Page 300 - Contribution To Phenomenology

THE STUDY OF RELIGION IN HUSSERL 293

the progress of the infinite realization of the infinite practical good (see
Hua VIII, 350). The expectation from the pursuit of these infinite ideals
is a life of blessedness. "Blessedness" is the joy of being true to oneself
in pursuing the absolute ought. Such a life contrasts with happiness as
the fulfillment of all one's hopes. Happiness is not to be expected in
life.^
One's loved ones die, fi-iends can go mad, crippling sickness can set
in, death occurs, not only for oneself, but for the community whose
hopes are inseparable from one's own. And science predicts the extinction
of the sun. One must then ask: How can one preserve oneself? How can
hope stay alive, when everywhere dire need, fate, death, etc. can and
often do break in, not only into the lives of individuals but also into the
life of the community and humanity at large? Is the hope in an infinite
horizon of a human future possible when we believe that any work we
might do will eventually vanish into nothingness. Is such a belief not
madness? Is it not quite possible that humanity spurn what is true and
sink to a kind of bestiaUty or even worse forms of degradation? Is the
open infinity of the community not a capricious assumption, given that
it is probable that the earth is heading toward a cataclysm? (This is a
paraphrase of a paragraph of A V 21, 90b.)
Husserl's responses to such agonizing meditations take the form of
proposals to hold open the horizon of real possibility for immediate
agency and reflection. In the worst-case scenario, i.e., where universal
doom seems certam, he offered this resolution to the task of the absolute
ought:

The practical universal goal, which up till now I regarded as the goal
of a genuine life of humanity, I now recognize as illusion—and yet: I
hold firmly to being genuine, I want to l)e true to myself, and that
means: I will so live as if the goal were still a practical possibility. It can
no longer be my goal in its infinity. But I am and we are; and in the
actuality of our life there remains the life-horizon as legitimate, if
nevertheless indeterminate, anticipation. Therein we have a stretch of
vital human development and to this we dedicate in love our strength,
as far as it reaches, to know as a practical possibility and in accord with
this knowledge to consciously effect as a practical possibility (A V 21,
91b).

^ I discuss these themes in The Person and the Common Life: Studies in a
Husserlian Social Ethics,