The Feeling of Being Carried; or, Becoming Aware of the Relation to Alterity: On Some Parallels between the Epochē and Religious Experiences
Abstract
The paper aims to illuminate the relationship between the act of epoché and religious experiences. The first brief overview about the two phenomena indicates a correlation, in which the epoché functions as a preparation for the religious experience or the religious experience can be viewed as realizing itself in several reductions.
Nonetheless, there seems to be another relation: both phenomena seem to have significant parallels and may even belong to the same family of experiences, albeit possibly with a different intensity. This becomes visible in the light of the tension between the imaginary and the real, which can be described as two heterogenous but intertwined areas.
The tension is revealed in the encounter with alterity that marks the starting point of the two experiences: It interrupts the ordinary experience yet does not cause a full rupture, but draws the subject further into the experience. During the climax, the relationship between with alterity in general is revealed, tough with a slightly different connotation, which indicates the different connotations of it and the different modifications of the attitude towards it.