Issue of religious language and realistic phenomenology. Based on Reinach’s Göttingen lectures

Abstract

The article aims to discover potential of realistic phenomenology for analysis of prayer as the most significant form of religious language.

To that end, the prayer thematization in the framework of religious discourse (as exemplified in works of metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh and R. Schaeffler) is compared to theoretical statements of Reinach’s lecture course “Einleitung in die Philosophie”. The study of texts by metropolitan Anthony and Schaeffler on prayer identifies a basic opposition – between a canonic liturgical text and subjective experience of the one who prays, that opposition manifests itself in reasoning of ordinary discussions on the topic and is overpassed in different ways by the religious thinkers. At another point Reinach’s reflections on some regularities of inner experience, concentrating on the example of artistic forms, offer a new approach to the opposition between formalised ritual and personal experience. While analysing a phenomenon of empathy, Reinach concludes that traditional terms of “the one’s own and the stranger’s” applying to experience must be substituted with an opposition between the immediate and the mediated. From such point of view hymnography is comprehended as a form of symbolic mediation of the ideal contents of religious experience, which allows to speak about the “deprivatization” of religious experience as an original contribution of realistic phenomenology to the philosophy of religion.