Page 278 - Contribution To Phenomenology

THE STUDY OF RELIGION IN HUSSERL 211

telos, of course, is the telos uncovered by transcendental phenomenology,
a eutopian authentic universal community of monads.
In the context of religious culture the entelechy of human culture
beckons to a higher form by way of two possible freedom movements.
One is obvious for readers of Husserl, i.e., the development of free
science, the liberation movement of logos in opposition to mythos,
culminating in philosophy. The other is a liberation movement which
religion itself may take. We will begin with this latter first.

II. Authentic Religion

Husserl claims that there are conditions for the development to the
higher form of reUgion which is a religious liberation from religion.
Husserl suggests that these conditions are cases where the priestly
mediated cult and teaching fails to provide either a national or personal
sah^ation. When much suffering is borne and severe penance performed
and when nevertheless salvation still seems remote, the formerly credible
explanations of a sinful departure from the divine ordinances can begin
to lose their power. And on such occasions individuals may find occasion
to begin rethinking their individual as well as collective relationship to
God (Hua XXVII, 64).
At this juncture {Ibid.^ 65) Husserl offers a very ambitious but concise
theory of the intentionality proper to what he calls reUgious culture and
its religious surmounting. We can get at this by noting a distinction he
made (on another occasion, A V 21, 22a) between how the world or
milieu is pre-given through one's own individual and intersubjective
experience and how venerable tradition co-determines the disclosure of
these experienced objects. He seems to suggest that tradition is a
lamination of apperceptions on top of the apperceptions of our individual
and intersubjective experiences. This enables people of different cultures
to see in one sense "the same thing" but yet not see "it" because one
does not have the "same world" as the other.^^ He seems to want
furthermore to say that there is an individual and intersubjective
apperception of values, upon which apperceptions also those of the
tradition are laminated. This is a compUcated matter because for Husserl
values are founded on the objectifying, apperceiving acts through which

^^ See A V 21, 22a and Hua IX, 497-498; also my discussion in §1. of "From
Mythos to Logos to Utopian poetics: An Husserlian Narrative."