S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 1 S p r i n g 2 0 2 2 4 5 Jaroslava Vydrová (Plessner 2017, 357, 359). The religious reference that is associated with this designation in the form of Deus absconditus and negative theology is analogously used by Plessner to highlight the need for a new approach not only to man (who is not transparent to himself), but also to God and religiosity. Firstly, regarding man, he connects with him such characterization as rootlessness, opacity [3], brokenness, insufficiency, and openness. This, of course, also influences the approach (method) to the facts concerning a man, which must be appropriate and attentive to it. Plessner suggests that anthropology is not a discipline which should interpret the results of other sciences or get lost in “borrowing” from other disciplines, but he calls for the renewed establishment of anthropology directly as a project (Ger. im Ansatz): it will only get in touch with reality when it includes it in the basis of itself, when it learns about it already in its basis, not only from its result (Plessner 2003, 140). This can also be expressed in the aptly words of Merleau-Ponty, which describe the direction of the philosophy concerning question of human life: “It is life which validly comprehends the life of the human composite.” (Merleau-Ponty 1970, 70). Secondly, the religious perspective is also being transformed. Plessner therefore titles the chapter devoted to the third anthropological principle, Nullity and Transcendence. In what sense? The two notions are correlative here. On the one hand, “his own lack of anchor, which both bars the human from finding an anchor in the world and becomes apparent to him as the conditionality of the world, suggests to him the nullity of reality and the idea of a ground of the world.” (Plessner 2019, 320). On the other hand, thanks to this, there is also a space for the emergence of transcendence in one’s life, where an experience can develop that has the potential to deepen our living, to intervene and transform a person, for example, in religious experiencing, mystical experience, or to liberate one from the ordinary flow of life’s affairs in meditation and contemplation. The felt inner tension can thus be released in both ways – by deepening and intensifying the experience, by verticality, or by liberating it, by relaxing it, by minimizing its demands. At the same time, the fact that this utopian standpoint is not linked to the establishment of some defined human or mundane space as a starting point, it does not lead to a reduction of religious experience or its subordination to cultural conditions. “Religious experiences and their norms, therefore, neither arise from nor are reducible to cultural, ethical, biological, or aesthetic experiences and norms or any combination of them. It has own structure, its own integrity.” (Steinbock 2007, 22) [4]. Man longs for a home, a place in the world, the anchoring of his own life in a meaningful reality, but he never actually exhausts this longing completely – he does not reduce himself in the material world, in actual space-time. This longing must be constantly verified vis-à-vis contingency, mortality, doubt, and uncertainty, because as an inner need to search it always reappears and takes on different forms (for example, at different stages of human life). For by being in a place, in the world, in a situation, we are also “behind and above” it. The precariousness of man, which philosophical anthropology draws attention to, is related to the fragility of the totality of the world and the care for the whole. If the utopian standpoint establishes meaning as the space and time of human life, then this constant striving – though not reduced only to conscious effort –manifests itself in man becoming who she or he is. Spiritual, religious experience is, according to this, a legitimate part of the life of man, who cannot step out of excentric positionality, and his spirituality can at the same time acquire different forms. As Anthony J. Steinbock (2007, 26) points out in the case of mystical experience that: [S]hould not be limited to the spiritual zenith of contemplation… It is further clear that mystical elements can also be present in ordinary forms of experience, like the experience of nature. Mystical experiences take on various forms, and it would be premature on our part to assert in advance that they are just in the reach of a few privileged individuals. But this does not mean that everyone is a mystic. Rather, strictly speaking, it means that mystical experiences are not within anyone’s reach because they are not correlative to our efforts in the first place, as would be the case in the field of presentation; they are experienced as ‘gifts’. The excentric positionality, as Helmuth Plessner describes it, implies that such experiences “they all contain an a priori core given with the human form of life as such, the core of all religiosity.” (Plessner 2019, 317). But the course of such experience is specific, and how it can be considered in the perspective of Plessner’s project, that will be traced in the following section.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MzgxMzI=