SATURATED PHENOMENON AND EXPERIENCE OF THE SACRED: REASSESSING A NOTION BY JEAN-LUC MARION

Abstract

In this paper the notion of saturated phenomenon, proposed by Jean-Luc Marion, is presented critically and revised. Drawing upon the objections to it raised by L.B. Puntel, which have considerable impact on Marion’s project of thinking God only from a phenomenological standpoint, the author reassesses the saturated phenomenon by means of a return to its first source: Kant’s third Critique. In so doing, the symbolic nature of this phenomenon is stressed, as well as its structural constitution by the analogic imagination. Then, focusing on the specific type of saturated phenomenon which is the revelatory phenomenon, it is shown how this revised version of Marion’s notion is adequate to think the experience of the sacred. Finally, a further corroboration of this standpoint is made by an allusion to Rudolf Otto’s conception of religious experience.