Page 298 - Contribution To Phenomenology

THE STUDY OF RELIGION IN HUSSERL 291

steadfast which holds sway . . . through sin and error . . . ,"^^ may be
esteemed as an adumbration of Verunftglaube or faith in reason.
If we take faith in the wide sense of naively taking something for
granted (natve Bodenstdndigkeit), faith in reason is that which establishes
itself with the event of Greek philosophy and science. Religious faith, in
its turn provides a world in which the believer is constantly able to affirm
meaning. The surds which occur in this world are to be dealt with as
something for which the believers along with their contemporaries know
themselves responsible. With the emergence of faith in reason there is a
new principle: No longer is the authoritative revelation of "positive
religion" the source of meaning and the foundation of the teleology of
life and history; rather, faith in reason itself becomes the principle and
it believes itself called to give meaning to God and the world in an
autonomous and responsible way (E III 4, 38b). Yet the possiblity of
"faith in reason'' is not ahvays evident. Tod und Teufel, to use, with
Husserl, the figures of Durer's engraving (Ritter, Tod und Teufel—see,
e.g., E III 4, 16a) are never far away. And today, as in the last decades
of Husserl's life, there is a universal disenchantment with faith in reason.
There thus emerges a "poetics,'* a "pragmatics," a Dichtung, Roman,
etc. which sustain and vivify the principle of "faith in reason." And thus
Husserl's rather extensive meditations on the surds or irrationalities of
life, both in the theoretical and practical dimensions, lead to a kind of
theology which might be called "eutopian poetics" or "eutopian eidetics."
Its precursor is, of course, Kant. Kant argued that, on the one hand, the
project of working out a universal history of the world, which, in
accordance with a plan of nature, aimed at a perfect unity of humanity,
must be considered as possible if we are going to act at all. But, on the
other hand, he noted that the writing of a history of how events must
develop if they are to conform to rational goals of humanity could only
take the form of a "novel" {Roman). He adds that even if evidence is
lacking that nature is teleological in a way conducive to history, the
fiction of a course of events as if this were the case is a way of
constituting a horizon of hope which nurtures action and virtue.^

2^ See, e.g., Hua XIII, 508 and E III 10, 15b.
^ See the Ninth Proposition of "The Idea of a Universal History with a
Cosmopolitan Purpose," in Kant*s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1970), 51 ff.