Page 303 - Contribution To Phenomenology

296 JAMES G, HART

strive for this godly world in highest awareness and will-power (Hua
VIII, 258).
I do not believe out of caprice but I believe from the necessity of being
I and a member of humanity and being in regard to my actual surround-
ing a benificent agent. I can do no other than believe and in this
disclosure of myself and the world to believe universally. Belief is the
power of God. As long as I live in faith and in the direction of my
calling there lives in me God's power (A V 21, 98b).

In short, the thematization of the contingency of rationality in life sets off
motivation for a kind of eutopian, theological poetics and pragmatics.
What form this poetics will take is various. As we have already seen,
Husserl believes the fictional presentation, in e.g., "idealistic art," of
alternative eutopian human possibilities has the capacity for a transforma-
tive revelation. But there can well be a more explicit theological function.
Aside from the grounds transcendental phenomenology has for the
necessity of some sense of God in accounting for the foundations of
consciousness, the reality of some sense of God seems eminently
desireable from the meditation on the tensions between the heart and the
mind and logos and anangke. The actuality of some sense of the divine
provides the basis for faith which is "the Infinite Yes which overpowers
the infinite No" (A V 21, 98a).
Thus faith and eutopian poetics provides a negative answer to the
question of '^vhether the things we care for most are at the mercy of the
things we care for least" (W.P. Montague). Faith in God, in the face of
Tod und Teufel, need be neither spinelessness nor mushy sentimentahty.
If God be envisaged as what ultimately supports that which sustains the
faith in our goals and striving, and therefore our striving, and as what
preserves the achievements of this striving, it is a contradiction to desire
that God not be.