Philosophy of Religion (Special Questions)

Teacher(s)

Leclercq Jean; Maesschalck Marc;

Language

French

Content

Method of theory of religion. What are the strategies of objectivation of the religious phenomenon? The contribution of the concept of forms of life
Course taught this year by Prof. Marc Maesschalck, Q2 2023–2024
Both the philosophy of religion and the human and social sciences of religion have come up against the primary question of the self-referentiality of the religious object, which knowns and experience itself in the form of a practice to which the mind and body adhere in their own way. Whether we approach a tradition as part of itself, or in the same way as an investigator who looks at its historical traces and strives to understand (and thus reinterpret) them as authentic or non-authentic parts of a corpus, the internal relationship to this self-referential phenomenon remains undiminished: whether the expert is a spokesperson or an independent scholar, he or she becomes the holder of a meaning that can only be understood in terms of himself or herself, as doctrine, law, wisdom or form of life. Faced with this form of indexicality specific to self-referential knowledge, where historical-critical and hermeneutic strategies have prevailed, other strategies have emerged to detach themselves from the processes of subjectivation that inevitably correlate with the strategies already known. Approaches linked to the theory of the firm and the theory of organisations have thus been attempted, as has a focus on the behaviour of agents in the market for spiritual goods and beliefs, with providers and users, and attempts have been made to objectify scales of values and identify the evolution of spiritual demands. All these attempts (and others) raise the question of what scientific knowledge is really available regarding the power of these phenomena and how to develop a rational policy on them, without having to rely on self-referential notions such as “radicalisation.”
However, such a stance on theorising religious phenomena remains linked to a double presupposition: on the one hand, the idea that it would be necessary to suspend the emotional investment that gives rise to the identification of certain individuals with systems of meaning and values — it then remains to be seen how it is possible to understand what specifically is involved in this anthropological adherence to a relationship of belief;on the other hand, the idea that the behaviours and practices resulting from a belief come together in a coherent way to constitute a grammar of action that makes it possible to provide solutions to situations experienced in a concrete living environment. But these presuppositions in fact consist in employing an epistemology of religion as a form of life, operating in an immanentist way and dependent on obedience to a problem-solving norm. We therefore need to clarify the epistemological issues involved in such presuppositions, and test them in terms of their ability to take account of both possible subjective variations in behaviour and possible phenomena of resistance, particularly those generated by the experience of dysfunctions in this problem-solving body.

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