Page 281 - Contribution To Phenomenology

274 JAMES G. HART

historical tradition that these foster a kind of selectivity and obfuscation
of the evident significance of the absolute ought in the particular context.
And, of course, finally, it can be that the person is in a position to make
evident the meaning of the absolute ought so that it's articulation is
bound to a definite content which directly conflicts with the scientific
probability.
Husserl holds that the life of a society or a community involves
typically an inauthentic allegiance to, as well as a genuine intuitive
experience of, values and normative types. He would seem also to want
to say that although the theme of the absolute ought becomes explicit in
a culture under the sway of the ideal of logos, individuals in all cultures
have intimations of the absolute ought. Further he once argued that the
sense of "depth" which characterizes rehgious, especially mystic, experien-
ces is to be accounted for by the kind of "gathering'' experiences in
which the fuller sense of our lives and our truer selves, i.e., the absolute
ought, becomes explicit.^^ The experience of values and normative types
which suffuse what Husserl regards as rehgious experience would seem
to be inseparable from the irrepressible issue of the absolute ought.
In so far as the experiences of the absolute ought, values and
normative types are genuinely evident experiences they have their own
kind of rationality even though evaluation and belief guide the percep-
tions and the judgments. Living within a tradition means that this
authentic experience of values is interwoven with or projected onto the
religious realm of inauthentic beliefs and representations. Thus the
religious content is inseparably "rational" or intuitive value-insight and
non-rational beliefs as well.
Recall that the mythic-reUgious attitude thematizes the totality of
world. The thematization of this totality is inseparable from core value-
experiences, that is, the whole (or **world") is profiled in these value-
experiences. Thus the content of the religious intentionahty, religious
belief, has at its center a developing core of intuitively evident values.

^^ This is the explanation of mystic experiences in his letter to Gerda Walther
in response to her theory of mysticism. See A V 21, 84-92; cf. above, n. 5. Another
relevant text is one wherein Husserl observes that if God is regarded as he
proposes, i.e., as the entelechy of entelechies, "Grod thereby can be no object of
possible experience las in the sense of a thing or a human). Rather God would be
'experienced' in each belief that believes originally-teleologically in the eternal value
of that which lives in the direction of each absolute ought which engages itlsef for
this eternal meaning" (A V 21, 128a).