Then I will turn to Otto's view on what one could approximately label the intentionality of the relevant feeling: The 'creature-feeling' would be misunderstood if it was construed as a mere state of mind without taking into account that it is 'about' something other than the subject. First, I will present his claim that the various 'rational' meanings in religious life and the specific doctrines related to it could not be properly understood without taking the non-rational element of 'creature-feeling' into account. In section 1, I will set out Otto's claims concerning the object-relatedness of that feeling as well as its relation to the conceptual-or 'rational'-dimension of human experience. In this paper I will introduce some of the central ideas in Otto's book, develop them further in light of later especially phenomenological and pragmatist research on bodily feeling, and consider their potential significance for moral theory.

The affective dimension in question is called 'creature-feeling' or, more precisely, 'numinous' feeling, and can be preliminarily characterized as 'the emotion of a creature, abased and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures.'1 As the subtitle of his book, An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, already suggests, Otto is interested in analyzing a particular affective dimension of religious experience that is at the same time supposed to be non-rational, non-conceptual or non-discursive. In his study, Otto gives detailed descriptions of a peculiar affective dimension of religious life. It has influenced the work of Mircea Eliade, Max Scheler, Gerardus van der Leeuw, C.S. Keywords: Rudolf Otto atmosphere Dewey Kant Levinas phenomenologyĪmong the classics in philosophy of religion is Rudolf Otto's 1917 book Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy). I then illustrate the yet unexhausted potential of these very claims by arguing that the numinous in Otto's sense plays an irreducible role in the ethical reflections of such distinct authors as Kant and Levinas.

Drawing on those discussions helps defend some of Otto's claims about the relation between the non-rational, affective dimension and reason against the prevalent accusation of unscientific mysticism. Therefore, I draw on discussions in phenomenology and pragmatism, despite the fact that Otto's own epistemological framework is rooted in a different tradition. I argue that this notion is best understood in terms of an atmospheric quality impacting on the subject's feeling body. Received Jaccepted August 31, 2017Ībstract: In this paper, I investigate the non-rational, affective dimension of religious experience that Rudolf Otto attempted to address with his notion of the numinous. Rudolf Otto's 'The Idea of the Holy' Revisited

The idea of the holy by rudolf otto