Husserl and the Phenomenology of Religious Experience:
A Sketch and an Invitation
Jeffrey Wattles, Kent State University
[Published in Eric Chelstrom, ed. Being Amongst Others: Phenomenological Reflections on the Life-World. (Cambridge, UK.: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006).]
This essay sketches a phenomenology of religious experience, applying ideas of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) on intersubjectivity, axiology or theory of value, egology or theory of the self, and ethics.[1] Husserl grew up in a Jewish family that accepted Christian baptism when Edmund was 27; some of his writings show interest in religion but as a philosopher he referred little to Biblical religion.[2] This bracketing was a matter of principle.
An autonomous philosophy, as the Aristotelian was and as it remains an eternal demand, comes necessarily to a teleology and philosophical theology—as a way to God bound up with no particular religion [inkonfessioneller].[3]
One of the research manuscripts characterizes this God of the philosopher.
God as idea, as the idea of the most perfect being, as the idea of the most perfect life, which out of itself constitutes the most perfect “world,” which out of itself creatively develops the most perfect world of spirits [Geisterwelt] in relation to a most perfect nature. (F I 14, p. 43)[4]
The focus of this essay is neither Husserl’s comments about religion and religious experience, nor his philosophical theology, which may be gleaned especially from the writings of James G. Hart.[5] Rather, without attributing my analysis to Husserl, the essay starts to explicate phenomenologically the possibility of religious experience of God. Phenomenology mediates between personal religious experience and one’s idea and ideal of God.
1. A Methodological Prelude
Husserl gradually realized that phenomenology does well to stay in touch with the empirical sciences, since the phenomenological effort to delineate the essential lines of the regions of being on which these sciences focus may profit from discoveries made by scientists. In a similar way, those who would undertake the phenomenology of religious experience may profit from those who speak primarily as religionists or scholars of religion. Ideally, over time, the interpretations of phenomenologists and religionists should converge.
This next two sections of this essay bear the mark of religious philosophy both in structuring the field of religious experience and in allowing metaphysical connotations to remain in the analysis of the constitution of religious experience. A religious philosopher making use of phenomenology needs to be lucid in doing so, given the critique by Dominique Janicaud of what he takes to be illicit claims by Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry and others to claim as phenomenology work that is confusedly mingled with faith. For Janicaud, the integrity of phenomenology as a coherent and useful discipline rests on preserving two Husserlian essentials: (1) the phenomenological reduction, which suspends belief in existence, including the transcendence of God, and (2) the resolve to describe phenomena simply as they are given, without presupposing any theological interpretation.[6] The special sense of “transcendence” and “immanence” in phenomenology should be noted. Transcendent is whatever is not part of the stream of consciousness, for example, the table that is perceived. Husserl recognizes (see Ideas I, #58) states that God is transcendent in a totally different direction than the transcendence of the world; but the term “transcendence” does not have the metaphysical and theological connotations that it has in other contexts. “Immanence” refers to whatever is in the stream of consciousness, such as acts of perceiving and sensory, “hyletic” data.
Husserl’s methodological commitment to the phenomenological reduction arose through his discovery that our perceptual consciousness of our obviously real natural surroundings has two components, perception itself plus the belief in reality, and that these two components may be disassociated. Thus reflective explication may proceed regarding perception, while one brackets the belief in the existence of the perceptual realm, the intersubjective historical community, and oneself as an embodied being in the world. The purpose of bracketing the belief in existence is to bring to light how the life of the mind, with its pre-predicative stirrings (Erlebnis) and conscious acts (Erfahrung), achieves the recognition of realities that transcend it, such as physical things and persons. The mind neither creates nor constructs such realities, but it does constitute its consciousness of them, and that constitution is what the phenomenologist tries to narrate. By the 1920s, Husserl realized that the process of constitution was intersubjective; the ego could not make sense of the notion of a transcendent reality without its own experiences of others understood as, in their way, constituting the same reality. The phenomenology of religious experience has the ambition of describing the varieties of religious experience in their structural features and explicating how, through time, the realities referred to in religious experience come to be constituted so that the mind achieves awareness of them. The phenomenological reduction enables religious and non-religious researchers to collaborate, regardless of personal belief.
The motives for the reduction are understandable, but if a phenomenon presents itself as divine, that, too, must be acknowledged by honest describing. Persistently asking, “But how does consciousness constitute it as divine?” does well to open horizons for further explication; but the question may also be a gesture of skepticism masquerading as rigor. To adapt a comment of Dan Zahavi on self-awareness, the impossibility of providing a non-circular definition of divinity is hardly a problem for an account that explicitly acknowledges the irreducible and fundamental status of divinity.[7] Philosophy cannot prove the reality of the spiritual; any attempt would assume too much or prove too little. Nor can phenomenology explain the mysteries. The human capacity for the spiritual opens an adventure for those who affirm and pursue the evidence that pertains to this realm. To be sure, the conviction of the existence of a divine other may carry assertiveness stemming from anxiety regarding one’s own salvation and pride in the superiority of one’s own religion. Nevertheless, the drive to bracket existence totally may fail; so long as religious consciousness constitutes unities, some implication of existence may remain.
This phenomenological venture has religious risks and rewards. Phenomenology as disciplined description may interfere with religious experience as with any process of experiencing. What would it be like, in the midst of a conversation, to step back to analyze the mode of appearing of the other person? It could amount to insincerity. Yet the shifting of perspective back and forth, from empathic-engaged to reflective-analytical, is more common than we may suspect, and is sometimes welcomed into the conversation. Any shift into the phenomenological gear does interrupt the dynamic of prayer and worship. Reflection tends to keep one on the level of the mind’s activity and prevents one from spontaneously following the motivations that lead to experiences too deep for words. Nevertheless, reflection is part of what keeps intelligent religious experience on course. Reflection may facilitate the turn from thinking to prayer and from prayer to worship, so phenomenology may enhance spiritual receptivity. Hence, this essay is an invitation.
2. Four “places” for religious experience
Relating to God will be described straightforwardly from the religious standpoint, leaving more constitutive phenomenology until the next section. Although in the broad sense religion may stretch to include any philosophy of living centered on convictions about ultimate reality, personal or otherwise, for the purposes of this limited exposition I shall assume a theistic paradigm and note alternatives as variations on that theme. The structure of conscious experience is implicit in the following sentence: I experience the object or person against a background, ultimately the world-horizon. Each of the components in this structure is a “place” where the religious consciousness finds God.
1. God as a personality to whom we can turn. In the most simple and basic experience, God is the focus of attention, the you, the one addressed, the one to whom congregational hymns of praise are sung, the one for whose response one listens in the silence of waiting after a prayer for wisdom. In the modes of prayer and worship, consciousness enters the religious standpoint most obviously and directly. In the integrity of relating as well as one can to a divine you, religious consciousness develops.
Religious experience weaves (1) experiences of supreme truth, beauty, and goodness, and (2) orientations to the religious other that prepare, are fulfilled in, and transcend such experiences. I mention truth, beauty, and goodness together since whichever one predominates is implicitly accompanied by the other two. Experiences of supreme value can lead to worship, and still deeper motivations can conduct the experience. There are cathedrals in Spain that preserve the medieval gates separating the priest from the rest of the people; the priest performs the mass with his back to them; perhaps they do not hear or do not understand what he says; they sense something sacred transpiring and allow it to continue. The intellect’s limits in comprehending worship are expressed in metaphors of darkness or “the cloud of unknowing.” Something of the worship experience registers in consciousness, and as awareness returns to normal, one has the sense that something profoundly wonderful has transpired, but one does not altogether know what.
2. A divine source within the I
The concept of an indwelling divine spirit, the presence of God within the mind, is widespread, and may become a focus in religious experience. Many people report an inner source of energy, wisdom, insight, love, peace, creativity, guidance, or purpose. They may come to such experiences by following the instruction simply to consent to the presence and activity of the indwelling spirit. Upon finding oneself distracted, one returns gently in receptivity to the focus, either by using the name of one’s choice or by returning without using any name at all. Another practice is illustrated by seeking to experience the love of God; one may gently call to mind one’s concept of God, then contemplate the thought of the indwelling spirit as God’s presence communicating, “I love you,” and let the experience unfold.
The love emanating from the source is directed to the I and also to values and to persons, including God as the goal of all worthy striving. Hart summarizes Husserl on this point: “Love, as the intentional correlate of the particular telos which stands in the horizon of the ultimate telos, i.e., the infinite idea of the beautiful, the good, the true, and the one, generates the endless approximation.” Husserl says, “Love is without end. It is only live in the infinity of love, and it bears as its correlate the infinity of pure value.”[8] Husserl recognized, according to Ullrich Melle, that love comes from the depths of the self.
Every person receives from the depths of her personality her own absolute values, her values of love. Such a value is an absolute ‘ought,’ and “to go against this value is to be untrue, to lose oneself, to betray one’s true ‘I,’” which amounts to an “absolute practical contradiction” (Ms. B I 21, 53a). We have to follow the call of our individual conscience; we have to realize and preserve our true genuine self, be true to our deepest self, to the absolute ought of our pure love.[9]
Thus love comes to and through the I to other persons and values, and religious consciousness may interpret primal love as originating in the indwelling spirit.
Husserl expresses the conviction that God is active in human beings generally.
God’s might lives and realizes itself nowhere else than in us, in our radically authentic will. Where else does he, the living God, work than in our life, in our pure will? He works in the deepest roots of the authentic person who does not will anything but what is true, as that which we cannot let go of without being forced to give up our life as meaningless. (Hua XXVII, 122)[10]
Here we see a matrix of associations linking God, love, will, and the deepest roots of the authentic person. In addition, Husserl refers to God as “the unsearchable Within”[11] and remarks that prayerful intentionality directs itself “within” to “the inkling of the interiority (Innensein) of God which founds every real relating.”[12] Hart expands the point.
When Husserl speaks of the heart of religion lying in a drive or instinct of God, he claims that prayer therefore must be directed not outwards but within to the immanence of God within consciousness. He does not discuss the nature of this turn within except to say that it is not something private and is in a way parallel to the phenomenological turn within (E III 9, 22a-22b).[13]
3. God manifest in transformed experiencing of truth, beauty, and goodness
There are diverse experiences that religious consciousness takes as radiantly self-evident manifestations of divinity. Sometimes the religious other is made present in a more vivid way, perhaps with unmistakable clarity (notwithstanding the possibility, later on, for doubt to overturn the previous, spontaneous affirmation of what was evident in the flow of the recollected experience). Sometimes, reading a religious text or hearing someone speak who is personally experiencing what she is proclaiming, a quickening occurs, and values implicit in meanings become newly real. One is invested with living truth, not as a static and final judgment but as clarity in process. One is caught up in the embrace of spiritual beauty, in a fresh flow of love toward another person, or a breathtaking beholding of a revealed panorama of reality. One is blessed by participation in divinegoodness, by receiving insight as a gift, by experiencing forgiveness and empowerment, and in loving service to others. Husserl gives the following basic axiological statement.
If we achieve an act of delight there appears not only what delights as it would appear if there were no delight in play, as it would appear through the same founding act of objectification; rather what is present is what delights as such or better the delighting as delighting, that which is beautiful as beautiful, the good as good. Here we have appearings of delightfulness, beauty, attractiveness, etc. (Hua XXVIII/ 323).[14]
Similarly, religious consciousness has appearings of divinity.
Progressive religious consciousness moves beyond taking appearances naively and develops a critical awareness. In the finest cases, the revelation of truth, beauty, and goodness is so decisive that there is no room for doubt. Only after the experience has subsided can there be any possibility of rejecting it, and to do so one would need to be untrue to oneself. The experience when recollected as the years go by continues to radiate its intuitively divine quality. It remains coherent with one’s advancing beliefs. Even when vital doubt is impossible, however, epistemological doubt is possible. Therefore, one remains responsible for one’s evaluating, even if intuitively and immediately, the meaning and value presented. One can never hand over one’s role in the intersubjective partnership to an impressive evidence. In fact, as in other kinds of experience, an interpretation of religious experience may be adjusted or rejected. It may become problematic in a way that does not admit of a definitive solution, so one chooses to continue without a definitive answer so as not to lose too much spiritual momentum. One’s developing realization of truth, beauty, and goodness weeds out some of what was previously taken for divine in the watered garden of one’s evolving experience. Difficulties of analysis and interpretation do not compromise a robust “Eureka!” when the difficulties are lived as part of the quest shared with and in God.
4. God as the one in whom we live
God is not only one to whom one can occasionally turn. There is also a feeling of being in God. This may occur in solitude, as one feels personally surrounded by the presence. Along the spectrum of experiences of nature as wondrously pervaded are experiences with a more personal tone. Furthermore, a social group may feel a sense of communing in the divine presence. Through all these varieties, God may be felt as one in whom we live and move and have our being. Thus, in addition to times of focal turning, accompanied by marked heightening of consciousness, there are durations filled by a sense of mutual abiding. Natural space is encompassed by a divinely personal space.
3. How consciousness constitutes its awareness of God
Since God is not an object and does not appear, how can evidence arise sufficient to motivate one to proclaim something as based on spiritual experience? What follows is a series of interrelated phases of constitution that pertain to some who enjoy religious experience. The discussion is just a beginning of a properly phenomenological account, and references to spiritual realities call for further constitutive explication.
Phase one: Participation in one’s linguistic and historical community
Interconnected layers of intersubjectivity include, in addition to face-to-face relating, the linguistic community and the historical community.[15] Since religious experience is in part a culturally acquired practice, it is relevant to recall the embeddedness of the subject in religious tradition. Before experiencing a swelling of truth, beauty, and goodness animating one’s turning toward God, one’s intention is comparatively empty. One’s concept of God is acquired from proclamation and teaching, including reports of revelation, truth from a higher-than-human source. Thus consciousness constitutes an initial sense of the idea of God as a heavenly being. The spiritual values of the ideal of God, as a goal for striving, are initially given mostly through human, social emotions. God, one learns, is an invisible spirit person to whom we can turn; one who can be experienced, known; who knows us intimately and is wisely loving. Religious belief at that early level is quite capable of performing the essential function of “pregiving the object” in a way that prepares the experiential transformation to be taken as spiritually expressive. Husserl describes some of the dynamics of preparation for experience in the case of ordinary objects.
To say that every grasping of an individual object, and every subsequent activity of cognition, takes place against the background of the world indicates something more than the dependence of this activity on the domain of what is pregiven in passive certainty. A cognitive function bearing on individual objects of experience is never carried out as if these objects were pregiven at first as from a still completely undetermined substrate. For us the world is always a world in which cognition in the most diverse ways has already done its work. Thus it is not open to doubt that there is no experience, in the simple and primary sense of an experience of things, which, grasping a thing for the first time and bringing cognition to bear on it, does not already “know” more about the thing than is in this cognition alone. Every act of experience, whatever it may be that is experienced in the proper sense as it comes into view, has eo ipso, necessarily, a knowledge and a potential knowledge [Mitwissen] having reference to precisely this thing, namely, to something of it which has not yet come into view. This preknowledge [Vorwissen] is indeterminate as to content, or not completely determined, but it is never completely empty; and were it not already manifest, the experience would not at all be experience of this one, this particular, thing.[16]
Prior to religious experience, one’s concept of God derives from one’s appropriation of the concepts expressed in one’s social surroundings. Indeed, the habits of the linguistic community may lead to complacency in the normality constituted by one’s particular group, whether one’s proximate group is religious or skeptical. Everyone speaks in consonant ways, seeming to understand without having to experience personally. Dan Zahavi explains:
As subjects brought up within language, we are exposed to the obscure intentions and apperceptions that have been sedimented and handed down in linguistic usage.”[17]
I am in the midst of a world that has already been provided with sense by others, and my formation of judgments, my self-apprehension, my evaluations, and my interpretation of the world are guided by a linguistically articulated pre-understanding.[18]
No matter how complacent one’s concept may be, one may break through to fresh discovery that intuitively fills and modifies one’s relatively empty intention.
For the purposes of phenomenology, relating to God as our Father is an instructive example. It connotes the flavor of personal religious experience and the intersubjective character of the God concept. That the father concept is a concept of God connotes height and unity. The concept of God as Father connotes personal closeness. God is not merely the other but you, one who enters a reciprocal relation. The concept of God as our Father, even if used in the depths of one-to-one relating, implies further intersubjective dimensions, which stabilize the adventure of discernment. It implies, first, that others, too, confirm, in a general way, what one finds. The phenomenological understanding of objectivity, reality, truth, and transcendence implies that others can and do experience the same God in the aspects given to them through their cultural interpretative heritage. It is one thing if the fatherhood of God comes as a purely private revelation, as it did to the thirteenth century Japanese Buddhist prophet Nichiren: “Our hearts ache and our sleeves are wet with tears until we hear the voice of one who says, ‘I am thy father.’”[19] Even there he uses the plural to convey what presumably was a private experience. The last intersubjective dimension to be remarked, as Zahavi has noted, is that shared constitution opens up the possibility of dissent as well as harmonious agreement. Representatives of the community are prepared to disqualify what they take to be anomalous or deviant experience. Indeed, the experiences of diverse religious communities, and, for that matter, the experiences of atheists, implicitly call each other into question in ways that are beyond the bailiwick of phenomenology to adjudicate. Regarding the fatherhood of God, it has become common in some circles to emphasize the associations of the father concept with maleness and patriarchal tradition. Husserl states, “If God as ‘father’ is represented in a worldly real fashion with the form of a real father, God is no longer God.”[20] The name one chooses is not essential; the quality of relating is what is essential. If religious consciousness is to progress beyond a mundane and merely human notion of parental love, it must think personality analogically and allow its primary sense of personality to be constituted through religious experience.
Two of the most widespread religious ideas are the idea of relating to a divine other and the idea of an inner spirit. In some cases, the point of referring to an indwelling spirit is to emphasize the very possibility of religious experience. Consider some examples. The Bhagavad-Gita sings of the atman, the eternal, spirit self. Buddhism speaks of the Buddha-nature within. Judaism tells of “the spirit in man, the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts.” Jesus speaks of “the kingdom of God within you.” Islam teaches that God is “closer to you than your jugular vein.” The Confucian philosopher Mencius writes, “A noble man steeps himself in the Way (tao) because he wishes to find it in himself. When he finds it in himself, he will be at ease in it; when he is at ease in it, he can draw deeply upon it; when he can draw deeply upon it, he finds its source wherever he turns.”[21] Could they all be referring to the same reality? Apparent similarities can be misleading, since texts do not necessarily portray experience, translations miss shades of meaning, and the phrases for comparison are taken out of the context which greatly affects meaning. Nevertheless, texts may express experience; people sometimes find kindred minds across alleged boundaries of language and culture, and meaning is only partly determined by context. Some Hindu meditations cultivate an experience some call “pure consciousness” (samadhi in Sanscrit), the counterexample to Husserl’s generalization, “All consciousness is consciousness of something.” In its classic occurrence the experience is utterly devoid of personal quality, beyond meaning, without any finite object or temporal flow whatsoever, hence changeless and in that sense static-eternal. It may also occur in a modulated way or associated with other modes of consciousness, such as dreaming or waking. Despite the non-personal character of the eternal spirit self, a majority of Hindus and other religionists have tended to interpret it as the presence of a loving God or figure of compassion; thus the indwelling spirit is accepted as facilitating one’s interpersonal relating with God.
Phase II. Turning to the religious other
Regions of reality open only to the correlated act-types appropriate to them. In order to grasp the perceptible, one must perceive. In order to find God as our Father, one must approach as a son or daughter. Through the appropriate religious turn, whatever language is chosen, the individual freely seeks to find out for herself what and who God is.
Despite the self-evident character of some religious experience for religious consciousness, an anomalous and significant phenomenological lack adheres to the religious other. Many kinds of objects are self-given in a paradigmatic, “originary” way: to hear a symphony in this way, one goes inside the concert hall and to the acoustically best area of the hall. The situation changes in the case of the empathic comprehension of another person, since the other’s conscious life remains the other’s, foreign to oneself, not perceived but only apperceived. In apperception one senses the other’s joy, for example, in the other’s beaming face and cheerful tone of voice. It is not a matter of first perceiving a merely physical thing and then making an inference to a hypothetical ego lurking inside the body; rather, apperception from the start finds the other’s body living and expressive. When the other person is thus present, the recognition of the human other has its paradigm case.
However, there is no such paradigm for religious consciousness, except for the personal turning to God and the resulting communion. Indeed, the ideal originary experience to which all partial experiences tend, the heavenly face-to-face, is not available in this life; Hebrew scripture declares that no human can see God and live (Exodus 33.20). One of the difficulties for a phenomenology of religious experience is the great variety of experiences that function for individuals in different traditions as originary experiences. It is a challenge to identify them all as experiences of one God, especially since many experiences may be more or less mingled with aspects that higher reflection might reject as not being genuinely spiritual. For the beginner, however, the initial achievement, while complex, is more simple: to identify the present experience with her linguistic-cultural concept of the divine.
The other is the first, personal I, according to Hart, who reconstructs a genetic account of the child’s early experience with the mother (one of Husserl’s most common examples of love). The other, by graciously relating to me as other, motivates the self-displacement of my primal sense of self into a sense of the self as a you for the Other.[22] Human intersubjective experience serves as a necessary preparation for spiritual relating to venture farther. Early in life one thus constitutes the “space” of intersubjectivity. As Zahavi puts it, “The constitutive foundation, the “place” that allows for appearances, would thus seem to be precisely this inter-space (Zwischenraum) of interrelationship.”[23] Seeking the root of intersubjective constitution, Husserl’s view, according to Hart, “tends toward (postulating? uncovering?) a prior instinctual communalization, so that when empathy occurs, the intersubjective community is already ‘there’ . . . .”[24]
In the interior spiritual dialogue, one’s own expression may be as explicit as any conversation with a human partner, or it may be as subtle and scarcely spelled out as a touch or a faint facial gesture. How does one bridge to a situation where one lacks a literally embodied, gesturing, and speaking conversation partner before one?
On the basis of early experiences within the family, one becomes able to achieve the recognition of persons who are less obvious. For example, after learning that mother can be absent without ceasing to exist, one learns to acknowledge others one has never seen at all. As a limit situation, one thinks of Viktor Frankl’s account of how some in the Nazi concentration camps sustained the meaningfulness of their daily existence by love for a spouse whom they did not know still to be alive.[25]
The constitution of “God” as an enduring temporal person (however important the trans-temporal dimension may be) involves achieving the recognition of God as the one who persists during a flow of relating, one to whom one may return, and as the same one experienced by previous generations. What is central seems to be the qualitative continuity of enhanced experiencing combined with the irreducible orientation to a divine you.
Phase III: Enhanced experiencing of truth, beauty and goodness as presencing divinity
Why are some experiences of truth, beauty, and goodness regarded as divine? No account can completely unravel it, nor will a single account apply in every case, but in many cases the experiences come in the context of an explicit turning to God. They also manifest qualities associated with God in one’s religious tradition. In addition, the presencing may be more dramatic, contrasting more sharply with what comes before and after. The data of inner sense are more vivid, the intentional act more alert. The experience tends more clearly to illumine previously cherished teachings; it may contain a solution to a practical problem or simply dissolve one’s anxiety. Again, any experience that is set off markedly from the rest of the flowing stream of consciousness and mental life generally will have its distinct temporal flow. Often the onset of the experience is sudden; it is then briefly sustained; and it may end abruptly, too, if the overeager mind seizes the initiative or the indecisive mind wanders off into thoughts. Otherwise the experience tapers off gradually, merging into ordinary experiencing. Afterwards, one’s relating with others has a more spontaneous and loving quality. The constitution of divinity has an additional temporal character. It anticipates its own confirmability.
Husserl recognized levels of depth within the I. Basically, the I has meaning only within I-you relationships. But there is an analogous “I” inhabiting the primal streaming of impressions with retentions and protentions. (Retentions are the just past phases of the present that are still retained by consciousness, prior to, and distinct from, explicit acts of recollection. Protentions are tacit anticipations of future phases of the appearing object as distinct from explicit acts of expectation or prediction. Thus the present has immediately past and future phases that cannot be dissociated from it.) The deepest “I” is the pre-reflective self-awareness inherent in every act of consciousness. The idea of the indwelling spirit is constituted, in part, by the experience of love when it pours forth from the deepest and most central region of the self.
Husserl offers a speculative piece to the puzzle of how the mind constitutes its awareness of God. Divinity is implicit in every act of consciousness, every streaming of experience, on account of the universal teleological tendency toward integrative synthesis: coherent understanding and harmonious ethical community. The all-pervasive entelechy, the trend towards the actualization of the potentials for divine life embraces every object, person, and horizon.[26] In the research manuscripts Husserl experimented with pantheistic and panentheistic versions of this theme, though he arguably sustained his theistic interpretation in the end.[27] Interior to subjectivity, there is a divine holding sway (Walten), then, implicit in the most intimate, anonymous streaming of primal presencing; it cannot be objectified and, in this sense, is not properly regarded phenomenologically as an intuitable presence.
There is one more side to the speculation. If God does not have a body, there remains a need for a way to satisfy two essential functions of the body as presented in Ideas II: the body as a field of sensory receptivity and as the organ of the will (Willensorgan). “He who planted the ear, does he not hear? He who formed the eye, does he not see?” (Psalm 94.9) A receptivity-and-agency present in each individual mind could be conceived as a silent witness-and-influence on the primal streaming. Nevertheless, it should be noted that a divine ministry to mind need not necessarily be associated with the idea of an indwelling spirit. In any case, the question persists: how can one constitute an inner reception of divine communication through non-verbal pulses whose meaning and value are barely discernible? A speculative theory of how God responds is not necessary for religious purposes, but faith and trust are necessary.
What seems correct is this. The concept of religious experience of God implies that there must be some interface between divine spirit and the human person. At that interface, the human lives the divine life, not as being God, but as abiding in God and being drawn into closer unity with God. Divine and living truth becomes something we live. Divine beauty lures us into the divine realm. We can participate in divine goodness, can live the will of God. Religiously guided phenomenologists may identify that interface differently? According to Hart, Husserl proposed, as “the foundation of all genuine religious experience and culture,” a mystical experience of values carrying unifying implications for the whole of one’s life and the destiny of the world.
The unified intuition contains the character of a unity of original religious experience, therefore also the character of an original experienced relation to God in which the subject of this intuition . . . knows himself as an embodiment of the divine light itself and so as a mediator of the message of the divine being (Wesens) from out of a content of the divine nature (Wesen) implanted in him (Hua XXVII, 65).
Hart comments: “Husserl is claiming that this is a description of Jesus and the experience of anyone who genuinely transcends religion religiously.” [28]
Phase IV: Living in response to the light received
On the dialogical and interactive model of religious experience used here, the reciprocal back-and-forth of relating with God is not limited to the time of focused prayer and worship. The truth, beauty, and goodness received imply norms for one’s life. Responding by making and carrying out the indicated decisions and thus living the will of God is the ideal way to return to the next time of communion with greater receptivity. Enhanced religious experience crowns dedicated living generally; a striking example is Husserl’s reported experience, during the final hours of his life, of radiant, revelatory, Christian clarity. Since God is held to pervade all of life, authentic religion must permeate all of life. In the life of the religionist, worship of God implies a desire to do the will of God, to become like God. Worship becomes real through living the will of God, seeking and trying out what a divinely human experiencing might be in perceptual, theoretical, aesthetic, and practical activities. The constitution of the concept of God will occur in part through the discoveries of truth, beauty, and goodness and enhanced sense of the relation with God that emerge through this venture. Moreover, the genuineness of one’s experience of divinity is verified in activities outside religious communion. The New Testament proclaims, in a context referring to the family of faith, that one who does not love the brother or sister cannot truly claim to love God (1 John 4). More generally, religious experience of God is interdependent with the experience of living with others as members in a universal family.
If the key to this broadened experiencing is faith, how shall it be characterized? A phenomenology of the receptive side of faith—faith as gift—could point to the clarified experiencing of divinity. Melle summarizes Husserl’s thought from one of the manuscripts dealing with faith in God, in oneself, and in one’s fellow human beings.
The faith in God is the condition of possibility for genuine self-realization and self-preservation of a self. It is a faith necessitated by a practical motive, “the motive of a possible life of practical reason” (Ms. A V 21, 21b). This faith is self-verifying. “In order to be able to believe in myself and my true self and the development toward it, I have to believe in God and doing so, I see God’s guidance, God’s advice, God’s opinion in my life” (Ms. A V 21, 24b-25a). Only in seeing us as children of God and the world as being guided by God can we reach the highest good which is the blissful life, a life of pure and final fulfillment.[29]
The active side of faith is one’s response, the full mobilization of one’s powers to live the divine values and to be loyal to the relationships thus disclosed. Husserl’s ethical investigations would be relevant here; they discuss striving toward an infinite telos. Holding oneself responsible to ideals shapes one’s character, the habitualities that affect the way we see things, our responses, and the resoluteness of our quest for perfection. The responsibility of the human partner in the intersubjective relation with God is itself part of the process of divine unfolding of sonship and daughterhood with God. The responsibility is, in addition, social, since respectfully learning others’ experiences and interpretations and judiciously sharing one’s own, is essential to religious responsibility as a participant in society and world history.
Phase V: Exercising critical discernment
The discussion of critical discernment begins with an account of the believer’s personal practice and concludes with programmatic remarks regarding a phenomenology of religious reason and wisdom.
Progressive religious consciousness evolves its concept of God, the constitution of its awareness of God, by raising questions about its own experience. In general, experience taken as spiritual is experience that survives the critique. Self-criticism is motivated by a desire for truth as well as by a sense of how others would see one’s experience. Through intersubjective constitution, one’s own experience becomes no longer simply one’s own. In other words, one’s own sense of one’s own experience depends partly on one’s sense of others’ sense of one’s own experience.
Religious receptivity prepares one for meaning-bestowing acts of consciousness through which any welcome phenomenon may appear as expressive of spirit. When experiences fall into the range that seems ambiguously divine, questions arise. Can one be sure of the origin of the phenomenon? Could it come from one’s own subconscious? What role did the brain play in the experience?
Husserl has described how experience generates anticipations that may be, to various degrees, disconfirmed, even “exploded,” by future experience. Every realm of life has its own kind of rationality, and when an experience must be synthesized with an inconsistent, later experience one’s the mode of belief, the “doxic modality,” regarding the earlier experience may change from certain to merely probable, possible, doubtful, or certainly false.
One may realize that, given the fact that thinking may go on in the form of an inner dialogue, and given the fact that the will has a great influence on experience, the desire to have the human mind voice the meanings of God can be unfortunately effective. Some persons do come to interpret quite ordinary thoughts which seem to arise spontaneously, addressing them in the second person, as what God is saying to them. While one would not want dogmatically to reject all possibility of such a communication, interpreting the thoughts of one’s mind as the thoughts of God can slip into fanaticism or insanity, and one’s “revelations” may be swallowed by gullible people who crave an intermediary with God.
Critical reflection identifies ordinary thoughts as such and re-focuses receptivity. More generally, there will be kinds of phenomena that one has found to be unreliable as indicators of divinity. When one finds oneself caught up in them, one can disengage and turn afresh. Even if one finds oneself contemplating an undoubted truth that has flashed into consciousness, that consciousness might not be a reception of divine expression. If God is regarded not only as eternal truth but also as the source of truth, one can always redirect toward the source of even a great insight.
The project of enhancing one’s critical discernment can generate an entire discipline. The last part of Ideas I includes a phenomenology of theoretical reason. Husserl realized that the axiological and ethical spheres had their own characteristic forms of rationality, too; and there should be a phenomenology of religious reason, as well. It would extend the normal efforts of believers to refine their spiritual intuition by criticizing their own religious experience. In a way analogous to what Husserl does in Formal and Transcendental Logic, it would explore the consistency of meanings and values implicit in different religious experiences, the way some meanings and values exclude others, and the way that some meanings and values imply others. Finally, it would explore the coherence of religious experience with scientific, philosophical, aesthetic, and practical experience.
On this basis, religious reason could address questions about the evolution of religion sensitive to essential diversities so as to reduce the tendency to religious bias. Husserl’s remarks on the history of religion are relevant in this connection, as he commented, in a way akin to Max Weber’s thought, about how there tends to be a routinization of charisma, when the founder of a religion is followed by a tradition that mingles authoritarian and inauthentic allegiance with a genuine, intuitive, and progressive focus on core values.[30]
Religious reason could also provide a critical theory of revelation. A theory of revelation is important because once a particular experience, truth, book, person, or tradition gets constituted as divine in the religious sense of conveying meaning and value from a higher-than-human source, one who sustains that conviction of validity can go beyond phenomenology to a realm from which an external critique of phenomenology is possible. The situation with religion is parallel to that with science: once consciousness constitutes the validity of science, biology arises as a discourse with relative autonomy, and philosophy acquires the task of integrating a concept of reality from multiple disciplines. The epistemological priority of phenomenology is not necessarily decisive for philosophy.
Beyond the logic of religious reason, then, is religious wisdom, which achieves its syntheses by drawing on a seasoned sense of the proportional weight of spiritual intuitions and inferences possibly in tension. The dream of a phenomenology of religious reason and wisdom is challenged by the plurality of religions and the variety of biological, social, economic, political, philosophical, and religious factors that affect religious experience. For the foreseeable future, the phenomenology of religious experience will function mainly to offer an approximately shared vocabulary for conversation and diverse inquiries. Nevertheless, a shared interest in attempting phenomenological accounts could conceivably enhance interreligious dialogue, reduce fanaticism, and promote the practice of the family of God.
[1] I am indebted to Gina Zavota for helpful comments on a draft of this article and for bibliographic assistance. I am indebted as well to Philip Rolnick for comments; his forthcoming book, Person, Grace, and God, illumines theological dimensions of this topic.
[2] For a survey, see R.A. Mall, “”The God of phenomenology in comparative contrast to that of philosophy and theology,” Husserl Studies 8 (1991), 1-15.
[3] Stephan Strasser, “Das Gottesproblem in der Spätphilosophie Edmund Husserls,” in Philosophisches Jahrbuch Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 1959), 130-142, 142.
[4] Strasser, 141.
[5] James G. Hart, “A Précis of an Husserlian Philosophical Theology,” in Steven W. Laycock and James G. Hart, eds., Essays in Phenomenological Theology (Albany: SUNY, 1986) 89-169; “Divine Truth in Husserl and Kant: Some Issues in Phenomenological Theology,” in Daniel Guerrière ed., Phenomenology of the Truth Proper to Religion (Albany: SUNY, 1990); The Person and the Common Life (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992); “The Study of Religion in Husserl’s Writings,” in Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines, ed. M. Daniel and L. Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994); “Michel Henry’s Phenomenological Theology of Life: A Husserlian Reading of C‘est moi, la vérité,” Husserl Studies 15 (1999); and “Entelechy in Transcendental Phenomenology,” in Rudolf Bernet, Donn Welton, and Gina Zavota, eds. Edmund Husserl: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, vol. V (New York: Routledge, 2005).
[6] Dominique Janicaud, “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” in Jean-François Courtine, ed., Phenomenology and the Theological Turn (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000) 16-103. For the Husserlian essentials referred to see Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, tr. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1982), ##24 and 58.
[7] Dan Zahavi, “Inner Time-Consciousness and Pre-reflective Self-awareness,” in Donn Welton, ed., The New Husserl (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 171.
[8] The summary and the Husserl quote are from Hart, The Person and the Common Life, 226.
[9] Ullrich Melle, “Edmund Husserl: from reason to love,” in Rudolf Bernet, Donn Welton, and Gina Zavota, eds. Edmund Husserl: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, vol. V (New York: Routledge, 2005), 134.
[10] Hart, The Person and the Common Life, 15-16.
[11] Husserl, A V 21, 42a, quoted in Hart, “A Précis . . .,” 158.
[12] Husserl, E III 9, 30, quoted in Hart, “A Précis . . .,” 148.
[13] Hart, “Michel Henry’s Phenomenological Theology of Life,” 211.
[14] Husserl quoted in Hart, ““Axiology as the Form of Purity of Heart: A Reading of Husserliana XXVIII,” in Philosophy Today, Fall 1990,” 207.
[15] Dan Zahavi, “Husserl’s Intersubjective Transformation of Transcendental Philosophy,” in Donn Welton, ed., The New Husserl (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 2003.
[16] Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe, tr. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) #8, 31-32.
[17] Dan Zahavi, Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity, tr. Elizabeth A. Behnke (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), 96.
[18] Zahavi, ibid, 100.
[19] Nichiren quoted from The Introduction to the Lotus in William Theodore de Bary, ed., The Buddhist Tradition in India, China, and Japan (New York: Random House, 1972), 349.
[20] Husserl, E III 9, 30, quoted in Hart, “A Précis . . .,” 148.
[21] See the Bhagavad-Gita, chapter 2, vv. 45 and 55; The Great Parinirvana Sutra, chapter 3; Hebrew Proverbs 20.27; New Testament, Luke 17.21; Qur’an, Sura 50. 17; and Mencius, IV B 14, D.C. Lau translation (Middlesex: Penguin, 1970).
[22] Hart, The Person and the Common Life, 179ff.
[23] Zahavi, Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity, 65.
[24] James G. Hart, “A Précis . . .,” 95.
[25] Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), 60.
[26] See Hart, “A Précis . . . .”
[27] The report is from Ludwig Landgrebe according to Strasser, op. cit., 137-38.
[28] Hart, “The Study of Religion in Husserl’s Writings,” 276. The Husserliana volume XXVII is Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922-1937), ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989). The context for this quotation is summarized by Howard Caygill, “Crisis and Renewal: Husserl’s Kaizo Articles of 1923-24,” in Gary Banham, ed., Husserl and the Logic of Experience (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
[29] Melle, “Edmund Husserl: from reason to love,” 138.
[30] Hart, “The Study of Religion in Husserl’s Writings.”