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Edmund Husserl on the Historicity of the Gospels. A Different Look at Husserl’s Philosophy of Religion and his Philosophy of the History of Philosophy

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Abstract

There is an obscure but recurring strain of Edmund Husserl’s theological ideas, simultaneously bearing on the question of the historicity of philosophy, which spans the entirety of Husserl’s oeuvre and has yet evaded closer scholarly attention. My paper combines the textual study of the passages in question with a survey of Husserl’s biography and a meticulous reconstruction of the relevant cultural-historical backgrounds—ranging from professional exegesis to general cultural-historical phenomena and to historical speculations by one of Husserl’s family friends and colleagues at the University of Halle—in order to obtain a useful concrete cross-section of the interconnected debates on Husserl’s views—and their possible phenomenological ramifications—on the history of religion, respectively the history of philosophy.

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Notes

  1. Husserl (1919), 156, 157—All translations are by the present author, unless indicated otherwise (Bible quotations or paraphrases are in KJV, as this fulfilled a historically-sociologically similar role than the Luther Bible).—My paper expands a historical footnote from my recent non-English book on the philosophy of the history of philosophy (Varga 2020b, p. 248, n. 239), as well drawing on some of the general consequences in it and other research of mine on Husserl (without any direct textual dependances).

  2. See my reconstruction of Husserl’s studies in Vienna (on the basis of archival sources): (Varga 2015; Varga 2018), 107 ff. In the present section, I attempt to the develop further biographical and metaphilosophical implications of this historical reconstruction with regard to Husserl’s religious and metaphilosophical commitments.

  3. See Schuhmann (1977 15, 1988a, 149). It must be noted that the report on Masaryk’s role in Husserl’s conversion, though historically plausible and consistent with Masaryk’s own views, is probably only based on hagiographical recollections upon the occasion of Husserl’s seventieth birthday in 1929, published in the Česká mysl. Časopis filosofický, vol. 25, no. 2, p. 189 (not to mention Masaryk’s political career by then).

  4. Stumpf’s response to Brentano’s well-known letters of recommendation has only recently been published: Brentano and Stumpf (2014, 262).

  5. Based on the actual inscription (capitalization updated accordingly).

  6. Cantor (1991), 373 = Tapp (2005, 532). This statement is stronger and more relevant philosophically than Cantor’s other letters cursorily quoted by the Schuhmanns (see Schuhmann & Schuhmann 1994, 34, n58). The lack of this stronger version of Cantor’s testimony might have led them to discount Husserl’s retrospective report of “overpowering religious experiences” (Husserl 1994, IV, 408).

  7. Tapp (2005), 371 = Purkert & Ilgauds (1987, 207). Ironically, Cantor was mistaken about Hugo Spitzer. Even though Spitzer’s religion is not specified in any lexica of which I am aware, he was, according to the baptismal registers, born in the remote mountain village Einöde (Steiermark) in the Habsburg Monarchy on April 7, 1854 and baptized as a Catholic in the nearby St. Stephan Church (see Ms. Matricula Online, St. Stefan bei Duernstein [rk. Diözese Gurk], Geburtsbuch VI, p. 49 = https://data.matricula-online.eu/en/oesterreich/gurk/st-stefan-bei-duernstein/S73_007-1/?pg=51 [last downloaded: September 23, 2021]). By the way, there was a Hugo Spitzer who obtained a doctoral degree in law in Vienna around the same time as Husserl and was member of the Jewish community of Vienna to which Husserl himself nominally belonged until 1886. In the case of Paul Natorp, whom Cantor denounced as being a “disciple of the Jewish Kant scholar Hermann Cohen” (Tapp 2005, 371), Cantor’s information was at least factually valid (he probably also knew that Natorp himself was a Protestant).

  8. Cf. Gassen & Landmann (1958), 114. At the same time, I disagree with the Schuhmanns’ harsh evaluation of Husserl’s own relationship to his Jewish identity (see Schuhmann & Schuhmann 1994, 16 ff.), for reasons I am not able to specify here.

  9. Gibson (1971), 71. Husserl’s memories are consistent with Volker Peckhaus independent analysis of the corresponding archival sources (1990, 206–209).

  10. Cf. the eulogy in Chronik der Georg-August-Universität zu Göttingen […] 1901 (Göttingen: Dieterich [W. Fr. Karstner], 1902), p. 19.

  11. On the development of Husserl’s idea of a parallelism between the ethical and the logical spheres in the 1900s, see the pioneering study: Melle (1990).

  12. Husserl (1988, 387–388).

  13. Husserl (1994, III, 41). Concerning the English title of the journal, see p. 45, vol. VIII, p.273.

  14. No books or articles written by Bertrand Russell as a public intellectual during and after the Great War are preserved in the extant library of Husserl; thus, Husserl’s knowledge of such activities of Russell was, probably, of second hand (in contrast to the earlier more direct, though unfortunate interaction between the two; see Varga (2016, 27 ff.).

  15. See Sect. 2.3 below.

  16. Husserl (1989, 101).

  17. Impartial publication during Husserl’s lifetime: Husserl (1936); early critical edition: Husserl (1962).

  18. Husserl (1993, 49) (emphases in original edition; ┌…┐ pencil insertions in original manuscript, cf. 453).

  19. Husserl (1993, 50).

  20. The Schuhmanns believed that Husserl studied with J. E. Erdmann in Berlin (see Husserl 1994, VIII, 236, n. 19), which, however, must be mistaken, since J. E. Erdmann was teaching in Halle continuously from 1836 until his death in 1892. According to my archival research, the “Erdmann” Husserl studied at was the young Benno Erdmann (1851–1921), unsalaried lecturer (Privatdozent) in Berlin between 1876 and 1878, whose lecture course Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy Husserl visited in his first semester in Berlin (Ms. Archiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin {Germany], Rektor und Senat, Abgangszeugnis v. 18.03.1881, Husserl, Edmund, cf. Verzeichnis der Vorlesungen [… Berlin SS 1878] [S.l.: s.d.], p. 11; Amtliches Verzeichnis des Personals und der Studierenden […] 1878, [Berlin: Gustav Schade, 1878] p. xiii).—This brings us to Husserl’s reference to his studies at J. E. Erdmann in Halle, which might simply be mistaken memory on the part of the septuagenarian Husserl, e.g., fusing the memory of his studies in Berlin with B. Erdmann who, in turn, became Husserl’s colleague in Halle in 1890. Also note that J. E. Erdmann was decades elder than Kähler whom alone Husserl called “old”. Or else Husserl indeed studied informally with the aging historian of philosophy J. E. Erdmann in Halle while preparing for the habilitation in 1886–1887.

  21. See, e.g., Gerlach and Sepp (1994), 188, n. 38. Owing to the energic support of Stumpf and the benevolence of the dean—who was, incidentally, none else than J. E. Erdmann (see note 20 above) —Husserl not only avoided the full repetition of the doctoral process (including the submission of a separate doctoral dissertation), which seems to have been nominally required in case of naturalized foreign doctoral degrees, but he also managed to carry out his examination (June 28) and public debate (July 2) without having any dissertation printed and published, on the basis of his one-page-long habilitation theses print alone (see 175 ff.).

  22. The original publication of Kähler’s eponymous public lecture: Kähler (1892). The controversy—which involved, inter alia, Ferdinand Kattenbusch (1851–1935), professor of theology with a brief stay in stay in Göttingen between 1904 and 1905, and Wilhelm Herrmann (1846–1922), professor of theology in Marburg since 1879—is well documented in the critical commentaries and supplemental texts collected in Kähler 1969.

  23. Husserl seem to have first became aware of Schweitzer in 1923 (see Husserl 1994, VII, 253), when the latter was already an acclaimed public intellectual. He continued to be enthusiastic about Schweitzer’s general philosophy of culture, which might have inspired him in the contexts of both the Kaizo and later the Crisis writings projects (see ibid. and IX:455).

  24. In the Ideas… Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, the seminal work of the early Phenomenological Movement (first published in Spring 1913), Husserl infamously claimed that the question of God as an “ ‘absolute’ and transcendent being […] shall remain excluded from the new field of research” (Husserl 1976, 125; quoted translation: 1982, 134). This declaration resulted in a view prevalent amongst early phenomenologists and early scholars alike, according to which Husserl’s reflections on God and religion were, at best, “casual and unsystematic”, while “[t]he real work in phenomenology of religion was initiated by Husserl’s disciples,” namely, Max Scheler and Jean Hering, respectively “independent thinkers […] influenced by” Husserl (Dupré 1968, 214–215). It must be mentioned that, in the hindsight, the list of early phenomenologists whose oeuvres are the most promising from the point of view of theology includes first and foremost Edith Stein and Adolf Reinach, whose turn towards religion in 1916–1917—as well as the broader effects of the Great War on other early phenomenologists in general—could have resulted in a fundamental transformation of the Phenomenological Movement, had Reinach not died on the battlefields of Flanders (cf. Varga, 2020a, 95 ff.).

  25. Husserl (2014). On the modern received view on Husserl’s philosophical theology, see, beside the informative introduction by the volume’s editors, esp. Lo (2008); Held (2010).

  26. Husserl (2014, 259). There exist some distinct parallel formulations in Husserl’s correspondence (“for me, in the end, philosophy is my a-religious way to religion, so-to-speak my a-theistic way to God;” (Husserl, 1994, IX, 124 [1935]; see also: “phenomenological philosophy, as an idea tending to infinity, is, of course, ‘theology’” VIII, 88 [1933; note the geometrical terminus technicus]; Husserl’s “scholarly [interest] in the parallelism of [Erich Przywara’s] theological and [Husserl’s] atheological philosophizing;” VII, 237 [1932]) and early private testimonies (“[f]inally, one arrives from this universal science, as worked out by phenomenology, to a teleological progress that, in the end, leads to God, the Absolute;” Jaegerschmid 1981, 49) that, albeit well-known and undoubtedly authentic, had been perplexing without the backdrop of the theoretical framework indicated above.

  27. Husserl (1989, 101–102).

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    Peter Andras Varga

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Varga, P.A. Edmund Husserl on the Historicity of the Gospels. A Different Look at Husserl’s Philosophy of Religion and his Philosophy of the History of Philosophy. Husserl Stud 38, 37–54 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-021-09298-7

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