God in modernity: Husserl

Abstract

In Husserl, God is identified as cause of the teleological order of the world, absolute and transcendent; but the divine being falls outside the scope of phenomenological study and must be “bracketed”. Husserl insists on a radical distinction between God’s transcendence and that of consciousness. However, the nature of the difference is unclear. The analysis of transcendental subjectivity manifests a priori grounds or functions which possess a seemingly divine absoluteness: the Logos of all possible beings, at once universal and concrete, reminiscent of the spinozian and kantian conceptions of the divine mind; the guarantee of intersubjectivity, analogous to God’s role as the guarantee of truth in Descartes; and a tension toward omni-comprehension, with religious connotations comparable to those of Kant’s “ideal of reason”. As in the case of the transcendental subject’s role as “constitutive” of meaning, a role which is ambivalent between “creativity” and mere “dynamic discovery”, the limits of the phenomenological method preclude a definitive resolution of the ambiguity. The question requires a positive confrontation between phenomenology and classical metaphysics.