Publication Details

Abstract

The paper is a continuation of the contribution in Filozofia 1997/6. It offers a discussion of so called negative experience, especially of negative existential one. In the author's view the negative experience results from subjectivization of an uncompleted positive experience. The objective absence of being is rendered subjectively as the presence of non-being, what is seen by the author as one of the sources of modem atheism. The absence of God in contemporary human experience is interpreted as the presence of His non-being and consequently as negation of His existence as such. This fact provides a background of the authors' examination of the reasons of the absence of religious experience in modem times. His conclusion is that this experience does not need not to lead to atheism; on the contrary, it could lead to an open theism based on a broader experience of God. Thus the shift from the experience of "nothingness" to a new religious experience is justified.