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In this paper, I engage three different sets of phenomenological concepts in order to explore the continuous transformation ("transmutation") of religious emotion from unwholesome (anger, alienation, grief) to wholesome (love, sense of connectedness, bliss). Analysis shows that in the practice of Neo-Buddhist meditation), emotion transitions from complex and axiologically directed at intentional objects (claims based on Husserl's theory of intentionality), to nonrepresentational (as suggested by Levinas). The way emotions are given in meditation, as a continuity in which one emotion is not replaced by another but transforms into it, is very different from the discrete, incremental character of emotion in the everyday life. Husserl's theory of passive synthesis and intentional continuity appears insufficient to account for the continuity of emotion's "transmutation," to be better understood by means of Henry's nonintentional phenomenology as nonintentional continuity. In meditative practice, emotion is reduced to being a counterphenomenon, continuously undergoing modifications and the inhibition of rising intentionalities. The modes of noēsis also change to include reversibility between the self-affective character of emotion and the "clear-seeing" aspect of noēsis. I further elaborate on the conditions of possibility for the continuous teleological transformation of emotion, found not only in the Husserlian horizon of time-consciousness and clear seeing but, more importantly, in noematic horizons of self-affection, of the rudimentary intentionalities related to the quality of emotion, and in the foundational horizon of phenomenological materiality (not hyletics). Finally, I argue that a religious quality of this experience depends on the teleology of emotion's continuous transformation.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-21575-0_5

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