Page 286 - Contribution To Phenomenology

THE STUDY OF RELIGION IN HUSSERL 279

power which I actually experience as emanating from the Idea lends
power to the historical religion (Hua XXVII, 100).

This text illustrates several aspects of Husserl's theory. The Gospel figure
of Christ, regarded in its pure essence, occasions the presencing of a core
value. Indeed, in this case an ideal is presented which at the same time
is burdened with more or less irrational contingencies or accidental
materials. For example, Christ is tied to miracles, the one God of
Judaism (who is a kind of despot for Husserl), Palestinian history, etc.
The example of reading the Christ of the Gospels does not disclose
how Jesus experienced authentically the core-values but how the followers
of Jesus may have authentic religious experience. And the example spills
over into what for Husserl is a basic conviction regarding the ethical
importance of experiencing the core value of human goodness: Ethical
experiences are not made through criticisms of others but only through
a concrete loving intuition of the goodness of others which announces
itself in the evidence of the pure fulfillment of love-intentions as value-
intentions.

What would the human be if he could not see admirable humans, purely
good people? He can only be good when he sees good humans, when
he is directed to exemplary figures and through them raises himself. He
can only become good through the transforming love which poetically
transforms the beloved into an ideal, [through a love] which wants to
see only the goodness of the beloved (Hua XXVII, 102).

In accord with Husserl's theory of emotive intentionality there is a kind
of disclosive power to emotions, and foremostly, under certain circumstan-
ces, love. Of course often the lover idealizes, and to that extent therefore
less authentically perceives the goodness. But idealization is also a way
of seeing and thus even the creative phantasy of the artist can create the
experiential basis for the basic experiences of ethics. For Husserl this
dwelling on the ideal in a non-real context parallels how logic provides
an experiential basis for an intuitive penetration into scientific formations.