Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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studies. This is where the most significant contributions of phenomenology of religion have been made.

Fourth, there are phenomenologists of religion influenced by philosophical phenomenology. A few scholars, such as Max Scheler and Paul Ricoeur, explicitly identify much of their work with philosophical phenomenology. Others use a phenomenological method and are influenced, at least partially, by phenomenological philosophy. There are also influential theological approaches, as seen in the works of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Paul Tillich, and Jean-Luc Marion, which utilize phenomenology of religion as a stage in the formulation of theology.

The terms phenomenon and phenomenology are derived from the Greek word phainomenon (that which shows itself, or that which appears). The term phenomenology has both philosophical and nonphilosophical roots.

One finds nonphilosophical phenomenologies in the natural and social sciences in which scientists want to emphasize the descriptive, as contrasted with the explanatory, conception of their science. A second nonphilosophical use of phenomenology appears in descriptive, systematic, comparative studies of religions in which scholars assemble groups of religious phenomena in order to disclose their major aspects and to formulate their typologies.

In the late eighteenth century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant devoted considerable analysis to ‘phenomena’ as the data of experience, things that appear to and are constructed by human minds. Such phenomena, which Kant distinguishes from ‘noumena,’ or ‘things-in-themselves’ independent of our knowing minds, can be studied rationally, scientifically, and objectively. For example, I can give a causal explanation of why the frisbee was thrown at a certain direction, velocity, and distance. However, I cannot give the same kind of spatial, temporal, causal analysis to explain noumena such as ‘God.’

Of all the uses of phenomenology by philosophers before the twentieth-century phenomenological movement, the term is most frequently identified with the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and his Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel was determined to overcome Kant’s phenomena-noumena bifurcation. Phenomena are actual stages of knowledge – manifestations in the development of Spirit – evolving from undeveloped consciousness of mere sense experience and culminating in forms of absolute knowledge. Phenomenology is the science by which the mind becomes aware of the development of Spirit and comes to know its essence – that is, Spirit as it is in itself – through a study of its appearances and manifestations.

This background led to two distinct senses of phenomenology that have shaped phenomenology of religion: there is the older, wider sense of the term as any descriptive study of a given subject matter of observable phenomena, and there is a narrower twentiethcentury sense of the term as a philosophical approach utilizing a phenomenological method.

Some background to the phenomenology of religion

It is helpful to examine the context within which philosophical phenomenology and the phenomenology of religion originated and developed. By having a sense of other approaches and what phenomenology was reacting against, the rationale for phenomenology of religion becomes evident.

Phenomenologists of religion, emphasizing religious experience, recognize that being religious is not identical with studying religion. There is a first, foundational level of experience for the religious believer. Phenomenology and other scholarly approaches always

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involve some distance between the scholar and the subject matter necessary for critical reflection, analysis, interpretation, and verification of findings. While disagreeing on the relation between being religious and studying religion, scholars agree that scholarly study is not identical with being religious or having religious experience.

For thousands of years, scholars have attempted to assemble religious data and interpret their meaning. This often arose from exposure to new religious phenomena from expeditions of explorers, military and political conquests, economic exploitation, and missionary work. Studies were usually shaped by self-serving, apologetic, religious, political, and economic assumptions and judgments. Comparative religion often became competitive religion in which scholars studied others in order to demonstrate the superiority of their own religion or culture. From the perspective of phenomenology of religion, these earlier studies did not do justice to religious phenomena of religious others.

The origin of the modern scholarly study of religion is usually traced to the nineteenth century and especially to influences of the Enlightenment. Modern scholars were determined to free their approaches and disciplines from pre-modern investigations with their subjective and normative assumptions and judgments, their dependence on supernatural and other external authority, and their lack of concern for rigorous standards of objective knowledge. By insisting on unbiased impartial investigations, careful accumulation of data or facts, and the authority of human reason to analyze and interpret the meaning of phenomena, modern scholars had confidence in the human capacity to make progress and arrive at objective, verifiable knowledge.

From the perspective of phenomenology of religion, these modern studies also were limited and did not do justice to the religious phenomena of the other. Built into their scientific or scholarly studies were all kinds of unacknowledged normative assumptions and judgments. For example, most of these philologists, ethnologists, and other modern scholars adopted a positivistic view of ‘facts’ and ‘objective’ knowledge. Phenomenologists of religion assert that our approach must be commensurate with the nature of our subject matter. An approach yielding factual, objective knowledge when dissecting a worm may not provide objective knowledge of religious experience.

Nineteenth-century scholars often adopted from Darwin a notion of evolution and then applied it to language, culture, and religion. Typically, they arranged religious data in a unilinear framework, starting with the most undeveloped stage of ‘primitive’ religions and evolving to the evolutionary apex of Western monotheism, especially Christianity. In some frameworks, humans evolved beyond all religion to a higher rational, scientific stage. For phenomenology of religion, imposing such an evolutionary scheme on religious phenomena prevents us from accurately describing and understanding the meaning of phenomena.

Phenomenologists assert that scholarly approaches have been normative, applying their standards to make disciplinary value judgments. Human beings claim that they have ‘experiences of God.’ Psychologists of religion analyze and explain such phenomena psychologically. Sociologists of religion analyze and explain such phenomena in terms of social needs, functions, and structures. Philosophers of religion ask questions about meaning, truth, and reality as expressed in propositions about God’s existence and the problem of evil. Phenomenologists of religion react against such approaches. Human beings claim to have experiences of God. What are the meaning and significance of such experienced phenomena? Other approaches, with their assumed norms and methodological framework, do not do justice to religious phenomena. How can we describe the religious phenomena and religious meaning of others as accurately as possible?

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Philosophical phenomenology

As one of the major schools, movements, or approaches in twentieth-century philosophy, phenomenology takes many forms. The primary aim of philosophical phenomenology is to investigate and become directly aware of phenomena that appear in immediate experience, and thereby to allow the phenomenologist to describe the essential structures of these phenomena. In doing so, phenomenology attempts to free itself from unexamined presuppositions, avoid causal explanations, utilize a method for describing that which appears, and intuit essential meanings.

Edmund Husserl, founder and most influential philosopher of the modern phenomenological movement, aimed to establish phenomenology as an objective science. The early phenomenologists worked at German universities, especially at Göttingen and Munich. Other significant German phenomenologists include Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger. In the 1930s, the center of the movement began to shift to France. Leading French phenomenologists include Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gabriel Marcel, and Paul Ricoeur.

One may delineate five characteristics of philosophical phenomenology that have particular relevance for the phenomenology for religion. Most phenomenologists have upheld a descriptive phenomenology that is antireductionist, involves phenomenological bracketing, focuses on intentionality, and aims at insight into essential structures and meanings.

Descriptive nature

Phenomenology aims to be a rigorous, descriptive science, discipline, or approach. The phenomenological slogan ‘Zu den Sachen!’ (‘To the things themselves!’) expresses the determination to turn away from philosophical theories, rational analysis and explanations, toward direct intuition and description of phenomena as they appear to consciousness. Phenomenology attempts to describe the nature of phenomena, the way appearances manifest themselves, and the essential structures at the foundation of human experience. A descriptive phenomenology, attempting to avoid reductionism and insisting on the phenomenological epoché, focuses on accurately describing the totality of phenomenal appearances in human experience.

Antireductionism

Phenomenological antireductionism is concerned with freeing us from uncritical preconceptions that prevent us from becoming aware of the specificity and diversity of phenomena, thus allowing us to broaden and deepen immediate experience and provide more accurate descriptions of experience. Husserl attacked forms of reductionism, such as ‘psychologism,’ which attempts to derive laws of logic from psychological laws and, more broadly, to reduce all phenomena to psychological phenomena. In opposing the oversimplifications of traditional empiricism and other forms of reductionism, phenomenologists aim to deal faithfully with phenomena as phenomena and to become aware of what phenomena reveal in their full intentionality.

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Intentionality Â

A subject always ‘intends’ an object, and intentionality refers to the property of all consciousness as consciousness of something. All acts of consciousness are directed toward the experience of the intentional object. For Husserl, who took the term from his teacher Franz Brentano, intentionality was a way of describing how consciousness constitutes phenomena. In order to identify, describe, and interpret the meaning of phenomena, phenomenologists must be attentive to the intentional structures of their data; to the intentional structures of consciousness with their intended referents and meanings.

Bracketing

The antireductionist insistence on the irreducibility of intentional experience usually entails the adoption of a ‘phenomenological epoché.’ This Greek term literally means ‘abstention’ or ‘suspension of judgment’ and is often defined as a method of ‘bracketing.’ We must bracket the uncritically accepted ‘natural world’ by suspending beliefs and judgments about existence and reality based on an unexamined ‘natural standpoint.’ We must suspend ontological questions, as raised by philosophical idealism and materialism, about the reality behind phenomenal appearances. Only then can phenomenologists become aware of experiential phenomena as phenomena and gain insight into their essential structures. Many phenomenologists now interpret such bracketing not as part of a completely presuppositionless science, but as freeing one from unexamined presuppositions and as rendering explicit and clarifying such presuppositions.

Eidetic vision Â

The intuition of essences, often described as ‘eidetic vision’ or ‘eidetic reduction,’ is related to the Greek term eidos, which Husserl adopted from its Platonic meaning to designate ‘universal essences.’ Diverse phenomena, as intentional objects of consciousness, can be reduced to their essence that expresses the necessary and invariant features of the phenomena. The following is a brief formulation of a general phenomenological procedure for gaining insight into essential structures and meanings.

In the ‘intuition of essences’ (Wesensschau), the phenomenologist begins with particular data: specific phenomena as expressions of intentional experiences. The central aim of the phenomenological method is to disclose the essential structure embodied in the particular data.

One gains insight into meaning by the method of ‘free variation.’ After assembling a variety of particular phenomena, the phenomenologist searches for the invariant core that constitutes their essential meaning. The phenomena, subjected to a process of free variation, assume certain forms or relations of parts that are considered inessential in the sense that the phenomenologist can go beyond the limits imposed by such forms without destroying the basic character or intentionality of one’s data. For example, the variation of a great variety of religious phenomena may disclose that unique structures of monotheism do not constitute the essential core or universal structure of all religious experience.

The phenomenologist gradually sees that phenomena assume forms that are regarded as essential in the sense that one cannot go beyond or remove such structures without destroying the basic ‘whatness’ or intentionality of the data. For example, variation might reveal that certain intentional structures of ‘transcendence’ constitute an invariant core of

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religious experience. When the universal essence is grasped, the phenomenologist achieves the eidetic intuition or the fulfilled Wesensschau.

Most phenomenologists using a method of Wesensschau propose that historical phenomena have a kind of priority, that one must substitute for Husserl’s purely imaginary variation an actual variation of historical data, and that particular phenomena are not constituted by an individual but are the source of one’s constitution and judgment.

The phenomenology of religion

The first major figure in the post-Enlightenment scholarly study of religion was F. Max Müller (1823–1900), who intended Religionswissenschaft to be a descriptive, objective science free from the normative theological and philosophical studies of religion.

For P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye (1848–1920), who was the first to use the phrase ‘phenomenology of religion,’ phenomenology of religion is a special discipline of classification that occupies an intermediary position between history and philosophy. It is a descriptive, comparative approach collecting and grouping religious phenomena. The Dutch historian C. P. Tiele considered phenomenology the first stage of the philosophical part of the science of religion.

Scholars point to phenomenology of religion’s sense of generality, with its approach characterized as systematic. For Widengren, phenomenology of religion aims at a coherent account and provides the systematic synthesis of the historical phenomena of religion. The Italian historian of religions Raffaele Pettazzoni viewed phenomenology and history as two complementary aspects of the integral science of religion. Phenomenology provides a deeper understanding of the religious meaning of historical data.

Major phenomenologists of religion

What follows are brief formulations of the approaches and contributions of seven influential phenomenologists of religion: Max Scheler, W. Brede Kristensen, Rudolf Otto, Gerardus van der Leeuw, C. Jouco Bleeker, Mircea Eliade, and Ninian Smart. Included are criticisms of Otto, van der Leeuw, and Eliade.

Max Scheler

Of the major philosophers who founded and developed philosophical phenomenology, Scheler (1874–1928) had the greatest focus on religion. In many ways, he can be considered the most significant early phenomenologist of religion. Influenced by Brentano, Husserl, Kant, Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Bergson, Scheler developed his own original phenomenological approach. His books On the Eternal in Man and Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values bring out his phenomenological method, his description and analysis of sympathy, love, and other values, and key characteristics of his phenomenology of religion.

Reminiscent of Schleiermacher and Otto, Scheler focuses on a phenomenological description and analysis of the unique religious human mode of experience and feeling; the being of the human being for whom structures and essences of religious values are presented to consciousness. Phenomenological disclosure, focusing on what is ‘given’ to consciousness as the Absolute, the Divine Person, or God, is not achieved through reason but only through the love of God orienting one toward experiential realization of the Holy. The turn to