Brady DeHoust, Ph.D. Student | Philosophy

Abstract:

Intellectual history, especially in the West, has been indelibly shaped by the relation, and opposition, between reason and revelation. In recent scholarship, the issue has been explicitly recognized as the paradoxical demand of conceptualizing an experience of disclosure, immanent to human faculties, which nevertheless transcends those faculties. In philosophy, this problem has been taken up principally as a matter of epistemology (“How can I justify, or not, knowledge claims that originate in the transcendent?”), or phenomenology (“What is the fundamental structure of the experience of transcendence?”). I argue that these two approaches are inadequate to the matter, in that they tend to err by effacing one of the necessary aspects of revelation: transcendence and immanence, respectively. I argue that the philosophical question of revelation can be better understood as a question of communicability, or “having in common.” Communicability underlies and encompasses epistemological and phenomenological concerns, which are both concerned with legitimating religious phenomena to others. The question becomes: what are the conditions under which transcendence can appear such that it can be shared or understood within and between communities? And, do these conditions involve a kind of logic or rationality that is more capacious than those which limit epistemological and phenomenological inquiries, thus allowing for a more robust understanding of revelation? This conclusion, if correct, reinvigorates questions about religious language and invites a more robust engagement with philosophical hermeneutics, as well as related disciplines such as rhetoric, literature, and the arts.