Abstract
AbstractPhenomenologies of religious experience have been developed by Max Scheler and via Alfred Schutz’s frameworks of “multiple realities” and “finite provinces of meaning.” For both, religious experience resists the pragmatic imperatives of the mechanistic worldview or world of working. Schutz’s paradigm begins with a distinctive noetic religious epoché opening the religious province, in contrast with Scheler’s start with spheres of being (especially the absolute sphere) furnishing the noematic context for religious acts. Scheler’s religious act resembles the religious epoché, but his eidetic analysis highlights the act’s distinctiveness, irreducibility to non-religious acts, and immunity to psychological reductionism. Correlating the religious act with his value theory (the absolute sphere), Scheler better withstands the subordination of religion to the pragmatic imperatives and the absolute to lesser values than does a Schutzian ranking of purposes in the province’s form of spontaneity. Scheler’s absolute personal being, whose revelation one must respectfully wait, supports the Schutzian relaxed tension of consciousness. Respectfulness of persons, the social/communal/critical dimensions of religious experience, religion’s need for critique from theoretical provinces of meaning, and the wariness of idolatrously substituting one’s own finite goods for the absolute can all mitigate the religious imperialism and violence to which absolute commitments can lead.
Highlights
Phenomenologies of religious experience have been developed by Max Scheler and via Alfred Schutz’s frameworks of “multiple realities” and “finite provinces of meaning.” For both, religious experience resists the pragmatic imperatives of the mechanistic worldview or world of working
Scientific theory is guided by an overarching non-pragmatic goal: “not to master the world but to observe and possibly understand it.”[7]. In the finite province of religious experience, one adopts an epoché to break with pragmatic everyday life; embarks upon a more relaxed tension of consciousness in which one at least partly depends on the transcendent’s interventions in one’s life; allows symbols, series of symbols, and symbolically functioning events and natural events or objects to appresent the transcendent; and lets go of pragmatically inspired efforts to master and finds oneself increasingly liberated.[8]
How can religious believers consistently hold the personhood of God in such reverence only to run roughshod over the personhood of their fellow human beings, especially those of alternative religious traditions or without any religious belief at all?. Both Alfred Schutz and Max Scheler recognize the dangers generated by the dominance of pragmatic imperatives, Schutz seeing those imperatives as originating in everyday life and Scheler as resulting from the prevailing of the mechanistic worldview that reduces ontology and values to manageable microelements
Summary
Both Scheler and Schutz present religious experience as a kind of resistance to pragmatic imperatives. For Scheler, the mechanistic worldview, which has for centuries been producing a revolution with wideranging, historical, sociological, epistemological, and ontological implications, has sought to reduce appearances and being to the blind processes of “ur-things” such as masses and electrons that, if managed, can facilitate efforts to dominate the natural world This revolution further depended on a rising societal order that focused on a will to work and to power and that was slowly suppressing the earlier non-invidiously hierarchized feudal order with its provisions for the enjoyment of the world and the contemplative knowledge of nature ( by monkish and priestly groups). In these alternative provinces, one pursues different purposes that are buttressed by encompassing cognitive styles whose six cognitive features cooperate in maintaining a more relaxed tension of consciousness than that of pragmatic everyday life
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