Conference | Paper

In Alfred Schutz’s account of the structure of the social world, he distinguishes relationships between Consociates, who share space, time and bodily presence, from those between Contemporaries who inhabit the same time but not space. Consociates experience others in ongoing continuity, in which the responses one receives leads one to revise typifications of self and other. Bodily distant Contemporaries, however, only receive, intermittent, occasional responses (e.g., email, letter) on whose bases they revise their inferential types of each other. The religious experience of God, not bodily present, but experienced in ongoing immediacy and leading one to revise or confirm self-typifications, represents, then, an anomaly. This anomalous transformation of the very structure of the social world suggests either that religious experience is merely a phantasy or that religious experience pertains to a distinctive realm. This paper highlights how religious experience of God differs from phantasy. Both Husserl (in his various accounts of phantasy culminating in quasi-acts and quasi-objects) and Schutz (for whom phantasy is a finite province of meaning) emphasize how phantasy is experienced as a great liberation from everyday life constraints. Little is said about finding oneself resisted or affirmed through a continual interaction with a person phantasied as one’s object. The freedom and unconstraint experienced in phantasied interpersonal relationships contrasts with the religious relationship with God, which, according to Steinbock and Scheler (in analyzing the religious act) involves the experience of God’s action on oneself. Hence the religious relationship is anomalous vis-à-vis the everyday structure of the social world.