Phenomenology of religion

2. Scientific and existential phenomenology of religion

Historically speaking, the phenomenology of religion is a post-Kantian affair, and one strand has Kant himself and Husserl as its mentors. From Kant (§8) comes scepticism regarding metaphysical disputes about the way the world really is, along with the notion that we can nevertheless set forth the basic structures of our experience of the world. By making the phenomenal rather than the noumenal our subject matter, we can retain the goal of a philosophy that is scientific in the sense of giving us objective knowledge about something. Husserl’s ideal of philosophy as rigorous science seeks to preserve this moment in Kant from lapsing into naturalism or psychologism. At the same time, his accounts of transcending the natural attitude by moving from fact to essence and by bracketing questions about the reality of the world as distinct from the mode of its givenness in experience (the epoche) seek to give methodological rigour to the descriptive tasks of postmetaphysical philosophy (see Husserl, E.).

A quite different motivation underlies the existential orientation in the phenomenology of religion. This strand presupposes both the hermeneutical and the existential turns phenomenology was to take away from Husserl’s conception of a rigorously scientific philosophy; and it replaces Kant and Husserl with Heidegger and Kierkegaard as mentors for the phenomenology of religion. The hermeneutical critique, building on the late work of Husserl, becomes fully explicit in Heidegger (§§2–3) and Gadamer (§§3–4). All our cognitions are interpretations whose own possibility presupposes our immersion in language, in culture and in history in such ways that the ideal of a purely scientific understanding, free from all particular perspectives and presuppositions, is a chimera. No phenomenology can have as its goal the preservation of scientific objectivism in a postmetaphysical context.

What then can the goal be? It is at this point that Kierkegaard (§§4–6) is able to provide an existential answer. Not only does reflection always emerge from within the concrete situatedness of human existence; it has as its goal the clarification of the possibilities that confront us so that we can choose responsibly what kind of lives to live, especially since we must choose without the epistemic guarantees we would like.

As a descriptive approach to the philosophy of religion, the phenomenology of religion is more than just an alternative to the normative mode. It is always, at least implicitly, a critique of the latter. In its scientific mode, it extends the Kantian judgment that theoretical reason cannot settle metaphysical disputes to reason in all its modes, and views traditional philosophy of religion as engaging in speculation that is unwarranted because undecidable. While the existential mode often shares this view, its critique grows primarily out of its appreciation of Pascal’s distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It fears that the debates over natural theology too quickly become a theoretician’s luxury in a realm of abstraction that loses touch both with the living God and with the concrete concerns and inescapable choices of existing individuals.

Both kinds of phenomenology of religion assume a kind of Socratic ignorance, a denial that we can attain final certainty about ultimate reality; and both place the Socratic question ‘What is religion?’ in this context. Sharing the Socratic preoccupation with the question about the way we should live, the existential mode transforms the objective question ‘What is religion?’ into the subjective question ‘What would it mean to be religious as distinct from being irreligious?’

These two modes of phenomenology of religion are ideal types. Some important descriptions of the religious experience proceed with hardly a pause for methodological reflection; others proceed on the basis of historical, psychological, sociological or even literary self-understandings; still others, with clear philosophical intent, describe their project in ways that do not correspond exactly to these descriptions of the scientific and existential modes. But these tendencies can be perceived, in varying degrees, across a vast body of literature, all of which can be read as contributing to this philosophical project. We read descriptions of the religious life phenomenologically, whatever their genre, when we look for meanings (or essences) rather than facts; when we view these meanings as living, as what happens rather than what happened; and, if we move to the existential mode, when we consider these meanings as live options, as possibilities for our own existence.