Abstract

A serious realist cannot play off mediation against immediacy or directness against mediatedness. The paper argues (1) that immediacy is a misunderstood mode of life-world self-evidence, (2) that phenomenology, understood as the study of appearing and not merely of appearances, is a paradigm of a realist philosophy, (3) that the world is the sum total of what can appear as something to somebody, and (4) that a phenomenological philosophy of religion that starts from the appearing of life-world phenomena, should construe God as the one without whom no appearing would be possible, and no appearances actual.