From Phenomenological Self-Givenness to the Notion of Spiritual Freedom

The paper explores how Husserl's concepts of givenness and evidence, along with later developments by Steinbock, can be applied to the study of religious phenomena. It outlines Husserl's ideas of self-givenness and original intuition, then examines Steinbock's generative phenomenology and his analysis of mystical experiences as revealing the essential structure of "vertical experiences"—encounters oriented toward a transcendent height beyond the self. The author argues that these experiences, exemplified by historical mystical accounts, disclose the eidos of religious experience as epiphany.

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Abstract

In my paper, I want to focus not only on the notions of givenness and evidence in Husserl’s phenomenology, but also on phenomenological work “after” Husserl. I will elaborate on how these phenomenological key ideas can methodologically be made fruitful, especially for an investigation into religious phenomena. After giving an outline of Husserl’s notions of (self-)givenness, evidence, and original intuition (I), I want to portray key elements of Steinbock’s discovery of a generative dimension in Husserl’s phenomenology and show how this approach correlates to the field of religious experiences (II). Subsequently, I want to focus on Steinbock’s book Phenomenology of Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience (2007), and elucidate how for Steinbock different historical examples of mystical experiences can serve as leading clues for the revelation of the essential, eidetic structures of “vertical experiences”—or, phenomenologically speaking, the eidos of religious experience, which turns out to be “epiphany” (III). The expression “verticality,” as opposed to “horizontality,” denotes the existential and dynamic dimension of experiences which are oriented toward a new height (religiously or morally) “beyond” ourselves.