Page 296 - Contribution To Phenomenology

THE STUDY OF RELIGION IN HUSSERL 289

arising out of the endless succession of pieces of evidence within the total
horizon. But between the question and answer, hypothesis and confirma-
tion, etc. much can and does happen. Besides the recalcitrancy of the
investigated matter to conceptual clarification, sickness, madness,
cowardice, greed, and death, to name only the most obvious evils, can
occasion that the initial motivation and legitimation of the inquiry be
called into question.
Furthermore, science is capable of becoming distorted, as in modern
absolutist mathematicized "scientism" and in the wedding of science to
destructive technologies and economic systems. This, in turn, can breed
a no less harmful reaction which can turn the only source of salvation
into the appearance of a curse. That is to say, reason itself can seem to
be madness, caprice, or absurdity.
The humanities as the human sciences which aspire to make sense out
of individual and social life, presuppose a context of intelligibility among
acting individuals. Human motivation manifests intelligibility when humans
remain "normal." Yet it belongs to human life that it be governed by
accidents. It is also proper that humans take them into account in the
supervision of personal life, society and the world into which they are
born. The context of intelligibility which the humanities studies itself is a
fact which presupposes everywhere irrationalities of accident, fate,
madness, etc. Husserl claims that death, whether the death of oneself,
one's society, or of humanity, as the always unintelligible yet necessarily
approaching certainty,^ is that which can call into question the meaning
of life itself because it undermines all our attempts to oversee life and
regulate its contingency (A V 21, 79b).
A typical and perhaps most obvious formulation of the central issue
of the challenge of the surds to rational life is the following text:

In considering the Universum and the universality of contingencies, I can
only live, I can only take upon myself a life which is riddled with sin,
error, absence of actual and universal values when I believe that
everything ultimately serves the good and that each radical willing of the
best really serves to the good of the universe, that my free will makes
a difference, etc. Only after the presupposition of this faith does my life

^ Husserl here must be speaking of the proper sense of death, i.e., the
cessation of personal identity; the transcendental "I," in the most basic sense,
neither comes to be nor passes away. Cf. my discussion in Time and Religion, edited
by J. N. Mohanty and A. N. Balslev (Leiden: Brill, 1992).