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

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for capturing the intentional characteristics of religious manifestations. Phenomenologists of religion criticize reductionist approaches for denying the unique intentionality of religious phenomena.

Religious experiences reveal structures of transcendence in which human beings intend a transcendent referent, a supernatural meta-empirical sacred meaning. Religious language points to intended sacred structures and meanings that transcend normal spatial, temporal, historical, and conceptual categories and analysis. That is why religious expressions are highly symbolic, analogical, metaphorical, mythic, and allegorical.

At the same time, no intentional referent and meaning is unmediated. For meaningful religious experience and communication, intended transcendent referents must be mediated and brought into an integral relation with our limited spatial, temporal, historical, cultural world with its intended objects and meanings. This is why symbolism is essential for revealing, constituting, and communicating religious intentional meaning. Religious symbolic expressions serve as indispensable mediating bridges. On the one hand, they always point beyond themselves to intended transcendent meanings. On the other hand, by necessarily using symbolic language drawn from the spatial, temporal, natural, historical world of experience, they mediate the transcendent referent, limit and incarnate the sacred, allow disclosure of transcendent as imminent, and render sacred meanings humanly accessible and relevant to particular existential situations.

This specific religious intentionality ensures that the structures of experience, as well as interpretations and understandings, remain open-ended. The necessary structural conditions for religious experience, disclosure of phenomena, construction of texts, and formulation of interpretations ensure that meaningful human understandings necessarily reveal limited intentional perspectives. And such relative, situated, intentional, religious perspectives always point beyond themselves to structures of transcendence; to inexhaustible possibilities for revalorizing symbolic expressions, for bursting open self-imposed perspectival closures, and for new, creative, self-transcending experiences, interpretations, and understandings.

Epoché, empathy, and sympathetic understanding

By bracketing and suspending our unexamined assumptions and ordinary preconceptions and judgments, we become attentive to a much fuller disclosure of what manifests itself and how it manifests itself in experience. This allows for greater awareness of phenomena experienced on prereflective, emotive, imaginative, nonconceptual levels of intentional experience, thus leading to new insights into the specific intentionality and concrete richness of experience.

The phenomenological epoché, with an emphasis on empathy and sympathetic understanding, is related to methodological antireductionism. By suspending all personal preconceptions as to what is real and insisting on the irreducibility of the religious, phenomenologists attempt sympathetically to place themselves within the religious ‘lifeworld’ of others. This phenomenological orientation, different from the ideal of detached, impersonal scientific objectivity, recognizes limitations to such personal empathetic participation, since the other always remains to some extent ‘other.’ Critics charge that phenomenologists often give little more than vague appeals to abstain from value judgments and for empathetic participation.

In assuming a sympathetic attitude, the phenomenologist is not claiming that religious phenomena are not ‘illusory’ and that the intentional objects are ‘real’ as existing behind the phenomenal appearance. (As a matter of fact, many phenomenologists make such theological

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and metaphysical assumptions and judgments, but these usually violate the limits of their phenomenological perspectives.) The phenomenological bracketing entails suspension of all such value judgments regarding whether or not God, the holy, or sacred is actually an experience of ultimate reality.

Many phenomenologists argue for the necessity of religious commitment, a personal religious faith, or at least personal religious experience in order for a scholar to be capable of empathy, participation, and sympathetic understanding. Other phenomenologists argue that such personal religious commitments generally produce biased descriptions. A particular faith or theological commitment is not a precondition for accurate phenomenological descriptions. Rather it is a commitment, manifested in terms of intellectual curiosity, sensitivity, and respect, that is indispensable for participation and understanding. Believers and nonbelievers alike may share such a commitment.

Insight into essential structures and meanings

No subject matter is more central to philosophical phenomenology than analyses of eidetic reduction and eidetic vision, intuition of essences, method of free variation, and other techniques for gaining insight into essential structures and meanings. By contrast, phenomenology of religion, even in the specific sense of an approach concerned with describing essential structures and meanings, has usually avoided such methodological formulations.

One generally finds that most phenomenologists of religion accept both Bleeker’s qualification that such terms as ‘eidetic vision’ are used only in a figurative sense and his warning that phenomenology of religion should not meddle in difficult philosophical questions of methodology. The result is that one is frequently presented with phenomenological typologies, ‘universal structures,’ and ‘essential meanings’ that lack a rigorous analysis of just how the phenomenologist arrived at or verified these discoveries.

Phenomenologists aim at intuiting, describing, and interpreting the essence of religious phenomena, but there is considerable disagreement as to what constitutes an essential structure. For some phenomenologists, an ‘essential structure’ is the result of an empirical inductive generalization expressing a property that different phenomena have in common. In the sense closest to philosophical phenomenology, essence refers to deep or hidden structures, which are not apparent on the level of immediate experience and must be uncovered and interpreted through the phenomenological method. These structures express the necessary invariant features allowing us to distinguish religious phenomena and to grasp religious phenomena as phenomena of a certain kind.

Controversial issues

The examination of major characteristics of phenomenology of religion raises many controversial issues.

Descriptive versus normative claims

Controversial issues arise from phenomenology of religion’s claim that it is a descriptive discipline with a descriptive method, especially since most phenomenologists go beyond a mere description of the data, offering comparisons and evaluations, universal structures, and essential meanings.

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Some of these issues arise from the adoption by many phenomenologists of religion of a traditional, at times absolute, descriptive–normative dichotomy consistent with classical empiricism of such philosophers as David Hume, with the Kantian philosophical framework, and with most nineteenth and twentieth-century approaches to religions.

Even phenomenologists of religion who go beyond Kristensen’s descriptive restrictions frequently adopt a clear distinction between collection and description of religious data, which is objective and scientific, and interpretation of meaning, which is at least partially subjective and normative. Phenomenology of religion, despite its rejection of positivism, has sometimes unintentionally retained positivistic assumptions regarding the description of unconstructed, uninterpreted, objective ‘facts.’

Recent scholarship challenges this absolute dichotomy. What is taken as objective and scientific is historically, culturally, and socially situated and constructed in terms of implicit and explicit value judgments. For example, how does one even begin the investigation? What facts should be collected as religious facts? One’s principles of selectivity are never completely value-free. Philosophical phenomenologists have never accepted this sharp dichotomy, since the phenomenological project is founded on possibilities of describing meanings. The challenge to phenomenology of religion is to formulate a phenomenological method and framework for interpretation that allows the description of essential structures and meanings with some sense of objectivity.

Understanding versus explanation claims

Many controversial issues involve a sharp understanding–explanation dichotomy. This ‘understanding’ often has the sense of Verstehen as formulated by Dilthey as the method and goal of hermeneutics. Phenomenologists aim at understanding, describing and interpreting the nature and meaning of religious and other ‘human’ phenomena, as opposed to scientific, reductionistic approaches that give historical, psychological, and other explanations but do not grasp the irreducibly human and irreducibly religious dimensions of phenomena.

Critics challenge such methods and goals as unscientific and question whether phenomenological understanding and nonphenomenological explaining can be so completely separated. Explanatory approaches involve understanding, and understanding involves critical explanatory reflection. For example, for phenomenological understanding, expressions of religious others are not the absolute final word. The other may have a limited understanding of her or his phenomena, provide false explanations, and engage in blatantly unethical behavior. Phenomenology of religion necessarily involves critical reflection, including contextual awareness and scholarly interpretations, understandings, and explanations that go beyond describing expressed positions of religious others.

This in no way denies the value of phenomenological approaches that are self-critical in rendering explicit one’s presuppositions, suspend one’s value judgments, empathize, and describe phenomena and intended meanings of the religious other. Such phenomenology of religion aims at allowing other voices to be heard and is informed by a history of dominant, normative approaches and explanations that ignore, silence, and misinterpret the religious phenomena of others.

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Antireductionist claims

Many critics attack phenomenology of religion’s antireductionism, arguing that it is methodologically confused and often arises from the theological intention of protecting religion from secular analysis. All methodological approaches are perspectival, limiting, and necessarily reductionistic. The assumption of the irreducibility of the religious limits what phenomena will be investigated, what aspects of the phenomena will be described, and what meanings will be interpreted. Phenomenologists of religion cannot argue that other reductionistic approaches are necessarily false and that their approach does justice to all dimensions of religious phenomena.

Phenomenology of religion must show that its religious antireductionism is not methodologically confused and does not beg serious questions by simply avoiding scholarly challenges. It can argue for an antireductionist methodological primacy on the basis of such key notions as intentionality and insight into essential structures and meanings. It must show that its particular perspective is essential for shedding light on religious structures and meanings.

Empirical and historical claims

Much of philosophical phenomenology, even when described as radical empiricism, is conceived in opposition to traditional empiricism. Husserl called for a ‘phenomenological reduction’ in which the phenomenologist ‘suspends’ the ‘natural standpoint’ and its empirical world in order to become more attentive to phenomena and to intuit the deeper phenomenological essences.

Critics claim that phenomenology of religion starts with a priori nonempirical assumptions, utilizes a method that is not empirically based, and detaches religious structures and meanings from historical and cultural contexts. Critics often assume a clear-cut dichotomy between empirical, inductive, historical approaches and nonempirical, often rationalist, deductive, antihistorical approaches. They identify phenomenology of religion with the latter and argue that it cannot meet minimal empirical, historical, scientific, inductive criteria, including rigorous criteria for verification and falsification.

Controversies arise from criticisms that phenomenology of religion makes nonempirical, nonhistorical, a priori, theological, and other normative assumptions and grants an ontologically privileged status to religious phenomena and to specific kinds of religious experience. Critics charge that Otto, van der Leeuw, Eliade, and others have nonempirical and nonhistorical, extraphenomenological, theological, and other normative assumptions, intentions, and goals that take them beyond descriptive phenomenology and any rigorous scientific approach.

The status granted to essential religious structures and meanings is also controversial insofar as they exhibit the peculiarity of being empirical, based on investigating a limited sample of historical data, and, at the same time, universal. These structures are therefore empirically contingent and yet also the essential necessary features of religious phenomena.

Finally, there is controversy regarding the insistence by many phenomenologists of religion that they proceed by empirical inductive inference. Critics charge that they cannot repeat this inductive inference, that phenomenological structures do not appear in the empirical data, and that phenomenologists read into their data all kinds of essential meanings. Some, such as Douglas Allen in Structure and Creativity in Religion, respond by formulating a method of ‘phenomenological induction’ different from classical empirical induction, in which essential structures and meaning are based on, but not found fully in, the empirical data.

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Questions of verification

Many criticisms of phenomenology of religion as methodologically uncritical involve questions of verification. Phenomenological ‘intuition’ does not free one from responsibility of ascertaining which interpretation of given phenomena is most adequate. Different phenomenologists, using a phenomenological method to investigate the same phenomena, present different eidetic intuitions. How does one resolve this contingency introduced into phenomenological insights? How does one verify interpretations and decide between different interpretations?

Such questions pose specific difficulties for a phenomenological method of epoché and intuition of essences. A phenomenological method often suspends the usual criteria of ‘objectivity’ that allow scholars to verify interpretations and choose between alternative accounts. Does this leave phenomenology of religion with a large number of personal, subjective, hopelessly fragmented interpretations of universal structures and meanings, each relativistic interpretation determined by the particular temperament, situation, and orientation of the phenomenologist?

Phenomenologists of religion submit that past criteria for verification are inadequate and offer a false sense of objectivity, but phenomenology of religion must also overcome the charges of subjectivity and relativism. It must formulate procedures for testing its claims of essential structures and meanings that involve criteria for intersubjective verification.

Response to controversial issues

Many writers describe phenomenology of religion as in a state of crisis. They usually minimize the invaluable contributions made by phenomenology to the study of religion, such as the impressive systematization of so much religious data and the raising of fundamental questions of meaning.

If phenomenology of religion is to deal adequately with controversial issues, the following are several of its future tasks. First, it must become more aware of historical, philological, and other specialized approaches to, and different aspects of, its religious data. Second, it must critique various approaches of its critics, thus showing that its phenomenological method is not obliged to meet inadequate criteria for objectivity. And most importantly, it must reflect more critically on questions of methodology so that it can formulate a more rigorous method, allowing for description of phenomena, interpretation of their structures and meanings, and verification of its findings.

Recent developments in phenomenology of religion

Developments within phenomenology of religion during the last decades of the twentieth century and early years of the twenty-first century convey a very mixed and confusing picture about the present status and future prospects for the field.

Within religious studies

Phenomenology of religion continues as a discipline and approach within the general scholarly study of religion. Earlier phenomenologists influence phenomenologists of religion, and they share the general phenomenological orientation defined by major characteristics previously delineated. Phenomenology of religion has also been successful to the extent that many other