of sort of discursive analysis, I think some of what you're talking about the resurgence of sort of identity markers, and you know, whether those be pre Christian, nationalistic etc tie into this. And so here it is that in the beginning, right, the postmodern turn was really a very leftist kind of a thing, right that it was emerging in the 60s and the 70s as being sort of a questioning of institutions of social patterns of authority, you know, in sort of in step with the counterculture a little bit, or more than a little bit, actually. In the past several years, though, the tools of post modernism seem to be sort of creeping into the toolbox of and discursive analysis for that matter, seem to be creeping into the tool box of authoritarianism in lots of different contexts. So questioning the nature of reality describing, you know, the denial, denial, denial of facts on the ground, right in in with an argument that there are alternative versions of the same history. I mean, is this inevitable that this is not just sort of a toolkit of the left but then ends up being sort of spread? I mean, what, I'm not going to ask you for the answer to this, but just you know, am I reading that phenomena right, are those phenomena right that this is something that is that is sort of spreading and being used in various various other cultural contexts than the one it grew up in?

Kocku von Stuckrad:

Absolutely, I fully agree with that observation, what we what we see is that these tools and these critical deconstruction or whatever you want to call that, that has that had a certain kind of root in countercultures, and critical leftist kind of readings of, of hegemonic discourses and so on that that are also used in in other milieu and apply to other questions as well and use as legitimization. And it's a, you, you hear these discussions, very often in one example of that is also I mean, if everything is, is constructed, then we cannot really attack fake news. So there is no, there are no fake facts, if all facts are basically fake, like, like, what the radical postmodernist Nietzsche said, I mean, nobody really said that, but that it's also misreading of a lot what's going on in that, but then it's turned into anything goes, right. And that is not what these people actually the theorist said, but which is how how much of that comes across easily, and then it can be can be used like that. And the answer, then is not okay, well, then we have to pretend that we know the truth. I don't think that that is very, very useful. But I think what what is important is to to understand that it does not mean that anything goes that that it does not matter what I claim, it only means that whatever I claim is coming from a certain position of prospectivity and a certain perspective, title kind of understanding of reality. And I still, as a scholar, I am accountable of what I do, and as a journalist and as the political political leader, you know I am accountable to what I say and that the then the interesting question is, what are the what are the criteria of accountability? And that's, I think, what we need to talk about, and that's what Laurie Patton writes about, and the institutional responsibility that we have, as scholars, for instance, that we always have to make clear that our privileged situation or more or less privileged situation has certain influence on what we are saying, which does not mean that we that we make things up. And that's also this nice distinction between making things up does not mean that things are made. They are made, things are made, but they are not made up. That's so the these distinctions are important to, to keep I think.

Chip Gruen:

All right, well, Kocku von Stuckrad, thank you very much for this. This has been super fun and super enlightening, and I really appreciate you coming on ReligionWise.

Kocku von Stuckrad:

Thank you so much for the conversation. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Chip Gruen:

This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming, or to make an inquiry about a speaking engagement, please visit our website at religionandculture.com. There you'll find our contact information, links to other programming and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise wherever you get your podcasts. We look forward to seeing you next time.