On All-Embracing Mental Structures. Towards a Transcendental Hermeneutics of Religion

Völker, Fabian

Abstract

The chapter explores some main features of a transcendental hermeneutics of religion. It is suggested that central questions in the comparative study of religions cannot be treated adequately within a hermeneutics dominated by empiricism. However, a hermeneutics based on transcendental philosophy may contribute to the comparative study of religions in two important ways: (1) It accounts for a strictly scientific methodological basis without limiting it to an empiricist criterion of meaning. The comparative study of religions can thus become truly interdisciplinary, no longer excluding theology and the philosophy of religion. (2) It accounts for the heuristic assumption of universal reason that enables intercultural comparability and intelligibility. It is also suggested that basically all seminal scholars in the phenomenology of religion, such as Rudolf Otto, Gerardus van der Leeuw, Joachim Wach, and Mircea Eliade already advanced a transcendental-anthropological basis for understanding that is predicated on the universality of reason as essence of man and common human nature. Moreover, postmodern and postcolonial objections against this alleged transcendental pretense are also taken into account. The chapter then elaborates on this transcendentally undeveloped claim originally inaugurated by these phenomenologists of religion and clearly distinguishes between the general anthropological standpoint of life and the universal standpoint of transcendental philosophy. The chapter concludes by arguing that a hermeneutics based on transcendental philosophy may contribute to the comparative study of religions in two more important ways: (3) While constituting the tertium comparationis that enables intercultural comparability and intelligibility, the transcendental grid that determines our thinking irrespective of place, time, history, and culture can become the object of cross-cultural analysis and comparison itself. (4) A transcendental hermeneutics of religion might also throw a new light on the understanding of the “religious a priori” that was claimed to be an irreducible datum of human experience and an element in the structure of consciousness by Otto, Eliade and other figures in the phenomenology of religion.