Page 275 - Contribution To Phenomenology

268 JAMES a HART

Religion in the specific sense is the higher level of mythic culture in
which

these transcendent beings are absolutized to deities, to the institutors of
absolute norms which they have communicated and revealed to humans
and in the observance of which the humans find their salvation (Hua
XXVII, 60).

On this occasion Husserl offers the opinion that the consciousness of
norms is what distinguishes the human animal. All animals live out their
life in the context of instincts, but the human animal has not only
instincts but also norms which pervade all conscious acts so that
everything she experiences is right or not right, i.e., lovely or ugly,
meaningful or pointless, suitable or unsuitable, etc/ Thus Husserl can
claim that the development of the consciousness of norms and the
development of religion are interwoven. In these passages he seems to
suggest that the lower level of mythic culture is somewhere between
norms and mere instinct. On this occasion I will not pursue an analysis
of HusserFs (rather impoverished) view of "primitives" and their
religions.^
In religion, as the higher form of mythic life, all of communal life, not
merely the realm of faith and cult, but even the private sphere, is
harnessed to the requirements of divine norms. In "The Vienna Lecture'*
he holds that reUgion properly excludes polytheism and that in the

thing." Similarly we can measure the facts of historical religions against the ideals
emergent in religious experience. The truth of religion in this sense would be
relative to the various historical disclosures and irrelative in so far as these would
be instances of the ideal unity which is manifest in them. See "Correspondencie
entre Dilthey y Husserl," Walter Biemel, ed., Revista Filosoia de la Universidad de
Costa Rica I (1957), 101 ff.; translation in Husserl: Shorter Works (South Bend:
Notre Dame, 1981), 203-208. See also "A Precis of an Husserlian Philosophical
Theology," Essays in Phenomenological Theology, edited by Steven Laycock and
James Hart (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 100 ff.
* HusserPs sketches of animal consciousness are worthy of a special study.
^ It is impoverished because he does not see the richness of forms of life and
collective virtue, e.g., practices of avoiding conflict, of non-violence, of child-raising
and child-care, etc. in many aboriginal cultures. Everything is judged from the
standpoint of whether the culture approaches the Greek discovery of logos. It could
be that a superior kind of social-political sophia, if not logos, is in play in many of
these cultures. For a sketch of Husserl's own view see Sect. 1 of "From Mythos to
Logos to Utopian Poetics: An Husserlian Narrative."