How does an entity such as a “religion” or a “nation” retain an identity in and through time? What is it that allows us to say “Buddhism changed,” or “America grew”? What is a “religion”? A “nation”? For that matter, what is an “entity”? Was ist ein Ding?

Any theoretical understanding, or for that matter, any act of description, of religion must have an answer to these most fundamental questions. Most scholars and methodological schools merely presuppose answers, i.e., they presuppose the ontological or epistemological status of such existants as unproblematic. Given the postmodern, poststructural displacements discussed in Chapter 1, that is no longer possible. For it is in these implicit assumptions that the objects of our field of inquiry are constituted: without such assumptions, not a single act of scholarship, not theorizing, not describing, not interpreting, not defining, would be possible. Such assumptions constitute both the objects and the methods of our field.

The answer that classical phenomenology gave to these questions was, as seen in previous chapters, ultimately metaphysical, positing a transhistorical substratum, “Man” or “Spirit,” “behind” as it were, the raw sequentially of events in time. A postmodern, post-metaphysical, and post-subject response would necessarily be quite different. Nietzsche's response to this issue, now called “genealogy,” was precisely the opposite of that given by the phenomenology of religion. David Hoy has argued that Nietzsche uses “genealogy to destroy metaphysics altogether. Genealogy itself becomes a way to do nonmetaphysical philosophy” (Hoy 1986, 23).