The Role of Genetic and Generative Phenomenology in Religious/Spiritual Experience
The 123rd meeting of the APA Central Division will take place in Chicago, Illinois at the Palmer House Hilton. 2/18/2026-2/21/2026, see the website of American Philosophical Association for more info. SoPheRE is sponsoring the meeting of the affiliated group. To participate, please have the current SoPheRE membership.
Central to phenomenological method has been the idea of constitution, namely that the experience of an object is something that is built up through a series of acts of consciousness over time and space. For Husserl and other phenomenologists, one can start with something given in the life-world and via reduction and phenomenological reflection recover the various activities of consciousness that led, genetically, to what is there before us as given. As George Heffernan and many others have shown, Husserl’s discovery of genetic phenomenology had the effect not of undermining the idea of evidential fulfillment, but of limiting, conditioning, and rendering it more tentative. One can also constitute eidetic objects, for instance, by inquiring what are all the components that make up the social world as one of Husserl’s regional ontologies (along with Nature, the material object, the human psyche, etc.). On can inquire into how the very idea of the transcendental ego, which constitutes the regional ontologies, is itself constituted—what are the essential features necessary for the ego to be an ego at all (e.g. temporality, bodiliness, social formation, etc). Generative phenomenology, a particular brand of phenomenology that Husserl developed around the time of his Krisis and that extends genetic phenomenology, involves seeing whole cultural institutions, most of them situated in the life-world, and even philosophy and phenomenology itself, as emerging from historical social-cultural processes across centuries and millennia.
Can one apply these notions of genetic and generative phenomenology to religious/spiritual experience, whose practices and types Husserl locates in the everyday life world?
Does religious/spiritual experience have its own genetic and generative origins? Can one understand particular forms of religious/spiritual experience as having their own origins? Does even the concept of “religious/spiritual experience” itself reflect a genetic or generative history that may not be shared in other cultures or spiritual traditions?
What difference might it make to a version of religious/spiritual experience to recognize its genetic/generative history?
Does genetic/generative phenomenology inevitably relativize or even falsify one’s religious/spiritual experiences, given the vast variety of such experience, as nothing other than products of socio-historical processes, mere ideologies one has grown up with, of which participants and practitioners may not be aware?
What kinds and degrees of evidences are there for something like religious/spiritual experience?
Can versions of religious/spiritual experiences themselves, with their unique genetic and generative origins, raise questions and challenge certain phenomenological concepts (e.g., the transcendental ego, the subject-object poles, intentionality)?
Does genetic/generative phenomenology apply to phenomenology and philosophy itself? Are its findings about eidetic objects, the transcendental ego, etc. merely the produce of a historical evolution not shared by other cultures or practices? But isn’t genetic/generative phenomenology itself needed to explain what historical evolution is?
Can genetic/generative accounts of religious/spiritual experience act back on and undermine phenomenological concepts regarding subjectivity, the body, evidence, etc. Please submit abstracts to Michael Barber at michael.barber@slu.edu by July 25.
Michael Barber
Session Organizer
michael.barber@slu.edu