Abstract
Religion often is conceived as the sine qua non of the human, thus imbedding religious activity implicitly even within our cosmopolitical globalization processes and secular political concepts. This depiction of the human as ever-religious raises a host of concerns: Does it justify that we can believe ourselves to hold a religious identity without any existential choice or faith? Would it entail the presumption of God’s existence, thus possibly leading to God’s becoming a banal Faktum that inhibits the subject from being able to disavow God or not believe? And finally, how is it possible to relate authentically/existentially with our religious life without disregarding this quality of religion as always already operative? In order to provide more specificity to this latter question in particular, this paper focuses on an essential aspect of homo religiosus: faith. Focusing principally upon Heidegger and Jean-Louis Chrétien, this paper develops three ways “forgetfulness” is indispensable to faith; or in another sense, how faith itself also operates in, and is acheived through implicit ways. Indeed, if forgetting is essential to faith, and faith is essential to homo religiosus, then “forgetting” also to some degree is essential to religious life.
Highlights
Religion often is conceived as the sine qua non of the human, imbedding religious activity implicitly even within our cosmopolitical globalization processes and secular political concepts
Religion has been described as the sine qua non of the human (Scheler 2010), making homo religiosus relevant for understanding: humans disposed to religious life (Eliade 1969), religion as an implicitly imbedded operation in our processes of globalization (Derrida 1998), the politicization and secularization of theological concepts (Schmitt et al 2010), and a permanently effervescent form motivating even the “faith for the faithless” (Critchley 2010)
This paper offers a phenomenology of the “lived experience” of faith, through the topic of forgetting, via Heidegger and Jean-Louis Chrétien
Summary
Forgetting (or “un-getting”) can be understood fundamentally according to how we experie the manifestation of truth. A remembrance that has gone throughtruth the could trial be of loss that forget (latere “to be hidden”)understood concerns thethusly dormant, or unknown. Emerging or developing despite being absent from conscious awareness: the related Latin latentem (latere “to be hidden”) concerns the dormant, secretive, or unknown. The river, whose sounds produced feelings of drowsy drunkenness, was said to have been drank from by the inhabitants of Hades in order to attain “forgetfulness” or “unmindfulness” of a past earthly life. 617) awaited them as they “marched on in a scorching heat in the plain of forgetfulness until they arrived at the river Lethe to drink and forgot all things.” It is no wonder that the cultural preferences for remembrance and the privileging of memorization came to be a matter of holiness, while forgetfulness came to represent human fallen nature. It is in this regard that Heidegger, who often referred to the inherent relation between forgetfulness and truth, provides some essential insight.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
