Communicative experience of God in prayer
pp. 167-175
in: Enik Sepsi, Aniko Daróczi (eds), The immediacy of mystical experience in the European tradition, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
Especially in Modern Thought, criticisms of different kinds have targetted on the key-concepts that figure in the overall theme of this volume: experience, God, and the mode of relating them: immediacy. Critisism in general has not the intention to annihilate the "thing itself' under investigation. It rather unmasks the naiveté and brings to light the conditions of possibility, hence the limits wherein which the subject must be defined. In a ground-breaking way, Kant and Husserl did critically reveal these limiting conditions regarding the theme of experience. The outcome of their intervention can be summarized as follows: "if experience, then impossibly of God; if God, then no possible experience." But from the vantage point of specifically the human sciences, the Kantian and Husserlian approaches are themselves subject of critic. We will explore how philosophy of language can yield an understanding of 'experience of God' according to structures of constitution that function transitively: a 'being brought into experience'. Such an 'experience of God' is communicatively performed by the speech-act of prayer and expressed in the language game of attestation.
