A Broader Concept of Experience?

Reflections on Anthony J. Steinbock’s concept of “vertical experience”

Abstract

The work of Anthony J. Steinbock on emotions―particularly moral emotions―and on religious experience is closely related to a methodological claim. This claim is that the concepts of “experience” and “manifestation” should be understood in a broader manner than that of classical phenomenology, particularly Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. In this paper, I examine the way in which Steinbock understands and conceptualizes the kind of givenness to which he refers with the notion of “vertical experience”. I focus on his claim that vertical experiences are irreducible to the kind of experiences that can be described in terms of what he calls “provocation”, “presentation” and the “noesis-noema structure”. Even though I make a criticism of his assertion that the latter implies that they should not be understood as forms of givenness founded on the above-mentioned structure, I agree with some major implications that he draws from them. In the last part of the paper, I discuss his suggestion that the Husserlian conceptualization of emotional givenness should be revised to set forward their structure in terms of what he calls “evocation” and try to give additional reasons, drawn from Husserl himself, to support this claim. The paper comes concludes by stressing the relevance of Steinbock’s analyses concerning what he calls “idolatry”. I argue that his analyses of attitudes that negate the vertical dimension of experience have far reaching implications that go beyond the field of philosophy of religion and open new, promising paths for phenomenological research on social and moral problems.