So I spent more time on my thesis than I was supposed to. It sat in my mind for about two years, and in rough paragraphs on paper for about one year. In reality, the total work probably amounted to two months worth of actual effort.
The rest was the result of being out of school due to the clowns in UPenn's financial department, procrastination, marriage, and accelerated fatherhood classes called "living with three children immediately after bachelorhood."
But based on conversations I've had with those who know better, I do think I managed to come up with something original and, at least in my view, interesting.
This is the history: Husserl's reputed influence on the religious experience theory tradition produced much by way of discovery and thought. A century's worth, in fact. Two schools arose: the perennialists (who hold that religious experiences share the same essence) and the constructivists (who hold that religious experiences are constituted by social, linguistic, and physiological causes and conditions).
Here's the original part: Heidegger's absence from these conversations has rendered much of the discussion naive to its own self-understanding. To do theory on religious experiences and exclude a factical account is to forget that both religious experience and theoretical conversations about them (theologies about religious experiences or even the religious experience theory tradition itself) happen in concreto. By filtering a discussion of religious experience through the factical categories of Dasein, I suspect (and only suspect), that we might deepen our understanding of religious experience and our way of talking about them.
For my part, I don't know which school strikes me as more attractive. My own sense is that there is much more to reality than human categories (the five senses, cultural/linguistic influences, our factical modalities, etc.). On that front alone the perennialists perspective is very attractive. They are at least willing to entertain the possibility of transcendence. On the other hand, the constructivist position simply can't be ignored. There are definitely physiological conditions necessary for any human experience (Physicalism is the extreme version of this idea). But it's also hard to argue (though not impossible) that cultural and linguistic influences are both causes and conditions for certain types of religious experience.
For example, when I had a religious experience (age 15, I think) it was stereotypically Protestant. I was in awestruck wonder of God and could feel, as it were, waves of ecstasy racing over my body. What I thought was four hours turned out to be about 20 minutes. But it's peculiar character resided in the fact that God was wholly Other and that I, in contrast, was insignificant and merely a recipient of his 'glory'--or so I termed it at the time. This experience (I've had others), is in principle indistinguishable from the famous example of Stephen Bradley as outlined in James' The Varieties of Religious Experience. The similarity rests in this: the subject-to-object character of the experience: God is the object, I am the subject.
This description is fundamentally different from, for example, an experience of nirvana, which is understood in terms of egolessness: where the "All" and the "self" merge together. There is no wholly Other and there is no 'self.' They are one and the same--whatever the deuce that means.
Both the Protestant and the nirvana experience are said (and I can confirm) to be unlike any other human experience, at least in terms of intensity. In fact, one of the debatable questions is whether these experience are, in fact, sui generis. I'm tempted to think as much--along with the perennialist tradition.
In any case, my paper is fairly simple at bottom: It functions as a formal indication for the direction of a new field of research--a factical one--one that moves beyond the current philosophical categories utilized by religious experience theorists in the perennialists and constructivists traditions: specifically the Husserlian categories.
In Being and Time Heidegger 'destructs' the history of western metaphysics--understood as a positive task, not a negative task. Part of that destruction includes the 'working through' and 'explication of' the factical categories of Dasein (e.g., historicity and temporality, care and existence, etc.). This is the well documented (and I'm not always certain well-understood) existential analytic of Dasein. The function of its explication in Being and Time is, in the spirit of Husserl, one of epoche, or bracketing. Heidegger mentions it in order to get at what strikes him as the real problematic: the question of the meaning of Being.
In other words, the existential analytic of Dasein is one of the primary stages in the destruction of the history western metaphysics.
The interesting part for my paper is that Heidegger hints at the existential analytic about 5 or 6 years earlier during religious lecture courses, now posthumously published as The Phenomenology of Religious Life. While most of his lectures focus on the destruction of onto-theology, there are two very small (and sloppy) passages directly aimed at Rudolf Otto, religious experience theory's poster-child and favorite Piñata.
In those passages Heidegger provides both a criticism and a positive task. The criticism is that the rational, theoretical comportment in Otto makes him naive to his own self-understanding. Excluding a factical account of religious experience renders his rational theory "indeterminate." Thus, the positive task is, as my paper suggests, the explication of the relationship of religious experiences to factical life. Specifically, 'the holy' should be made into a problem 'as correlate of the act character of faith, which is to be interpreted only from the fundamentally essential context of historical consciousness."
What the heck this means is well beyond my knowledge of Heidegger. I know that 'historical consciousness' refers to Dasein's recognition not only that it comes from a community but also that there are other Dasein from other communities that live in history. I also know that the act-character of faith here refers to the noetic/thetic character of intentional acts (noema=content of an intentional act, noesis= the act character of the act [e.g. perceiving], thetic character=the type of perceiving [e.g. touching, seeing]).
What I'm not sure about is pretty much everything else as it relates to numinous-like religious experience.
But that's the point. Nobody does.
And it's about high time we do.
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