Immediacy

Abstract

At least for Schleiermacher, religion is life in immediate feeling. Whether or not we agree with him, immediacy can be understood as one essential aspect of feeling that makes feeling congenial as the means by which we tend to express the source of religious experience. Yet in general, immediacy is difficult to define and qualify. Is there a hope for immediacy in seeking “to be delivered from contingency” (Merleau-Ponty)? Is immediacy expressed in the instantaneity of how qualities of things are given in a “total interpenetration” (Sartre)? Or are “immediacy and mediation” always inseparable, thus leaving any “opposition between them to be a nullity”? (Hegel)?[i] Might immediacy entail a threat to faith through the absolutizing of the relative (Kierkegaard)? And finally, would not the absolute insistence upon mediation morph it into a new form of immediacy? It is against the backdrop of these questions that this paper investigates the constellation of roles immediacy might play in religious experience, and it does so through building upon the (seemingly diametrically opposed) claims of Jean-Yves Lacoste and Anthony Steinbock in regards to religion. For Lacoste, “feeling” is not an adequate means by which we should give expression to religion, in part because it leaves religion responsive to an all too volitional and intentional account. Lacoste also prefers to conceive relation with the Absolute/God (a relation he calls "liturgy") not as an experience, but as a non-experience. Whereas for Steinbock, even though emotions all to often are conceptualized according to sentimentality and solipsism, he undertakes to reveal that (especially regarding Religious Experience or "epiphanic" givenness) they in fact have an inherent inter-personal/Personal or Moral intelligibility. The paper builds up to the final claims that immediacy is a temporal expression of the unconditioned, yet that it is precisely this temporal element in relation to the Absolute that complicates the mediation/immediacy interaction.