Page 276 - Contribution To Phenomenology

THE STUDY OF RELIGION IN HUSSERL 269

concept of God "the singular is essential" {Crisis, 288). In both this
lecture as well as in the Kaizo essays he claims that religion as the
highest form of myth leads to a hierarchical cultural priestly class which
administers a universal system of absolute norms encompassing all
directions of life, i.e., in general, knowing and evaluation as well as the
practical details of life. Husserl makes reference to the earliest forms of
this religious culture in Babylon.^
Suffusing Husserl's analysis of culture and reUgion is his own pervasive
progressivism. Because consciousness itself is radically teleological and
facing infinite ideals, so also the "objective spirit" which it constitutes
discloses such a teleology. This becomes evident when he claims that
culture, in this specific sense of religion, has an entelechy in the sense
proper to human development, i.e., it is not blindly functioning as a goal
toward which the organism heads unconsciously in its normal growth.
Rather it functions as a conscious axiological principle, a constituted
ideal-goal, under the leadership of a class of priests. Each cultural form,
Husserl speculates, may be envisaged as an analogous species in so far
as it grows towards its specific ideal form of maturity. But because it is
rooted in the conscious functioning of an axiological perspective tied to
an ideal-goal, it is to be contrasted with entelechy as a way of describing
unconscious organic development.
In short, religion, as an objectification of a community's consciousness
in the form of an absolutization of the mythic powers in unified norms,
directs all the formations of this type of culture (Hua XXVII, 63).
Seemingly the culture of religion, as a unification of norms with a
resultant centralism and hierarchy, would have a nisus toward the
objectification of a single God in order to ward off the destablizing, de-
centralizing, and centrifugal forces of polytheism.'

* Husserrs brief description of religion's hierarchical, centralist, and totalitarian
structures parallels Lewis Mumford's monumental account of the rise of "civilization"
in antiquity as the forerunner of the modern "megamachine." See The Myth of the
Machine, Vols. I and II (New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1964).
' That Husserl, in some sense is philosophically a monotheist and not a
polytheist cannot be held against him as a form of cultural prejudice. One may
disagree with this position but then one is disagreeing with his philosophical
theology, and that is the terrain upon which that difference of opinion must be
worked out, not on the level of claims of personal intolerance or Western
chauvinism. Similarly, the view of Husserl that religious experiences have some
essential features may or may not be a kind of cultural and metaphysical prejudice,
e.g., "essentialism." Such a matter has to be determined by arguments which help