Phenomenology of religion

1. Descriptive philosophy of religion

Typically, the philosophy of religion is a normative enterprise, reflecting on the truth of religious beliefs. Thus proofs of the existence (and nature) of God are offered in the attempt to establish the truth of various theistic claims, while the existence of evil is offered as evidence against such claims. Both sides of this argument attempt to show that the other’s arguments do not decisively establish the conclusion put forth, and the discussion often turns from the question of truth to the question of rationality. If God’s existence cannot be decisively proved or disproved, is it rational to believe in God? But this, too, is a normative question.

By contrast, the phenomenology of religion brackets or temporarily sets aside such questions as to whether we are obliged or permitted or forbidden by the standards of truth and rationality to hold various religious beliefs. Instead, its point of departure is the fact that religion is an observable phenomenon of human life, and its task is to help us better understand what religion is by giving descriptive analyses of that aspect of human experience. In this regard it strongly resembles the philosophy of science and the philosophy of art, the tasks of which are neither to praise nor to bury science and art, but to give us deeper insight into the structures and functions of these widespread human activities. In all three cases, the observability of the phenomena is no guarantee of agreement when it comes to descriptive analysis.

By asking the question ‘What is religion?’, the phenomenology of religion expands the subject matter of the philosophy of religion in two ways. First, since religion is as much a matter of practice as of belief, it abandons the assumption that the philosophy of religion is primarily concerned with locating religious belief on some hierarchical scale of cognitive acts inspired by Plato’s divided line. Instead, it focuses attention on religion as a language game that is a fully fledged form of life or mode of being-in-the-world.

Second, in seeking the essence, the common nature, or at least the family resemblances of a wide variety of phenomena usually taken to be religious, it requires a multicultural approach not usually found in the normative philosophy of religion, which often restricts itself to issues arising out of Jewish and Christian monotheism. Data for philosophical reflection emerge from work in comparative religion or the history of religions, such as Frazer’s The Golden Bough or Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion.

As the search for the essence or common core of religion encounters divergences, numerous and often sharp, among religious beliefs and practices, a new task arises: typology. Now the question ‘What is religion?’ is supplemented by the question ‘What differences among religious phenomena are most fundamental, and what kinds of classification are most illuminating?’ It often turns out that historically distinct traditions, such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism and so forth, can be replaced for such purposes by categories that cut across these traditions. Among these categories are Eliade’s distinction of cosmos from history, James’ distinction of once-born from twice-born and Bergson’s distinction of static/closed from dynamic/open (see Eliade, M. §2; Bergson, H.-L. §8.)