The Self-Internalization of Religious Subjectivity: Commentary on Part 1

Abstract

This is a commentary on the papers presented in Part 1 (“The Primeval Showing of Religious Experience”) of The Problem of Religious Experience: Case Studies in Phenomenology, edited by Olga Louchakova-Schwartz. This commentary provides a reflection upon and an integration of the findings in the papers by Shogo Tanaka, Patrick Laude, Espen Dahl, and Olga Louchakova-Schwartz. All the authors present either a full or a partial descriptive phenomenology of religious experience, some of them deepening the analysis toward static or genetic constitutive phenomenology. Religious experience is shown to be a result of spontaneous reduction leading to various forms of the self-internalization of subjectivity and to the uncovering of aprioristic horizons pertaining to religious experience. It is suggested that religious experience constitutively influences subjectivity. Limited parallels are made with a cognitive science of religion, suggesting that religious experience is a sui generis activity of consciousness and cannot be reduced to a result of group behavior. The commentary includes directions for future research of the subjectivity under conditions of constitutive influences of religious experience.