After Essentialism: Possibilities in Phenomenology of Religion

• Other Authors: Lupo, Joshua S. (author)
• Format: Others
• Language: English; English
• Published: Florida State University
• Subjects: Religion > Philosophy
• Online Access: http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/2018_Sp_Lupo_fsu_0071E_14397

Scholars of religion and the humanities more often than not claim to engage in critical inquiry. Too often, however, these claims are not adequately justified. To resolve this problem, this dissertation turns to the philosophical movement known as phenomenology. Inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and developed by Martin Heidegger, this philosophical movement, at its best, has focused on how our consciousness of the world is structured by our intentional relation with it. At its worst, this tradition of philosophy has supported essentialism, that is, the belief that we can bracket our social, political, and historical contexts and in doing so attain unchanging knowledge of our world. The phenomenological method has a complex history within the study of religion. Phenomenologists of religion believed that they could discern a common essence behind different religious traditions. The phenomenological approach is no longer popular among scholars in the study of religion. Russell McCutcheon, for example, claims that the phenomenological approach has allowed scholars to implicitly protect religious traditions, and indeed the very category of religion, from criticism. For McCutcheon, when scholars essentialize religion, they place it outside the social and political realm, and make it immune from critique. On McCutcheon’s account, however, it is not simply phenomenology of religion, but the phenomenological method itself, that is to blame for this lack of critical rigor. To examine the plausibility of this claim, the first three chapters of this dissertation examine the work of three of the most widely cited phenomenologists of religion—Rudolf Otto, Gerardus van der Leeuw, and Mircea Eliade—and show how their work does and does not share in the same philosophical assumptions as Husserl and Heidegger. I contend that much of their work does suffer from the problem of essentialism that McCutcheon identifies. I also contend that some of the blame for this should be pinned on Husserl, for whom essential knowledge remained an important aspiration. This, however, does not mean that all phenomenology should be abandoned. In the fourth chapter, I argue that existential phenomenology not only allows for critical analysis, but also offers a more plausible grounding for critique. McCutcheon’s method seeks to fix our knowledge of the world by arguing that our claims about it, including our claims about religion, are constituted by power relations. But if this were the case, scholarship itself would simply be an expression of power, and for that reason its critiques could never be evaluated using criteria established by reason. Through an examination of Heidegger’s early lectures and Being and Time, I provide a justification for a critical approach to examining religious traditions. What makes Heidegger’s account useful, I contend, is his analysis of the formation of a subject who can take up and critique the norms that govern his or her life, not by placing him- or herself outside of his or her tradition, but by taking up a place within it. This grounding makes possible a non-essentialist approach to critique. It takes the content of our lives to be made up of the historically, socially, and politically contingent norms that govern us. But it also offers an account of how we can take up and critique those norms. In the final chapter of the dissertation, I cash out this approach’s usefulness by turning to recent debates surrounding natural law. As opposed to some approaches to natural law reasoning which claim that there are essential moral and ethical goods that make up the natural law and transcend our contexts, Jean Porter and Vincent Lloyd argue for a tradition-based approach to natural law that takes the content of the natural law to be dependent upon the social and historical contexts in which proponents of natural law locate themselves. I argue that John Finnis and Germain Grisez, along with two critics of Finnis and Grisez, Lisa Cahill and Cristina Traina, desire to fix the content of the natural law in an essentialist manner, and that Porter and Lloyd offer a more compelling account of natural law reasoning that is amenable to Heidegger’s existential phenomenology. This chapter thus shows how the previously proposed phenomenological account of selfhood can be used to critique a religious tradition without fixing that tradition as either a manifestation of a sacred reality or of power. The dissertation ends with a reflection on the role of irony in the study of religion, arguing that irony should be used by scholars to challenge the status quo, but should not be used cynically to suggest that there is no way to move beyond it. === A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. === Spring Semester 2018. === April 20, 2018. === Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Natural Law, Phenomenology, Phenomenology of Religion, Russell McCutcheon === Includes bibliographical references. === Martin Kavka, Professor Directing Dissertation; George Williamson, University Representative; Aline Kalbian, Committee Member; John Kelsay, Committee Member.