Qualia of God: Phenomenological Materiality in Introspection, with a Reference to Advaita Vedanta. Phenomenology of Religious Experience Open Access. Open Theology, 3, (1)257-273. Published Online: 2017-05-18 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2017-0021 (original) (raw)
Related papers
The problem of Religious Experience: Case Studies in Phenomenology, 2019
This is an introduction to The Problem of Religious Experience: Case Studies in Phenomenology, with Reflections and Commentaries. The book presents an updated overview of the problem of religious experience in phenomenology, from the time of Husserl to French phenomenology's theological turn, which was followed by important publications such as Steinbock (2007), Depraz (2008), Alvis (2016 and 2018) and others. Significantly advancing understanding of religious experience, these studies nevertheless left open a question of what exactly makes religious experience what it is: that is, gives it a specific quality distinguishing it, for its subject, from all other experiences. In contemporary phenomenology, Dahl's (2010) theory of interruptions and Barber's (2017) theory of the appresentative mindset and the finite province of religious meaning comprise two most probable and mutually complementary answers to this question. Further, the Introduction covers the contents of the two volumes, entitled The Primeval Showing of Religious Experience and Doxastic Perspectives in the Phenomenology of Religious Experience. The case studies in Volume I proceed from the descriptive phenomenology of religious experience as it relates to subjectivity research (Part 1) to the relationship between religious experience, intersubjectivity, and alterity (Part 2). Part 2 also serves as a bridge to metaphysical, theological, and theistic approaches in Part 3 and Part 4. Along with the overview of the contents of the book, this Introduction presents Olga Louchakova-Schwartz's (as editor of the book) synthetic meta-reflection on the findings, so that the findings in the book are coherently represented in light of contemporary debates in the philosophy of religion.
Phenomenology and the Possibility of Religious Experience
Open Theology, 2017
Work in what has been known as the theological turn in French phenomenology describes the way in which human beings are always, already open to a religious encounter. This paper will focus on Levinas as a proper transcendental phenomenologist as would be characterized by parts of Husserl and Husserl’s last assistant Eugen Fink. What Levinas does in his phenomenology of the face/other (which gets tied up in religious language) is to describe an absolute origin out of which the subject arises. This point of origin structures the self in such a way as to always, already be open to that which overflows experience and, thus, makes possible the very experience of an encounter with the numinous. Such an approach to religious experience for which I am arguing simply takes Levinas at his word when he declares “The idea of God is an idea that cannot clarify a human situation. It is the inverse that is true.” (“Transcendence and Height”) Understanding the structure of the subject as open to th...
Religious Experience in the First-Person Perspective: The Lived Body and Perception of Reality
Religions, 2022
Errata (for whatever idiotic reason, the journal eliminated Husserl's authorship and/or band in HUA and made errors in volume numbers. I am now trying to force the corrections in). Should be Sowa, Rochus, and Thomas Vongehr. 2014. Einleitung. In Husserl, Edmund, Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie: Analyzen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte—Metaphysik—späte Ethik; Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937). Edited by Rochus Sowa and Thomas Vongehr. Dordrecht: Springer, HUA, Band XLII. pp. xix–cxv. Husserl, Edmund. 2014. Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie: Analyzen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte—Metaphysik; späte Ethik; Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937). Edited by Rochus Sowa and Thomas Vongehr. Dordrecht: Springer, HUA, Band XLII. The first-person perspective, developed by Husserl for the scientific study of consciousness, consists of formal categories which can be used both for the analyses of consciousness as such and its concrete forms. Evidence (Evidenz), the central category in this approach, characterizes consciousness as knowledge. This paper presents the phenomenology of changes in perception and embodiment which lead to evidence for religious/spiritual experience (RE). Such change develops over time via contemplative practice, but also can be a part of spontaneous RE. Because of the presence of evidence, RE containing the change of perception are presentational (as distinct from appresentative). This temporally extended evidence concerns reality’s giving of itself, granted that the main distinction between religious and non-religious experience is in the kind of reality to which they refer: physical in the case of non-religious, and ‘ultimate’ in the case of religious experience. Involving flesh and the reversibility of the body, the change in such complex RE also entails the transmutation of emotion from negative to positive. I compare these findings with Husserl’s analysis of religious experience in HUA XVII, and argue that grounding religious experience in the preconceived idea of God, as Husserl does, limits RE to regressive forms which do not constitute knowledge. Such experiences remain teleologically directed at the world-horizon. By contrast, REs grounded in change of perception have a different teleology and do constitute knowledge.
PHENOMENOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE IV: RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AND DESCRIPTION, EDITED BY OLGA LOUCHAKOVA-SCHWARTZ, 2020
In this Introduction to the topical issue of Open Theology, I sketch research-related themes in the topic of description of religious experience. According to phenomenology, clarifications in the expression of experience are necessary first steps towards both the theory of knowledge in its cognitive and transcendental "incarnations" and the consequent metaphysics. Description gives one an access to ideal apriori-s and the transcendental ego as they are lived in one's experience. As Husserl himself shows in the beginning of Logical Investigations, in its unity with meaning, description has to be approached by means of phenomenological analyses.
Religious Experience and Phenomenology
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan. Religious experience and the experiential dimension of religious practice have come to constitute a fruitful area of inquiry for anthropology. Phenomenology has been of key importance in developing anthropological approaches to study the experiential side of religion and continues to inspire new developments in this area. Key authors in the anthropology of religion, such as Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner, have drawn on the phenomenological school in philosophy to think through the ways in which humans experience the world, constitute their lifeworlds, and theorize how religious experience emerges. Furthermore, since the late 1980s, several prominent anthropologists have drawn on phenomenology to create fresh approaches to and representations of subjects that are of interest to the anthropology of religion, such as ritual, witchcraft and sorcery, healing, and religious experience. This trend was partly a reaction to structural-ism but scholars were often also prompted to draw on phenomenology as an inspiration when confronted with phenomena that seemed to have no place in Western scientific and secular understandings of the world. To some extent, the influence of phenomenology, particularly in studying phenomena usually found under the umbrella of the anthropology of religion, has involved an epistemological project to find a nonreductive way to understand such phenomena. Phenomenological anthropology has created pathways both into how people come to experience these phenomena as real, as well as into the ways the anthropologist, as an embodied subject, comes to understand people's lifeworlds.
Introduction: The Religious Structure of Phenomena—A Phenomenological Investigation
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2019
The essays presented in this issue focus on the phenomenological investigation of religious phenomena. Scholars belonging to different phenomenological traditions address the following groups of questions in order to describe the structure that makes a phenomenon religious. First, is it actually possible to talk about religious experience? In this issue we decided not to give a final answer but, rather, to refer to religious experience as the religious structure of phenomena. In fact, the main question that informs our current contributions is: Could there be a phenomenology of religious experience? Second, we would like to ponder what different forms of phenomenological investigations can add to the description of the religious structure of phenomena. In this case we refer to the philosophical and psychological reflections of Dewey, Husserl, Heidegger, Ricoeur, James, and so forth, in order to shed light on religious phenomena. Third, we would like to address the question that gives the title to this issue: Do these phenomena present themselves as religious, or is it their structure as it interacts with our sense of self, our beliefs, our sense of the sacred, and our transcendental attitude that attributes phenomena a religious color? Can a religious sentiment be grounded in a perceptual and experiential quality? Or does our way of relating to neutral matter color it with a theological and axiological quality?
The religious structure of phenomena. A phenomenological investigation
The papers we presented in this volume focus on the phenomenological investigation of the religious phenomena. Scholars belonging to different phenomenological traditions addressed the following groups of questions in order to describe the structure that makes a phenomenon religious. First, is it actually possible to talk about religious experience? In this issue we decided not to give a final answer, but rather to refer to religious experience as the religious structure of the phenomena. In fact, the main question that informs our current literature is: could there be a phenomenology of religious experience? Secondly, we would like to ponder what different forms of phenomenological investigations can add to the description of the religious structure of the phenomena. In this case we referred to the philosophical and psychological reflection of Dewey's, Husserl's, Heidegger's, Ricoeur's, James' and so forth, in order to shed light on religious phenomena. Thirdly, we would like to address the question that gives the title to this issue: Do these phenomena present themselves as religious or is their structure as it interacts with our sense of self, our beliefs, our sense of the sacred and our transcendental attitude that attribute the phenomena a religious color? Can a religious sentiment be grounded in a perceptual and experiential quality? Or is our way of relating to neutral matter that colors them in a theological and axiological quality? Anna Varga-Jani approached religious experience through a twofold phenomenological investigation aimed at discovering, (1) how religious experiences reflected on reality, and (2) how the methodology of phenomenology lead to the wider ontology of theology. These two divergent approaches to religious experiences found their source in the phenomenological reflection on reality, and this reality, in view of the substantially non-real experience of religiosity, urged the creation of a new ontology in the donation of revelation. Ricoeur's phenomenological approach was used to inquiry into this layer of reality. Drawing on Husserl's egology, Marc Applebaum's contribution Remembrance: A Husserlian Phenomenology of Sufi Practice, discussed the traditional Sufi practice of " remembrance of God " (dhikr), which can be understood as " the primary meditative practice " within Islam (Elias 2013, 199). The aim was to describe dhikr as a religious phenomenon consisting in turning from a condition of heedlessness and duality to a unitive experience of remembering God and being remembered by God. Remembrance was framed not as a metaphysical doctrine but as a lived-experience situated in the practice of classical Sufism, traditionally understood as a lifelong, sapiential path.
This paper investigates the connections between the phenomenology of religious experience and Michel Henry's entire body of work. Henry debated on Christianism and the phenomenological interpretation of religion in the latter part of his philosophical thinking. However, a new interpretation of Henry's work is needed starting from his work The Essence of Manifestation and his critique of religion by Marx and Feuerbach which he analyzed in two volumes devoted to these two philosophers (1976). Although it has been scarcely investigated, Henry's work should be considered as a whole from its beginning to his philosophy of Christianity. As this aspect of Henry's work has often been ignored, this paper proposes a new interpretation of the essence of religion through its connections with the essence of manifestation. This will be done in three steps: firstly, an investigation of Henry's thought starting from his interpretation of Marx and Feuerbach will be proposed; secondly, a " new ontology of manifestation " by Henry will be analysed; and finally, a connection between Henry's phenomenological essence of manifestation and the new conception of the essence of religion will be suggested. Throughout his work, Michel Henry shows that the manifestation of reality cannot be known without understanding the experience that every man has of it. Henry also deals with this argument in his works on religion and, specifically, on Christianity, which he addresses from the point of view of the Incarnation and Life in the flesh that unites Christ and man. Therefore, all his work can be regarded as a phenomenology of religious experience. He develops this topic by considering what religion is, and how its phenomenology could be possible. The objective of this article is to analyze Henry's view of the phenomenology of religious experience examining different aspects of his study. Firstly, his idea of religion is presented. Secondly, the article investigates his " critique of religion " through the reading of Marx and Feuerbach. The analysis concludes with Henry's investigation of the essence of manifestation and Christianity. These three key elements have provided a decisive contribution to the answering of Henry's fundamental question: how does a religious experience manifest itself?
What Counts as a 'Religious Experience'?: Phenomenology, Spirituality and the Question of Religion
2018
This paper: a) offers a phenomenology of the religious that challenges the assumption that “religious experience” is primarily to be understood as a type of experience, called ‘religious’ experience, which is distinct from other (i.e., ‘non-religious’) experiences; and b) traces out some implications of this for phenomenological and other scholarly approaches to religion. To achieve these aims, the paper begins by explaining the phenomenological claim-found most explicitly in Husserl and Merleau- Ponty-that all experiences are expressive of a certain kind of spirit. This account of spirit, when applied to the phenomenological understanding of the ‘religious,’ allows us to distinguish between religiosity (as a transcendental structure), religions (as dynamic forces that express that structure), and religious phenomena (as concrete phenomena that express religions). In turn, this tri-partite distinction allows us to explain how religiosity leads to the development of religion in a way that suggests that ‘the religious’ is best conceived as a particular dimension of all experience. In that light, two major implications for the study of religion emerge from the phenomenology of the religious provided in this paper: 1) the realm of possible subjects of study is greatly expanded; while 2) the proper object of study is narrowed and clarified.
Religious Experience, Adumbrated: Towards a Phenomenological Ontology of the Region
Phenomenology of Religious Experience Open Theology Topical Issue, 2017
In this introduction to the topical issue in Phenomenology of Religious Experience, the editors present a brief overview of problematic of religious experience in philosophy and phenomenology, as related to massive evidence of religious experiencing in esotericism, mysticism, and experience-based theologies. An novel approach to the study of religious experience suggests integration of multiple phenomenological perspectives which, instead of creating interdisciplinary constraints, illumine religious intuition with regard to its positioning in different horizons of inquiry. Religious experience appears as generating its own lifeworld which can be further subjected to constitutive analyses in any of its forms, such as static (i.e., structural), genetic (temporal), and generative (historical) analysis. This framework further develops towards the idea of the regional ontology of the holy unifying conditions of possibility for religious experience which manifest themselves across different domains and spheres of consciousness. It is possible that the lifeworld of the everyday would be “masking” the Holy while the Holy can be spontaneously “unmasking” itself, that is, coming out of anonymity in instances of religious experiencing. In oral transmission and traditional texts, religious experience is deployed from interiority into intersubjectivity. The forms of religious experiencing add up (not unlike adumbrations in Husserl’s view of sensory objects) thereby creating a picture of the essence of religious experiencing on the whole.