Benjamin Constant’s Ideas as an Opportunity for the Substantiation of Religious Feeling only as Emotion

Abstract

Summary On the basis of B. Constant’s ideas, this article discusses the possibility of studying religious feeling only as emotion and substantiates the superiority of this approach to the cognitive. The difficulties of the non-cognitive approach are mainly related to its fusion with the cognitive and can be overcome by a strict distinction between them. Religious feeling is thereby shown to be an ordinary emotion without any cognitive properties – only as a sensual stream that is specified by the particularities of its flow and its interactions with thought (and probably will). Its specificity as religious would be considered as the effect of such particularities and interactions. Further specification of this feeling – the differences among faith, religious hope, love, etc. – is proposed in the same manner, revealing and distinguishing nuances of its flow. In this way, religious feeling could be considered without mystification, and its nature would be understandable through the mechanism of consciousness. The whole of religion as reduced to religious feeling and consciousness would be accessible in its nature to the researcher while fully preserving its details as they occur in the believer’s consciousness.