Religious Experience, Adumbrated: Towards a Phenomenological Ontology of the Region

Abstract

Theological approaches to religious experience attribute the same if not a higher degree of reality to it as to everyday experience1. In this, theology differs from philosophy, for which the existence of religious experience remains subject to debate. Phenomenology’s “legitimization” of religious experience as a subject matter of philosophical research goes back to the larger phenomenological agenda of establishing subjectivity as a valid area of scientific inquiry. Drawing on a field of inquiry as broad as this, the present topical issue richly represents contemporary phenomenological research addressing religious experience. Instead of axiomatic affirmation of religious realities, philosophy aims to harvest the fruits of knowledge from both the via positiva and the via negativa. This thesis is proposed in this issue and examined with regard to 20th century Continental thought by Jason Alvis, Martin Nitsche and Olga Louchakova-Schwartz, as a form of dialectic which goes back to the influence of apophatic and cataphatic theologies on trends in continental philosophy. These philosophers examine whether religious experience exists, in what mode, and how exactly it may be different from everyday experience. Debates around this issue have affected many disciplines. For example, most of psychology avoids researching religious experience, treating William James’s famous classic as a roster of altered, spiritual, and non-ordinary states of consciousness2, as if “religious” in the title is merely a confusing metaphor. Religious experience has been reported to cause a profound personal transformation and have effects on health3, but in defining religious determinants of health, medical research is more interested in the social function of religion and religious behaviors4. Conducting cognitive or neuroscientific studies on a form of experience is not possible as long as its specific properties remain unclear. The argument against the possibility of religious experience goes back to Hume’s rejection of the possibility of the ego’s knowledge of itself,5 and Kant’s argument that, since God is not an object, experience