[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

Nevertheless, some of Husserl’s statements permit other interpretations. They make uspay attention to Augustine’s achievement. Husserl was to find there a way of reachingGod, similar to his own and consisting in going deep into one’s own subjectivity. Theauthor of the Confessions emphasized how God was closer to him than he was to himself,and that the way to God starts at the spiritual level; but he did not stop there. WhereasHusserl was not looking for God, but for the truth:We find different transcendence, which is not like pure Ego directly given with reducedconsciousness, but which we experience very indirectly.... I mean transcendence thatis God.... He would be transcendent not only for the world, but certainly also for the“absolute” consciousness.... We are naturally spreading phenomenological reductiononto this “absolute” and “transcendence.” It should be excluded from this field of studythat we are to create from scratch since this is supposed to be a field of pure consciousnessonly. 13Since God is not just a phenomenon, He cannot be placed at the same level as pureconsciousness, and -- even more so -- this consciousness cannot be made into a placewhere God is manifested and to be found. He is not reachable by the human mind assuch, and this is why God reaches the dimension of the ideal telos -- divinity. Husserlhimself stressed that God -- if God exists -- is “absolute” in a completely different sensethan consciousness, and that the “absolute experience” available to the human being hasa finite dimension. 14 For this reason, some researchers say that Husserl’s phenomenologywas, in its assumptions, egocentric, and theocentric in its purpose. 15 Therefore, Augustineis closer to Husserl’s standpoint than Thomas Aquinas. But Husserl himself knew that, inorder to resolve the “issue of God,” he had to go beyond the phenomenological structureof philosophy and turn toward metaphysics. The issues around the fundamental characterof transcendental consciousness cannot be easily avoided. Yet he did not leave phenomenology,since he was looking for what it was possible to achieve while staying in itsconfines, namely, the building of a philosophical method that would ensure that a properfoundation can be created for human culture in general. Therefore, reality is for him onlya human reality, and the human mind consequently has abilities that are almost divine.Did he credit phenomenology with being a special kind of “new religion”?In his works, Husserl did not mention any personal experience of faith. He did notexamine God as an object of religious or para-religious acts, but he did point to God asa theoretical possibility. Nevertheless, only a possibility. When stressing the role of “thehighest innner concentration,” he perhaps left a space for “the silence of faith.” He knewthat religious experience can be described only as far as it is really experienced. Contraryto Roman Ingarden, he did not construct an idea of God. He preferred to sit on the fence,caught in a kind of intellectual paradox. His search was concentrated on a “God withoutGod,” without recourse to the tools of metaphysics. 16 While unable to overcome subjectivism,he could nevertheless accept that looking for truth is inseparably connected with God.13Husserl, Idee czystej fenomenologii, 110-111.14Ibid., 189.15This interpretation was presented by Tadeusz Gadacz during the Symposium “On the ChristianCharacter of Philosophy” held on 4 November, 2003, at Warszawa UKSW.16This does not mean that Husserl ignored metaphysics as a whole, as suggested by Jacques Taminiauxin his essay “Les deux maitres de la phénoménologie face à la métaphysique,” in Jean-Marc Narbonneand Luc Langlois, ed., La métaphysique, son histoire, sa critique, ses enjeux (Paris; Sainte-Foy: Vrin;Presses de l’Université Laval, 1999), 129.263