Introduction
In a famous letter from Edmund Husserl to Rudolf Otto from 1919,
Husserl comments on the strange effect that his phenomenological
philosophy seems to have on the religious orientation of his students,
it makes ”protestants out of catholics and catholics out of protestants.”^1
The phenomenological mode of thinking seems to opens up a space of
reflection in which religious themes and concerns obtain a new
philosophical weight and urgency, so as to bridge or at least make
problematic the apparently strict separation between reason and faith.
In Husserl’s own intellectual development these two strands are
already clearly intertwined, yet rarely thematized as such. In another
letter from 1919, he even confesses that his own move from mathematics
to philosophy ran parallel to and was inspired by his conversion from
Judaism to Christianity, and in private conversations he is to have said
that he saw his philosophical work as a path toward God.^2 The God
mentioned in his philosophical writings is often a philosopher’s God,
a metonym for absolute rationality and intelligibility, as well as a name
for a radical transcendence. But he saw the possibility of a renewed
understanding of religion not in the construction of a rational
theology, but rather in a radicalized exploration of interiority, through
a return to the “inner life”, as he writes in a letter to Wilhelm Dilthey
on this matter. Thus he also ends his Cartesian Meditations with a
quotation from Augustine, “in the interiority of man dwells truth.”
Against the standard image of orthodox phenomenology, as a
philosophy of purified rationality and as a “rigourous science,” we
should instead be aware of the way in which the remarkably fecund
- The letter is published in Das Maß des Verborgenen. Heinrich Ochsener zum Gedächt-
nis, eds. Curt Ochwadt and Erwin Tecklenborg, Hannover, 1981, 159. - Adelgundis Jaegerschmidt, ”Gespräche mit Edmund Husserl: 1931–1936” in
Stimmen der Zeit, 56.