Page 282 - Contribution To Phenomenology

THE STUDY OF RELIGION IN HUSSERL 275

e.g., the absolute ought, the saintliness of a colleague I work with, etc.,
but these, Husserl observes, are wrapped in an irrational facticity which
comprises the particulars of the religious beliefs. For the persons who
themselves are spiritually growing, the intuited value, what Husserl calls
the rational core, which has its own evident normative necessity in the
content of the act of belief, receives the chief emphasis and becomes the
sustaining force of the entire act of faith. For Husserl all progress in
cultural development involves this kind of distillation of the core values
which he also calls a "spiritualization" (Vergeistigung) of religious represen-
tations (Hua XXVII, 64-65).
In summary, values and the experiences of the absolute ought, which
for Husserl's theory have as their foundation objectifying acts, i.e.,
presentations of things in the world, themselves are inseparable from the
apperceptions of the rehgious culture. Husserl speaks of them as
projected into a reahn of mythico-reUgious presentations. The basic
perceptions of things are quaUfied with values, but these, i.e., the
esteemed things or events, in turn are interwoven into the mythic
religious representations. In the case of the maturely developing religious
personality these core value experiences are given the central emphasis
and sustain the entire act of faith. Indeed, all of faith here is led by the
intuition of values.
But we ought not to conceive the core value-experiences apart from
the fundamental "general will'' which goes in advance and therefore
determines the hierarchy of interests, relevance and relief in the
perceptual field and which is the foundation for the articulation of the
absolute ought. This is where Scheler and Husserl draw together. On
the basis of the primal passive synthesis of one's life in the general life-
will, the world may be said to greet us first through the values (and not
the things presented through objectifying acts) and as these are mediated
by the traditional apperceptions.^^
For Husserl the case of Jesus serves as an example of where religion
is called into question on the basis of the vital intuition of the core
values. Such an experience poses a crisis for reUgion because it discloses

^^ Although there is much work to be done here on the issues of axiology
joining and separating Scheler and Husserl, 1 make an initial run at a few of the
issues in "Axiology as the Form of Purity of Heart." The general will is developed
in conjunction with value perception in Ch. II of The Person and the Common Life:
Studies in a Husserlian Social Ethics (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992).