Must We Avoid Speaking of Religion? The Truths of Religions

Abstract

AbstractHeidegger already recognized in the 1920s the difficulties facing a phenomenology of religion, but the problems are greatly multiplied once one recognizes that many of the so-called religions were constituted as such only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and that the "invention" of these religions was according to an idea of religion shaped by Christianity. By investigating the incompatible attempts of Kant and Hegel to negotiate that idea, I identify the genealogy of the double bind whereby today it appears that one is faced with a choice between two violences: the violence of imposing the word religion on practices that do not readily follow the model of the Christian religion and the violence of refusing the word to non-Christian religions.