Transformative Impact: The Environmental Significance of Religious Conversions

Abstract This paper concentrates on the transformative impact of religious conversions. I understand religious conversions here as all individual spiritual transformations that either create an essentially new religious experience or substantially intensify an existing religiosity. The transformative impact of these transformations consists not only in modifying life perspectives or values, but also (and more substantially) in altering the very structure of personal experience. They can even bring significant changes in the phenomenal character of individual life-worlds, which are then experienced as perceived “differently”. This reflects on the possibilities the phenomenological method possesses to describe (and understand) these changes, and mainly discusses the applicability of Husserl’s analyses in Ideas 2 of the double constitution of body. On this basis, I suggest an explanatory model of transformative localizing/layering.


Introduction
What do religious conversions mean for phenomenology? They reveal with the utmost intensity how a human life-world can be transcribed. Converts (mainly from atheism) often report that they perceive the world differently, because religious insights possess what I call in this paper the environmental significance, i.e. the ability to affect the very appearance of the life-environment. Converts may experience changes in the very sensory appearing of their life-worlds claiming that they not only perceive the "reality" differently (i.e. in a new perspective), but that they even experience a new reality -that they see new things. To take converts' reports seriously thus means to understand religious conversions not only as a change of perspective or a creation of a new perspective, but (let us say) more substantially as an emergence of a new life-environment.1 At the same time, an emergence of a convert's new life-environment is not effected primarily by materialization of new things; even though new things can be involved (such as new books, religious objects, etc.). So the methodical position of this paper, as it concerns the approach to an emergence of a new life-environment, is situated between the two extreme positions of a mere change of perspective, on the one hand, and a materialization of a new environment, on the other. In this paper I want to claim that the new appearance of the convert's life-environment can be explained by connecting the environmental emergence with a transformative transcription of the life-world. The transformative transcription implies the way between a change of perspective and materialization of a new reality; it means more than a perspective because it really changes what is experienced (perceived), and it signifies less than a materialization as it does not create new things.
I aim in this paper to track the transformative transcription in so far as it is detectable at what I call the transcribable layer of perceptual experience (i.e. the layer of our perceptual experience that can be repeatedly overwritten). My approach is methodologically rooted in the transitive-topological model of phenomenology.2 This model brackets the intentionality of perception (i.e. it methodically reduces the objectdirectedness of perception) and focuses on areas or layers of experience. Bracketing of intentionality, in the context of this paper, means that the transcription is not connected to subjective-objective moments of perception (e.g. attention, acts of perceiving, perceptual contents, etc.), but to its topological moments (e.g. location, localization, environmental aspects, etc.). Topological moments of perception are methodically disassociated in this model from the subjective-objective attributes of perception; the latter properties are not denied, of course, but reduced. With the help of the transitive-topological model, I believe, phenomenology may track the transformative impact of religious conversions from a religious insight in a convert's consciousness to its inscription in a layer-of-transcription (i.e. the transcribable layer) that belongs to an individual life-world.
In this paper, I aim mainly to reflect on Husserl's analyses of the double constitution of body in the framework of the phenomenological approach to religious conversions. After a brief review of the state of art, I introduce, in paragraph 3, the phenomenological difference between the physical and lived body. Then in paragraph 4, I interpret in greater detail how Husserl conceptualizes layering of experience in relation to the localization of sensations upon my body. On this basis, I finally suggest an explanatory model of transformative localizing/layering and discuss its applicability in theorizing the transformative impact of religious conversions.

The phenomenological approach to religious conversions
For the purposes of this paper, I define religious conversions broadly as individual spiritual transformations that either create an essentially new religious experience or substantially intensify an existing religiosity. I do not focus on conversions in the sense of moving from one religious group to another; i.e., I disregard sociological, cultural or political moments of changing religions. Nevertheless, a shift from one religious culture to another may include (and usually does) phases of spiritual transformation; these phases, then, belong to a religious conversion in the sense of this paper, and in this way sociologically understood religious conversions also remain within the scope of this study.
Currently, the interdisciplinary approach is highly promoted in conversion studies, even though, naturally, in this perspective a conversion itself inevitably remains a religious phenomenon.3 It can be seen, for example, in Rambo's influential definition of a religious conversion as "a total transformation of the person by the power of God [... that] occurs through the mediation of social, cultural, personal, and religious forces".4 Existing attempts to analyse what might be called a "transformative" power of religious conversion remain in this interdisciplinary religious context -as most evident in Iyadurai, author of Transformative Religious Experience: A Phenomenological Understanding of Religious Conversion.5 The term "phenomenology" in these attempts refers to the usual psychological qualitative approach to how experience appears to converts as persons, not to the tradition of Husserlian and Merleau-Pontian thinking.
In an entirely different way, my paper employs the phenomenological method developed in the Husserlian tradition to reduce religious and psychological aspects of religious conversions and focus on phenomenal changes in converts' life-world. This reduction does not indicate an exclusion of conversion studies from the interdisciplinary perspective. Nor does the phenomenological approach -since phenomenology is essentially a methodology -simply aim to widen the interdisciplinary scope of religious studies as a discipline, but rather to suggest a new topic (i.e. the environmental significance of religious conversions) that should be addressed by the interdisciplinary research.

Layers of experience in Husserl's conception of the double constitution of body
As mentioned in the introduction, shifting point of view from transitive movements to regions of transitions means, in fact, bracketing the intentionality of experience (and of perception in particular). The focus on intentionality gives preference to object-directed acts, i.e. to moves of experience. Therefore, a phenomenological description of layers of experience must bracket (not deny) the intentionality of experience. To require a bracketing of intentionality may seem to be the opposite of how Husserl himself applied the phenomenological reduction, namely to reveal the intentionality of experience. Particularly in Ideas I, intentionality is designated as the "principal theme of phenomenology".6 Looking more closely, however, we see that Husserl claims this in a broader framework of explaining the "universal structures of pure consciousness"; right after extensively examining consciousness as a "stream of mental processes" (Erlebnisstrom),7 he determines the path further: "We now pass over to a peculiarity of mental processes, to intentionality, which one can directly designate as the general theme of 'Objectively' oriented phenomenology".8 So the focus on intentionality, however essential, occurs as just one option given by the phenomenological method.
In my understanding of these expositions in Ideas I, the stream of consciousness represents the whole phenomenological field, i.e. the full scope within the reach of phenomenological methods, for consciousness as a stream expresses not only the temporality of experiencing, but also the unity and uniqueness of "my" "complete" (i.e. entire) life-experience. Earlier, in Logical Investigations, Husserl understands the stream of consciousness as the "experiential unity of the ego" (Erlebniseinheit des Ich)9; this term denotes the phenomenological domain, i.e. "all lived experiences"10 as made accessible by the phenomenological attitude. Within this domain, phenomenology can choose from different techniques of description according to different aspects of the stream of consciousness (i.e. the experiential unity of the ego). Although "objectively oriented phenomenology" picks out intentionality as the predominant way to grasp our experiences within the stream of consciousness, there are yet other phenomenological ways that focus attention on other aspects of (the stream of) consciousness. To remain within the framework of Husserl's approach, in his late works he describes not only intentionality but also horizons of experience (in Cartesian Meditations) or geneses of meaning (in genetic phenomenology). Both horizons and genetic phenomena reveal structures of experience different from a direct intentional relation to objects (and other objective parts of the stream of consciousness). Yet for a closer analysis, in what follows I focus on what I believe is the most evident examination of layers of experience in Husserl's earlier thinking; namely, the theme of localized sensations.
In his first analyses of intersubjectivity (beginning in 1905 and published in Husserliana 13)11, Husserl tries to derive the human capacity for empathy (Einfühlung) from our (i.e. always my) capacity to sense our (i.e. my) own body. The constitution of my own body has continually a double character, as Husserl explains already in his fragments on empathy from 1909.12 Later, in Ideas 2 (mainly § §35 -42), the double constitution of my own body gains more precision and appears in its most well-known version: Hence the Body is originally constituted in a double way: first, it is a physical thing, matter; it has its extension, in which are included its real properties, its color, smoothness, hardness, warmth, and whatever other material qualities of that kind there are. Secondly, I find on it, and I sense 'on' it and 'in' it: warmth on the back of the hand, coldness in the feet, sensations of touch in the fingertips.13 My body in the sense of a physical thing (Körper) becomes a lived body (Leib) in a continuous process that Husserl theorizes to be the localization of sensations. I simply find many of my impressions placed at and on my body, which I perceive as an extended material object; particularly, as Husserl points out, I identify haptic sensations as being localized at visually given places. In Husserl's phenomenology, the visual field has a primacy in constituting the experience of my environment, so it is very important for understanding this process that parts of my visual environment (i.e. my own body) are specifically enlivened by localizing haptic sensations (thus constituting my lived body).
One aspect of the double constitution of my own body is very important for the investigation of religious conversions in this paper: the layering of experience. In this respect, localization of haptic sensations at the visible body creates a new layer of experience: a layer of "localized sensings" (lokalisierte Empfindnisse).14 I elucidate this view in more detail below.

Layering of experience: Localizing/layering
Körper and Leib can be understood as two layers of experience. Yet the phenomenological notion of a layer of experience must be comprehended as a dynamic expression of a process; it is not a static stripe (i.e., a piece) nor a level of experience. The double constitution of my body occurs in a process which repeats again and again, almost constantly.15 Therefore, I refer to the layering of experience in the process of the double constitution of my own body. This concept also expresses in a better way the unity of experience: even though Körper and Leib constitute two layers of experience, which can be distinguished by a phenomenological description, they articulate a unified bodily experience (since we experience one body, not two bodies).
Likewise, the layering of experience has a specific spatial meaning. In the passage quoted above concerning the double constitution of the body, spatial vocabulary is of great importance since the sensations are found (i.e., localized) in and on a body that is primarily defined by an extension (it occupies a limited part of the extended space). The localization of sensations not only enlivens the visible body to become a lived body, but also transforms its essential spatial characteristic of extension to a topological determination. Localization converts the extended space to what can be called a place-space (i.e., a topological space).16 11 Husserl, Husserliana 13. 12 Mainly in the texts "Auszug meiner ältesten Blätter über Einfühlung vor 1909" (even before 1909) and "Einfühlung" (1909). Husserl,Husserliana 13,[21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55] Husserl, Ideas 2, 153. The passages concerning the double constitution of the body can be dated from around 1913. 14 E.g. Husserl, Ideas 2, 153. Husserl uses an unusual word here: "sensings" (Empfindnisse) to capture specific sorts of "sensations" (Empfindungen). By sensings he understands the sensations (mainly haptic) which relate to my own (extended) body. 15 Husserl describes this process in the moments when the one who experiences pays attention to how haptic sensations take place at her visible body, but we may add that this process must continue somehow also subconsciously (when she is awake yet without a particular focus on the process, or differently in a dream). 16 The place-space is not defined by extension (by visible occupying parts of the container-like space), but by localization. See more in my book Die Ortschaft des Seins which provides detailed interpretations of phenomenological topology in the works of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.
Husserl specifies the spatial aspects of layering in §40 of Ideas 2, where he further reflects on the essential unity in the double constitution of body. He starts with a clear claim: "The physical Body is, of course, a constituted unity, and only to it does the layer of the sensings belong".17 So the main problem is exactly how this belonging occurs. Husserl emphasizes that sensations, in the case of localized sensings, do not belong to the physical body as sensation-contents of a material thing; i.e., sensings are not sensual qualities of my own body. On the one hand, sensings cannot be simply taken as sensation-contents; on the other, my physical body is not perceived as a mere physical thing (I always perceive it as mine and lived body). Therefore, Husserl utilizes concepts like correspondence or coincidence to help elucidate how sensings belong to the physical body: To the place in the extension corresponds a place-moment in the sensation, and to the degrees of stimulation and kinds of stimulation correspond definite moments which render the sensation concrete and modifiable according to more or less known ways. Thus there lies in the sensations an order which 'coincides' with the appearing extension.18 Topological relations are the key to the problem of belonging; in the quoted text, the correspondence or coincidence expresses an intertwining of localization and layering. (Subsequently, to name the intertwining of localization and layering, I will use this notion: localizing/layering.) To explain sensings' belonging to the physical body only as a localization would still be in danger of being misunderstood as a possession of qualities. Thus, the localization Husserl has in mind must be comprehended also as layering. In this (genuinely phenomenological) framework, a physical body reveals itself primarily as a visible (or "appearing") extension, and sensings are essentially described as "fields of sensation", which "are always completely filled".19 These two domains, a visible extension and a field of sensations, coincide with each other, or -as expressed in the German text -a field of sensations covers the appearing extension. Husserl literally writes about a "'deckende' Ordnung", an order of covering that primarily characterizes fields of sensation in the process of their localization upon the extended physical body. I understand this covering order to be a topological one, since it joins two different place-related specifications: a "place in the extension" with a "place-moment" of sensations ("der Örtlichkeit in der Extension entspricht ein Ort-Moment in der Empfindung").
Localizing/layering happens within this topological order. Localizing happens not as a one-way placement of sensations upon the body, but con-jointly as a connection of the two place-related specifications (the "place in the extension" and the "place-moment" of sensations).20 Layering, accordingly, means that localization of sensings does not apply to separate spots (points) of experience but to fields of sensations. For example, a touch on my hand (be it by my other hand or an object) never appears as a pointed impression; even a sting is accompanied by a spread and (possible) succession of its perception.21 The spread and succession of a particular sensation establishes the field of sensation, which is "always completely filled", as quoted above. In my reading, this claim is related to Husserl's general idea of the continuous stream of consciousness.
The real location of perceptions (e.g. when I say I have been stung to this exact spot) emerges from localizing/layering according to the topological order of covering, as if these locations were extracted from the extension by localizing/layering of sensations upon the physical body. In this sense, localizing/ layering not only constitutes our bodily experience, but also transforms it by extracting a new experiential layer. The ability of localizing/layering to form new layers of experience is the last important moment of the double constitution of the body Husserl pays attention to in §40 of Ideas 2. The analysis there begins 17 Husserl, Ideas 2, 161, translation altered. The English translator uses "stratum", whereas I prefer to speak about "layer". 18 Husserl, Ideas 2, 162. "Der Örtlichkeit in der Extension entspricht ein Ort-Moment in der Empfindung, und den Reizstarken und Reizarten bestimmte Momente, die die Empfindung konkret und nach ungefahr bekannten Weisen modifizierbar machen. So liegt in den Empfindungen eine sich mit den erscheinenden Extensionen 'deckende' Ordnung; [...]. " Husserl,Husserliana 4,154. 19 Husserl,Ideas 2,162. 20 On the basis of a two-way, con-joint localization, Merleau-Ponty later unfolds his conception of a reversibilty of touch. 21 Husserl gives this example: "If an object moves mechanically over the surface of my skin, touching it, then I obviously have a succession of sensings ordered in a determinate way". Husserl,Ideas 2,161. with a question how a new stimulus (Reiz), which brings a new sensation, relates to the field of (existing) sensations. The initial answer is simple: "[E]ach new stimulation does not provoke a sensation as if for the first time, but rather, it provokes in the sensation-field a corresponding change in the sensation".22 And the following explanation provides further insight into the process of localizing/layering: The field receives localization, and in the field each new change receives localization as a consequence of the particular stimulating circumstances. The new layer the thing has received by means of the localization of the field acquires, with respect to the constancy of the field, the character of a kind of real property.23 As emphasized above, the topological order of localizing/layering is founded by a covering correspondence between the place in the extension and a place-moment in the sensation. Now, the quoted passage elucidates that changes caused by new stimuli occur without interrupting the continuity of localizing/layering. A new stimulus "receives localization" by emergence of a new layer of localized sensings. With "respect to the constancy of the field" and according to the "particular stimulating circumstances", the new layer has a character of a "real property". The localization of a new sensation reveals more forcefully the intertwining between localization and layering, since localization of a new stimulus "provokes" emergence of a new layer of experience. The thing, Husserl says, primarily means the physical body; a new stimulus brings a new layer of how this extended "thing" is covered by the lived body and changes how we "really" perceive our body as such. For example, when I am stung by a bee, my body receives a new layer and consequently the way how I perceive it (and myself too) changes.
In this context, the topological order of localizing/layering involves moments of transformation, in at least two senses: first, localizing/layering transforms our body perception by establishing its new layer; second, and related to the first, a new stimulus becomes a real property of the body. In this way, a real place that defines the position of a new stimulus on or in the body (I have been stung right here) emerges (or is extracted; see above) from the new layer of localized sensings. In both senses, localizing/layering has a transformative impact with a spatial significance since it has the force to establish new layers and found new places. More concisely, I express this transformative impact by calling it transformative localizing/ layering.
However, the transformative impact is described within the narrower context of the double constitution of my body. This raises two questions that I address in the next section. First, does spatial significance implies an environmental significance? And second, can a model of localizing/layering also be applied beyond the framework of bodily perception?

Transformative localizing/layering and the environmental significance of religious conversions
The two questions raised at the end of the previous paragraph arise from methodological considerations, which are connected with the main problem of this paper, i.e., how to phenomenologically conceptualize the change in perception of lived environment caused by religious conversion. In answering these questions, I aim to foreshadow the development of an explanatory model based on transformative localizing/layering in my future research.
Regarding the first question, in my understanding the spatial significance of a transformative impact implies an environmental significance, but the difference between spatial and environmental remains subtle. In the introduction, I defined the environmental significance of a new stimulus as the ability to affect the very appearance of a life-environment. I claim simply that changes in spatial forms of perceptions inevitably affect how we perceive our life-environment. Thus, a spatial impact implies an environmental significance of a new stimulus. This preliminary claim is applicable not only to the spatial impact of sensings' localization in the Husserlian perspective, but generally to the spatial impact of all perceptions. Therefore, I assume that the way Husserl's conceptualizes the double constitution of "my own" body can be applied also in research on the environmental impact that usually accompanies religious conversions.
This indicates my answer to the second question as to whether a model of localizing/layering can also be applied beyond the framework of bodily perception. A positive answer admits the possibility of creating (based on Husserl's conception) an explanatory model of transformative localizing/layering. This model pays attention to the spatial-and-environmental impact of new stimuli (i.e. mainly to emergence of new layers of experience) by investigating their localization within the previously existing perceptual environment; the methodological core of the transformative localizing/layering, then, consists in the topological order of covering place-moments of both, the new stimulus and the existing life-environment. A negative answer, though, would point out that there is a difference between the physical thing that is my body (or becomes my lived body within the process of sensings' localization) and another physical thing that is not my body (e.g., another body or thing such as a table or a chair). Therefore, the localization of sensings cannot be used to explain all changes in the sensory appearing of converts' life-worlds.
My reaction to this objection recalls two lines of argumentation from the broader Husserlian framework (which also includes, in the context of this paper, Merleau-Ponty's thinking). Firstly, the difference between other (alien) bodies and simple material things is of importance. My relationship to the visible bodies of other human beings (and partly also to animal bodies) is carried out by empathy (inter-subjectivity). Empathy enables us to convey the validity of the double constitution of the body to bodies of other humans as well (even though we cannot experience the localization of "their" sensings directly). Secondly, the limits of my own extended body (i.e. Körper) are significantly widened while it transforms to the lived body (i.e. Leib). In this sense, things that are in reach of my lived body within the practical framework of everydayness (e.g., tools) also become parts of my body.24 Hence, the model of transformative localizing/layering can also be applied to understand changes in the perception of simple material things in our lived environment.

Conclusion
This paper searched for a phenomenological way to theorize changes in the very sensory appearing of religious converts' life-worlds. After a religious conversion, converts sometimes claim that they not only perceive "reality" differently, but that they even experience a "new" reality. To understand the status of this new reality, I propose an explanatory model of transformative localizing/layering. This model focuses on spatial aspects of new stimuli for perception caused by religious conversions. It primarily describes the ways in which the place moments of these stimuli coincide with the spatiality of the convert's existing life-environment. It pays attention to how localization of the new stimuli affects layering of the existing life-environment, most importantly in the emergence of both new layers of experience and new places for the "new" reality. 25