Arts , Humanities & Social Science

Abstract

This study deals with the ontological background reference of religious experience in general, and it aimed to demonstrate how our existential condition of finitude is imposed to understand the most varied forms of manifestations of religious phenomena that arise in the contemporary world. Thus, we will start from the distinction between a hermeneutic-phenomenological conception of the religious experience in its essence and the empirical approaches on its diverse concrete configurations. In the end, we will try to point out that the possibilities of apprehension of religious phenomena in general lack an existential element that is essentially constitutive for us, namely, the condition of the precariousness of the finite being faced with the opening of meaning that exceeds it in its horizon of transcendence. As general contribution, this way of understanding must foreclose every claim to make absolute a background meaning that should remain open as the most radical condition of possibility for the religious phenomena. For this, we will show, at first, how our existential condition as ephemeral beings requires an interpretative bias for the religious dimension circumscribed by the opening of the world in which we are launched and from which we build our feasible projects. Then, we will see how this delimitation of sense implies a fragmentation of the absolute conceptualization.