Rudolf Otto Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Bruce W. Ballard

Critical Essay by Bruce W. Ballard

SOURCE: "Heidegger, Otto, & The Phenomenology of Awe," in Philosophy Today, Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring, 1988, pp. 62-74.

In the following essay, Ballard examines Otto's phenomenology of the numinous and Heidegger's "ontological inquiry" as set out in his Being and Time.

In what follows I work out some of the signal implications of Heidegger's philosophy of mood for a reinterpretation of Rudolf Otto's phenomenology of religious feeling. I further argue that Otto's investigation of numinous feeling makes better sense than Heidegger's account of anxiety in elaborating the most primary human questioning. Consequently, Otto's phenomenology more completely meets the criteria Heidegger sets out in Being and Time for thorough ontological inquiry, namely, that it keep the whole phenomenon (man's existence) in view and grasp it in the unity of its structures. Otto does not, however, work out an adequate philosophical anthropology and therefore does not grasp the unity of human...
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