Anthony J. Steinbock: Phenomenology & Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience

Excerpt

The ways that religious experiences are conceived today among philosophers in general, and phenomenologists in particular often lack an imaginative, yet still critical lever for describing and normatively discussing such phenomena. This is a cultural problem that springs from everyday life, and as Anthony Steinbock claims in his Phenomenology & Mysticism, we should think of such cultural problems not “in terms of a crisis of understanding, a forgetfulness of Being, ideology, or drives, but as a despiritualization understood as idolatry” (p. 241). The everyday lived experiences of such idolatries marks one of the most profound “difficulties we face today as persons” as they are invisibly at work in our desires, economies, and political structures (p. 241). These idolizations do not innervate simply the secular imagination, but also the religious one, like Nietzsche’s saint who attempted to express the délicatesse of the metaphysically sublime experience of loving another for the sake of God. …