evan zeusse - the role of intentionality in the phenomenology of religion

8/2/2019 Evan Zeusse - The Role of Intentionality in the Phenomenology of Religion

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LIII/1

THE ROLE OF INTENTIONALITYIN THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF RELIGION

EVAN M. ZUESSEAlthough there are many phenomenologies of religion, and it mayeven be said that phenomenology is now a la mode in Religious Studiesthroughout at least the non-Communist world, there has been remarkablylittle scrutiny given to the theoretical and, if one likes, the epistemologicalfoundations of this discipline. The major classics of the phenomenology ofreligion, such as Mircea Eliade's Patterns in Comparative Religion an dThe Sacred and the Profane, or Gerardus van der Leeuw's Religion inEssence and Manifestation, perhaps properly devote very little attentionto the philosophical assumptions on which their entire effort is based.Instead, eschewing elaborate digressions, they devote themselves to "the

things themselves." Yet for lesser phenomenologists in difference to or igno-rance of the philosophical consequences of their methods can lead to seri-ous distortions. Phenomenological philosophy has itself changed over theyears; so adherence to older assumptions may not always be justified. Wh oindeed can be sure that even the above-mentioned leaders in the phe nom e-nology of religion have succeeded in entirely avoiding problem atical a reas,knowledgeable though they obviously are in their craft?It may therefore be useful to turn back to the founders of phenom enol-ogy as such, to determine the major varieties of approach, with the impli-cations that flow from each, and their consequences for the study of reli-gion. Our own study naturally cannot hope to be comprehensive; in thefollowing remarks we shall merely trace some of the main lines of thephenomenologists of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, whom I take to be re pre-sentative of two quite different lines of a single tradition. Our chief interestwill be in the varying ways "intentionality" has been treated by these twothinkers. Following these surveys, some applications to the study of reli-gion will be v entured.

Evan M. Zuesse (Ph.D., 1971) studied for his degree at Chicago under Mircea Eliade. Heis presently Lecturer in Religion Studies at the South Australian College of AdvancedEducation, Underdale, South Australia. He is the author of Ritual Cosmos (1980) andnumerous articles; this is his third essay for the Journal of the AAR.


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52 Journal of the American Academy of ReligionEDMUND HUSSERL (1859-1938)

1. Husserl's Concept of "Intentionality"and the "Transcendental Reduction"Husserl is a difficult thinker to interpret not only because of his neol-ogisms and horrendous Teutonic style but also because he himself wasuncertain of where his thought was leading him. He confessed that hisvarious works were only experiments in articulating a perspective whicheven for him was not always too clear. Phenomenology, he said (perhapsmaking a virtue out of a frustrating necessity), requires ever new begin-ningsanyone claiming to have reduced it to a cut-and-dried system hassimply not understood what phenomenology is about (see Speigelberg,1969, 1:76 and especially the humorous/pathetic footnote there). At hisdeath in 1938 at the age of 79, he left a veritable mountain of unpub-lished manuscripts for his assistants and disciples to sift through, amount-ing to some 45,000 pages of shorthand! Even the published work is filledwith paradoxes, undeveloped lines of thought, and unresolved, some-times undetected contradictions. One can understand why he has been soamazingly stimulating in the history of modem thought, for he offersrichly diverse original insights into some of the most basic areas of exis-tence and philosophy. As one reads through such a seminal work asIdeas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (which firstappeared in 1913 in German), one has the sense of beholding a powerfulmind groping indefatigably but uncertainly through an almost impene-trable thicket. Husserl, after all, was a pioneer in one of the most daunt-ing and lawless of all regions, consciousness itself. Nevertheless, Husserl'sgoal was to map out in all their actual and especially potential permuta-tions the absolute structures of consciousness, constituting a science thatwould sum up total reality and would be the queen of all sciencesforall sciences are necessarily founded by and in consciousness. Husserlsought nothing less than to fill in the gaping void left by the demise ofthe theological verities of the Middle Ages, and thus to restore certitudeand values to a declining Western civilization. The reader of Husserl willin fact be occasionally taken aback by passages of unrestrained prosely-tizing for his phenomenology, and almost religious claims for its powerto reverse the spiritual decay of the West.As is well-known, Husserl began this quest for his holy grail with thecry: "To the things themselves!" So ended his first major work, LogicalInvestigations (the first edition appeared in 1900-1901). With this cryhe sought, firstly, to point to the true "things" that we know, namely, thenecessary and essential logical structures of the mind, and, secondly, todismiss the prevailing naively positivistic scientific theories whichassumed an objective world of "reality" apart from human perception.The crisis of modern culture, he claimed, was due to the separation of


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Zuesse: Intentio nality 53human and material spheres, of value and fact. For, he insisted, "things"only constitute themselves as such through consciousness, and are relativeto a knowerall consciousness is "consciousness of," and thus instead ofthere being absolutely objective things intruding on fallible awareness,the crucial fact for science must be the intentional act in which things,self, and even consciousness as such are generated.

"The main phenomenological theme," he therefore stated quite baldly,is "intentionality" (cf. section 84 of Ideas, entitled: "Intentionality as theMain Phenomenological Theme": Husserl, 1962:222). Of course, therewere criticisms from the start that Husserl was sinking into a subjectivisticidealism, in which the entire world becomes merely a shifting phantom ofthe m ind; he indignantly rejected such "m isconceptions" in his early career(although Logical Investigations explicitly sought "the ideal types of logi-cal experience corresponding to the ideal logical laws; wh ether or not theyhad counterparts in actual experience was immaterial to him": Spiegel-berg, 1969, 1.102). However, by his later years Husserl's own logic hadinexorably led him to what he called "transcendental idealism" or "phe-nomenological idealism," which he found it necessary to distinguish atlength from solipsism (cf. Husserl, 1973:83-90, et alii).1 Husserl was anx-ious to show that thro ugh intentionality we will our enti re world into beingand give it shape. So, for him, the truly fundamental question must be:How is it that aw areness of things, of primal identities, is built up, or "con-stituted," in consciousness? How is the "intentional act," the "idea," thatthis chair exists "synthesized" out of the "raw data" of consciousness? (Notethe distinction h ere between intentionality and raw data; w e shall return toit.) Husserl teaches us to attend closely to the "chair" quality of the chair,until we arrive at the primal constituting idea or "essence" of "ch airhood."The act of cognition of the c hair is in this way disassembled into its constit-uent partsone recognizes an essence of "redness," for example, an essenceof "cloth," and essence of "w ood," and so on, which can all be distinguishedfrom the organizing, intentional essence, the "archon" or controllingsynthesizing intention, or "chairhood" (on the "archon," see Husserl,1962:304). There is suggested in all this a kind of separability and even

1 An important question, which has evoked a considerable scholarly debate, is whetheror not Husserl went through different periods of thought, in the earlier of which he was"idealistic," and in the later of which he was "realistic," as Merleau-Ponty has argued.Some scholars instead insist on Husserl's overall faithfulness to his basic orientation,whether it is judged to be realistic or idealistic. My own view is that both the very earlyLogical Investigations and the very late Cartesian Meditations are clearly idealistic, butthat the integrity of Husserl's thought leads him in both to statements that have realisticimplications; the same remains true even where, as in The Crisis of Europea n Thought,Husserl devotes a good deal of attention to the life-world (on which, see Carr). Kockel-mans gives a long discussion over to just this issue, surveying all the various positions, andespouses basically the sam e conclusion (see Kockelmans: chap. 11 : "Realism or Idea lism?"315-55).


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54 Journal of the American Academy of Religionopposition between "essence" and "intentionality" which is most signifi-cant. Essences are the building blocks, the sensations per se, the "raw data,"which intentionality puts together in additive fashion into a syntheticunity, i.e., a posited, "thetic" meaning. Meaning, then, can be and is thesum of discrete parts, items which can be analytically isolated and then putback together again, unlike Hum pty D umpty. In any case, in this approachthe experienced and contextual chair is transposed into an isolated datumof its own by the achievement of the phenomenological reduction, inwhich it stands forth as a thing in itself, a pure "idea" detached from itsimmediate environment. Husserl is in fact not interested in the concretechair, but in "chair" as a typification: he wishes to define the structuraltypes of thought itself. To understand this typification better, how ever, it isnecessary to disintegrate the presented "chair" into its cognitive elements,the basic sensations and formal characteristics of which it is constructed(i.e., the essences). These are the true material for phenomenological anal-ysis.The given world is therefore merely the occasion for a wider studyof consciousness; or, more truly, "reality" is not to be found in the actualfulfilled experience of the chair, but precisely in its infinite potentialvariations, in its transcendence of givenness. This is one of the most pro-found of HusserPs insights. It is only due to the endless potential formsof the chair, which are available to and in a sense even known as anindeterminate "fringe" around the perceived chair by the cognizing self,that the changing perspectives on the chair as experienced from momentto moment in everyday life can all be synthesized by intentionality intoforms of the single, "real" chair. That is, without a sense of other possibleperspectives or forms of the chair, we would not only not be able torecognize a particular kind of chair as a "chair," but we would even beunable to keep this actual chair in mind as a chair from instant to instantin all shifts in perspective and use. So a main characteristic of intention-ality is that it gives a continuing identity to the varying modifications ofthe data stream of consciousness: intentionality connects past, present,and future and is the form of internal time awareness (cf. Husserl, 1964).It is therefore intentionality which "objectivates" or bestows real identityon those data, discovering within them a transcendent enduring object.The recognition of a level of consciousness which is given over totypifications of experience was a very important and far-reaching one.This is prepredicative consciousness, consciousness "before" speech.Speech in fact makes explicit these typifications, which according toHusserl have been generated out of sedimentations of previous experi-ence: acknowledging "red" many times, we come finally to know of atypical "red" which informs any particular instance. Through typicalforms, then, reality itself becomes known. Essences are these typicalforms.


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Zuesse: Intentionality 55Since "reality" is only known through typifications, a science of real-ity must concentrate on the potential essences of consciousness, notmerely on givenness. The goal of analysis, to quote Husserl, is "to clearup, in respect of all internal structures, the essential structure of thedimensions of infinity that make up systematically the ideal infinitesynthesis of this ev idenc e . . ." (Husserl, 1973:63). T he re are infinitemodes of any "real" thing; phenomenology discovers the structures gov-erning this infinity, and thus arrives at the fundamental reality of thething. One extraordinary way of doing this recommended by Husserl isto vary the forms of the "thing" freely, in fantasy, shifting about particu-lar qualities so as to arrive at the ultimate structures defining the "thing"in any conditions. We may also collect in consciousness ah1 the actualmodes of the "thing," so as to arrive at the same end. (In the phenome-nology of religion it has been customary to collect actual, rather thanwholly imaginary, instances of, say, "sacrifice" or "world tree" so as toarrive at the "essential structures" of sacrifice or world-tree-as-such. Par-ticular contexts are thus mainly occasions for these concepts to appear.)These potential variations of a single object or idea Husserl calls

"horizons." A purely imaginary or illusory "stone" lacks reality because ithas only the immediately presented horizon. A painted stone possessesonly a single perspective. Real stones, however, have a top, a bottom,sides and a back; they also have insides and outsides. The reality of thestone is implicitly confirmed when, as we shift our position or the stonechanges relative to us, other sides or horizons are presented. At no onemoment are all horizons presented to us, and this very absence of"givenness" is the proof that the stone is real. Only through transcen-dence of reality is reality constituted; what is not makes what is. If wecould ever delineate explicitly the laws governing all possible horizons,we would have achieved a total description of the Beyond, of Beingitself. This was Husserl's greatest goal, but one which he knew was notpossible of com plete fulfillment by one person. His unceasing attem pts atit help explain those 45,000 pages of shorthand left at his death. Cer-tainly it was no cliche for him when he insisted that all phenomenologybegins in radical wonder, wonder directed to the "beyond" quality of allexperience.The systematic operation of radical wonder consisted of the "transcen-dental reduction." Husserl was never quite sure that he had fully attainedto the perfect form of this reduction, but that it containe d the essence of hisapproach was not in question. Disciples have confessed that the kind ofconscious awareness that it requires has taken them m any years of con stantpractice to master (Natanson: 70). What seems to be involved, however, isthe induction of a meditational state very similar to certain Zen and Tan-trie conditions, or to schizophrenia as it has sometimes been described inmedical literature. In a full transcendental reduction, the "world" as a


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56 Journal of the American Academy of Religioncoherent unity disappears, idiosyncratic and pragmatic personal purposelikewise drops away, and the world of things and ideas therefore standsforth unveiled, each of these with its own fringe of horizons, and evenmore primal, each constituted out of its own "essences." Things dissolveinto shifting essential qualities and perspectives. These essences are eter-nally themselves, and only manifest themselves through empirical experi-ence. The phenomenologist is able through the reduction to contact them,an d to vary them freely in imagination: the bird flying through the airbecomes air surrounding a hollow shap e, or two birds, or a griffin, or noth-ing at all (see, e.g., Husserl, 1973:70, and the elucidation of Natanson, 68;for some striking parallels, see the discussion of a Zen koan by R. D. M.Shaw, 18, and of Haitian tra nce states in Zuesse, 1980:198).In a world so totally dismembered, what provides the unity? Obvi-ously, the self. Husserl frequently referred to his method as an egologicalscience. Not for nothing was one of his last, and most readable and deci-sive, formulations of his phenomenology entitled Cartesian Meditations.He founded his all-encompassing phenomenological "doubt" or reductionon the rock of the ever-present self, and from there sought to reconstructthe whole of reality in all of its actual and potential forms of conscious-ness. Yet the self that remains after the bracket of the reduction isapplied cannot be the biographical ego of the natural world. All "natu-ral" intentionalities, and worldliness as a whole, are put into suspension,of course. What remains is a contentless ego , a pivot of thought, in rela-tion to which all things and ideas appear. It is this ego which wills aworld and even other persons, whom it constitutes on an analogical basisfrom itself (see Cartesian Meditations, passim). This ego itself stands onnothing. The analysis here has a fascinating resemblance to the psychol-ogy of Hindu and Buddhist yoga, even to the insight that all things arecomposite constructions and that the self along with all else is empty.One may say that Husserl here begins an analysis of the soul, the selfbeyond the self. In any case, this is the foundation on which he proposeshis science of consciousness be built. As he writes at the very end ofCartesian M editations: "The Delphic motto, 'Know thyself has gained anew signification. Positive science is a science lost in the world. I mustlose the world by epoche, in order to regain it by a universal self-examination. 'Noli foras ire,' says Augustine, 'in te redi, in interiorehomine habitat veritas' [Do not wish to go out; go back into yourself:Truth dwells in the inner manf (Husserl, 1960:157).

2. Inner Tensions in Husserl's PhenomenologyHowever, Husserl is too rich and complex for us to end our sum-mary of his thought here, high and dry in a transcendental idealism. Forone thing, he confesses that the contentless ego is itself given a location


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Zuesse: Intentio nality 57and a pivot by the body. This is an absolutely crucial insight, which iftaken to its logical conclusions would even seem to alter Husserl's wholeidealistic system. For it will be remembered that the sole characteristicof the "ego" of the transcendental reduction is that it is the fulcrum andpivot of thought: it is the necessary pole before which all things appear,which wills experience and ideas. But what does the ego pivot onwhatlocation can it have other than the humble body? Does not this suggestthat the transcendental ego is simply the first efflux in consciousness ofthe inwardness of the body itself, that it is the most "subjective" experi-ence of the body? The pivot of the pivot, the soul of the soul, would thenbe the sentient flesh, the content of the "contentless ego" is that physicalperson with the ski nose, bushy mustache and beard, vest and watch-chain (cf. the photograph in Speigelberg, 1969, 1:73), and we areplunged from the transcendental reduction back into the given worldwith all its existential and experiential facticities, in which the self islimited by a specific biography and skills, by particular other persons, byotherness, disease, and death. In this case, a total transcendental reduc-tion is certainly not possible, for an essential aspect of all thought at itsfoundation would then be embeddedness in a given world and embodi-ment. From the Buddhist anatman (no-self) we are thrown back into thefusion of nefesh (life-soul) and gu f (flesh): here arises the chasm betweenfundamentally different world-views. Yet what a delicate distinction liesat their root! And, when we take the bodily foundation of consciousnessseriously, it is not hard to see how contemporary existentialist phenom-enologies have arisen out of such Husserlian hints.Many of the unpublished and published manuscripts of Husserl aredevoted to the analysis of how precisely things come to be synthesized inawareness. Here we are at the opposite pole from the ego, focusing onthe "things" of consciousness. There were, according to Husserl, twoways we could go about analyzing this process, a formal analysis, or agenetic one. The formal-logical or formal-ontological app roac h is con-cerned with all the potential modalities and structures of consciousness,and employs the technique of "free imaginative variation" we havealready mentioned. The material ontological, genetic analysis centers onthe breakdown of an intentional unity into the horizons and essencesunderlying its synthesis, so as to understand its givenness and its "real-ity." But Husserl found that at the end of such an analysis, if he wasthorough, he had arrived at the "life-world" (Lebenswelt) as the logicallynecessary horizon. Despite the exorcism of worldliness at the beginningof the transcendental reduction, it had a way of reappearing at the end.Another side of the same dilemma was the genetic analysis of how aspecific "thing" came to be constituted as such. Husserl hoped to showthat every intentional unity had its original source in an "active synthe-sis," that is, in an act of the ego whereby it posits an identity in the "raw


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58 Journal of the American Academ y of Religiondata" or essences that confront it. But, as he is forced to admit in hisCartesian Meditations, he found that the origin of the perception of acognitive unity in experience was always a "passive synthesis," given tothe self but not formed by it, which in turn became the material foractive syntheses. This language of passive and active syntheses refers toprecisely the same process that Jean Piaget later called "accommodation"and "assimilation"a process which perhaps under the influence of Hus-serl and his followers he regarded as basic to the development of cogni-tive complexity in human beings. Piaget, too, finds that infants begin byaccommodating themselves to their environment, and discovering theirworld by responses to its cues. From this we begin to build up a self, andthus the contextual world appears to be the basis of thought.So it would appear that at both of the poles of intentional awareness,that of the ego and that of apprehended things and ideas, Husserl's phe-nomenological idealism runs into some basic difficulties.Indeed, one might well go on to ask how universal the supposedlyuniversal and absolute essences of Husserl are. For example, the essenceof redness which is so often mentioned in Husserl's writings as a finaldatum of consciousness may not exist as such at all. Even "essences" maybe contextual. There are cultures, anthropologists tell us, where red is notadmitted to be a primary color, and in which there is no term as suchfor it; a member of such a culture, beholding what we would take to bea shade of red, might well view it as a form or shade of yellow. Nodoubt the same wave lengths of light would be perceived, but theirintentional meaning would be different, and yellow might be used inter-changeably with red in ritual or symbolic contexts. But even if "redness"does seem to be recognized in most cultures (as would seem to be indi-cated by ethnographic research: see Turner: 59-92, and especially Berlinand Kay, and Sahlins), the same need not follow for nonperceptual,cultural structures, or even certain aspects of sensory life that are cultur-ally dependent. If this is correct, then far from his work's constituting ananalysis of absolute transcendental consciousness, Husserl's analysis mightat least partly consist of an analysis of the essential structures of (central)European consciousness. To a considerable degree his analysis may evenbe merely of the connotative and denotative referents of various terms inEuropean languages. For Husserl's analyses of essences, after all, wereexercised on and by European adults whose acculturation was largelycompleted and whose sense of the world had already been internalizedfrom long years of unself-conscious speech and interaction.In H usserl's last published works before his death , and even m ore in hisunpublished manuscripts, the consequences of such reflections are evi-denced in an increasing interest in culturally generated structures and theLebenswelt. In The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phe-nomenology (first published in 1936), Husserl shows that the life-worlds of


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Zuesse: Intention ality 59Congo farmers or Chinese peasants are quite different from ours, but adoctrine of cultural relativism is overcome "when we consider that the life-world does have, in all its relative features, a general structure . . . [which]is not itself relative. We can regard it in its generality and, with sufficientcare, fix it once and for all in a way equally accessible to all" (Husserl,1970b:139; the italicised passage is, as in all quotations in this essay, foundin the original). In other words, the a priori essences include the basic struc-tures of cultu re as well as the sensations with which he was conce rned in hisearlier works. As the English translator of The Crisis remarks, however,perceptual structures may not change since they are part of our bodilymalce-up, but cultural structures certainly do. Moreover, cultural creationsare clearly "intentionalities," in Husserl's terminology, and therefore bydefinition the product of "essences," and secondary in constitution. Howcan they be essences as well? What is needed before Husserl's position canbe justified is a "stratified co nstitutive analysis" showing how from univer -sal perception experience universal cultural structures can arise (Carr:202-12; see also note 1, above).Such reflections, many of them arising directly out of Husserl's ownthoughts, hold the promise of a very different kind of phenomenologicalanalysis of inte ntionality and essences. Husserl, in fact, in one of his earliestworks, recognized two kinds of intentionality. H e first used "intentionality"in Logical Investigations to refer not to an act of constituting "things" or"ideas," but as indicating the relation between a sign (or symbol) and itsreferent. It is possible that further study of this type of intentionality mighthave revealed to Husserl the primacy of contextual fields of awarenessrather than specific things or ideas taken in isolation one from the other.But, in perhaps the most crucial decision affecting the development of hisphenomenology, Husserl assumed that symbolic meaning could only be theoffspring of inten tional acts which establish "objectivity"first a thin g or asign must be, before it can symbolize or be symbolized, thus symbolicintentionality is derivative and secondary. So, in terms of the constitutionof conscious meanings, we first have elementary essences, synthesized intounities by localized intentionalities, which then relate to each otherthrough symbolic meanings. The possibility that we come to know thingsonly through symbolic fields of awareness did not occur to him. In a veryinteresting passage, made in passing as such remarks so often a re with him,Husserl acknowledged "the eidetically valid and self-evident proposition,that no concrete experience can pass as independent in the full sense of theterm. Each 'stands in need of completion' in respect of some connectedwhole, which in form and in kind is not something we are free to choose,but rather are bound to accept" (1962:221). But Husserl goes on in the pas-sage in question to maintain that the "inner uniqueness" of a perceptionremains identical with itself despite context, and so he did not give hisinsights into what he called the "marginal zone" much importance.


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60 Journal of the American Academy of ReligionLogical Investigations, in which Husserl laid down the first orienta-tions which would govern his method, appeared in 1900-1901 (with asecond edition in 1913), and made a considerable impact. The guidinglines of the phenomenological method were articulated over the nextthree decades, helping to generate or sustain a whole school of Germanphenomenological and introspective psychology. (However, this schoolwas developing before Husserl's work, and Natanson is at pains to disso-ciate Husserl from the Introspectivists; Natanson: 42-43). At the sametime, this school provided the chief dissent from the behavioristic psy-chologists who employed a strongly mechanistic and positivistic theory.However, in 1912 a young academic psychologist named Max Werth-eimer published an obscure article on the stroboscopic effect (such as wesee in the movie theater, where rapidly illuminated still photographsconvey the impression of flowing movement); this laid the first stone in anew theoretical edifice, Gestalt psychology. The Gestalt school reallybecame significant in the twenties and thirties, towards the end of Hus-serl's life, and produced its definitive, classic summations in the forties.The Gestalt school took issue both with the Behaviorists, with whom

their differences were vast and fundamental, and with the phenomeno-logical Introspectivists, with whom they shared many common assump-tions. It is interesting to read, for example, Wolfgang Kohler's GestaltPsychology (rev. ed., 1947), and find an entire chapter devoted to acriticism of "Introspective psychology," following immediately after achapter on the Behaviorists. The chief failing of Introspectivism, accord-ing to Kohler, was that it took local sensory data (e.g., redness or round-ness) in isolation from its experiential context. In sharp opposition to thisview, Kohler writes: "Our view will be that, instead of reacting to localstimuli by local and mutually independent events, the organism respondsto the pattern of stimuli to which it is exposed; and that this answer is aunified process, a functional whole, which gives, in experience, a sensoryscene rather than a mosaic of local sensations. Only from this point ofview can we explain the fact that, with a constant local stimulus, localexperience is found to vary when the surrounding stimulation ischanged" (Kohler: 62). There are, then, no "raw data" or a prioriessences which intentionality "synthesizes," only patterned fields ofawareness; the problem Introspectivists as well as Behaviorists fail toanswer, according to Kohler, is that of "organic order" (64).It is not surprising that Husserl was so enormously influential in histime: his richness of insight was extraordinary. But it is perhaps also notsurprising that his most notable disciples dissented from his "transcen-dental" and idealistic program, and in one way or another emphasizedother possibilities in his theory. Alfred Schutz, while accepting Husserl'smethodology, analysed the intersubjective realm solely from the naturalviewpoint. As H. Pietersm a has recently shown, Heide gger differed from


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Zuesse: Intentio nality 61his master Husserl above all in his rejection of the possibility of a com-plete transcendental reduction: we are irreducibly Dasein (a Husserlianterm meaning "Being-in-the-world") and cannot escape the naturalworld, facticity, specific identity, and death. We do not complacentlyspin our experience out of ourselves: we are thrown into it willy-nilly,and this very thrownness is the fundamental truth of all of our states ofconsciousness. Sartre followed Heidegger in this, as did Ortega y Gasset,giving Existentialism a new depth and prestige. Strictly within the phe-nomenological tradition, perhaps the greatest follower of Husserl wasMaurice Merleau-Ponty. We turn to his thought now.

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY (1908-1961)As is the case with any thinker, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was verymuch a man of his time. Just as Husserl is thoroughly a German of theKaiserian epoch in his idealistic but thing-oriented academic philosophy,and comes to reflect as well the feeling of apocalyptic despair commonto many humane thinkers between the wars as decent institutionsseemed to collapse under a barbarian scientism, so too Merleau-Ponty

matured as a scholar during the Second World War, and became com-pletely disillusioned with "the conventional lies of French society"revealed by the Vichy cooperation with Nazi savagery. He became aMarxist humanist, holding that there is" always a systematic, functionalcoherence between the idealisms and the deeds of historical societies:informing all aspects of social life is a patterned order which serves theunderlying and real "Idea" of an age. All things are implicated in eachother. (However, he was unable to apply this insight in turn to Russia,when the "show trials" and the Gulag were first brought to the attentionof post-World War II European intellectuals by Arthur Koestler andothers: cf. his essay "The Yogi and the Proletarian," first published in1947 in French, and translated in Merleau-Ponty, 1964.) Philosophically,just as Descartes, Berkeley, and Kant lie behind Husserl, Hegel is a con-tinuing inspiration to M erleau-Ponty. Fascinated by psychology (his firstbook was The Structure of Behavior, published in 1942), Merleau-Pontyalso read the Gestalt psychologists closely while his own ideas were stillin the formative stage, and he was deeply influenced by them.It is perhaps not wholly surprising, then, that as a philosopher heturned to Husserl for insight into psychological realities; even the Gestalttheorists acknowledge HusserPs influence. But for Merleau-Ponty it wentfurther than that; he found Husserl so deeply stimulating he ended upalmost appropriating him, often defending the "true" Husserl not onlyagainst HusserPs critics but especially against Husserl himself. For evi-dence of this, and insight into the specific understanding of intentionalityof Merleau-Ponty's masterpiece, The Phenomenology of Perception


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62 Journal of the Am erican Academy of Religion(1945), we only need to turn to the "Preface" of that work. In fact, thisentire preface, so widely acclaimed as a lucid and persuasive introductionto Husserlian phenomenology, is from beginning to end a polemic againstHusserl's idealistic approach. The unsophisticated reader can be forgivenfor missing this, however, for with the utm ost delicacy M erleau-Ponty p re-sents himself as the defender and elucidator of Husserl's complex andsometimes admittedly ambiguous pioneering insights.The "Preface" begins by posing the question, "What is phenomenol-ogy?" and goes on directly to adm it tha t the answer still remains somew hatobscure, due to Husserl's ambiguity. For example, Husserl's doctrine of"essences" has sometimes been criticized as being in opposition to his insis-tence on existence and the given world. M erleau-Ponty sets himself, there-fore, to clarify the basic insights of Husserl. Phenomenology, he says, is ofcourse the return to the things themselves, which means to the things asexperienced, or even more accurately, to the world which alone permitsthings to exist. This move to the experiential world is "absolutely distinctfrom the idealist retur n to consciousness" and to the ego as the foundationof consciousness (Merleau-Ponty, 1962:ix). Descartes and Kant were inerror in m aking such an idealistic analytical reduction, as Husserl correc tlyunderstood (sic\; ibid.:x). For "[t]he world is there before any possible anal-ysis of m ine, an d it would be artificial to make it the outcom e of a series ofsyntheses which link, in the first place sensations, then aspects of the objectcorresponding to different perspectives, when both are nothing but prod-ucts of analysis, with no sort of priority." Here Merleau-Ponty has pithilysummarized and dismissed Husserl's concepts of the a priori "essence" andthe "horizons"! H e goes on:

Analytical reflection believes it can trace back the course fol-lowed by a prior constituting act and arrive, in the 'inner man'to use Saint Augustine's expressionat a constituting powerwhich has always been identical with that inner self. [But on thecontrary:] The world is not an object such that I have in my pos-session the law of its making; it is the natural setting of, and fieldfor, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth doesnot 'inhabit' only 'the inner man' [a footnote here cites Augustine,In te redi, etc., but omits that the source for this reference wasHusserl], or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in theworld, and only in the world does he know himself. (ibid.:x-xi)Similarly, Merleau-Ponty describes the account given of intersubjectivityand other persons in the Cartesian Meditations as if it were the argu-ment of an anonymous school of thought, and adds, "For Husserl, on thecontrary," things are not so cut-and-dried (xi-xii).The true purpose, then, of the phenomenological reduction is not todismiss the natural attitude to the world, but the very opposite, to raise itto consciousness and make it the subject of investigation. The natural


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Zuesse: Intentio nality 63world of actual experience is the only proper subject for phenomenologi-cal reflection. "Far from being . . . a procedure of idealistic philosophy,the phenomenological reduction belongs to existential philosophy" (xiv).It follows that Husserl's doctrine of essences has been badly misun-derstood. It really refers, not to local sensations taken out of their contextand made a priori, but to the nature of things in experience, their being-quality. "But it is clear that the essence is here not the end, but a means,that our effective involvement in the world is precisely what has to beunderstood . . ." (xiv). We require the epoche or transcendental bracket-ing to disclose the ideality of experience, so that having overcome ourordinary thoughtless immersion in things we can behold the actual fac-ticity of our world. In a telling footnote to a later chapter of The Phe-nomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty is much more explicit: heasserts that Husserl himself came in his last years "tacitly" to give up thedoctrine of essences altogether, as he grasped more adequately the con-sequences of phenomenological theory (49, n. 1; also see note 1 to thispaper).An entire chapter of The Phenomenology of Perception is givenover to an analysis of sensation, which is the analogue of Husserl'sessences. Drawing on the Gestalt psychologists, some of the earliest workof Piaget, and various monographs on brain damage, Merleau-Pontyshows that no sensations are merely local nor of isolated qualities. Themeaning we discover in experience, even on the rudimentary level ofsensation, determines what we experience; this meaning is part of a totalhuman being-world continuum which cannot be broken up, parsed, orobjectified: indeterminacy is essential to our experience of the world(6-9). Perception proceeds from the whole to the parts, not vice versa asempiricism pretends; neither can the whole be constructed (or "syn-thesized") from parts, since the meaning which shapes the whole arisesfrom the whole as such in relationship to a yet larger controlling field.Merleau-Ponty draws our attention to the background against which ourexplicit perceptions stand out: the non-explicit halo which sustains allexplicit thought is essential to the meaning of that thought (for a conver-gent study of "the tacit dim ension," see Polanyi, 1958 and 1966).We can begin to examine this halo through study of th e "horizons" ofthings and ideas, as Husserl said. But Merleau-Ponty's use of this techn iqueis far m ore concretely contextual: As we have seen, in his phenom enology,"things" do not exist isolated from other things; instead, through coexis-tence, things emerge into distinct identity. That the back, top, bottom,sides, and inside of the stone I see are "potential" horizons possessed by anisolated thing and waiting to unfold would not occur to Merleau-Ponty:they are actual horizons, part of the total tacit existence of the world theyinhabit. For a perspective that may be potential for me is assumed as theactual perspective of other p arts of my experienced w orld:


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64 Journal of the Am erican Academ y of ReligionThus every object is the mirror of all others. When I look at thelamp on my table, I attribute to it not only the qualities visible fromwhere I am, but also those which the chimney, the walls, the tablecan 'see'; the back of my lamp is nothing but the face which it'shows' to the chimney. I can therefore see an object in so far asobjects form a system or a world, and in so far as each one treats theothers round it as spectators of its hidden aspects which guaranteethe permanence of those aspects by their presence. Any seeing of anobject by me is instantaneously repeated between all those objectsin the world which a re apprehended as co-existent, because each ofthem is all that the others 'see' of it. (68)

Any particular thing implies therefore as a ground the entire world ofthings.The figure-ground relationship, as it is known to Gestalt psychology,is the subject of some of Merleau-Ponty's most brilliant meditations. Notonly is it the condition for any particular explicit perception, but it alsoapplies to ideas and even to clear consciousness. That is, Merleau-Pontytries to show that all reflective, distinct or rational thought of wh ateverkind rests on and emerges from and refers back to "preconscious" aware-ness. With such language, Merleau-Ponty not only applies Husserl'sinsights about prepredicative thought, but also appropriates the positiveinsights of the psychoanalytical schools. He eschews the term "uncon-sciousness," because for him the outstanding trait of preconsciousthought is not its refusal to become conscious, but its flux and indetermi-nacy, which makes preconscious thought as such unable structurally tobe clear and determinate thought. Preconscious thought is antepredica-tive, that is, it is before language, but language is its revelation and evenself-revelation. From its silence emerges the word, for it is not a silencebereft of m eaning; quite the contrary, no w ords can exhaust its mean ing.Intentionality, in such a setting, can only be worldly and contextualin its basic n atu re. "Consciousness itself is a project of the world . . ."(xvii). Particular intentionalities rest on more global ones, residing in theantepredicative unity of the world and our life. A phenomenologicalanalysis of any particular perception must rest that perception orthought in the vast embracing life-world of which it is a product, and interms of which it takes on meaning. But even more interestingly,Merleau-Ponty begins in his phenomenological researches to sketch outmultiple levels of intentionality, each providing a basis for the others. Inparticular, he was interested in the genesis of thought, and followedclosely such researches as Piaget's. As he shows in The Phenomenologyof Perception, the body and its movements, which generate global, pre-reflective or preconscious patterns of sensation and apprehension, are thefoundations for all reflective thought. The multiple levels or modes ofconsciousness permit or rather demand multidisciplinary research; aspersonal thought enters into intersubjectivity and more general social


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Zuesse: Intention ality 65structures, we must move from psychological categories to sociologicaland historical ones. Of course, in each case we are concerned as phe-nomenologists with the interconnections of these realms, not with anyone solely in itself:

Whether we are concerned with a thing perceived, a historicalevent or doctrine, to 'understand' is to take in the total inten-tionnot only what these things are for representation (the'properties' of the thing perceived, the mass of 'historical facts',the 'ideas' introduced by the doctrine)but the unique mode ofexisting expressed in all the events of a revolution, in all thethoughts of a philosopher. It is a matter, in the case of each civili- -zation, offinding he Idea in the Hegelian sense . . . that formulawhich sums up some unique manner of behaviour towards others,towards Nature, time and death: a certain way of patterning theworld which the historian should be capable of seizing upon andmaking his own. (xviii)As a result, we can start our search for historical understanding with astudy of ideology, or psychology, or politics, or religion, or economicsor more adequately from all these and other perspectives simultaneously,for all of these are true perspectives, all imply each other, and we shallfind the same pattern underlying everything: "All these views are trueprovided that they are not isolated, that we delve deeply into history andreach the unique core of existential meaning which emerges in eachperspective" (xix).Merleau-Ponty's use of the field-theory of understanding is so enthusi-astic that he even applies it, as we can see, to the study of whole civiliza-tions, and even further, to the entirety of history. "Considered in the lightof its fundamental dimensions, all periods of history appear as manifesta-tions of a single existence, or as episodes in a single drama . . ." (ibid.).Here we may be forgiven if we find not a phenomenological datum, butpurely a statement of faith. It is evident, in short, that Merleau-Ponty hasfound it easy to sup from a discussion of lived contexts to just the study ofcontexts. But if no one person experiences world history, how can we besure that it is all one single drama? It is precisely the transce nden tal Spiritthat unifies Hegel's phenomenology that Merleau-Ponty's Marxist materi-alism cannot accept. Phenomenologically, that is, strictly in accord withlived experience and specific existences, it would seem impossible to makesuch affirmations, although as individuals each of us will inevitably have agenuine personal experience of that history, and may wish to assert thisexperience in the form of a larger philosophical or theological statement.This criticism of Merleau-Ponty suggests others. Even in the case ofan actual life-situation involving more than one person, can we assertphenomenologically that the meaning of the situation really is the samefor everyone concerned, that it is all one single drama? Granted that


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66 Journal of the American Academy of Religionphenomenologically even the slightest gesture has meaning (xviii), needit always be the same meaning? It is not more accurate to say that mean-ing may differ from person to person and even moment to moment? Wecan take our skepticism one further step, and direct it to the texture ofexperience for a single person. Without denying the basic orientationtowards coherency in all humans, it would seem most faithful to actualexperience to admit that levels or modes of meaning may not coheretightly, and may indeed be differently oriented at different times.Finally, Merleau-Ponty's own phenomenology suggests that it is a basicerror to talk of a single meaning or unique existential core to any event:it is precisely to the degree that reality is transcendent to any specific"meaning" or horizon assigned to it that it is reality, and not a playthingof our fantasy. The "otherness" of every thing, and especially of everyperson, is our experiential warrant for knowing it to be truly existent (cf.our earlier remarks; the profound implications of this insight areexplored by Levinas).

CONCLUSIONSWe have seen that there are two major forms of phenomenology,which we may call essentialistic and contextualistic. (The four varietiesdistinguished by Jacques Waardenberg may be grouped under the abovetwo headings as subvarieties; see Waardenberg: 105f.) The two methodshave not had an equal impact on the phenomenology of religion, how-ever. The classic methodological works in the phenomenology of religionhave generally used an essentialistic approach, and it is only recentlythat explicitly worked-out methodologies for a more contextualisticapproach have been broached (chiefly by Ninian Smart and Wilfrid C.Smith). This imbalance in methodological studies is all the more striking,in that from the first more contextual studies of particular traditionshave been assiduously made, even if only based on an ad hoc approachwhich borrowed and continues to borrow its methodologies from what-

ever nonphenomenological discipline looks at the time most attractive,whether historical, philological, anthropological, psychological, or socio-logical. There has been a need, in short, for contextual sophistication,even if there has not been a well-worked-out rationale for it.The reasons for this imbalance in methodological sophistication areno doubt many. This is the obvious fact that at the time of the earlydevelopment of the discipline of the objective study of religion, duringthe first two generations of its formation when a search was made for amethod that promised to be nondogmatic, scientific, and a legitimatingbase for a distinctive discipline of religious studies, Husserlian phenome-nology had just achieved its greatest acceptance and was generatingmany applications in all fields of knowledge. Husserl's aims, to develop a


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Zuesse: Inten tiona lity 67scientific and all-embracing theory which would be nonreductionistic,held out the hope that religion could be sympathetically and yet objec-tively dealt with on its own terms. These were certainly powerful lures,especially when we remember that most early scholars of religious stud-ies were theologically trained and ill-disposed to a merely positivistictreatment of religion. For most of them, their real research was into"Comparative Religions," the handmaiden of theology. Rudolf Otto, withhis pioneering and confessedly essentialistic study of The Idea of theHoly (first published in German in 1917), certainly is an example of this:the aforementioned work in effect shows how all religions are strivingfor and achieve their fullest realization in Christianity as interpreted bySchleiermacher. As such, the work is a study in what can also be called"natural theology." Gerardus van der Leeuw, whose Religion in Essenceand Manifestation is certainly one of the towering accomplishments andgeneral summations of that first period of modern religious studies, alsoexemplifies these observations. His masterpiece, for the first time expli-citly basing the comparative study of religion on Husserlian assumptions,appeared in 1924 in Dutch and went through many translations andeditions, the last of which was in 1956. It is significant that even afterthe appearance of existentialism and contextualistic phenomenologieslike Maurice Merleau-Ponty's and even after the full impact of Gestalttheories had been felt, van der Leeuw preferred the new researches ofCarl G. Jung, who in the post-war period held out the chief promise of anew scientific rationale for an essentialistic methodology of religiousstudies (Waardenberg: 222). Mircea Eliade, whose works hold the com-manding position in the third generation of phenomenology of religionthat van der Leeuw's held in the second (Chantepie de la Saussaye maybe said to represent the first generation), has in a nondogmatic way com-bined the Husserlin and Jungian approaches in his own works, whichaccordingly emphasize an essentialistic methodology as well. Yet Eliade'sstudents are almost all more contextualistic than essentialistic, reflectingnot only the openness and broad sympathies of Eliade but also a neworientation in the field.A major reason for this is probably the strong impact of anthropol-ogy, which in its British and American versions has concentrated oncontextualistic issues. Another is the growing importance in general cul-ture of field theory such as Kurt Lewin's, personalistic philosophies suchas Michael Polanyi's, and existentialistic thought in general. But perhapseven more decisive is the fact that most doctoral students of religiousstudies are no longer trained in theological studies first, but come to thesubject from a variety of undergraduate backgrounds (usually from thehumanities or the social sciences). This new perspective is reflected, notonly in the development of centers where contextualistic phenomenologyis emph asized, as at Harv ard u nder W ilfred C. Smith or Lan caster und er


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68 Journal of the Am erican Academy of ReligionNinian Smart, or even Chicago where Eliade's students and colleaguesspend a good deal of time in the faculties of anthropology and Asianarea studies, and generally adhere to a more "historical" and anthropo-logical approach than the master, but also in the sudden flood of mono-graphs critical of the theological and/or ontological agendas of van derLeeuw or Eliade.

For, as our study has shown us, the essentialism of Husserl does tendto reflect, or to lead to, an idealistic a priori system of some sort: it isimplied in the epistemological structures of the method. Moreover, evenfrom within this epistemology, fundamental contradictions arise whichsuggest its ultimate untenability, as we have seen. Yet if the cominggeneration of phenomenologists of religion are going to be more inclinedto contextualism than ever before, our study also points to some furthercautionary remarks. We have, first of all, noted the general absence of asolid theoretical basis for most non-essentialistic phenomenologies up tothe present. It would appear that Maurice Merleau-Ponty's modificationof Husserl supplies a large part of that base, although its applications inthe phenomenology of religion still remain to be worked out. 2 But, even2 What would a contextualistic phenomenology of religion look like? It would, first ofall, be sensitive to the multiple levels and the constitutive nature of religious experience,and would therefore use as a basic and necessary part of its method a controlled multi-disciplinary analysis of religious behavior, taking into account the sensory-motor, ego-centric, social, "ideological" and transcendental fields of awareness, in which preconsciousand conscious awareness interweave on all levels. The psychological studies of Piaget, aswell as the independent researches of Heinz Werner and Bernard Kaplan, have showed inrich detail how a constitutive analysis of the sort that Husserl calls for in The Crisis ofEuropean Thought might unfold. But the most striking attempt to date to develop a trulyconstitutive and multi-disciplinary analysis of religious behavior is that of the recent sym-posium The Spectrum of Ritual: A Bio-Genetic Structural Analysis, edited by E. G.D'Aquili. Caps remain, and in fact this work amounts only to an incomplete scaffolding.But it is a promising start. Secondly, a contextual phenomenology of religions woulddevote much attention to the ultimate and world-structuring level at which religious

intentionality properly so-called resides. In particular, it would seek to discover in reli-gious behavior the intentionality oriented to the dynamic framework controlling all lessultimate networks of meaning; we might call this an intentionality of transcendentalstructure. Rudolf Otto has informed us of the structure-sha ttering W holly Oth er. But inaddition to or even instead of this primordial Being there is in all religion an intense anddevout attention to the deep structures and even the impersonal processes that assure theperpetuation of the world and all sanctified things in it. This structure, too, is Other, andtranscendental. In it the whole normal round is sanctified. Thirdly, in this phenomenol-ogy, in which context, and not timeless "essence," is central, it will be necessary to takethe human body seriously as the foundation of all meaning. This phenomenology musttherefore be sensitive to such "existential" concerns as shame, sexuality, identity, and duty.A preliminary essay at such a phenomenology can be found in my own study of Africanreligions (Zuesse, 1980) or in my essays on ritual (Zuesse, 1975, 1983); no doubt moresatisfactory versions will emerge from other hands in the future. Here we have an entirelynew and exciting field in the phenomenology of religions to explore.


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Zuesse: Intentio nality 69more importantly, it must be admitted that a solely contextual approachto phenomenology is almost certain to be seriously deficient. There areexcellencies in the essentialistic program, and weaknesses in the con-textualistic one, which must be noted. Let us mention some of them.Every student of the history of religions has had the heady experi-ence of discovering in the course of research amongst some little-knownsects or religions, in far-flung corners of the world, religious structures,ideas, and insights remarkably like those previously thought to be uniqueto some better-known religion (better known, at least, to the student). Asolely contextual approach has no way of handling such palpable similar-ities, for in itself it only knows uniquenesses. Nor can Merleau-Ponty'ssuppositions about universal historical ideas supply the lack, for as wehave seen his Hegelian ideas are not inevitable consequences of his basicmethodology, but posited in spite of it. There should be some consistentway of recognizing not only the differences between religions, but alsotheir similarities, for if these are noted only on an ad hoc basis, it islikely that the student will be led to inadmissible and naively hasty con-clusions about the history and structure of religions.It may be parenthetically remarked that tolerance between religions,which is part of the underlying moral motivations for the phenomenol-ogy of religion, is as much enhanced by recognition of the commonelemen ts and aspirations in outward ly very different religion s, as it is byrecognition of the contextual differences of very similar religions.The methodological problem of similar symbolisms, myths, rituals,and so on, in different religions must therefore be dealt with systemati-cally. Of course, it is evident that similarity in a particular case may wellbe due to historical factors such as past contact between the cultures inquestion, or a common historical source, even though this does not reallyexplain why particular structures are chosen by the religions as part oftheir own meaning systems, and others are ignored. We also find thatsimilar symbolisms, etc., even if historically linked , serve very differentmeanings in different religions or in the same religion in differentregions or ages. Evidently, even in the study of "similar phenomena" thecontextualistic approach cannot be replaced.But we cannot overlook the possibility that there may indeed be asurplus of meaning, beyond context, that a merely contextualist approachcannot reach, which is revealed by a comparative analysis. Even if someversions of this attitude (the Jungian "collective unconscious," FrithjofSchuon's esoteric "transcendent unity of religions," etc.) come perilouslyclose to a most unphenomenological and indulgent mysticism or mystery-mongering, it remains the case that an agnosticism about the basic issues isbecoming to a discipline still in its first stages. It is perhaps too early towrite off entirely any notion of basic cognitive structures which, if theyare not "universal" or "absolute," are at least surprisingly widespread. A


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70 Journal of the Am erican Academy of Religionresurgence of interest in Lamarckian biology and psychology may evenhelp to confirm some of Jung's at present too speculative ideas. PerhapsHusserl is even more accurate, and there truly are universal and necessarystructures of thought, comm on either to all humans or even to any th inkingbeings. Structuralist linguistics and structuralist anthropology certainlyargue that this is the case.

There is no doubt, in fact, that consciousness does proceed by way of"typifications" as Husserl called themsedimentations of experiencewhich assume ideal and finally even abstract status in our prepredicativeconsciousness. Inasmuch as we all share a hum an and w orldly environm entit is not e xtreme to grant that some, at least, of these typifications are heldin common. The implications of structuralist anthropology not only sup-port this, but remind us of some of the paradoxes of Husserl's method: ifcertain structures prevail across many or all cultures, the conscious mean-ings given to them in any one culture are alm ost, or perhaps entirely, irrel-evant. Such structures must operate at a preconscious level below and out-side of any appa rent contextual logic. As is well-known, Levi-Strauss doesnot accept either Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology or Sartre's existential-ism (cf. Levi-Strauss, 196 6,19 64-1 971 , especially the conclusion of the lastvolume, and also the contributors to Rossi). Such an approach can lead to aparadoxical rejection of any meaning at all (cf. Sperber, Sahlins and othersin the same v olume, and especially Levi-Strauss's own irritable rejection ofreligious meaning as literal *non-sense" in his 1966:227f.), in effect over-looking completely the importance of the quest for meaning even in form-ing the "sensory-motor complexes'* (Piaget's terms) and the most ele me ntaltypifications which, when fully mastered, sediment themselves in the pre-conscious as the axiom atic assumptions ma king later stages possible. Mean-ing creates the whole.However, the least speculative religious "typifications" are thosefound in historically related religions. Analysis of both similarities anddifferences is most illuminating in such cases. Here contextual and essen-tialistic study can interweave with each other in fruitful dialogue.Essentialistic perspectives can contribute even more profoundly tocontextualistic study by reminding us that there may always be a "sur-plus" of meaning that cannot be captured even by a multi-disciplinaryand many-leveled analysis. The openness of the real may finally gobeyond context: even if there is a drive towards coherence in us, ourexperience, as Merleau-Ponty and Husserl both stress, is also alwaysrecalcitrant and resistant to such coherence, and this indeed is proof ofour "thrownness," our reality and the reality of what we encounter. Aslong as essentialistic conclusions are admitted to be tentative, they keepalive in us an awareness of hidden possibilities and wider significancesthan even the most thorough contextualism can reveal, meanings thatmight indeed only be disclosed in the wider history of a symbol within a


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Zuesse: Intentionality 71religion, or more broadly within several religions. In this way essential-ism keeps contextualism open to the wonder of "the things themselves,"and humble in face of it.

R E F E R E N C E SBerlin, Brent, and Paul, Kay1970 Basic ColorPress. Terms. Berkeley: University of California

Carr, David1977 "Husserl's Problematic Concept of the Life-World." InHusserl: Expositions and Appraisals, ed. by Frederick A.Elliston and Peter McConnick. Notre Dame: University ofNotre Dam e Press.D'Aquili, E. G., ed.1979 The Spectrum of Ritual: A Bio-Genetic Structural Analy-

sis. New York: Columbia University Press.Husserl, Edmun d1962

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Ideas: General Introduction to Phenome nology. Trans, byW. R. Boyce-Gibson. New York: Collier-Macmillan.The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness.Trans, by James S. Churchill. Bloomington: Indiana Univer-sity Press.Logical Investigations. Trans, by J. N . F indlay. 2 vols.New York: Humanities Press.The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phe-nomenology. Trans, by David Carr. Evanston: Northwest-ern University Press.Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenol-ogy. Trans, by Dorian Cairns. The Hag ue: Martin us Nij-hoff.

Kaplan, see WernerKockelmans, Joseph J.1957 A First Introduction to Husserl's Phenomenology. Lou-vain: Duquesne University Press.Kohler, Wolfgang1947 Gestalt Psychology. Mentor Books. New York: The NewAmerican Library.


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Levinas, Emmanuel1979 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. TheHague : Martinus Nijhoff.Levi-Strauss, Claude

1964-71 Mythologiques. 4 vols. Paris: Librarie Plon.1966 The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice1962 The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans, by Colin Smith.New York: Humanities Press.1963 The Structure of Behaviour. Trans, by Alden Fisher. Bos-ton: Beacon Press.1964 The Primacy of Perception, and Other Essays. Edited byJames M. Edie. Chicago: Northwestern University Press.Natanson, Maurice1973

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Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks. Evanston:Northwestern University Press.

The Idea of the Holy. Trans, by John W. Harvey. Balti-more; Penguin.Pietersma, H.1979 "Husserl and Heidegger." Philosophy and Phenomenologi-cal Research XL,2:194-211.Polanyi, Michael19581966 Personal Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.The Tacit Dimension. Garden C ity, N.Y.: Doubleday 4 C o.Rossi, Ino, ed.1974 The Unconscious in Culture: The Structuralism of C laudeLevi-Strauss in Perspective. New York: Dutton Press.Sahlins, Marshall1977 "Colors and Culture." In Symbolic Anthropology: AReader, ed. by Janet Dolgin et al. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.Shaw, R. D. M., trans, and comm entator1961 The Blue Cliff Records: The Hekigan Rohu. London:Michael Joseph.


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Sperber, Dan1975 Rethinking Symbolism. Trans, by Alice Morton. New York:Cambridge University Press.Spiegelberg, Herbert1969 The Phenomenological Movement: An Historical Intro-

duction. 2d edition. 2 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.Turner, Victor1967 The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.van der Leeuw, Gerardus1963 Religion in Essence and Manifestation. 2 vols. New York:Harper & Row.Waardenburg, Jacques1978 Reflections on the Study of Religion. Religion and Reason,15. The H ague: Mouton.Werner, Heinz, and Kaplan, Bernard1963 Symbol Formation: An Organismic-Developmental Ap-proach to Language and the Expression of Thought. Ne wYork: John Wiley & Sons.Zuesse, Evan1975 "Meditation on Ritual." Journal of the American Academyof Religion 43/3:517-30.1980 Ritual Cosm os: The Sanctification of Life in African Reli-gions. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.1983 "The Absurdity of Ritual." Psychiatry 46/1:40-50.


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