Husserl Studies 9:91-110, 1992.

1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

The entelechy and authenticity of objective spirit:

Reflections on Husserliana XXVII
JAMES G. HART

Indiana University

1. Introduction

The editors, Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp, of Husserl's Aufsdtze
und Vortri~ge (1922-1937) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989) have given us a
fascinating present with quite a few surprises. I would like to take this
occasion to thank them publicly for their able and selfless labors. Here we
have Husserl attempting to address himself to a large philosophically
untrained audience for funds of which he had dire need: he had two children
getting married and the real value of his inflated German annual income
was worth $160.00. But, as he told a friend, what he was doing was as
genuine philosophical work as what he would do for his Jahrbuch ffir
Philosophie und phginomenologische Forschung. In many ways it is
regrettable the work did not come to full fruition for the publication in the
Jahrbuch because then the tensions and ambiguities we find here would
have been perhaps less severe.
The basis and core of these essays and MSS are the ninety-three pages
which are Husserl's response to a financially generous invitation by the
Japanese journal Kaizo. The name of the journal means "renewal" and this
apparently occasioned the focus of the essay. Three of the five essays bear a
title with the word "renewal" in it. You can read for yourselves in the fme
editorial introduction the historical and biographical facts surrounding the
genesis of these essays and the others the authors have chosen to include.
The best summary statement is in Husserl's letter to Albert Schweitzer:
"My theme is taken from the literal tide of the journal, 'Renewal'...
Renewal in the sense of ethical turnabout and the formation of a universal
ethical human culture" (Hua XXVII, xi).
The style of writing is for the most part popular and often homiletic. The
philosophical discussion and distinctions seem to take place in the natural
attitude; with the exception of some appended texts, especially pp.

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129-181, the transcendental attitude is not ever an explicit theme and
neither the writer nor the reader are ever engaged in discussions which
require the radical break with the natural attitude. I think we may say that a
good part of the discussions are in the service of what Husserl calls "the
ethical reduction," i.e., a reflection on whether the drift of one's life and
style of self-preservation are truly in one's best interests and really what
one wants to be responsible for. Clearly a reason for this popular philosophical and often homiletic style is, of course, the choice of the theme of
"renewal".
Another reason for the style is that he doubtless expected the Japanese to
be unfamiliar with his thought. But perhaps the chief reason for the choice
of style is the dilemma in which Husserl found himself: He must deliver his
message on the soteriological role of philosophy and reason to an audience,
which would be both European and a European-influenced Japanese,
disposed to specialist sciences, moral and political hype, skepticism and
cynicism. In Hua XXVII, 117, he describes the mentality of the broad
masses of modem Europeans who, he says, are the booty of social forces
which weaken the power of scientific reason and even the wisdom and
common sense of empirical intuition - a distinction to which we will later
return - in favor of the authority of political, social-economic and nationalistic clich6s. What reigns are Realpolitiker, egoism and a fetishim of
technocratic-specialist sciences. In this climate one smiles superciliously at
the belief in the power of reason and philosophy to transform humanity to
an ever more pure form of self-consciousness and to an era of a kingdom of
God on earth. Thus, just as the learned academics confess allegiance to a
skepticism in the form of positivism or fictionalism (the philosophy of the
as-if) or the philosophy of the superman - all of which present themselves
as a positive truth whose essential sense, basic presuppositions and theses
deny the very possibility of positive truth - so in the realm of praxis the
rationality of the day is defined by the power mongers and brokers with
their determinations of reasonable political and economic reality in terms of
Realpolitik - all of whose proposals fly in the face of the categorical
imperatives which emerge from reason (Hua XXVII, 117-118).
As we shall see, what makes possible Husserl's seeming hermeneutical
naivety is the theory that intuitions of values are at the core of the culture
and these may be evoked in such a way as to exercise a purifying force as
well as a critique of the culture. In this respect the function of the occasional homiletic tone is to evoke the appreciation of some core values at
the heart of the Europeanized Japanese culture.
The time of the writing of this text is somewhat reminiscent of our own
era in that a widespread pessimism, if not cynicism, weighed on the souls of
many. I have in mind in our own day the themes of "the end of nature," the

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apocalypse of the avalanche of ecological catastrophes, and the general
sense that the ideal of reason is, if not down-right pernicious, burned out.
'~'he Great War," as it has been called, wasted European culture until 1918
with its military means of compulsion; and, Husserl observes, since the end
of the war the "finer" means of mental torture and the depraving forces of
severe economic need have been in play. The war, at the same time,
revealed the inner untruth and meaninglessness of the culture.
Similarly in our day we hear from feminists, peace researchers, and
ecologists that there is something rotten at the heart of things in our society
and culture. For me a mostJimpressive statement comes from Rudolf Bahro,
in his Die Logik der Rettung: Wer kann die Apokalypse aufhalten? where
we hear that our participation in the exterministic bent of the megamachine
of modem society, has similarly revealed the inner decay and moral
bankruptcy of our culture.l We hear from many quarters and over and over
again that it is the hybris of reason, logos, rationality, science, intellect, and
theoretical understanding that is one of the profound symptoms if not
causes of our cultural decay. An Indian "Green" thinker, Vandana Shiva has
characterized the patriarchal Western special epistemology of the "scientific
revolution" as reductionistic because
it reduced the capacity of humans to know nature both by excluding
other knowers and other ways of knowing, and it reduced the capacity of
nature to creatively regenerate and renew itself by manipulating it as
inert and fragmented matter.2
Certain strains in Hussefl would fall under this critique, especially when
nature is reduced to the considerations of its being a mere substrate for
animating apperceptions. Yet such an unqualified charge of a Husserlian
reductionism does not do justice to the remarkable vitality of the stratum
from the viewpoint of the ultimate constitution of inner-time consciousness;
nor does it take account of his project of a reconstructive philosophy of
nature or his universal monadology. At the same time Husserl has his own
massive critique of Western culture and science and a powerful early
statement appears in Hua XXVII. What I wish to do on this occasion is to
present some of Husserl's views on the constitution, nature, evolution, and
ideal of culture especially as they are presented in this volume. Along the
way there will be occasion to note some tensions in his positions. I will
neglect the prominent theme of the constitution of the ethical personality
because I have elsewhere devoted much space to it. I will begin by summarizing some more systematic positions on the nature of culture.

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2. Culture and objective spirit

Early in Hua XXVII we f-End a general description of what culture is.
In a culture the unity of an active life objectifies itself whose total subject
is a particular people. Therefore what we mean by culture is nothing but
the group of achievements which occur in the ongoing activities of
people in a community and which have their abiding spiritual existence
in the unity of the communal consciousness and its continuing tradition.
On the basis of its physical embodiment, its externalized expression of
the original creator, these achievements are experienceable in their
spiritual meaning for each subsequent person capable of understanding.
These achievements can, in the subsequent times, ever again emanate
spiritual forces for ever new generations in the framework of historical
continuity (Hua XXVII, 21-22).
In other texts written around the same time (especially in Hua XIV) we
have discussions of culture more integrated into favorite themes of Husserl.
I will here give only the barest outline of what I regard as a fascinating
story. In these other texts also culture is tied to the constitution of personhood or the personal I. The constitution of personhood rests on the capacity
to shape the immediate sensible presence in a way which surmounts its
immediacy by acts which enjoy a validity beyond the immediate present.
Husserl generally calls these "position-takings" (Stellungnahmen). We may
think of culture in the sense of cultura culturans as the constituting of these
ideal formations. Culture as cultura culturata, as what the constituting
effects, may be regarded as the constituted idealities. But these, it must be
noted, are also derivatively "constituting," i.e., as "personal traditions" or
the traditions of a people they abidingly shape human lives.
Properly, of course, culture refers to the intersubjective constitution of
idealities which have an abiding validity and which, in the proper sense,
shape a community, a people, etc. [We can note that almost all the achievements ("personal culture") which establish the individual personal I are
intersubjective in the sense that they involve the co-presence of others and
are rendered as public or intersubjectively valid. They are not, however,
constituted through and with Others, nor are they constituted as formative
of "us all" but rather formative for and definitive of my unique life even
though valid for anyone in my shoes.] Husserl often, however, appeals to
person-constitution to elucidate what a tradition is and how a "person of a
higher order," i.e., a community in the proper sense - a theme which we
shall here neglect -, gets constituted with its distinctive identity.
Culmra culturans, as the constituting of idealities by persons or communities, is inseparable from the produced ideality (cultura culturata)
which, in turn, inculcates (awakens) the constitution of persons and tradi-

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tions which, in both cases and inseparable from one another, is an ongoing
constitution of idealities and persons as members of a culture.
As Iso Kern has observed, 3 the phenomenological basis for appreciating
the Hegelian topic of "objective spirit" is the theme of "indications"
(Anzeichen). To be precise, objective spirit has to do with formations of
sensibility which indicate a human achievement as well as occasion, by
their so indicating, certain types of intentional acts, e.g., perceiving, acting,
and representing in its various forms (picturing, reading, speaking, etc.). 4
We may here note that for Husserl "objective spirit" is a phrase which is
used occasionally both for the Other, i.e., the empathically-perceived I who
"there" is a "here" as I am. But he also uses it in a sense which is closer, but
still quite removed from Hegel, i.e., as a besouled or inspirited (begeistete)
object (see, e.g., Hua IV, 239 and 244). This latter sense requires that we
distinguish this mode of being besouled from both the apperception by
which we can take something as .... i.e., invest the world in general with
meaning, and from the appresentation through which a spirit is made
present which besouls a Leib. And similar to the interwoveness of the
founding and founded layers in these two cases it is important to remember
that the founded grasping of something as a script, an artwork, etc., is not a
matter of laminating on top of the apperceived spatial-temporal thing. The
grasping of something as a sign, an artwork, or a script is not superimposing
a higher-level meaning on top of another layer which itself is the result of
another position-taking or attitude, e.g., on top of the red pentagonal thin
object, the ink on the paper, the massive piece of limestone. Such a description, which externalizes the cultural object from the physical object, distorts
their unity and the unity of attitude (see, e.g., Hua IV, 239).
We may note here that Hussed approaches Hegelian themes in his
concept of a person of a higher order; but, of course, this "we" which is an
analogous "I" is always constituted from below and is never constitutive
"from above" of its members in an original way. Furthermore one must
keep the notion of objective spirit, i.e., culture as Anzeichen and cultura
culturata/culturans, separate from the personality of a higher order. In
Hegel cultura culturata or Anzeichen fuses together with spirit as a higherorder quasi-person.
Perhaps another point of contact with Hegel's objective spirit is the
Aristotelian theme of entelechy which is one of the most undeveloped but
significant aspects of Husserl's occasional systematic proposals. We will
briefly turn to this issue below.
The basic phenomenological issue with Hegel, and here I am indebted to
Iso Kern, is that reason immersed in sensibility or what Husserl also calls
humanized nature (cultural culturata) awakens, but does not produce a
spiritual activity which besouls sensibility. How may one understand

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culture as awakening but not producing spiritual activity? When we
understand culture as the shaping of a spatial-temporal sameness in sensibility it can be said that wakeful mind goes in advance. Yet it can be said
that the reason immersed in nature, i.e., the "shaped" ideality, awakens and
goes in advance in that it motivates or pre-ordains certain kinds of representing acts and acts of self-detelmination. Thus phonemes, words,
pictures, statues, tools, steps, traffic signs, etc. are there first of all (in
psycho-genetic as well as transcendental-genetic senses) as temporal and
sometimes spatial-temporal identity syntheses founded in creative personal
or intersubjective acts. For the subsequent perceivers of them their sense is
to awaken a certain kind of achievement, a kind of intentional act; as
familiar parts of our surroundings they become besouled through passive
and automatic association. As learned, inculcated, etc. the acts of representation and self-determination that are called forth are not at the discretion or
caprice of the individual; rather, the "indication" is there calling forth a
determinate actuation, re-presencing, etc. Specific kinds of besouling acts
are awakened or called forth through the association. But the besouling of
sensibility is not achieved eo ipso through the simple fact of the existence
of the reason immersed in sensibility in the form of an indication - as if its
simple actuality were the besouling of another (e.g., my) spirit, making my
besouling unnecessary or redundant. Let these very brief remarks suffice for
a sketch of some of the foundational issues in Husserl's theory of culture.
We may now turn topics which have to do with its telos.

3. The entelechy of culture

In Hua XXVII we gain glimpses of the symbols or utopian approximations
of the infinite regulative idea and telos of human history as a godly person
of a higher order. Before we look at these I wish to summarize briefly a
basic metaphysical-theological theme of this work. In the course of the
work the Aristotelian term "entelechy" or perhaps a Fichtean equivalent,
Zweckidee, appears (e.g., Hua XXVII, 37, 62, 98 ft., 109, 118 ft.).5 You
may recall that for Aristotle there were at least two basic senses given this
term. The f'irst has to do with what Aristotle means by "actuality" - the
usual English translation of entelecheia. This gives expression to his
position that being in the most proper sense is a completed unity (cf. De
Anima, 412b 8 ft.). The more perfect the being, the more its completion
(telos) and unity are essential to and inseparable from it. The three words
which the neologism bring together, echein (having), telos (end), and en
(within) may be initially rendered as "having the goal immanently." In
Aristotle's primary sense "entelechy" derives from the consideration of the
action accomplished or brought to its term in contrast to an action which is

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in the course of being realized. "Entelechy" can be said to be the dominant
sense of what is because what is in and of itself actual and complete is
foremostly a unity; and what is a unity foremostly is what is most actual or
being. Thus what is being in the most proper sense is the source of the
process and change of what is in a lesser sense. Thus entelechy as actuality
is prior in the order of genesis and of time, prior to what is only potential,
prior to the process of actualization, prior to substance (Metaphysics 1050a
3). In the case of the divine being the priority of actuality is that of a final
cause. Thus the divine being is entelecheia even ofphysis because it is prior
to the eide and the other unmoved movers which comprise the whole of
physis. Properly entelechy is always the actuality correlated to what it
actuates. But the divinity is absolutely perfect in itself; it not only has its
telos (which is the final cause of the universe) always already actually but it
does not have an entelechial function which enables the enhancement of the
kind of being which it is. Thus obviously Aristotle's God as pure actuality
is not a perfection realized through a process of development (Metaphysics
1071a 36).
Yet there is a second but not disconnected sense of entelechy: the form
(eidos) or the inherent principle of structure or specific intelligibility which
enables a determinate actualization of a power. Here entelechy refers to a
formal-essential actuality which functions as the actuation of hyle and
therefore which is in regard to this functioning not yet complete or fully
actual. Toward that end it works immanently, i.e., toward the realization of
that perfection or telos which is inseparable from, indeed, is itself as form
or eidos. Aristotle's concept of soul as first entelechy (in De Anima 412 a
27 ft.) points to this sense of entelechy.
It is this latter Aristotelian sense which ceteris paribus most reverberates
in Hussefl's discussions in Hua XXVII and other writings where he speaks
even of the "divine entelechy.'6 And here contact with Hegel may be made
for whom Aristotle's entelechy, in the case of the soul, "is the existing
concept of the being in its possibility. ''7
Without any analysis or discussion I will simply summarize Husserl's
views from Hua XXVII. The context generally is the type of development
of humanity and non-human organisms toward their telos. In several
passages Husserl uses the term of Zweckidee (e.g., Hua XXVII, 61, 88,
97-98, 109) to contrast the human with the non-human organic development. It is characteristic of all organic development that it, through a stream
of typical passage, heads toward a typical form of maturity. This is a
process which transpires realiter and independent of the consciousness of
the organism. Organic nature develops itself and forms a unity of nature
determined by unifying "conditions of life" tied to the unity of the planet
(Hua XXVU, 99).

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Each organism is part of a system of development, a system of selfcontained ideas of development (species) in which an indefinite number of
individuals manifest a typicality of kind and development. And this whole
system of ideas and of development is itself taken to be developing. New
species, phylogeneses, with new ontogeneses appear. Seemingly there is a
direction to ever higher form and complexity. This "drive" toward ideas and
to the conception of new ideas and this more or less perfect realization of
ideas and development of ideas of a higher order in no way means that there
is a conscious goal-directedness. The ideas here in the pre-conscious
organic realm are not intentional forms of conscious achievements. With
the animal we have consciousness and bodilyness; the animal has its
organism; it is not simply organism. The animal has its body and thus is an
organism in a new sense, i.e., a system of consciously given organisms to
which it can practically relate. The animal thus has organs of perception and
organs for voluntary agency in the environment outside the body. The
animal has its biophysical organism but it has it consciously only as a unity
of actual experiences, i.e., it deals with only what is immediately before it
in the unity of its consciousness; it is not able to integrate what is immediately present with the absent open and infinite horizons of possibility.
The animal follows blindly and passively the power of motivation of the
affections which cascade upon it and follows the desires which express its
self-realizing tendencies (Hua XXVII, 99).
Clearly this characterizes aspects of human life. But the human also has
the capacity to deal not only with the pressure and importunity of particulars and particular cases but he is able to integrate these in the horizon
of similars and wider generalities, and indeed within the entire universe of
possibilities (Hua XXVII, 100, 109-110).
Furthermore the human has the possibility and free capacity to be the
subject and object of its striving; the power to be its own craftsman, as it
were. Before each human there beckons the ideal of its authentic true self
and the ideal of a life in which it places its striving under a freely chosen,
autonomously appreciated ideal-goal (Zweckidee). In this case the human
life relinquishes the naivety and even the original beauty of natural growth
in order to reach the higher beauty of the ethical struggle with clarity and
truth (Hua XXVII, 36-37). Here I must insert that Husserl seems to hold
(Hua XXVII, 100 ft.) that the ideal can only be awakened by the presence,
whether actual or fictional, of an actual embodiment of the ideal in the form
of an exemplary person. We Shall return to this.
As the individual human can posit the goal-idea and consciously regulate
its life so can a community of humans. As the individual human has its
inborn telos or infinite idea of its true self and true life which, once
awakened, constitutes the categorical imperative so does a community of

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humans. That is, in the streaming unity of a c o m m u n a l a n d cultural life
there is an inborn idea of an authentic humanity, authentic communal life
and a categorical communal imperative (Hua XXVII, 118).
As the categorical imperative awakened in each individual bears witness
to the idea-goal as principle of development in the form of an autonomous
rational self-determination - an entelechy which is both an expression of
and transcendent to the entelechy of blind organic development evident in
the natural kinds and types - so the community may live a life which
expresses over and above its communal consciousness with its own type of
development an attunement to the true entelechy or be awakened to the
communal consciousness in its absolute form. Now it no longer lives in a
culture of blind becoming and growth, as rich as this might be in the
creation of values. Rather now it is organized to a unity of will which is
directed to its true humanity as an absolute idea and strives to take the
shape suitable to the development toward an absolutely valuable human
community (Hua XX-VII, 119).
Thus underlying human culture itself there is the automatic as well as the
free entelechial functioning. Each culture has seemingly a typical development to a typical form of maturity. Each culture may be seen as guided by
an axiological principle of form (Hua XXVII, 108) which more or less
adumbrates the entelechy of logos and the divine, which for Husserl is the
entelechy of entelechies. Thus, e.g., we may speak of the development of
Greek art to the zenith of a Phidias. The ideal philosophical culture, which
correlates to the individual's free following of what Husserl terms the
absolute ought and categorical imperative, is adumbrated as well as hindered in the types of culture which precede it. The details of such
foreshadowing and obstruction we will pass by here.

4. The communal and philosophic ideal of culture

The ideal community towards which the vectors of theoretical and practical
life point are given several indications in this work. For me one of the most
important is found in a passage where he illustrates the ideal community
and common life by an example. This ideal life would be comprised of
individuals joined together with the same basic attitude united under the
idea of a true humanity and of a universal "science" as a form of worldly
wisdom which serves the ideal of true humanity. This would not be a
collection of individuals each having incidentally the same will directed
incidentally to the same ideal but rather it would be a community of wills in
which a communal will would penetrate and unify the individual lives and
wills. He takes the world community of mathematicians to provide a cipher

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for this ideal human community, i.e., for showing how an enlightened
communal will is formed in striving after the common good:
There is thus a universal bond of wills present which creates a unity of
will. And this happens without an imperialist organization of will, a
central will in which all single wills are centered and to which all must
subordinate themselves voluntarily and whose functionaries each must
acknowledge himself to be. (Note: We can here speak of a communist
unity of wills in contrast to an imperalist unity.) Here is the consciousness of the communal goal of the common good to be pursued, of an
encompassing will of which all know themselves to be functionaries, but
as free - and not even a freedom which must practice renunciation - and
not subordinated functionaries (HuaXXVII, 52-53).
Husserl is drawn to numerous features of this example. First, it is commendable that the cultural achievements, i.e., the oral presentations, essays,
formulae, equations, etc. are not appropriated in a blind rote way. We will
return to this. It is important for him that the cultural achievements advance
other cultural achievements, indeed are the necessary conditions of advancement. No less important is the fact that the achievings and what they
achieve require an interpenetration of minds and wills wherein each is not
only supplemental to but part of each other's will and conceptual achievements. Further, the achievements come not "from above," i.e., are not the
result of a ruling will (imperium), class, genius, or segment, but they arise
from the cooperative and reciprocal interaction of minds and wills "from
below." And, finally, throughout the endless process of creation the insight
of the individuals is in play as an essential condition at every stage.
What is missing, I believe, in this model is attention to how political
reason, though in many respects analogous to theoretical reason, is still very
different. Husserl does not ask in what respect does the mathematical
community resemble and differ from the democratic political community in
establishing common goods and wills. How is political dis-course necessarily different from philosophical and mathematical discourse?
I may here state without argument that in spite of Husserl's often
sanguine attitude toward the state, I believe something like the ideal of
anarcho-communism pervades his ideal of culture. 8 The ideal of Husserl
here is in part that of Socrates, namely, that we know what we are doing
and we know that for the sake of which we undertake deeds. This is the
ideal of a communal and cultural life which is shaped out of a free reason
which reaches its advanced form in the idea of a philosophic culture. The
fruition of this Socratic/Platonic idea started to blossom in the modem
Enlightenment period; until then it remained always an unpractical ideal
(Hua XXVII, 108).

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The obvious tension in this view, and it is poignant in this volume, is in
what sense the philosophical culture requires everyone to be a philosopher.
Again, is not there a political reason, a dis-course, a habitus, by which
members self-displace to the points of view of others with the goal of
achieving a common good and common will, a kind of logos which is
different from that to which the mathematician and philosopher are bound?
Husserl's philosophical culture recalls the anarchist tradition as first
articulated in Godwin and Proudhon. Here we fred a devaluation of cultural
achievements, traditions, etc., in proportion to their falling into passivity,
lacking a legitimating evidence, although claiming, nevertheless, an
obedience. In general it is suspicious of experts and representation by
experts and leaders.
Nevertheless, because people have an inclination toward thoughtlessness
and languor in matters of judgment they must be vigilant in regard to
structures which encourage apathy. And this torpidity is in great part
because of a social arrangement wherein others are assigned the task of
representing "the masses" and making up their minds for them. For the
communal-anarchist tradition, it is generally true that the authority one
individual has over another stands in inverse ratio to the critical habitus of
the people in the culture. 9
Husserl's philosophic culture has at least this much in mind. Consider his
ideal of "the life of the spirit." By such an honorific term he means
not the total mental life, not the life in mere dull passivity, but rather the
universal realm of free active life with one another in the medium of
reciprocal understanding of individuals existing in personal community.
[This is characterized by a] life of goals personally posited, the achievements of which continually objectify themselves in sensible incarnate
works (Hua XXVII, 110).
Here we see another statement of the ideal of culture. But before we turn to
some more of the details of this ideal we must note that Husserl entertains
the view that the philosophic culture needs to be inaugurated and seemingly
led by an estate of philosophers, exemplarily instanced by transcendental
phenomenological ones. Following Plato, Fichte, Natorp, et alii, he
proposes a representative estate of philosophers as the necessary condition
for the emergence and continuation of the ideal non-statist community of
communities of communities - to use the term of Gustav Landauer. In this
function philosophers are the organ of the propagation to the laypeople of
the community's awareness of its true destiny (Hua XXVII, 54). On
occasion he seems inclined to equate this view with the claim that the
community is best represented by this estate of philosophers in terms of the
form and norm of authentic human life (Hua XXVII, 55). The ones who are
best empowered to say "we" and represent us in the initial determination of

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what is wise are members of the philosophical estate. Indeed each
philosopher is the place in which humanity's taking stock of itself is
realized (Hua XXVII, 235).
This is, of course, troubling. Consequences of this view, which initially
seem absurd, would be not only that phenomenologists would have as a
primary ethical task the conversion of as many as possible to phenomenology, but also that they would believe that phenomenologists as such would
be morally superior people. Here we do not merely have the theme of
permitting philosophy to reign as queen over community and society but
that philosophers should be kings. 1 The philosophic issue here is an
ancient one. Husserl insists (e.g., in the London Lectures), that the Cartesian quest of radical evidential foundations is continuous with the Socratic
quest to know ourselves and what we are doing. Indeed he laments on
several occasions (e.g., London Lectures and B 1 21 IV, 35-37) that modem
philosophy has become detached from the quest for wisdom and the good
life. Its technical expertise and its failure to ordain itself to the requirements
of practical reason and the quest of the good life, he maintains, is a disaster
for both philosophy and humanity (Hua XXVII, 107-124 and passim). An
underlying theme of the Kaizo essays is how the philosophical life must be
subordinate to the ethical task of authentic individual and communal life.
It occurs to me that a chief reason why Husserl can hold that there ought
to be an estate of transcendental phenomenologists is because he believes
that true philosophy, (and transcendental phenomenology is to be regarded
as exemplarily true philosophy), is coincident or at least continuous with
the quest of the moral life. If this is so, and we phenomenologists are not
making moral advancement, then the thesis regarding this coincidence is
false or we have not really been practicing true philosophy and transcendental phenomenology.

5. The ideal of authentic culture

The ideal of culture is tied to Husserl's early concept of authentic and
inauthentic concepts in his Philosophy of Arithmetic. I can see that the lot
across the street has three trees but I cannot see that it has thirty trees. I can
see that 3 = 2 + 1 but not that 5 x 4 = 20. I have immediate evidence for 1 +
1 + 1 = 3 but not that 8 x 6 = 48. Husserl says of the typical arithmetic
achievement that it is economic but blind and mechanical. Once the child
starts learning, e.g., multiplication tables there is the curious circumstance
of extraordinary convenience and efficiency but at the cost of evidence and
responsibility (see Hua XXI, 39, 232, 246, 242 ff.).
This is a paradigm for the social-cultural situation. In our everyday life

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we find ourselves increasingly not knowing what we are doing in our
purchasing, disposing, investing, travelling, voting, etc. For example: we
pick up our checks from which is drawn money for social security, income
tax, etc., and our consent is assumed for the use of these funds for purposes
which we frequently do not know or when we know them we have reason
to believe they might well be immoral.
Thus we can ask: In what sense we may be said to know what we are
doing in the most familiar tasks of our American cultural life? In an obvious
sense we know we are pushing a button, turning an ignition key, handling
money over to a bank teller or sales clerk, throwing away a wrapper,
flushing waste down a drain or toilet, X-ing a ballot, and even writing a
check for the government. These are evident activities. Yet the full and
perhaps essential sense of these activities is far from evident. Indeed, almost
everything about them is not only hidden from us but we would find it
difficult to know how to make them evident.
Perhaps it can be said that we all lead a double-life, a life where the
surface significance of our actions means one thing and where the true
sense of the action means something else: On the one hand, there is the life
of our everyday actions which have an obvious superficial evidence - but
the greater sense of which is hidden from us - and, on the other, there is our
political life, in which, because of the surface and obvious ritual of paying
taxes and visiting the ballot booth, we f-rod that others are constantly acting
in our name, whether we want it or not, doing things which we would not
ever do nor, given ample reflection, could we permit someone else t o do
them in our presence.
For Husserl all this would clearly point to an inauthentic cultural life:
'l'rue humanity requires a perpetual struggle against sinking into the lazy
nest of conventionality or, what is essentially the same, living in lazy reason
instead of living a life of authentic originalness of evidence" (Hua XIV,
231). In the Conversations recorded by Cairns we read: "Acts of all sorts
that I cannot affLrm genuinely are unethical. This is applicable not merely to
the individual but also to society. ''11
Clearly as Husserl is not saying that we ought to stop taking advantage of
the multiplication tables and the other devices of mathematical praxis, so
neither ought culture dispense simpliciter with technology and all structures
of representation. But as the enlightened mathematical praxis is amenable to
an analysis which makes evident the truth-value of the typically blind
mechanical procedures so the emptily intended mechanically practiced
conventions and representations ought to be able to be brought to an
original evidence. More important, there must be a human scale by which
we can both see and oversee the significance and evidence for these
practices and conventions. 12

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What does Husserl mean precisely by "a life of authentic originalness of
evidence? We here can only hint at the answer because the topic encompasses Husserl's philosophy. Certainly the treatment of ch. vi, of the sixth
of the Logical Investigations, i.e., that of categorial intuition, is basic. From
the discussion of the Philosophy of Arithmetic it is clear that what we do out
of blind convention and rote procedure, regardless of its efficiency and
fruitfulness, has the drawback of being without evidence and therefore
without responsibility. We involve ourselves in something which has
certain clear conveniences but whose evidence and sense remains, for the
most part, hidden to us.
Husserl claims that all cultural achievements are a common good in that
they are embodiments for everyone of spiritual contents which lie ready to
be actuated, awakened, brought to life. How? They lie there to be taken as
signs, indications, expressions, etc., i.e., as motivations to perform certain
acts, e.g., to be read, to be taken care of, to act in a certain way, to be reenacted, to be performed, etc. But he says that all such spiritual activity is
either an achievement step by step out of an originally evident motivation,
thus being moved on the basis of a pure intuition, or it is done in a secondary passive way which derives from a more original achievement and
activity (Hua XXVII, 110).
Here tradition is defined as an "appropriation" of an earlier achievement
of spirit through "bloBes Nachverstehen," which I am tempted to translate
as a "second-hand," or even "languid and second-rate understanding." In
the next sentence there is some clarification. He says "this can be completely external, or symbolic, as a more or less empty inkling without there
being a really autonomous, step-by-step recreation of the original steps of
production" (Hua XXVII, 110). Husserl claims that the inertia of most
people is such that they are content with a more or less empty symbolic
grasp of the cultural achievements. Similarly there can be a dissemination
of the achievement through weak copies, e.g., of paintings, which do not
have the power to awaken the original giveness of the original achievement.
Or the achievements can become part of a secondary sensibility or
habituality so that they fall into the dimension of the automatically conventional, the customary.
Thus he stipulates a contrast between "civilization" (or what is often
called "tradition") and "culture." The latter is the ideal sense of culture as a
communal spirituality which mediates all communal relationships and
which is characterized by a habituality which is always ready to awaken the
received achievements to their original intuitive validity, beauty, etc. But
culture always has as its milieu "civilization," i.e., what is sunken into the
conventional and merely traditional dimension of the scarcely understood
object or reason immersed in sensibility. As such civilization is not capable

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of reproducing the original motivations; these remain completely dead for it
(Hua XXVII, 111). The cultural ideal is that the entire people have this
habituality and not just a few. The notions of "awakening a culture," and
"cultural renewal" can refer to this revitalization of the cultural achievements. But this is appropriately a revitalization for the entire people, not
just a few.
Today's European culture is characterized by a weariness with science.
This is to a great extent justifiable because today's science has missed its
mark. The increase in specialization, information, and technological knowhow, in infinitum has neithe~ made us more blessed nor has it made us wiser
(Hua XXVII, 112-113). Similarly today's culture may be said to have
wandered from its inborn telos and has sinfully fallen into a distortion of its
entelechy in so far as it was aware at one time of this telos or enjoyed the
tree of knowledge. It has neither raised to full consciousness this telos nor
has it remained steadfast in living consistently in accord with it. Rather it
has been unfaithful to its true sense. Husserl insists that he is here (Hua
XXVII, 118) notpreaching a bad conservatism but rather is describing an
essential failure of western humanity.
Art works like those of Bernard Shaw can awaken us. Indeed, transcendental phenomenology itself is a source of renewal. God has not withdrawn
his hand from us.
God's power lives and fulfills itself nowhere else than in us, in our
radically genuine will. Where else does the living God make himself felt
than in our life, in our pure will, the will which is true to its utmost fibers
which wants nothing other than that which we cannot relinquish without
having to give up our life as meaningless (Hua X.XVII, 122).

6. Nature and function of religion

This text points to our concluding theme, the function of religion in culture.
Besides an appraisal of Western religion as both a forerunner to the
philosophical culture as well as an obstacle, one may fred in Husserl's
discussions elements of a theory of religious evidence and faith which seem
to be both juxtaposed and harmonized with the ideal of philosophical
evidence. Husserl regards "religion," in a specific sense, as an extension
and development to a higher level of mythic culture in which divinities are
absolutized to absolute norms of action and belief (Hua XXVII, 60).
Religion harnesses the totality of communal life under the requirements of
the divine norms. He regards religion as having an entelechy in the sense
proper to human development, i.e., it is not blindly functioning in the
maturation of an organism; rather, it here functions as a conscious axiologi-

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cal principle of form (cf. Hua XXVII, 108), a consciously constituted idealgoal, under the leadership of the class of priests (Hua XXVII, 62).
Religion is characterized by a kind of compulsion, unfreedom and lack of
criticism. Indeed, here freedom and the capacity for criticism are identified
(Hua XXVII, 63). Culture moves into its next higher form by way of two
possible freedom movements. One is the obvious one for students of
Husserl, i.e., the development of free science, the liberation movement of
logos in opposition to mythos which eventually calls into question the
attitudes of religion. The other movement, which the reader is perhaps
surprised to discover, is the form which religion itself may take.
In the characterization of this latter cultural type it seems to me we have
a fascinating theory of authentic religion which is Husserlian not only in the
sense of indicating who the author is but also in the sense that it bears
witness to some personal experiences of the author. Permit me to sketch for
you what is deserving of much more detailed study.
Hussed relates the objects and representations of religion to the experience of values. The experience of values has a basic core of what is
intuitively valid and evident but these are clothed in an "irrational facticity"
(Hua XXVII, 65) so that inseparably in religious presentations we have
intuitive insight and inherited irrational packaging. He holds that there is a
tendency toward a gradual spiritualization of these representations. The
"higher developing humans" are disposed to let the intuitively evident core
be the dominant tone in the totality of faith (Hua XXVII, 65).
Husserl does not explicitly relate this position on the experience of
values to his rich theory of value perception. 13 What would have to be
sorted out is how the perception of the value-core is packaged or tied to
what he here calls "irrational facticity." Is this irrational context part of the
founded objectifying acts upon which value-perception builds? Or is the
packaging part of the founded value-constituting acts themselves? Or is the
packaging tied to the experience of the ideals, e.g., as manifest in the
exemplary figures of a culture? Recall that in the Krisis we have the claim
that the perceptual realm of nature is alienated from us because it is
wrapped in an ideological garment (Ideenkleid) of the post-Galilean
mathematicized nature. Here culture educates us to look away from the
qualitatively experienceable nature in favor of the mathematical idealities.
But what is the relation of the values to the cultural apperceptions so that
Husserl can urge that they may emerge in a pure way so as to transform the
irrational cultural habitus of apperceptions? We have no clues to these
questions in Hua XXVII or, as far as I know, anywhere else. 14
Religion reaches a crisis when it is critically called into question in a
religiously rooted critique. Christ serves as an example of the case where
religion is called into question on the basis of values manifest in a most

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vital form of intuition. Religion undergoes a purification when its representations of the divine and the divine requirements are measured by an
increasingly pure intuition of values.
I want now to quote a text which seems to me to be of great interest for
several reasons. First, I believe it bears witness to Husserl's own experience
of what he would call authentic religion. This I think can be backed up by a
careful biographical study but also by the text in Hua XXVII, 100, which is
rich both as an autobiographical statement as well as a philosophical theory
on the nature of religious experience. Secondly, the theory of experience
here recalled is inseparable from an understanding of the divine as an Ideal
Pole-Idea (E III 4) or entelechy which is both transcendent to the transcendence of the world and immanent to the transcendence of the I-pole (Ideas
I, Sect. 51 and 58) - themes which I only mention because I have discussed
them at some length elsewhere. 15 In conjunction with this text we may note
the text just cited from the essay on G.B. Shaw, as well as the statement
which we find in Hua XXVII, 234: "The 'teleology' discovers, God speaks
in us, God speaks in the evidence of decisions which points through all
fmite worldliness to infinity." And here we may also note the enigmatic text
in Hua VI, 335, where Husserl claims that of God, from the human side, it
is proper to say that "his ontological and value validity is experienced as the
absolute inner bond." Thirdly, it is also inseparable from Husserl's theory
of what we might call utopian poetics or what he calls "idealist art" in Hua
XXII, 540 ff. Fourthly the type of religion which Husserl regards as
authentic clearly is the familiar one of the proto-reformation and the
Rheinland mystics for whom, as the Cairns Conversations record, he felt a
kinship. 16 Fifthly, this text, as well as the discussion in Hua XXVII, 100 ff.
make it clear that the ultimate sense of religious faith is founded in a filled
experience of value, an intuition of godliness within subjectivity. And the
proper sense of faith which this intuition founds is belief-in the ideal; this,
and not faith as a form of believing-that or as even believing someone, is
what provides the intuitive legitimacy of religious experience and renders
its kinship with the ideal of intuitive evidence; indeed, the realization of
logos itself requires a Vernunftglaube, which is a belief in the ideal of logos
which is inseparable ultimately from the belief in the ideal of a divine
humanity, the basis of the religious belief in the ideal. (Whereas the theme
of the loss of faith in reason is a theme in Hua XXVII, the sense of faith in
reason is not here developed; but cf. ibid., 207).
Here is the text of Husserl; remember the context is the liberation
movement whereby religion purifies itself in the form of a pure intuition of
the values which are at the core of religion:
The unified intuition here contains the character of a unity of original
religious experience, therefore also the character of an original ex-

108
perienced relation to God in which the subject of this intuition knows
himself to be addressed not by an external God who stands over against
him and [in which the subject] knows himself determined to be the
bearer of a communicated revelation. Rather, he knows God as intuited
in himself and as originally one with him. Therefore he knows himseff 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 (Wesens) implanted in him (aus einem ihm selbst eingelegten

Gehalt grttlichen Wesens).

Here there occurs a transformation of religion from out of the power of
original intuited values and norms, which are seen in the world as the
basis of the meaning of the world's salvation. Here is the evidence that
such a world really would make blessed the one who would live in
accord with the thoughtful grasp of this sense of the world, should he
realize the norm of the good within himself and thereby verify its sense
of salvation.
It is this evidence which gives faith its power and which grounds faith.
Faith makes blessed and it is true because it makes blessed, because it
proves the meaning of the world in the living of a meaningful life (Hua
XXVII, 65-66).
We pass by the theological pragmatism or utopian poetics of the last
sentence. We similarly postpone the question of how Husserl is in a
position to know the nature of the original experienced relation to God and
whether the description here has forms of correlative transcendental
phenomenological evidence. Instead I immediately call your attention to an
exemplification of this pure intuition of values in Hua XXVII, 100-101.
Here Husserl discusses what he believes is the effect of an honest encounter
with the figure of Christ as presented in the Gospels, namely the experience
of the ideal of the "pure God-man," which presumably is the experience of
the original relation to God, the theme of the text we just cited.
But this connection is not explicit in these pages. Indeed, the basic point
of this text would seem to be that one makes religious experiences only
when one is awakened to the power of the idea. And one makes ethical
experiences only through the concrete loving intuition of the goodness of
others. This goodness discloses itself in the evidence of a pure fulfillment of
an intentional act of love as a value-intention (Hua XXVII, 102).
These texts furthermore suggest a theme almost neglected in this work,
namely how culture is also ethos, i.e., how, to put it in Aristotelian terms,
culture establishes the beginnings of character over which the individual
agent has no control. In Hua XXVI-I, 46 this precise theme is broached
abstractly where Husserl establishes a correlation between individual virtue
and that of the community of which he or she is a member. And on p. 121

109
of the same volume he notes the significance of good examples in the
awakening of the individual to the appropriate character.
The encounter with the exemplarily good person - the condition for
one's wanting to be good - as in the case of Christ, need not be an experience "in person," or "in the flesh" (leibhaftig). A novelist could effect
such a presence (Hua XXVII, 101). Indeed, Husserl reads the Gospels as a
novel or a legend and claims to be awakened to an infinite love of this
trans-empirical figure. He experiences the Jesus of the Gospels as an
embodiment of a pure Idea of an ideal God-man. Hussed feels himself
filled with blessedness when he thinks that this infinite person lives a life
which includes himself. Christ, then, has the power to awaken the presence
of the reality of the idea which irradiates a power which we may call
believing-in the idea, or in this case believing in this legendary individualized idea. Thereby does this idea become a power in his life. And the love
of the idea makes one receptive to the tradition in which it is situated. Such
experiences serve as the experiential material for what may be called a
"pure" theology or a true theory of religion (Hua XXVII, 102). But note
that the function of the exemplar is to awaken to the ideal. And the exemplarity of the exemplar can be manifest even in fictional presentations.
Here religion at its best is utopian poetics, i.e., what awakens to an effective
love of the ideal. This function of religion may or may not be found in
traditional religions.

7. Conclusion
I think it can be said that many of the very suggestive ideas especially in the
manuscripts and essays appended to the Kaizo lectures are sketches which
Husserl merely "threw out." Their value, of course, lies both in their
potential merit as well as in the light they shed on other aspects of Husserl's
more solidly developed thought. I have especially in mind the theme of the
way the intuition of values is at the core of cultural experience and how this
core experience can come to dominate the articulation of cultural idealities.
Aside from its intrinsic interest as a theory of value perception, especially
religious experience, I believe it of great importance for, on the one hand,
building up the notion of the polis "from below" wherein the points of view
of everyone must be included regardless of their philosophical and educational training. Secondly, it defuses the tendency in Husserl to think of the
polis as needing philosophers, in particular, transcendental phenomenologists, as the vanguard elite of a philosophical culture. The proposal that
there is possible a pure intuition of values in spite of privilege and in spite
of the pressure of the culture and society points in the direction of the ideal

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of a non-statist and grass roots version of the polis wherein a basic virtue
would be the ability to participate in all the relevant views and seek the
c o m m o n g o o d in and through these views. 17

Notes
1. Ulrich Melle has on numerous occasions, most recently in the Freiburg
Symposium on "Die Frage nach dem Anderen" made connections between
Husserl and Bahro. Of this talk Wemer Marx rightly said that never had he
heard any one speak so beautifully of Husserl.
2. Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive (London: Zed Books, 1989), p. 22.
3. See Iso Kern, Idee und Methode der Philosophie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975), p.
371.
4. Lester Embree's Gurvitsch Lecture at the 1990 SPEP meeting helped me add
this precision.
5. In Die Tatsachen des Bewusstseins (1810-1811) in Fichtes Werke, Vol. 11
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971), pp. 658 ft., Fichte uses the term "Endzweck" in a
way similar to Husserl's "Zweckidee." Yet it seems unlikely that Husserl ever
read this work and I have not been able to find the same concept in the popular
writings which he did read.
6. See, e.g., B 1 4, 52 ft.; for published texts see, e.g., Hua XXVII/, 225-226. See
my "Entelechy in Transcendental Phenomenology: A Sketch of the Foundations of Husserlian Metaphysics," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
66.3 (1992).
7. Hegel, Sdmtliche Werke, Vol. 18, Philosophie der Geschichte H (Stuttgart:
Frommann), p. 373.
8. I try to make this case most explicitly in my forthcoming work The Person and
the Common Life: Studies in a Husserlian Social Ethics (Kluwer, 1992).
9. See, e.g., William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (New York:
Viking Penguin, 1985), p. 198.
10. For this distinction I am indebted to the learned book of K. Schuhmann,
Husserls Staatsphilosophie (Freiburg/Munich: Alber, 1988).
11. D. Caims, Conversations with Husserl and Fink (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976),
p. 35.
12. R. Phillip Buckley has helped me to see this point more clearly.
13. For a discussion, see my "Axiology as the Form of Purity of Heart: Meditations on Husserliana XXVIII," in Philosophy Today (1990).
14. I pursue these matters in greater detail in "The Study of Religion in Husserl's
Writings," in Philosophy and the Cultural Disciplines, ed. Mann Daniel and
Lester Embree, Center for Advanced Phenomenological Research, forthcoming
(Kluwer, 1993).
15. See my "A Precis of an Husserlian Philosophical Theology," in Essays in
Phenomenological Theology, ed. Steven Laycock and James Hart (Albany:
SUNY, 1986), pp. 138-141.
16. Cairns, Conversations, p. 91. See also the entry for 5. September 1917 in
Husserl-Chronik, ed. K. Schuhmarm (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), p. 215.
17. I present, much indebted to Hannah Arendt, a Husserlian theory of political
reason in the fifth chapter of my forthcoming work The Person and the

Common Life.