The conference theme asks whether spirituality or religion constitutes a remedy for existential emptiness or a surplus of modernity. This paper proceeds from the assumption that the human experience of emptiness need not be understood as a disorder or failure, but may be an inherent part of human existence. The encounter with finitude reveals human fragility and dependence, while simultaneously opening them to reception and gift, both from another person and from something that transcends them. From this perspective, existential emptiness does not require a remedy in the form of spirituality or religion. Rather, through an encounter with one’s own finitude, an individual may discover and cultivate a personal relationship with that which transcends them, thereby developing their spirituality or religiosity.
This idea is explored through two situations in which a person bodily confronts the limits of their existence and experience: aesthetic experience and anesthesia. However, this is only possible if we approach them phenomenologically, treating the artwork not only as an object, but as an event arising between the work and its observer, revealing specific modes of human being. Following Jan Tlustý, the experience of art opens so-called “gaps”, moments/places of emptiness, where established meanings dissolve, and a more fundamental experience of being is disclosed. This concept is also applied to general anesthesia, which is understood not merely as a medical procedure but as part of a human story, unfolding bodily and unconsciously and accessible only through indirect reflection. In this sense, it disrupts the certainty of one’s own existence and personal identity.
These experiential gaps link aesthetics (aisthesis) and anesthesia (an-aisthesis), offering a path for examining human finitude and the existential emptiness that arises from it. The perspective is further developed phenomenologically in dialogue with the thought of Patočka, Bachelard, Barbaras, and Hojda.