Abstract

abstract:

The article examines how phenomenology can investigate experience in a way that appears to us meaningful from a spiritual and ethical point of view. By comparing Husserl’s and Nishida’s experiential analysis, the article investigates the ethical experiencing of reality as a unicum detached from that validated by one’s intersubjective community. Besides, the article addresses the problem of how the meaning of this experience can be reactivated within an intersubjective community through a proper understanding of its layers, including time, being, and teleology. It seems in fact that the multilayered nature of time entails an organization of ethical and psychological reality that cannot be explained by an exclusively epistemological point of view: rather, a unique form of teleology is required that bridges epistemology and ontology. Moreover, I clarify how axiological experience—by which Husserl means a specifically ethical way of processing reality—has its source in a mode of spiritual belief that we may call religious. Finally, I explain how this religious source reflects a teleological manner of experiencing time.

pdf