Faith Assimilated to Perception: the Embodied Perspective
- PDF / 369,652 Bytes
- 19 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 34 Downloads / 210 Views
Faith Assimilated to Perception: the Embodied Perspective Elena Kalmykova 1 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In this paper, I consider how the embodied approach can be applied to religious faith, and possibly other kinds of faith. I start with the reformed epistemologists’ idea that religious faith is similar to sense perception, and I argue that we can elaborate this idea by taking into account our capability perceptually to grasp what is not accessible by senses—the ‘presence in absence’ (Noë 2012) or, as I call it, perceptual faith. As perception necessarily involves not only a mental but also an embodied relation to its object; an embodied relation can be seen as a constitutive component of faith as well. According to phenomenological accounts of perception (Merleau-Ponty, Noë, Siewert), embodiment and enactment allow humans to transcend perspectival limitations and to perceive an object as it is beyond its appearances: constant despite changes of angle, light, and other conditions and whole even when only parts of it are visible. I argue that, in the same vein, embodied relations and particular normativity involved in perception-based faith allow humans to transcend the precariousness of our experience and to sustain a perception-like relation to religious objects, achieved in a ‘better look’ moments of religious experience. I conclude that an embodied account can provide new insights into the nature of religious faith and resolve some puzzles, such as how faith can be a virtue. Keywords Faith . Embodiment . Perception . Belief . Religious experience .
Phenomenology . Epistemology
Faith Based on Experience In this paper, I propose a novel model of religious faith, based on the embodied approach to perception. While some models of faith focus on the noetic structure of beliefs and the attitudes involved in faith that something is the case, according to a * Elena Kalmykova [email protected]
1
University of Uppsala, Uppsala, Sweden
E. Kalmykova
proposition (Tennant 1943; Schellenberg 2005; Swinburne 2005; Audi 2011; McKaughan 2013; Pojman 1986, 2001; Buchak 2012), others render faith as primarily an experiential or perception-like relation to God, or faith in (Alston 2005; Plantinga 2000, 1983; Hick 1966, 1968; Smith 1979). My account aims at the latter family of the models of faith, and in particular those assimilating it with perception. What interests me here is how new empirical data and phenomenology of perception can help us elucidate the possibility of perception-based faith in a transcendent God. Thus, I provide an account of perception-based experience and then base my model of faith on it. My contribution is quite modest: any novelty and usefulness of my account lies in explicating the role of body and action in faith. My account neither purports to exclude other views of faith nor rejects them and can be seen as complementary to those of John Hick, Alvin Plantinga, William Alston and other thinkers of this sort. The paper proceeds as follows: to show how my model is related to existing ones, I sta
Data Loading...
