auto-immunity or transcendencethe demands for completion and fulfillment that characterize human
life.
II. Transcendence — Where to?
As argued above, religion is both the suppressed side of rationality as
well as its ultimate and unattainable challenge. Only a reflection that
accounts for the pivotal role of transcendence in the process of self-
constitution — i.e., for the mystery of human incarnation, vulnerabil-
ity, and finitude — can, in fact, offer a sufficient explication of the
ambivalent options of interpretation and action implied in our open-
ness to transcendence. A certain moment of transcendence, of the self-
overcoming of the empirical human being in the direction of some-
thing unconditioned, seems to be part of human existence.
It is the phenomenological tradition in particular that has proven
to be most capable of dealing in philosophical terms with religion and
transcendence. Max Scheler, Edith Stein, or Karol Wojtiła might be
mentioned as just a few famous examples of philosophers within this
tradition who dedicated significant sections of their work to questions
of religion. Recently, the so-called “theological turn” of French phe-
nomenology, a label referring to authors such as Jean-Luc Marion and
Michel Henry, has been widely discussed. In one of his earlier articles,
Marion almost paradigmatically underlined this specific potential of
phenomenology: “Kurz, die Phänomenologie wäre in ausgezeichneter
Weise die Methode der Manifestation des Unsichtbaren auf dem Weg
über seine anzeigenden Phänomene — und somit auch die Methode
der Theologie.”^7
Nevertheless, this “theological turn” has also given rise to some
doubts and reservations. Bernhard Waldenfels, to name one of the
most prominent critics, has made a distinction between a phenomenol-
ogy of the religious (a mere description of religious phenomena and their
“categorization”) and a religious phenomenology, exemplified by thinkers
- Marion, Jean-Luc, “Aspekte der Religionsphänomenologie. Grund, Horizont
und Offenbarung,” Religionsphilosophie heute, eds. Alois Halder, Klaus Kienzler, and
Joseph Möller, Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1988, 92 (quoted from the German transla-
tion; the French original apparently remains unpublished).