Hermeneutik der religiösen Ekstase

This essay develops a philosophical hermeneutics of religious ecstasy, beginning with an experience of unease during a Nagar Kiirtan procession in Jelenia Góra, Poland. It asks why inwardly oriented ecstatic practices often appear, from the outside, as mere excitement. The ambiguity is traced to a hermeneutic asymmetry: participants inhabit a shared symbolic horizon, while observers perceive only external form. From this, a distinction is drawn between centripetal and centrifugal ecstasy. Although externally similar, centripetal ecstasy is structured by an inner semantic attractor that generates renewed coherence, whereas centrifugal ecstasy lacks such an attractor and tends toward disintegration. This distinction is situated within a broader framework of a space of possibilities, where religious symbols are understood not as competing truth claims but as expressions of general structures of semantic transformation. Ecstasy and contemplation thus appear as different modes of access to the same underlying structure. The essay concludes that philosophy cannot adjudicate religious truth claims but can articulate the structural patterns shared across symbolic worlds, offering a non-reductive interpretation of religious ecstasy.