Lectures: A Phenomenology of Holiness:
These lectures will inquire into what we mean by ‘holiness’ by focussing on discussion in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics. This is not a theological inquiry but an anthropological and philosophical inquiry that seeks to argue for the necessity of understanding human life in terms of holiness and for understanding holiness in terms of human life.
Lecture 2: Is Holiness Outside of Language?
Two issues are important, for whom is holiness and appearance and of what? In this lecture we will focus on the for whom. The existential experience of holiness necessitates an approach that simultaneously describes it and explains it at one level. In locating holiness in feeling, Rudolf Otto implicitly placed the experience of holiness outside of language. Yet if language is constitutive of human reality and not only descriptive of it, then what does it mean to claim that an experience of holiness could be pre-linguistic and prior to language? To address this question, we need to go back to some basic claims of phenomenology and try to build a new understanding sensitive to the constitutive view that has had such profound impact on the Humanities while at the same time recognising pre-linguistic, somatic experience as the ground upon which the linguistically constitutive view can be formulated. We need to consider Husserl’s intentionality, Heidegger’s Dasein, as well as Romano’s pre-linguistic experience.