Page 274 - Contribution To Phenomenology

THE STUDY OF RELIGION IN HUSSERL 267

ways in which the totality of world becomes a theme. "World" is
comprised of the invisible and visible, and the visible is but a section of
an apperceived invisible dimension filled with hidden malificient and
benificent powers/ But since the mythic attitude is under the sway of
invisible hidden powers, the speculative knowledge proper to myth is
subordinate to the task of shielding visible life from every sort of evil
fate/

^ E III 7, p. 2; see also my "From Mythos to Logos to Utopian poetics: An
Husserlian Narrative," Journal of the Philosophy of Religion 25 (1989), 147 ff.
^ See The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,
trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press: 1970), 283-284; Hua VI,
330. I am grateful to John Drummond for some insights into these matters. As far
as I know a phenomenology of religion as such is missing in Husserl. He greeted
Otto's work on Das Heitige as a "first beginning" in the phenomenology of the
religious dimension. He told Otto that his speculations, presumably the theory of the
innate propensity for the religious, was better left out. But as a beginning it goes
to the true origins of religious experience. What precisely he liked about the
descriptions of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans we do not learn from this
letter. He only volunteers that Otto does not yet offer the radical distinction
between the incidental fact and the eidos in religious intentionality and there is still
wanting a study of the essential necessities and possibilities of religious consciousness
and its correlate—as well as a study of the essential necessities of its development.
What he had in mind is perhaps indicated in the discussion in the body of the text.
In response to Grertha Walter's letter (in preparation of her Phaenomenologie
der Mystik (Halle: Niemeyer, 1923/70) Husserl offers a theory how we can be
touched in "the deepest depths" by noting how the strewn out position-takings and
the acquired values of the heart may get reactivated by felicitous Gestalten so that
all of one's life is gathered together in a unique synthesis. Deeper strata of the I
are awakened into play and what before functioned as unrelated motives in the
passive underground are awakened into a synthesis which permits infinities and
powerful new perspectives to open up (A V 21, 92); cf. my "A Precis of a
Husserlian Philosophical Theology," 152-154 and 166-167; (on p. 167 I gather some
of Husserl's remarks on mysticism.) What perhaps Husserl has in mind, and what
can bring together these considerations, is the way the religious sphere makes
present the ontological-metaphysical actuality of the divine idea. We will come back
to this later on in the essay.
Finally, Husserl maintains in the correspondence with Dilthey that the
phenomenology of religion is, to use Dilthey's own expression, an empathic study
of the inner life of religious persons and communities in terms of the various
motivations and life-forms. The historical-factual serves as exemplifications of the
way the pure ideal is intended. And the history of religions investigates the
historical-factual but is indifferent to the essential-ideal in the same way that actual
sciences of physical bodies are indifferent to the essential nature of the spatial-
temporal thingliness. Thus the endless relativities of gases, particles, liquids, solids,
waves, fields, etc. are all pervaded by the ideal norms of the idea of "corporeal