Phenomenology and the Possibility of Religious Experience
October 26, 2017 R. Mercer
The paper argues that Emmanuel Levinas, understood as a transcendental phenomenologist in the tradition of Husserl and Eugen Fink, describes an absolute origin from which the subject arises. This origin structures the self as always already open to what overflows experience, making possible an encounter with the numinous. The author contends that Levinas's phenomenology of the face, though expressed in religious language, reveals that the human situation is inherently ready for religious experience, rather than the idea of God clarifying that situation. The argument takes Levinas at his word that the idea of God cannot clarify a human situation but the inverse is true.