Religious Experience in the First-Person Perspective: The Lived Body and Perception of Reality

The first-person perspective developed by Husserl for studying consciousness uses formal categories to analyze consciousness and its concrete forms. Evidence (Evidenz), a central category, characterizes consciousness as knowledge. This paper presents phenomenology of changes in perception and embodiment that lead to evidence for religious/spiritual experience (RE). Such change develops over time via contemplative practice or can be part of spontaneous RE. Because of evidence, RE containing perceptual change are presentational rather than appresentative.

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Abstract

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.