Phenomenology and Religion: New Frontiers

ludger hagedorn
This clearly shows religion’s twofold potential. In its inherent expo-
sure to the radical transcendence of alterity, it can be seen as engender-
ing meaning and proposing new ways of understanding. It can, how-
ever, also be seen as destructive of those alien structures of meaning
that challenge our practices of identification and self-preservation,
that is, those that endanger the absoluteness these strategies protect.
The biological and allegorical concept of “auto-immunity” proves
to be a powerful metaphor for describing what is so characteristic of
essentialist worldviews and their exclusionary attempts to preserve
themselves. As we know, this — necessary and obligatory — protection
of the body tends to turn inward, attacking itself, when the “outward
enemies” lose their power or disappear. This metaphor says quite a lot
about religious and other “purifications.” But at the same time, one
could argue that precisely the potential outlined above for a “shaking,”
i.e., the special openness to self-transcendence, might enable religious
worldviews to redirect their immune systems and to overcome their
aggressive auto-immunity. The final conclusion of this article, that
started off with Nietzsche’s critique of religion, might therefore be
quite a Nietzschean one, though with a very different understanding
of religion: to endure or, even better, to enhance the tensions and
contradictions between reclaiming the “truth” for one’s beliefs and
suppositions while at the same time shaking their general validity in
accepting perspectivism. Is that asking too much of a religion or of a
belief? It is at least very difficult to imagine. But it is an attempt to
think “beyond the opposition of religion and reason.”
And what about secularism? The proposed perspectivism is not any
less demanding for the secular worldview than it is for any religion.
Religious belief is and must be a challenge or even a provocation to it.
It might be a necessary one, though, to save it from its own auto-
immunizing police system. The God within us sanctions our finitude.