Kant and Otto Paper

Kantian Influence on Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy

           
            Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy is widely known to harbor the most popular exposition of sui generis religious experience, an experience Otto calls the mysterium tremendum of the numinous object. Less spoken of, however, is the degree to which Otto is dependent on Kantian thought. This paper explores three aspects of Otto and Kant’s relationship, with particular emphasis on the first: 1)  the ways in which Ottoian and Kantian models of schematization ‘match up’, 2)  the degree to which or sense in which Otto is Kantian, and 3) what Kantian influence on Otto can tell us about Kantian influence on religious theory at large. The latter two points are implied through a careful analysis of the first, and though they do not make up of the meat of this paper, they may be said to be the purpose of this paper.
            In general, the phenomenological schools of both the philosophical and religious theory traditions—the latter of which Otto is something of a co-founder[1]— reflect a Kantian methodology. The efforts of Husserl and Heidegger, for example, are contiguous with a Kantian-like, transcendental formula. For Husserl, the necessary and universal conditions for the possibility of intentionality come to the fore. For Heidegger, the necessary and universal conditions for the possibility of Being in the world come to the fore. On the religious studies side, Otto, whose theory depends so much on Husserl (see footnote 1), reflects the same method. Like Kant, Otto is concerned to a high degree with delineating the universal and necessary conditions— as a priori conditions—for the possibility of the numinous object. Where for Kant the transcendental deduction concerns itself with problems of epistemology, such as the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments, Otto is preoccupied with, roughly, transcendental sui generis religious experience.

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     [1] The other is William James.  Really, the relationship between philosophical and religious phenomenology with respect to religious experience is very close. For example, when James first distinguished individual religion from institutional religion in The Varieties of Religious Experience, he centered the discussion of religious experience around Husserl’s account of phenomenological experience, viz. the possibility of intentionality. After all, it was Husserl who first exposed philosophy to the rigors of the phenomenological reduction. In The Idea of Phenomenology we find Husserl concerned almost exclusively with a bracketing methodology. Ignore everything but, “that which is appearing,” he says, especially ontological questions and categories. Only once that which is appearing is our object of study can we begin an empirical analysis of what conditions of consciousness must be necessary for intentionality to occur at all.

      Thus, by bracketing institutional influence on individual experience James allocates authority to the incorrigibility of Husserlian-like intentional  moments. This was James’ primary contribution to the religious theory debate: an argument from authority based in intentionality. For James, mystical experiences, “usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.”  Religious phenomenologists thereafter have employed more or less the same strategy.
      Otto, who comes a little after James, constructs his own argument from authority by grounding his mysterium tremendum (a trans-religious experience) on the incorrigibility of cross-cultural intentional experiences. Like James, Otto thinks that since no one can tell John Smith that his experience did not appear to him the way it did, John is the authority on the matter, and we are at the mercy of his memory and communication skills. What Otto adds to the discussion is the fact that many Johns across time and space say exactly the same thing: that the experience is inexplicable and can only   be ‘known’ by direct contact with it. Otto infers from the ubiquity and similarity of these testimonies that something transcendent does, indeed, interact with people. This, again, is an argument from authority. But instead of being merely authoritative to the individual, like we find in James, Otto thinks that the similarity between cross-religious experience grants authoritative reliability to them, leaving even those who have not experienced the mysterium tremendum with good reason to believe in its legitimacy. If all the best authorities are saying that something transcendent interacts with them, who are those on the ‘outside’ to disagree?