| Summary: | 博士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 哲學研究所 === 88 === The purpose of this dissertation is not only to show the character and limitations of Mircea Eliade''''s religious study, but also to propose the possibilities to go beyond the limitation of his academic works. By demonstrating the dialectic of the sacred and profane, the morphologies of the hierophanies and the religious symbolisms, Eliade uses the synchronic structure of time consciousness to analyze various religious traditions, especially the primitive religions (which he calls the archaic people). For him, the manifestation of the sacred should creatively repeat the structures of the sacred event which happen in illo tempore , in order to renew the power of the mythic origin. He believes that there are universal structures of the meanings hidden in various religious phenomena. Through the interpretation of religious symbolisms, western people will discover the spiritual mind of non-western Others which will help the western religious researcher to find a new path for the whole of humanity.
However, I shall argue that Eliade ignores the differentiations between this universal homo religiosus and the students of religious studies. Instead of Eliade''''s emphasis that the students of religious studies can totally explore the religious meanings of homo religiosus, I suggest that to understand the meaning of every religious phenomenon is not the way to find the one-by-one corespondent relationship between the object and theory. Rather the understanding process includes three moments: representation, criticism and recreation. To show the uniqueness of each religious experience is to replace Eliade''''s mechanism of repetition of the same to the repetition of the differences.
Moreover, I argue that the modernist "back to the phenomenon itself" is always in the incomplete process of our movement of thought. The epoche (suspension of judgment) of understanding of religious phenomena can''''t reduce to something called "essence". This is what Eliade uses as the universal mechanism of the sacred. Rather paradoxically, an epoche shows the irreducibleness of the interaction between the situations, moments and identities of researchers, the religious experiences and religious theories. The uniqueness of the religious experience is the other beyond our horizon of understanding. Religious experience always includes the coincidentia oppositorum: the "I" totalizes the other, and the unique infinity of the other always flees from the "I".
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