Aesthetics and Analysis in Writing on Religion: Modern Fascinations

8. Interpreting Anew and Alone: Vision and Succession in Dutch Phenomenology

chapter 8 Interpreting Anew and Alone Vision and Succession in Dutch Phenomenology Among the different English renderings of Religionswissenschaft— which include “the science of religions” and “comparative religions,” alongside “history of religions”—one sometimes also encounters the phrase “phenomenology of religion.”1 Highlighting the “phenomena” of traditions can lead scholars, in one direction, to try to describe the stuff of religious tradition as it exists in its own right, leaving their own vision as far as possible outside the picture. In this sense, phenomenology tries not to be interpretive. But highlighting the phenomena of religion can also lead scholars in another direction, toward abstractions about the materials of traditions, toward identifying basic types of phenomena. In this sense, phenomenology is an inherently interpretive exercise: Eliade’s work is sometimes characterized as a phenomenology, even though he did not normally refer to it as such himself. The writer who most famously embraced the term “phenomenology of religion” for his own scholarship was the Dutchman Gerardus van der Leeuw, and the term is sometimes used specifically to characterize his and related work by Dutch pioneers in religious studies. In the interplay between privately intuited vision and publicly articulated statement out of which religiohistorical knowledge grows, these early Dutch phenomenologists sometimes struck a radical posture. Indeed, especially as exemplified by van der Leeuw, they often seemed to present their private syntheses as public truth. On its surface (and at deeper levels, too) classical Dutch phenome131 132 Working Together nology of religion bears little resemblance to Husserl’s philosophical movement of phenomenology, which developed contemporaneously with it in Germany and later in France.2 But the religionists’ use of the term phenomenology has its own pedigree. As George Alfred James points out, this term has been used in different senses in two distinct communities of discourse: not only in the German and French philosophical tradition but also in nineteenth-century British empirical science .3 In German philosophy, the term has been used in different ways to probe the relationship between subjective and objective realities— from the internal dynamics within Hegel’s manifesting Geist to Husserl’s phenomenological method of getting at the “the things themselves .” The British usage, by contrast, is much more pedestrian, referring first of all to descriptive ordering as the first phase of empirical inquiry . It is primarily in this sense that the term has been used by religionists: the classical phenomenologists of religion offered ordered presentations of the totality of religious objects they saw. Some, however , including van der Leeuw—perhaps seduced by the ambiguity of the term—have explored the subjective dynamics among their categories or adapted Husserlian method to what is primarily an exercise in systematic arrangement.4 If the phenomenologists’ science was one of ordered description, it was of description presented to their remarkable religious intuitions, which were guided by different senses of order. The diverse, widely encompassing , phenomenological sciences that emerged could thus appear both highly personalized and grounded in a sense of spiritual selfconfidence . Like Eliade, the classical phenomenologists tended to be “great men” with great visions. Standing out primarily as individual interpreters guided by their own lights, the Dutch phenomenologists also sometimes seem to respond to predecessors in tradition. These responses tend to show little direct in- fluence save that of general style and vocabulary. More often, the response appears as a reaction; the tradition of scholarship looms as a backdrop against which men of vision can distinguish themselves. In this sense, the kind of scholarly interaction that we find among these phenomenologists presents a caricature of the patterns of interpretive work in the humanities. Valued in contemporary humanistic interpretation, newness and originality are even more highly prized in twentieth-century art. The grand interpreters in the science of religion, creating aesthetic syntheses, sometimes demonstrate the virtues (and vices) of originality to a very high degree. Interpreting Anew and Alone 133 The phenomenology of religion had its heyday in Holland during the end of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. In addition to fostering the work of van der Leeuw, Holland was also the home of two founders of the science of religion—P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye and C. P. Tiele. My focus will be on the chair in phenomenology of religion at Leiden. Although never held by van der Leeuw—perhaps the greatest of “great men”—it housed the greatest number of early influential scholars...