Religion beyond Myth and Enlightenment

The goal of our research project is a systematic phenomenological reconsideration of religion and its meaning for the modern world. This involves an overcoming of traditional concepts and dichotomies at work in political philosophy which prevent us from fully grasping the potentials inherent to religion. Typically, religious convictions are either regarded as mere irrational forces in opposition to the secular world or considered condescendingly as offering `some values` that can serve as tools for a further refinement of our basically unchanged and unchallenged secular self-understanding. Both these attitudes not only deprive the non-secular worldview of its own character; they also exacerbate the ongoing clash between secular societies and religiously defined groups or cultures. Against this background, the often cited `return of the religious` calls on us to revisit the place of religion in modern societies. To reassess religion`s role and potential in a post-secular context, we suggest an approach that reaches `beyond the dichotomy of myth and enlightenment`. The central hypothesis of our project is that religion harbours a twofold potential for shaping our encounters with otherness and, hence, with the other of reason in general. One potential of religion will be addressed as a tendency to auto-immunity. In an attempt to protect its view of reality, religion seeks to escape from encountering otherness as an integral and constitutive part of its own identity. The result is not just a deformation of religion`s own character; it also includes the possibility of a violent reaction to such otherness. Religion`s second, positive potential consists in its capability to transcend the relative autonomy of pre-given sense structures. Thereby, religion allows the shaking of our sedimented interpretations of the world by accepting otherness as an integral and irreducible part of our own identity. Unless we address both these potentials as well as their relationship, the very phenomenon of religion remains unintelligible. The philosophical inspiration to fulfil this task is mainly shaped by phenomenology and its unique capacity to unfold meaningful structures in a non-foundational and non-essentialist way. Relying on the broad (and yet often not fully recognized) insights of classical phenomenology, we will also take up more recent developments (esp. in the French and American context) that provide for an innovative and profound understanding of religious phenomena. Our venture seeks to develop a new paradigm in conceiving the relations between the secular- scientific and the religious worldviews. Overcoming their mutual exclusion, it calls for a thorough revision of the modern self-conception and, thus, aspires to break ground for a political thought that leads us to a genuinely post- secular society.

The project "Religion beyond Myth and Enlightenment" aimed at a comprehensive philosophical analysis of various phenomena that are dealt with today controversially under the header of "the return of the religious" and the related question of "post-secularism." As to its basic task, its overall intention consisted in the development of a phenomenological reconsideration of religion in the context of late modernity and its inner antinomies (e.g., the "dialectics of secularization," "globalization and its discontents"). Since any reflection on the varieties of religion today must not avoid the question of "religious violence," our analyses have been calibrated alongside various phenomena that epitomize the ambivalent positioning of religion between its affinity to violence and its potentials to resolve conflict; in this context, the topics of sacrifice and gift have been singled out as most central to our undertaking and accordingly have been used as the major guiding threads for our project. In the course of the project, these topical constellations have been unfolded concretely by recourse to a variety of different theoretical positions, including phenomenology, continental philosophy of religion, and postmodernism. In order to provide a sustainable basis for the overall task to be achieved, we have firstly elaborated a comprehensive assessment of both classical and recent phenomenological accounts and have plumbed their yet under-explored potentials for promoting the philosophy of religion. Our focus has been situated respectively according to 1) developing an integrative phenomenology of religion, 2) applying this approach to the vast topic of the "return of the religious" and major related issues, and 3) providing detailed analyses concerning specific "religious phenomena" that are of paramount importance in this regard more generally. In order to fulfill these tasks, we have deepened traditional research on classical positions (Husserl, Scheler, Stein, Schütz), have reassessed its scope and potentials; furthermore, we have attempted to reconcile the most recent "radical phenomenologies" (Levinas, Henry, Marion, Chrétien), which emphasize a specific and extraordinary givenness of religious experience, with hermeneutic accounts, which underscore the mediation of religious experiences in mundane meaning structures (Heidegger, Patocka, Ricoeur). Finally and complementarily, we have included related research in continental philosophy of religion (Kearney, Westphal) and "Postmodernism" (Derrida, Nancy, Badiou). This expansion of the field has, finally, proven to be of utmost importance since its has helped us enormously to cover the whole phenomenon of "religious experience": on the one hand, it made it possible to concretize the phenomenological account of the religious under the post-structuralist sign of its irreducible materiality, textuality, and historicity; on the other hand, it has enabled us also to give an account of the practical and poetic dimensions of "lived religion" (including the quandary of "religious violence").In combining the host of aforementioned positions and perspectives, the project has, generally regarded, developed a framework for an integrated phenomenological account of religion; this theory revolves around the key idea of the intertwining of transcendence and self-transcendence. In providing evidence for an essential correlation that exists between experiences of transcendence and experiencing self-transcendence, the project has, in the last analysis, opened up continuative pathways for the analysis of religion in a post-metaphysical age.?