Page 273 - Contribution To Phenomenology

266 JAMES G. HART

perceiving, acting, and representing in its various forms (picturing, reading,
speaking, etc.).^
On the occasion of writing about "cultural renewal" Husserl reserved
the term "culture" for an honorific sense which he contrasted with
"civilization" and "tradition." Here the ideal sense of culture refers to a
commual spirituality which mediates all social relationships and which is
characterized by a habituality which is always ready to awaken the
received achievements to their original intuitive vaUdity, beauty, truth,
etc. Here culture is authentic culture. Civilization and tradition, however,
are the inseparable milieu of culture. These are the ways achievements
fall into the merely conventional and thereby become scarcely under-
stood.^ As such, civilization and/or tradition are not capable of reproduc-
ing the original motivations. These thus remain, for all practical purposes,
dead. Thus, at least on this occasion, civilization and tradition are
regarded as the realm of the inauthentic, i.e., a realm in which there is
no intuitive legitimation of one's thoughts and deeds, analogous to the
way our knowledge of 9 X 9 = 81 is automatic and uninsightful, in
contrast to 1 + 1 + 1 = 3. Culture is properly authentic or approaches
a "philosophic culture" when it has the steady disposition and ability to
awaken the received achievements to their original legitimating intuitive
senses.
Religion for Husserl in the Kaizo essays has the specific meaning of
that towards which elemental mythic culture develops. The lower level of
mythic culture, proposes Hussserl at least on one occasion, has to do
with the way a people establishes a practical relation to, deals with,
placates, etc. the cosmic powers which pervade the world. World as a
totality, he noted later in "The Vienna Lecture," becomes a theme for
the mythico-religious attitude. The mythico-religious objects or values are

^ I deal with Husserl's theory of culture more at length in "The Entelechy
and Authenticity of Objective Spirit: Reflections on Husserliana XXVII," forthcoming
in Husserl Studies', also in "The Rationality of Culture and the Culture of Rationali-
ty," forthcoming in the Philosophy East and West (1992).

^ As we shall see, Husserl's theory resembles Max Weber's view that there
is a basic pattern where charisma tends to suffer a decline and to give way to
powers of tradition and rational socialization. The "routinization" of bureaucracy
is the well-known devolution of the charisma of the great founder. Stanford Lyman
called my attention to this parallel at the CARP Conference. For a discussion of
these matters, see Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (New York:
Doubleday Anchor, 1962), 325-328.