Ontology of gerhard oberhammer’s transcendent experience as an experience of thinking on the border of reason

The article presents an attempt by one of the most interesting modern thinkers, the Austrian scientist Gerhard Oberhammer, to substantiate the possibility of a transcendental experience of meeting with God and the philosophicalhermeneutic objectification of this experience. Based on the traditions of Kant’s transcendental philosophy and its hermeneutical interpretation by Karl-Otto Apel, Oberhammer also draws on the productive intentions of Karl Jaspers’ concept of the “ciphers of the transcendent”, experience as a person’s being captured by Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas’ hypostase. The article deals with a heuristic interpretation of these concepts for Oberhammer’s explanation of the possibility of a transcendent experience as an experience of an absolute meeting of man with God. According to the Austrian philosopher and Indologist, the place of transcendent experience is the inner world of the subject, which is characterized by two main properties: depth and openness. The latter allows us to hope for the possibility of meeting with the other, but again, not outside the subject, but inside it, realizing the hidden structures of the inner world, as a world correlated with what is outside it. That is, according to Gerhard Oberhammer, the transcendent experience of the subject can be comprehended in its two interdependent moments related to the subject’s situation, namely, the moment of its self-explanation and the moment of its correlation. The Austrian philosopher represents the religious subject as being in a constant self-overcoming of its limited isolation and finding its true essence, which implicitly contains both its depth and its correlation with the other, as its ability to accept this other into itself. The article substantiates the idea that the Austrian scientist builds his concept of religious and philosophical hermeneutics with a firm belief in its productivity and the possibility of using it for the analysis of any religion, since he focuses on universal transformations and events that occur in the life of a believer, regardless of the religious tradition to which he belongs. © 2021.