ludger hagedornsuch as Marion and Henry, which to him is on the verge of turning
into an esotericism speaking solely to “initiates and fellow believers.”
Waldenfels does not hold that phenomenology should ignore or
neglect religious experience. He would agree with Marion that the
“phenomenological method” or the phenomenological path is the
most suitable one for philosophically entering the religious field. The
tasks and outcomes of such an approach can, according to him, be best
compared to a phenomenology of art,^8 but with an extra difficulty that
is characteristic of any attempt to grasp religious experience. Waldenfels
defines the “dilemma” of any phenomenology of religion: either it
presupposes certain structures and horizons within which religious
phenomena appear, thereby taking the allegedly unconditioned and
extra-ordinary (God, the Holy, etc., as exceeding any categorization)
as something conditioned and ordinary, or it turns things around, as
Marion does, and takes religious phenomenon as an “unconditioned
giving,” thereby potentially implying a loss of phenomenological
provability and turning the addressee into a mere passive recipient of
this gift. With respect to this second approach Waldenfels explicitly
speaks of a “fundamentalism.” Given the concept of auto-immunization
outlined above, we could also characterize it as a kind of philosophical
auto-immunity, as a gesture that tries to “open up,” to liberate,^9 but
in a paradoxical result “closes off” itself, turning the liberating move
into a tool directed against the original idea.
The main task arising from this critique would be the attempt to
formulate a philosophical approach that comes to terms with the
exclusive either — or of the dilemma described.^10 Waldenfels offers
- “Religiöse Erfahrung bedeutet eine bestimmte Weise der Erfahrung, in der
Unsagbares sagbar wird. Sie gleicht darin der Kunst, die gerade in ihren modernen
Varianten darum bemüht ist, Unsichtbares sichtbar, Unhörbares hörbar zu-
machen... ”, cf. B. Waldenfels, “Phänomenologie der Erfahrung und das Di-
lemma einer Religionsphänomenologie,” Religion als Phänomen, eds. Wolf-Eckart
Failing, Hans-Günter Heimbrock, and Thomas A. Lotz, Berlin/ New York: de
Gruyter, 2001, 77. - Cf. Marion’s statement: “Die Phänomenologie befreit... die Möglichkeit. Sie
eröffnet also das Feld den eventuell von Unmöglichkeit gekennzeichneten Phäno-
menen”, op. cit., 8. - This does not mean to “solve” the problem (“Es gibt Dilemmata und Parado- This does not mean to “solve” the problem (“Es gibt Dilemmata und Parado-