초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Understanding religious experience is a daunting, if not impossible, enterprise which involves two correlative dimensions ― the phenomenon of religious experience and understanding/interpretation ― and corresponding disciplines, namely, phenomenology and hermeneutics. But this enterprise is indispensible for religious studies, as the two dimensions have played decisive roles in the formulation of religious tradition. This paper seeks to reinvestigate it from a postmodern philosophical standpoint drawing on Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology. Marion's phenomenology is highly promising from a postmodern philosophical standpoint, not just because it provides a post-subjectivist conceptual resource that critically engages with, yet decisively moves beyond Edmund Husserl's subjectivist phenomenology, but more importantly because it creates a new possibility for hermeneutics that has been under severe criticisms from poststructuralism and critical theory. This paper highlights the following features and implications of this postmodern phenomenology: (1) Inverting the Husserlian understanding of the subject-object relation, Marion conceives of phenomenon as what gives itself (or “the self”) and the participant as the receiver of this “gift.” (2) The understanding of “saturated phenomenon” is always incomplete and transient because the phenomenon always exceeds understanding. (3) Naming the invisible phenomenon is always incomplete because a distance is created between the phenomenon and the phenomenalized, so the interpreter is invited to wait for the phenomenon to be given. (4) It is because of the distance that a religious tradition cannot claim exclusive truths, a situation which favors religious pluralism. (5) Marion’s phenomenology could also provide fresh insight into understanding mystical religious traditions of diverse kinds.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
Religious Experience, Jean-Luc Marion, Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism.
