from mythos to logos to utopian poetics: an husserlian narrative

Philosophy of Religion 25:147-169 (1989) �9 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands

From mythos to logos to utopian poetics: An Husserlian narrative

JAMES G. HART Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, 1N 47405

In memoriam: Mircea Eliade

# 1. Commonplaces concerning the mythic mode of life

"The visible is but a section of the invisible. ''1 There is a technical and a popular sense in which this statement by Edmund Husserl might be said to be true for archaic peoples. In the world of their experience there is an invisible dimension which is replete with hidden beneficent and dreadful powers which make their presence felt along with the visible realities. But this conviction about the invisible has a way of affecting the visible and permitting the visible to be, i.e., permitting certain things to appear and appear in a certain light. The absent or invisible felt presence of the invisible functions in the visible by determining directions of interest and perspectives on visible things. Husserls often used the term "appercept ion" (Auffassung) to desig- nate the way the mind suffuses what is "immediately given" with the light o f its retained past experiences and protended present expecta- tions. Thus apperception is a way of being directed toward what is present in the light o f what is not present. Being so directed to what is present involves letting the ways the absent formerly visible has behaved and looked inform the present visible; it is also permitting the future ways it is expected to behave and look to shape its sense for us. Thus the other side o f the house (which I have already seen or can see by taking a walk) may be said to be apperceived or accom- paningly "mean t" along with the directly given side facing me. (If this were not the case, if there were not this apperception or "co-meant" other sides, the "house" facing me would not appear as a real house

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but as a stage prop.) When the Bantu at the beginning of this century would enter into a European cultural milieu, he or she would, in all likelihood, see us as other humans. (At least according to official records, many of the Europeans took the natives for sub- or non- human; and we might here recall the accounts of how the Latin Ameri- can Indians perceived the Spanish soldiers mounted on horses; cf. also n. 10.) In any case the aborigine would not experience us as "Euro- peans" or "Americans"; nor would she experience us as philosophers, mathematicians, anthropologists, capitalists, etc. (even though she might well experience us as ruthless conquerors).

The Bantu would "see" our parks, our houses, churches, etc. And there would be spatial things for him there and perhaps even things that would also have for him the character of buildings and gardens. But here there is a difference. What the architect wanted and, accordingly, what sort of practical and aesthetic "meaning" the build- ing has - that is not understood by the Bantu .... With respect to one of our artworks the Bantu sees indeed a thing, but not an object (an artwork) of our milieu. He has no viewpoint, no apprehension of such, of this sort of object, i.e., an artwork which is there within our milieu as Michelangelo's "David" with its "objective properties." Each existing object and each kind of object is a correlate of certain general "apperceptions" which are proper to the perceiver. And each distinction with respect to things fitting or not fitting into the perceiver's way of looking at things, whether things are right or not right, presupposes the relevant kind and particularity of apperceptions to which the perceiver has recourse .... Accordingly we have different worlds for humans, the world of the European, the world of the Bantu, etc. and these worlds in their personal ("we") relationship are changeable. ~

The apperceptions of archaic peoples of the unseen co-meant invisible realm of power enables "thunder," "lightning," "streams," "lakes," "woods," "trees," etc. to appear in a different way than they do for the modern. (Needless to say it is not only these apperceptions of numinous power which account for the differences. Typically the archaic peoples and aborigines are infinitely more skilled in discerning beings in the natural surroundings to have analogous life-projects; and this knowledge serves both the native people as well as the non-human surroundings.) Whereas archaic peoples might find all these "natural phenomena" metaphysically and morally portentous, we moderns bring to these experiences a different background, e.g., one guided by

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interests of control, profit, measurement and appropriation, therefore our experiences involve different meanings of these "same referents" (see below). Thus we might be quite indifferent to these natural phenomena or regard them from either ecological, economic, meterologi- cal, or "romantic" viewpoints,

The difference in apperceptions extends to the experience of space and time as well. Archaic peoples frequently divide the spatiality of the world into an absolute above and below, the endlessly remote and proximate, and the central and the peripheral. For transcendental phenomenology, these are, of course, founded in the basic kinaesthetic "intentionality" of the Leib or lived body and its being the zero-point of orientat ion? For archaic peoples typically the regions which are down and up, proximate and endlessly remote, may enjoy a qualitative opposition of inferior and superior. On the one hand, for example, they may contain what is base, lowly, full of inertia, heavy and vicious; on the other hand, they may be dwellings of what is elevated, exalted, excellent, stellar, dynamically free and weightless and thus virtuous. But such a division of the world, in spite of its possible metaphorical value for transcendental considerations, is, in its naive form, a view which is completely determined by tribal traditions and perspectives. The gods and demons, who populate these visible and invisible spaces and who are to be placated by special techniques, if the tribe is to enjoy prosperity, are the gods and demons of this tribe and tradition. These spatial divisions of the world comprise the world and these gods are the gods.

Similarly, the apperception of time by the primitive is bound to a tribal naivety. Perhaps the foremost distinction between the modern and the primitive is that the latter is without a genuine sense of history. In a characteristically human way the primitive envisages the whole of life and not just the urgent present. And, of course, there is no lack of the sense of the past. 4 However, the primitive lacks a capacity for development and evolution. An example which Husserl gives is of a small group of aborigines cut off from its tribe by a natural catastrophe, s Such a group would, it might seem, be in a position to develop and strive for new goals because it would now be in a situation calling for new considerations. Furthermore, it would be geographically removed from the stereotypical approaches of its tribe. But this group typically falls into a state of stagnation, i.e., a state which conceals its possibilities and robs it of any motivation to look to the future for possible

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goals. Husserl believes that primitive people live on the margin of the general flow of evolutionary history. Their life, he wrote to Levy- Bruhl, is only a "streaming present. ''6 Hussefl maintains that primi- tives know on one level that their own life and that of the tribe will prolong itself in the future. But this sense of succession and of duration does not suffice to constitute an authentically historical consciousness. For such a consciousness the awareness of the duration must be subsumed under the ideal of an infinite approximable perfection. (To explicate this ideal would require a presentation of Husserl's ethical- metaphysical theology - which, of course, is out of the question here. Suffice it to say that such a regulative ideal comprehends within it the teleological unity of the individual within the collective life of humanity: I ought to become a member of an ideal We which is a higher- order "I.") Also the primitive tribe lives in such a way that its aims are in accord with what preserves the life of the tribe in the best possible way - but always as a best possible present as predetermined by the exemplary ideal past. The temporal horizon itself of the present is subordinated to the ideal of preserving the present if it is good, that is, if it conforms to the exemplary ideal. If the present is less good or evil, the exemplary ideal requires that the improvement be through renewed contact and accord with the exemplary ideal.

The ideal of the best possible self-preservation is not one of a remote future accessible in the remote future. Rather, what the primitive perceives as future, in so far as he can or even could imagine something future, is something which continues to be always the same. T

Even though, as we shall see, the rise of logos out of mythos advances initially through stages of discovery of a common world of things to the uncovering of irreal (or absolute) idealities which transcend all spatial-temporal perspectives, we may here note a homology between the achievements of mythos and logos. They both effect objects which are:

1) not mental beings, i.e., their mode of being is not to be identified with the occasional experiences of persons thinking them;

2) "there" for everyone, regardless of spatial position; they are intersubjective for all those who have the requisite noetic capacity;

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3) characterized by being supra-temporal. No particular historical moment or temporal segment is proper to them. (The time of "the Dream" or "the Chiefs" is heterogeneous to the time of the mortals.) They, furthermore, are as valid now as they were thousands of years ago - for those exercising the requisite noetic capacity;

4) repeatably the same in all the different acts of representation, i.e., ritual, on the one hand, paraphrase, translation, etc., on the other.

#2. The Greek novel on the birth of "logos"

Husserl calls attention to a complicated but inevitable process wherein the closed-off "world" of a nation or tribe collides with that of another. The story of this confrontation is Husserl's version of the ancient Greek account of the birth of philosophy.

Every people, large or small, has its world in which, for that people, everything fits well together, whether in mythical-magical or in European-rational terms, and in which everything can be explained perfectly. Every people has its "logic" and, accordingly, if this logic is explicated in propositions, "its" apriori. 8

In cultures whose self-apperception entails the apperception of strangers, the myths which prevail lack the power and absoluteness of the "pristine" primitive peoples whose myths determine the borders of the world. Husserl observed that a Papuan (of the early twentieth century, and thus someone not yet affected by "civilization") has, in a pregnant sense, neither a geography nor a national history. 9 The reason is that these involve the interrelating apperceptions proper to post- archaic people: (1) an apperception of the historical inner world of one's own culture and its development and (2) an apperception of the historical outer world as the environment of one's own nation or culture. Every post-primitive apperceives the foreign nations that are external to it and by force of this apperception these nations are part of the life-milieu of the apperceiving tribe. (But cf. the American In- dian nations wherein we may assume no contact with Westerners but apperceptions of other tribes or nations; in these cases we often find that the mythologies integrate and accommodate the apperceived

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Others.) But the Papuan, i.e., the "integral archaic or primitive person," has apparently no such apperception. The world is delimited by his or her tribal boundaries. 1~

Initially each tribal view claims to be the view. (Husserl calls attention to how there is a core-periphery structure within the "we" and its perceptions. The anomalous views of the mad, the senile and children a re thus familiar but relegated to the periphery; they are anomalies of the view, i.e., ours.) Our or one's own apperceptions do not appear as such until one has encountered the apperceptions o f the anomalous members. But it is the stranger who first forces the reference to one's own views as Other to the Other because the stranger insists that her view is core and refuses to be consigned to the anomalous. That is, not until the Other is experienced as seeing what I (or we) see differently do my apperceptions emerge as such, i.e., as tribal-national modes of apprehending the one and same things which the Other apprehends differently. Seeing as such-and-such means that at this time one is in a position to see " i t" differently. " I t " being the (same) people, animals, trees, rivers, mountains, soil, heaven/sky, stars, etc.

One could experience the Other who is experiencing differently than I (we) but not desire to fathom this and regard him or her as perversely blind, etc. But I can also come to see that "the same" appears differently to the Other. If this is a mutual insight then for each this means that "this" (e.g., " fox") is ambiguously the referent of what each apperceives (their "meanings") and of what each apperceives the Other apperceives. And because the depth and breadth of the mythic apperceptions ("meanings") have not yet been extinguished, the same referent can only be the ambiguous "same" which we apperceive the Other to apperceive and what we apperceive she apperceives us to apperceive. Thus "the fox" as the ominous sign for me or your totem has not yet the common (but perhaps impoverished)status of "woodland animal" (for the "nature lover") or the member of the species vulpes or canis (for the zoologist).

On the other hand, it no longer has merely the sense which my tribal tradition gives to it. And, therefore, Husserl says, "a new idea of being burgeons forth. ''11 The burgeoning experience of what is common in spite of the traditions and mythic perspectives leads to the gradual discovery of an "objective . . . . common," and "universal" world which is the same for all humans. This is not yet the "objective" world in the modern sense which is scientifically true and capable of being "given"

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in propositions which transcend absolutely not only the historical- cultural circumstances of the scientist but also all manner o f perspect i - val appearing. That is, we do not yet here have a standard which finds its fulfillment in ideal objects such as mathematical entities wherein there is a perfect givenness of the "purely spiritual" object and where no historical-cultural or spatial-temporal perspectives are relevant. Rather, here we have the vague idea of an "objective" world which appears identically the same for one's own people and for all the peoples which surround us. 12 "Us" and "we" now encompass other peoples for whom we are the Others, i.e., Others to the Others.

This emergence of the new idea of being coincides with the birth o f philosophy as the lifetime commitment to what is universally true for all.

Instead of following the naivety of the coherence of one's experience within the chance life-milieu of one's tradition which has its own mode of appercept ion, [the philosopher] attempts to embrace the universality o f the existing world. He tries to do this in such a way that he, instead of taking for granted the pre-given world, grasps it as "opinion" and regards it as questionable. And in this atti tude ... he inquires about the achievement and extent of the naive self- presentation o f the world ...13

Thereby is also born the ideal of "European humani ty ," an epochal moment in world history. The point would be missed if this was taken as cultural chauvinism, i.e., the imperialistic repression of a part of the whole by another part which defines the whole in terms of itself. Today the phrase "ideal of European humani ty" properly strikes us as offensive. But Husserl intends it to be another name for the ideal of the whole and for the common capacity, the actuation of which is the necessary condition that each may be a member o f a universal com- munal whole.

Furthermore, this ideal, as we shall see, is not realized in Europe (or America). On the contrary, it is in crisis in Europe and America. Fur- thermore not only is there much in Europe and America which is remote from the ideal, but it is often enough the case that the non- European world has occasion to appeal to Europe and America that they pursue rational and nonviolent resolutions to solve their conflicts. Thus the ideal is of a knowledge which is universal

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and there is no question of restricting it to those who have brought it forth or o f limiting it to a European form of existence. In order to surmount the crisis it is going through, it must be rendered universal in fact, as it is in right. Certainly nothing was more foreign to Husserl than a European chauvinism. For him European knowledge would maintain its value only by becoming capable of understanding what is not itself. ~4

#3. Heraclitus as proto-phenomenologist

Heraclitus' well-known critical remarks about " the many" and his exhortat ion to what is common to all can be shown to parallel Husserl's appropriation of the Greek story of the transition from mythos to logos. Furthermore, an appropriation of Klaus Held's excellent reading of Heraclitus enables us not only to show the parallel but it also to sketch a Husserlian theory of reason.

Heraclitus, in a similar vein to Xenophanes, points to the significance of the sacred context of mythic rituals. He observes that when they are judged by what all share in common they might well appear unintel- ligible or even shameless. ~5

For Heraclitus what is common cannot be divorced from what is given in experience: "The things of which there is seeing and hearing and perception, these do I prefer. ''~6 Yet that which is common in perceptual experience is soaked with difference and opposition. So much so that one is tempted to despair that there be something common among humans. Indeed, the differences between individuals and cultural communities concerning what is objectively true resembles the differences between species: "Sea is the most pure and most polluted water; for fishes it is drinkable and salutary, but for men it is undrink- able and deleterious. ''~7 Nevertheless, the heart o f Heraclitus' teaching is that the difference o f views and the different perspectives point to something common which we can uncover by reason of the common logos. "The many" believe themselves to have an insight which exempts them from the common bond of logos. And thus they break away from one another after the fashion of people falling asleep wherein each retires to a private world. "Therefore it is necessary to follow the common; but although the logos is common the many live as though they had a private understanding. ''~8 The power o f mythic "apperceptions" both before and after the discovery of what is common proves, in most cases, to be stronger than the new sense of being, of logos.

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Of the logos which is as I describe it men always prove to be uncom- prehending both before they have heard it and when once they have heard it. For although all things happen according to this logos men are like people o f no experience, even though they experience such words and deeds as I explain when I distinguish each thing according to its consti tution and declare how it is; but the rest of men fail to notice what they do after they wake up just as they forget what they do when asleep. 19

An Husserlian reading of Heraclitus might well at tempt to locate logos as that common principle which enables all to appreciate what they have in common through the individual perspectives of " the many"

- to which the indexicals or occasional expressions bear witness. "The m a n y " understand not only their view as a private matter but,

furthermore, they are disposed to regard every other view, philosophy not excluded, as private. Thus Heraclitus, or the philosopher, must make clear to his listeners among "the many" the difference which thinking involves. Therefore "listening not to me but to the logos it is wise to agree that all things are one. ''2~ What distinguishes thought- ful insight from "private views" is the hornologein. Thereby is the view taken to be of the same to which other views are related and thereby also is there agreement among the thinkers. But this is never defined merely by the agreement among the thinkers; it is always agreement about something ("die Sache selbst").

That about which the thinkers agree is that "all things are one." "All things" here stands for the polarities and opposites that comprise the world. 21 For Heraclitus the human perception of the world involves the possibility of seeing the same object differently: the path can be seen as the way up or the way down ("The path up and down is one and the same"). 22 Although we call it something different, in reality it is the same.

But why does Heraclitus focus on this consideration that something is identical even though it appears non-identical to us? "The way up" is, like " the way down," a view of something and this something can only be given to us through this view. The view is subjective in as much as there is no "way up" or "way down" in itself but rather these only make sense in reference to someone here and now experiencing the path in terms of his or her range of interests. 2a But the view is not "subjective" in the sense that it is at the caprice o f the viewer. Rather, the view is an aspect of the thing as what appears, how it shows itself,

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and how it looks to someone ("elative" of manifestation) in this situation. The thing as what appears is inseparable from its looks and these are inseparable from the circumstantial Iooking. Thus (recall Fr. 61) water's appearing pure or putrid is dependent on the standpoint of the experiencer. "Water in itself" is only water for a perceiving standpoint, and in this case for a standpoint which self-displaces to include another standpoint, that of fish; therefore sea water has "in itself" the feature of being poisonous and nutritious. Thus one and the same thing has the capacity to appear as having opposite aspects: the paths can be up or down, long or short, steep or level, etc.

A view (aspect, perspective, etc.) is always interrelated to other aspects and is always of that same to which these other aspects are related. In this sense there is no such thing as an incommensurate perspective; perspectives are incommensurate only in the fairly obvious sense that as things are heterogeneous, so also are their aspects.

For "the many," however, the path appears not as a path for which it is properly the case that it may be seen as up or down. For "the many," for whom the path is what it is only as appearing to them within the pre-determining boundaries of their situation, there is not even the concession to their opponent (who says the opposite: down, narrow, etc.) that they are speaking of the same (path). "The many" have not yet grasped the path as such, i.e., that it is something which necessarily has the opposite modes of appearing depending on the vantage point, perspective, and so forth, i.e., that it is necessarily both the way up and down.

Heraclitus' point, however, was less the rather obvious observation that the same path could have opposing aspects and puzzling how one could ever make a problem of this. Rather, he asked how human beings are capable of going beyond the disparate views to something identically the same. With the birth of logos, the hope surfaces that it was not only possible to bring together the contesting views with the sweet non-violent force of logos, but logos could self-reflectively show how this was possible.

If the Sioux and the millionaire rancher see the same land respective- ly as "our Mother" and as "my spread," each might believe his or her way of seeing the "matter" is the only way. There is bound to be re- sistance to appreciating the referent as capable of bearing conflicting views, each of which seems to be the destruction of the other. Both perception and communication will be distorted. Because each claims

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to be uniquely and exclusively valid, each is prevented from talking about the same "mat te r . " Thus the recognition o f the Other's view, as a competing view about the same, provides the opening for the insight into one's view as a viewpoint. Now one can begin to apprehend "how being at variance with itself it agrees with itself (literally, how being brought apart it is brought together with itself...). ''~4 With the recognition of conflicting views of the same one becomes aware that the confrontation of views is what holds them together: "it is necessary to know that polernenon is what is common. ''25 That is, through controversy - which is in the nature of things - one becomes aware of one's view as that which is an aspect of what, in another circumstance, would appear differently, i.e., have a different aspect.

Now it is possible for these different aspects themselves to become common themes which bind and differentiate. Thus, conceivably, the issue between the Sioux and the rancher could boil down to the apperceptions generating the beliefs about common "mat ters" like "everything," whether everything can be owned, the nature and ethics o f animal husbandry, the nature of the relationship between strangers, and the limits of the right to private property. Here the "same" attains the level o f (unownable) idealities for which, again, different "perspectives," i.e., propositions, properties, etc. can be proposed.

But in each case there is a sameness established for which the respective viewpoints emerge whose merit remains to be seen only through controversy but whose actuality demands respect. Of course, because this boiling-down cannot be pursued with the necessary equanimity if the conversation has structures wherein the rules and outcome of the exchange are left not to logos but to the might and discretion of one o f the parties, it might well be the case that a prior non-violent action be the necessary condition for the emergence of the respect of the Others's viewpoint.

It is the discovery of the transcendental situation, i.e., that the "same" is tied to its looks and the looks to the occasional standpoints, which highlights "motivat ion" as the proper causality among minds and therefore excludes physical causality and violence. Therefore this, the transcendental situation emerges as more fundamental than the common "issues" which occasion division. (In both, Heraclitus and Husserl, reflections on "the many" for whom ideally the same, i.e., the same for all, is, one may find seeds of radical democracy. But there are also signs o f skepticism, if not disdain, in so far as the many "in the natural

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at t i tude" are philosophically asleep.) The actually represented views demand respect because it is in the nature o f logos that things, among which logos itself cannot be numbered, be bound to opposing views and that it is only through the insight into the opposing views as claims to be defining relations (or meanings) of the same that logos articulates itself and we gain insight into the same.

#4. Excursus: "Logos" as Entelechy

Thus the sense of the discovery of logos is a mot ion toward a regulative idea, i.e., a mot ion through the fact of individual and collective perspectives beyond a skeptical relativism or a deferral of all positions (in- cluding that of the proposed deferral); it is a move beyond the skepsis and epochr of all worldly positions to a study of the nature of perspectives as such and to logos as the idea which enables what appears to be bound to occasional (or indexical) appearings to the datives of appearings; yet the sameness and identity o f what appears are only through the occasional appearings to these datives in their situatedness.

For Husserl, o f course, even the dative of appearing bears witness to the holding sway of logos as that which lets the differences appear and binds them as differences of the same: the ultimate sense of the dative of appearing is a "primal presencing" which itself is an interplay of sameness and difference. 2~ But for Husserl, it would seem, logos is not a principle which is absolute and ontologically independent of the primal presencing or some sense o f "I ," "soul," or "mind." This issue might be echoed in Heraclitus' Fr. 45: "You could not in your going find the ends of the soul, though you travelled the whole way: so deep is its logos." Perhaps Heraclitus' metaphor o f fire for this world-order- ing principle is appropriate here. Neither the primal streaming presencing nor logos as fire are to be regarded as part of cosmos and thus on a par with human beings, the sea, earth or the tangible fire at hand. Heraclitean fire is

naturally conceived of as the very consti tuent of things which deter- mines their structure and behavior - which ensures not only the opposition o f opposites, but also their uni ty through "strife. ''27

The world-order (the same of all) did none of the gods or man make, but it always was and is and shall be: an ever living fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures) 8

Thunderbolt steers all th ings) 9

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The ultimate considerations o f logos for both Husserl and Heraclitus enable an account of the measure of all things as an interplay of sameness and difference as well as rest and motion. For Husserl surely, and perhaps for Heraclitus, this interplay is also one of presence and absence. And for Husserl this interplay is within the "holding sway" (Walten) of the Idea which is also referred to, on occasion, as the divine entelechy. We shall briefly discuss these metaphysical matters.

In Ideas I, ##51 and 58 the divine is described in a di-polar way as being transcendent to the world's transcendence - which is the transcendence o f a regulative idea - and transcendent to the transcendence o f the I-pole's transcendence in immanence. Elsewhere I have tried to show how this latter (transcendence in immanence) is what accounts for the founding passive synthetic rationality in the facticity of the flow of the "primal presencing" which, for Husserl, is the ultimate sense of transcendental subjectivity and the foundational consideration for all considerations o f meaning and being. This sense of the divine idea is not merely, in Kantian terms, regulative but also constitutive; but it is not constitutive as the categories of the understanding are alleged to be constitutive of the experience o f the world; rather it accounts for feeble, proto-rationality which is evident in the mind's ineluctable elemental self-awareness, an awareness which is an ongoing, incessant othering and gathering, self-identifying and self-absent- ing. Hussefl called attention to the form here o f nunc starts and nunc fluens; he also called it the form of the standing-streaming. Following Sokolowski we may call it an interplay of sameness and difference, presence and absence, rest a n d m o t i o n . It is the presupposition for all senses of constitution o f egological acts; it is not a result o f such acts. But the form or supra-form of this interplay is always within the horizon of the infinite ideal of a synthesis of all syntheses, a comprehensive system of constitutive self-givenness, etc. Thus the constitutive functioning is always also a regulative functioning and teleology is at least as fundamental as the interplay. Therefore Husserl could call teleology "the form of forms. ''3~

Thus, the demonstrat ion that the divine idea is constitutive and not merely regulative consists in showing both how, on the one hand, transcendental subjectivity is, and yet not responsible for, the interplay o f presence and absence, rest and motion, sameness and difference and, on the other hand, how this interplay is always teleological. There- by it would become evident that the divine ideal is not merely for sub-

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jectivity and founded in the constitution of the infinitely determinable horizon, but rather "constitutes" subjectivity at all levels.

In a late (1930s) text Husserl brings together into a single principle two sets of considerations: on the one hand, the di-polar considerations of Ideas, i.e., the divine as transcendent to the world's transcendence and transcendent to the transcendence in immanence of the I-pole. On the other hand, he joins the Aristotelian-Scholastic transcendental and Kantian transcendental ideal. (The Aristotelian-Scholastic tran- scendentals, unum, verum et bonurn, are beyond all worldly beings and all worldly categories by being, in each case, instanced by them.) He also names this unifying consideration logos. Here Husserl speaks of this "absolute supreme idea as the ultimate total meaning-giving principle for truth and being, yes, even for the being of the absolute subject and totality of subjects ..."

This ideal pole-idea is of an absolute in a new transworldly, trans- human, supra-transcendental-subjective sense. It is the absolute logos, the absolute truth in the complete and full sense, as the unum, verum, and bonum toward which each being is bound, and toward which all transcendental subjective life, as vital being living toward constituting truth, tends. 31

One of the basic issues, to which we here can only allude, is how phenomenological elucidation, which is always in some sense a constituting, discloses a principle which constitutes this elucidation as well as all other constitutings. And, further, how is one speculatively to conceive that principle which, in some sense, "constitutes" transcendental intersubjectivity which constitutes the world? If it constitutes subjectivity as a transcendent Other for which the monadic universe is a creatio ex nihilo or mere stuff to be externally informed, then there is a fundamental sense in which transcendental phenomenological life and reflection remain outside the inner side of all that is. (I believe that this is unacceptable for transcendental phenomenology and, therefore, the concept of God would have to be appropriately adjusted.)

Clearly, the divine principle is not a being or a cause in the senses proper to innerworldly things; but this, of course, may be said already of both the regulative ideals as teleological horizons and logical con- ditions as well as of transcendental subjectivity's intentional relation to the world as a "constituting." Echoing Plato (in the same text) Husserl names it supra-being and not an eidos - w h i c h would give it

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a formal specificity and therefore not an all encompassing pervasive- ness and "openness o f the horizon for the emergence and determina- tion of every essence" (Derrida). It thus is choris toun ontoun: outside of what is. But, as Husserl also notes, it holds sway over (waltet) the ongoing flux of experience. Here again perhaps we have an echo of Plato's paro usia.

Suffice it here to say that Husserl ultimately seemed inclined to envisage this principle as one which at once was egological and formal; but it was also, at the same time, regulative, and transcendental in the various Kantian as well as scholastic senses. Therefore, he referred to it of ten as an "entelechy. ''32 And as entelechy the divine is not a transcendent whole apart from the monadic universe but a constitutive principle part, a momen t not a piece, id quo, non id quod, of the all o f m o n a d s ) 3

In Husserl's last published account of the emergence o f logos he speaks of the telos which breaksforth in humani ty with the birth of Greek philosophy - "o f humani ty which seeks to exist, and is only possible, through philosophic reason, moving endlessly from latent to manifest reason ...-34 Subsequent to the appearance o f Greek philosophy, this entelechy directs human becoming in a conscious way. And in the same work (#3.), he immediately connects the theological issue to the problem of "meaning" and reason in history: "The problem of God clearly contains the problem of 'absolute' reason as the teleological source of all reason in the world - of the 'meaning' of the world."

#5. The modern crisis of r e a s o n

The first-person experience o f logos is not of something best rendered with a noun; rather it is best rendered in gerunds and verbs: othering and gathering, self-displacing and self-identifying; to remember, to think, to judge, to imagine, to respect, etc. The gerunds express both the active and passive synthetic achievements of an analogous "self"; the verbs point to more properly active egological acts. It is the latter to which we can be exhorted; at the most fundamental level of the primal presencing exhortat ion is irrelevant because here the othering and gathering is irrepressible as long as we are awake.

Reason, we see, is analogical. Whether at the ("gerundial") level of primal passive streaming or at the uppermost higher-order level of

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"the absolute ought" humans self-displace to other points of view (their own pasts or futures or to Others) under the sway of the infinite idea of a comprehensive compassionate self-unifying "wakeful- ness" which binds all viewpoints together into the same and lets each profile be given its due. The pre-being of the gerundial life founds the ought; the sense of what ought to be is nestled in what in some sense already is.

Mankind is rational in seeking to be rational ... Reason allows for no differentiation into "theoretical," "practical," "aesthetic," ... Being human is teleological being and an ought-to-be and ... this teleology holds sway in each and every activity and project of an ego (Crisis, p. 341).

As an essentially inadequately presentable " theme," world (the elemental horizontality of experience) gives birth to the infinite idea of a science of sciences and a "world-praxis" which are infinite tasks. For transcendental phenomenology this science and praxis do justice not only to the infinite idea but also to the correlate idealizing intentionality. However, the ideal of the mathesis universalis in moderni ty is en- visaged as an exact science of an exact essence, i,e., of ideal formations which have emerged out of the non-ideal forms, shapes and features of perceptual experience (as, e.g., a plane, a point, a frictionless state, etc.). This view of universal science is essentially perverse because it is a form of being lost in a consti tuted formation which overlooks the constituting idealizing source, and also because its ideal of mathematical definiteness neglects the basic features of transcendental subjectivity. The proper form of the ideal mathesis universalis is an understanding of absolute reason as resident in the world of monads and all of I's under the sway of the infinite ideal pole-idea or divine entelechy. This ideal science would, therefore, not be indifferent to transcendental intersubjectivity, nor would it aspire everywhere to a perfect exactness and definiteness which would surmount the indefiniteness, non-objec- tifiability, and contingency of the streaming primal presencing. 3s

But with the breakthrough of post-Galilean science, just such an indifference to transcendental subjectivity occurred. Thus, the ideal of "European humani ty ," i.e., the ancient Greek ideal of science and the commitment to the new notion of being as what is common on the basis of participation in logos, has enjoyed only a superficial con- quest of the world. The crisis occasioned by this superficiality is to be

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understood in conjunction with a parallel development of the loss of religious meaning. The enthusiasm for the enlightenment ideal brought in its wake an erosion of what was once taken for granted by more traditional religious cultures; for masses of humanity religion is no longer that self-evident resource for founding the quest for a unified meaningful life. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the Socratic spirit reawakened with an enthusiastic upsurge of faith in autonomous reason, a faith in the rationality of all that is. But today, even though it is true that all the nations of the world celebrate the success of natural science and the benefits of technology, and while all, therefore, are drawn into this universal common sphere of discourse and thereby gradually relinquish the basic assumptions of their cultural heritage, this present-day unification of humanity is treacherously ambiguous. The external unification of humanity by the common appropriation of the naturalistic categories of what is officially called science is a unification which propagates spiritual torpidity and aliena- tion stemming from a loss of faith in reason and thus in humanity. "Science" is exemplified by the natural sciences and scarcely anyone is tempted to look there for an answer to the basic issues once addressed by religion and philosophy. Modern science with its objective idealities cut off from the transcendental community's quest for meaning is be- reft of any power to disclose the connection of its insights to human destiny and teleology. 36

The worldwide phenomenon, on the one hand, of an ineluctable advance of natural scientific categories and, on the other, of an in- creased sense of the meaninglessness of life, i.e., of life as understood by these categories, characterizes the end of modernity. This crisis has occasioned various theories of salvation and therapy. What they all have in common, Husserl believes, is a loss of faith in reason.

One view which is quite widespread separates the quest for meaningful existence from science. It grants to science a legitimacy in its own sphere, the sphere of "nature." But it excludes any sense of science from the sphere of ultimate meaning and turns to non-scientific or anti- rational sources, some of which are traditional, some modern. Such an accommodation is disloyal to the profound common aspiration of the scientific and the authentic religious quest, i.e., a universal comprehensive liberation from the fetters of illusion and deception which brings "salvation" to us all as members of one another. For Hussefl Existenz- philosophie typified much of contemporary thought in this respect

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because it took over the truncated sense of science characterizing the modern and post-modern eras and thereby fell prey to the same naivety which plagues the scientific mentali ty it rejected. For Husserl, therefore, it is precisely the naivety about the transcendental dimension which must bear the burden of guilt for the baneful historical development of science) 7

The development o f post-modernity has a twofold significance for Husserl. Not only has it cast into doubt the faith in autonomous reason by enabling the objectivistic aspect of science to run its course, but also the discovery of transcendental phenomenology was made possible by the interim destitution o f the inheritance of philosophy. That is, the epochal advance toward the telos of logos which over- comes all naivety and is as comprehensive as life itself, i.e., transcendental phenomenology, was facilitated by the aberrant objectivistic turn o f science) 8

#6. Faith in reason and utopian poetics

Kant observed that the writing o f 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 added that even if evidence is lack- ing that nature is teleological in a way conducive to history the fiction of a course of events as i f this were the case is a way of constituting a horizon of hope which nurtures action and virtue. This theme recurs in Husserl's occasional, if inconspicuous, references to der Roman der Ge- schichte. 39 Generally, the context of these references is the need to nourish the real possible horizon of both action and theory. The moti- vational basis of praxis and reflection is the realizability and attractive- ness of the "approximation" of the telos (which itself as an Idea is not a fiction or hypothesis). The story of the birth of logos out of mythos is a major chapter in this "novel." The retrospective Dichtung or "poetic fiction" with respect to the archaeology o f logos or philosophy is necessary because the telos of philosophy is not merely what can be infinitely approximated but it must be evident from the start as a beginning motivation. If this unitary telos is not evident at all stages as a functioning entelechy then the proper explication of the idea of philosophy in the present (i.e., transcendental phenomenology) is not possible. 4~

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But doubtless at least as important as the retrospective is the pro- spective "poetic fiction" for both action and theory. An interpretation of Husserl's theory of logos must take account of how he, throughout numerous Nachlass manuscripts, underscores the surds, irrationalities, blows of fate, and contingencies which menace, indeed, interrupt the pursuit of "the infinite task." What holds open the world within which action and theory founded in transcendental phenomenology may flourish is not itself the fruit o f a prior achieved evidence (and strict science) but is, on the one hand, what we have elsewhere called a passive ineluctable transcendental self-trust and, on the other, an active faith in reason and a poetic-pragmatic postulate which enable and sustain a will for the Good and the True in pure evidence.

As long as I have an open practical horizon for which no termina- tion is definitely predelineated, and so long as I have given to me a recognized realizable value - even if it be merely in a vague presump- tive mode o f givenness - which presumably can lead to new practical values in the direction of the best possible or the absolutely binding, I have the duty of acting .... When I believe [in the practical realizability of the telos of history] and make myself aware of this belief, when I freely perform this belief out o f this practical source, there is given meaning to the world and my life; there is given also a joyful confidence that nothing is in vain and that all is to the good. 41

It is for this reason perhaps that Husserl once observed that maybe the greatest of all Kantian theories is the theory o f postulation. 42 In the spirit o f William James, Husserl argues that in the absence of evidence that any at tempt at ameliorization is bound to fail, and so long as a case can be made that the pursuit of what is great and beautiful can be successful, a creative self-displacing into a horizon nurturing hope is in order:

I will do best to overestimate the probabilities and to act as if I was certain that fate was not essentially hostile to humanity and as if I could be certain that through persevering I could ultimately attain something so good that I could be satisfied with my perseverence. What is theoretically reprehensible, i.e., the overestimation o f probabilities or o f what is only slightly likely at the expense o f empirical certainty, is practically good and required in the practical situation. 43

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Utopian poetics is not an optimism for which the better future is auto- matic. Fate is so cruel, or perhaps the hyletic s tuff of the monadic universe is so recalcitrant to the divine entelechy's "persuasion," that faith in reason must often enough appear as a grace. Indeed Husserl himself must have been sorely tempted late in life when in the face of his approaching death he took stock of his unfinished work. Thus, aside from the uncertainties and perils of the historical future of the human communi ty and its biosphere, the individual, Edmund Husserl, agonized over the meaningfulness of the very process of utopian poetics in the face of both the surds as well as the infinite demands of the ideal:

what can bind us to our goal? Is it only the foolhardiness of striving toward a goal which is beautiful but only vaguely possible, one which is not definitely impossible but still, in the end, imaginary, one which gradually, after the experience of millenia, finally begins to bear a very great inductive probability of being unattainable? or does what appear from the outside to be a failure, and on the whole actually is one, bring with it a certain evidence of practical possibility and necessity, as the evidence of an imperfect, one-sided, partial success, but still a success in this failure? However, if such an evidence ever was alive, in our time at any rate it has become weak, has lost its vitality .44

But his basic point remains that humans are rational in striving to be ra- t ional and this striving is sustained by faith in reason and the appropriate poetics which nurtures this faith.

Notes

1. This is from a 1930s Nachlass MS of Edmund Husserl with the archival signa- ture E III 7, p. 2. It is entitled "Trivialities Concerning Primitive Man." This title surely reflects Husserl's awareness of the schematic character of his reflections. At this point I wish to thank the American Philosophical Society for a summer grant which enabled me to consult the Husserl Archives at the New School of Social Research. I would also like to thank Prof. Samuel IJsseling, Director of the Husserl Archives in Louvain, for permission to use and quote from the Naehlass.

2. Phiinomenologische Psychologie, Hua IX (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1968), pp. 497-498.

3. For a discussion of lived spatiality which proposes phenomenological senses of

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"heaven" and "earth" see "Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenologi- cal Origin of the Spatiality of Nature," trans. Fred Kersten, in Husserl: Shorter Works, ed. P. McCormick and F.A. Elliston (South Bend: Notre Dame, Univer- sity Press, 1981), pp. 222-233 .

4. See MS K I I I , p. 7; also R. Toulemont, L 'Essence de la Soci~t~ selon Husserl (Paris: Presse Universitaire de France, 1962), pp. 198 ff.

5. MS K I I I 3, pp. 78 -79 ; see Toulemont, p. 198. The example is perhaps occasioned by a reading of L. L6vy-Bruhl's Mythologie primitive.

6. Letter to L6vy-Bruhl, cited in Toulemont, p. 199. Usually this term indicates the basic foundational theme of the transcendental reduction. Its somewhat surprising appearance here presumably aims at conveying Husserl's view that archaic people lack a capacity for imaginative displacement to future real possibilities. Husserl's position, tentative as it is, would not seem to accommodate progressive features of some aboriginal peoples, e.g., that they are communitarian, stateless, non-violent, egalitarian, and wiser in their practices of the birthing and rearing of children.

7. MS K III 7, p. 13; Toulemont, p. 199. 8. The Crisis o f European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans.

David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1970), p. 373. 9. K III 9, p. 20.

10. Cf. Hans Schaerer, Nga]u Religion (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963), pp. 63 -64 , where the terrifying presence of strangers is incorporated into the mythology of the Ngaju. "With the interpretation of one's own society as the sacred people and as humanity in general, and the explanation of other tribes as only human seeming beings, is linked a very strong self-consciousness and feeling of superiority." One's own world is the central point of all worlds, the focus of the divine cosmic order and harmony. "Foreigner and misfortune are synonymous ideas, not only in Old German but in Dayak as well, for in foreign parts and under foreign powers one is without protection and in every respect homeless, and it is the worst thing that can happen to a man to fall ill and die there." See Mircea Eliade's appreciation of Schaerer's work in The Quest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 77 ff.

l l . K III 9, p. 74. 12. K I I I 9, p. 76. 13. K III 6, p. 137; cf. Die Krisis der europ~'ischen Wissenschaften und die trans-

zendentale Phdnomenologie, Hua IV (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962), p. 491. 14. M. Merleau-Ponty, Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University,

1968), p. 89. 15. Heraclitus Fragments 15 and 5 in G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven, The Pre-Socratics

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 211. I am indebted throughout this discussion of Heraclitus to Klaus Held's remarkable "Der Logos- Gedanke des Heraklits," in DurchbIicke: Martin Heidegger zum 80. Geburts- tag (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1970), pp. 93 ff. See also his Heraklit, Parmenides und der An fang yon Philosophie und Wissenschaft (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1980), Part II.

16. Fr. 55; Kirk-Raven, p. 189.

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17. Fr. 61;Kirk-Raven, p. 189. 18. Fr. 2; Kirk-Raven, p. 188. 19. Fr. 1;Kirk-Raven, p. 187. 20. Fr. 50; Kirk-Raven, p. 188. 21. See Held, p. 186. 22. Fr. 60. 23. Held, pp. 181-182. 24. Fr. 51;Kirk-Raven, p. 193. 25. Fr. 80. 26. For this interpretation and the insight into the fundamental feature of the

interplay between sameness/difference, rest/motion, and presence/absence I am indebted to Robert Sokolowski, "Ontological Possibilities in Phenome- nology: The Dyad and the One," Review of Metaphysics 29 (1976):691-701. See also his epochal Presence and Absence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). The interplay of these couples, i.e., presence/absence, etc. requires a teleological principle, the Good, as Sokolowski acknowledges; but for Husserl the interplay and the teleological principle cannot be constituting principles essentially independent of the dative of manifestation. Here Husserl and Sokolowski have a basic disagreement.

27. Kirk-Raven, p. 200. 28. Fr. 30; Kirk-Raven, p. 199. 29. Fr. 64. 30. Zur Ph;inomenologie der Intersub]ektivitiit III, Hua XV (The Hague: Nijhoff),

pp. 378-380. See also n. 33. 31. See E III 4, pp. 60-61. See Alwin Diemer, Edmund Husserl (Meisenheim am

Glan: Hain, 1965), pp. 313-314, for most of this passage. Jacques Derrida has called attention to the conjoining of Kantian-Aristotelian senses of transcendental in his Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (Stony Brook: Nicolas Hays 1978), p. 146, n. 177.

32. See, e.g., Zur Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitiit III, pp. 380-381, 610; MSS F I 24, p. 41b ;AV 21, p. 30;B I 4, p. 52 ff. ;F I 14, p. 1 0 b - see Diemer for most of this important text, pp. 314-315.

33. For a more ample but still too sketchy treatment of this see James G. Hart, "A Precis of an Husserlian Philosophical Theology," in ed. Steven Laycock and James Hart, Essays in Phenomenological Theology (Albany: SUNY, 1986), especially pp. 129-145. See also my "Divine Truth in Husserl and Kant: Some Issues in Phenomenological Theology," in ed. DanieI Guerriere, The Phenomen- ology of Truth Proper to Religion (Albany: SUNY Press, forthcoming).

34. The Crisis, ~6. 35. See Analysen zur passiven Synthesis, Hua XI (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966),

pp. 434-436 for a wrestle with this matter. 36. An extensive critique of modern science as objectivistic is, of course, found

in The Crisis. I have drawn also on E III 4, pp. 40a ff. and the MS of the Kaizo lectures which will soon appear in Husserllana as Aufsiitze und Vortriige (1923-1937). These lectures are perhaps the most explicit statement by Hus- serl on the ideal of a philosophic culture, i.e., a culture permeated by an ethos of logos.

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37. E III 4, pp. 45b ft.; for authentic religion's similarity to logos, see E III 4, p. 44b.

38. E III 4, p. 34a; the full text is given in Paul Janssen, Geschichte und Lebens- welt (The Hague: Nijhoff), p. 74.

39. See the Ninth Proposition of "The Idea of a Universal History with a Cos- mopolitan Purpose" in Kant's Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 51 ff. For reference to the "Roman," see, e.g., Krisis, p. 556; Intersub]ektivitiit III, p. 437; Crisis, pp. 393-395; MS, K III 9, p. 2; MS E III 5, p. 3.

40. See Crisis, pp. 394-395; all of Beilage XXVIII in Krisis; and MS K III 9, pp. 2 ff.

41. Erste Philosophie II, Hua VIII (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1956), pp. 351 and 355. 42. See Iso Kern, Husserl und Kant (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1968), p. 302. This is a

pioneering work in the study of Husserl's philosophical theology. 43. F I 24, p. 88b. 44. Crisis, p. 391.

from mythos to logos to utopian poetics: an husserlian narrative

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