Page 277 - Contribution To Phenomenology

270 JAMES G. HART

In so far as the teachings and commands of the priestly class are
sanctified and performed in the legitimating traditional manner they are
experienced by anyone raised in the religious tradition as absolutely
binding. Thus the hierarchical religious culture, as exemplified in the case
of the Babylonian or ancient Israelite religions, has naivety in spite of its
being a matter of conscious ideals and is unfree in spite of the free
pious fulfillment of the religious prescriptions. Indeed, religion in the just
sketched sense is essentially characterized by compulsion, unfreedom and
lack of criticism. These seeming paradoxical remarks are less jarring when
we consider that in the Kaizo essays freedom and the capacity for
criticism are identified (Hua XXVII, 63). In the religious culture, asking
about the truth of the beUefs and the legitimation of the norms is
typically regarded as manifest impiety (Hua XXVII, 64).
Note throughout Husserl's schema the hierarchy of cultures is in terms
of what seems to him to involve a greater wakefulness of consciousness,
thus, e.g., having norms and not mere instincts, and what approaches
authenticity, i.e., the intuitive evidence which legitimates the norms. The

decide whether philosophy can escape some sense of allegiance to something like
essences and whether the analysis of religious experiences does show, indeed, some
essential features. That Husserl presumed to tell the Japanese what authentic culture
was is to be expected. The theory of authenticity runs throughout his philosophy.
It would be disengenuous for him to do otherwise. I take Husserl to be cautious
rather than chauvinistic when it comes to the details and specific meanings of other
cultures. Consider, e.g., the reserve and seeming deliberate vagueness, in spite of
his clear enthusiasm, in regard to the new translation of Buddhist texts; although he
claims for the Buddhist texts a genuine transcendentalism as well as a purity and
depth matching anything the West has to offer, and although he is confident the
encounter with Buddhism will be a determining factor from now on in Western
culture, he does not make a single specific reference. See Hua XXVII, 125 ff. I,
with Merleau-Ponty, do not take HusserFs Eurocentrism to be chauvinistic. He was
as ignorant of other cultures as most of us are; but it seems rather clear that he
was not interested in restricting logos to a European form of existence. Rather, he
was confident that neither Europe nor America approximated the ideal of logos;
indeed he saw clearly that the forms of rationalism that had developed under
scientism and capitalism were in danger of destroying any sensibility to a genuinely
philosophic culture. Cf. Merleau-Ponty's remarks in Primacy of Perception (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), 89. For another interpretation of Husserl's
view of religion and religious studies, see R.A. Mall's "The God of Phenomenology
in Comparative Contrast to That of Philosophy and Theology," Husserl Studies 8
(1991), 1-15. I cannot here deal with Mall's interpretations in detail; readers of his
essay will see that we disagree on many points.