Page 297 - Contribution To Phenomenology

290 JAMES G, HART

gain a purpose and can it maintain itself rationally and acquire zest and
a necessarily increasing value (A V 21, 25a).^

Indeed, Husserl adds that only with this experience of purposeful striving
is there an experience of teleology and the possibility of an argument
about the teleology of the universe. And if we think of this teleology as
the divine holding sway, it must be said that "in order to know God's
holding sway I must first believe in God'' (A V 21, 25a). Now although
the very structure of intentionality, as an ongoing interplay and surfacing
of empty and filled intentions, might be said to be teleological, and
perhaps at some level this interplay and teleology are irrepressible and
not able to be called in question, still at the level of founded acts of
intentionality and at the level of the more discrete blocks of life
dysteleology and irrationaUty are exceedingly evident."
Thus some sense of faith in reason functions at all levels of conscious-
ness as a prior condition to reason's achievements (see, e.g., E III 4,
24b). And at the higher, founded levels of meaning-units where the surds
most dramatically announce themselves and where the agony of holding
the mind together approaches despair, Husserl advocates a kind of will
to believe and poetics of edification of faith in reason.
For this reason the theory of postulates was esteemed Kant's greatest
theory^ and religion itself, in so far as it provides "belief in the power
of the good in the world" and "reveak in us teleology as something

^ Whether Husserl ultimately believed that action was possible only if
"everything ultiamtely serves the good . . . ," etc, is not clear to me. I think his
meditation on irrationalities as well as his metaphysics point to a more Platonic
view, i.e., that the universe is rational for the most part, but the receptacle and/or
hyle are eternal and never become perfectly transparent to form. Furthermore, late in
his career, he raised the issue of whether there may not be values which we are
forced to sacrifice and which remain valid and are not harmonized by that for which
they are sacrificed. See A V 21, 80b ff.
^ We may note, however, as the most basic theme of his philosophical
theology, that at the irrepressible level of proto-reason and teleology at the
foundation of consciousness, i.e., the doctrine of association in the awareness of
inner-time, Husserl is motivated to see a divine entelechy at the heart of this hyletic
facticity which accounts for how the propter hoc trustfully rides on the post hoc. See
my "A Precis . . . ." Cf. also "Entelechy in Transcendental Phenomenology: A
Sketch of the Foundations of Husserlian Metaphysics," American Catholic Philosophi-
cal Quarterly Vol. LXVI, No. 2 (1992).
" See Iso Kern, Husserl und Kant (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1968), 302.