ABSTRACT
Heidegger says that phenomenology means ‘to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself’ (Heidegger 1962: 58). For Merleau-Ponty it means ‘relearning to look at the world’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: xx). It is thus better conceived as a virtue akin to attentiveness and openness than as a method. This means that in its broadest sense the phenomenology of religion is a descriptive approach to the philosophy of religion. It assumes that religion is a phenomenon, that it shows itself and can be observed; but rather than try to evaluate or explain religious beliefs and practices, it seeks to describe them carefully so as to help us see them clearly, however we may subsequently seek to evaluate or explain them. This means that any descriptive approach can be called phenomenological, including the work of scholars such as Eliade (1958; 1959), James (1958), Malinowski (1954), Otto (1958), and Van der Leeuw (1963) along with others whose work is also called the history, sociology, or psychology of religion, comparative religion, and ethnography or cultural anthropology. A somewhat more restricted sense of phenomenology of religion refers to work done by philosophers working in the tradition whose founding father is Edmund Husserl (see Husserl 1970; 1982). The central idea for Husserlian phenomenology is intentionality. All consciousness is consciousness of . . . . This relation of consciousness to its object or content is taken to defi ne the realm of the mind and to be a unique, non-causal, non-spatial relation. Two further specifi cations of this notion are important here. First there is the correlation between the intentional act (noesis) and the intentional object (noema). The ‘what’ or content of consciousness can only be given in conformity with the ‘how’ or mode of awareness; in other words, nothing can be given to me apart from the way in which I take it. This means that phenomenological description can focus either upon the intentional act or, more concretely, the horizon, life-world, or the language-game of the believing soul from which the intentional act emerges; or it can focus on the intentional ‘object’: God, the gods, the Sacred, or the Holy.
