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A major locus of contemporary phenomenological debate is the loosely termed "postmodern" phenomenology of religious experience, where a number of thinkers have taken up Heidegger's approach to the divine in terms of the question of the "gift," whose givenness is crucially distinct from the presence of intention, meaning, or concept.¹ This leads to the denial of immediate intuition and consequently to a kind of "negative phenomenology," which, some argue, should no longer be considered phenomenology at a11.² This is also called the "phenomenology of the impossible," in which the absence of God in traditional negative theology turns out to be the same as the overabundance of the Infinite and All-Powerful which overwhelms the human being in the instant or moment of the "time of the gift."³ Here there may be, in the words of one observer, "some kind of vision," but no objectification and neither presence nor absence as commonly understood.⁴

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-0229-4_12

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