Introduction to the Special Issue “Religious Experience and Metaphysics”: A Brief Overview of Husserl’s Concept of Metaphysics

Over the past decade, the recognition of connections between phenomenology and metaphysics has transformed our understanding of phenomenology quite significantly. Rather than being treated as a technical discipline—a method of philosophy—phenomenology has emerged as a fully fleshed-out philosophy of its own. One may assume that interpretations follow the zeitgeist (which nowadays favors metaphysics), but it is not by vogue alone that a variety of metaphysics have come forward in contexts of phenomenology. The freedom of making reference to metaphysics in the context of phenomenology arose via the influx of a significant amount of new evidence from Husserl’s archival notes, lectures, letters, new translations, and from the advent of a new generation of daring investigators with a strong capacity for epoché. This epoché suspends the methodological purism that dominated readings of phenomenology up to the end of the 1990s, and brings to light the unifying logos in Husserl’s sui generis philosophy.1

Where does religious experience come into this picture? The answer to this question depends on what was meant by metaphysics in different periods of Husserl’s work. Within the scope of this changing view, different conduits for our knowledge of reality can be established; religious experience then either counts or does not count as knowledge. The common consciousness of the everyday gives us the materialized world, and reality as physical reality. Religious experience also gives us reality, but in another mode, not as a physical but as a spiritual reality. If this experience is rational and if it is given by intentionality,2 religious experience is knowledge. If so, reality may have different modes of being given, and how it is given in religious experience can lead to a metaphysics which complements that of physical reality. This claim needs proof; without it, claims to knowledge of reality via religious experience can be unfounded; the whole concept of reality may have validity only when reality is materialized. To sort these questions out, we have to analyze the connections between religious experience and phenomenologically oriented concepts of metaphysics—which is exactly the objective of this Special Issue of Religions.

The evolution of the idea of metaphysics in Husserl was noticed and outlined by De Santis (2021b, 2023a, 2023b). De Santis brings to the forefront not only Husserl’s life-long interest in clarified and revitalized metaphysics, but how conception of metaphysics was correlated with advancements in the understanding of consciousness. Before this ground-breaking volume, Husserl’s critique of Heidegger, and the Husserlian roots of Heidegger’s ideas were, of course, known, but the connection has not been made between Husserl’s criticism of Heidegger and Husserl’s own idea of metaphysics as radically distinct, at all times in its development, from Heidegger’s metaphysics of Dasein.

If Husserl’s work in the phenomenology of consciousness was indeed connected with his background desire to clarify the metaphysics of reality, including the questions such as “what is this world?” and “what is our place in it?”, the separation of the theory of knowledge from metaphysics was a necessary undertaking. This separation also brought up a question which one is the “first”, and which one is the “last philosophy”—the views that changed in Husserl over the course of time. The question of sequencing the fields of study in the creation of phenomenology was a subject of debates between Husserl and Heidegger, Husserl beginning with the principles of the phenomenology of consciousness, and Heidegger beginning with the his anthropomorphic metaphysics of Dasein. For Husserl, theology stood as a field of study separate from scientific metaphysics, but not from the so called “new metaphysics” that he articulated later in his work. As of Trizio (2021b, p. 521), “theology is the most important part and the overarching theme of what Husserl systematically referred to as the highest and ultimate questions (höchsten und letzten Fragen) along with the closely connected problems of immortality, freedom, the sense of history, and the possibility of a happy and meaningful human existence”.

The highest and ultimate questions are, paradoxically, not the questions that philosophy as a vocation can exclusively uphold, but questions which are asked by all of us naively. The idea of connection between consciousness and metaphysics of reality has a spiritual angle which is shared by all seekers of spiritual advancement. Soteriology in all religious traditions, be it concerned with enlightenment, liberation, immortality, or salvation, inspires the focus on the nature of the self. But if, in the spiritual quest, the self is designated to be the locus of the supernatural reality, there remains the problem of the nature and origins of the world. In all of religious history, the theological metaphysics of the self served as the foundation of soteriology (cf. papers by Oliva and Litvin in this Issue). The primacy of the metaphysics of Dasein in the phenomenology of Heidegger thus stands as a variation of this theme. However, as we know, religious traditions did not solve the problem of relationships between consciousness and multiplicity in the appearances of the world. Some traditions, such as Buddhism or Vedanta, neutralize this question by announcing the world to be an illusion. Other traditions, such as Christianity, give rise to dual metaphysics, but in monastic practice, abolish the world by renunciation. Islamic absolute monotheism, in which dual substance metaphysics has no place, treats the world as the signs of God (Schimmel 1994). But how did the “illusion” of the self and world come about? How does creatio ex nihilo appear as multiplicities? And if the seat of absolute reality is in the self, what is the world? Rather than sidelining these problems with the metaphysics of the world, Husserl (1983) confronted them directly and started his transcendental phenomenology with material ontologies of the natural attitude in Ideas 1.

The phenomenology of consciousness is thus the means to discovering both religious and non-religious metaphysics. Beginning with originating intuition, the phenomenology of consciousness searches for foundation on which true concepts can be built. All rational intentionality emerges out of this foundation. If things are understood as they are in themselves, i.e., if understanding correlates with these originating intuitions, the sense of truth is bound to emerge. Research of consciousness is thus the way to a grounded metaphysics, to the true inventory of the world, and to the concept of reality of the whole.

Now back to how religious experience fits into metaphysical agendas of phenomenology. In the beginning, Husserl’s metaphysics was the metaphysics of a natural scientist, i.e., the metaphysics concerned what pertained to the nature of reality as physical reality, or as reality of sciences, but not as God or the self. Similarly to Aristotle’s metaphysics, it was supposed to complete the a priori sciences by serving them an apodictic path to general principles—the principles these sciences were lacking and on which they themselves should have been based. De Santis (2023b) differentiates between three periods in the development of Husserl’s concept of metaphysics: the beginning period with natural and scientific metaphysics, which lasted till 1906; the period after 1906–1907, in which his metaphysics was impacted by the transcendental theory of consciousness and the conceptions of the transcendental ego; and the period when not only the transcendental ego, but other concepts of subjectivity, become pronounced with regard to metaphysics and alter Husserl’s interest in it.

Up to 1906–1907, Husserl agreed with the Aristotelian idea of metaphysics as the first philosophy. This metaphysics proceeds from the natural attitude which becomes modified by the sciences. Such metaphysics should produce the grounding assumptions for the sciences concerned with actuality and reality, i.e., is valid not just for itself but for the sciences. By presenting its vision of reality, such metaphysics would fix and test presuppositions of experimental sciences regarding the actuality they attempt to investigate. The assumptions under scrutiny concern (a) the existence of an external world, (b) the nature of space and time, and (c) the relationship between becoming and causality. For his contemporary situation, Husserl also emphasized the need to untangle metaphysics from the theory of logic (or knowledge). Formal researches in phenomenology, whose task was now to uncover the foundations of pure logic without metaphysics, requires metaphysical neutrality. However, and as Husserl says in the 1898 lectures, the questions falling under the heading “theory of knowledge” stood and remained “on the threshold of metaphysics” (an der Schwelle der Metaphysik)… “knowing consciousness and known realities are two, necessarily disconnected, realities”; “the knowing consciousness is always directed towards something that is really present in it” (Hua-Mat III, 253, 235–236, apud De Santis 2023b, p. 132).

Religious experience is hardly relevant for this kind of metaphysics. These metaphysics of the natural attitude are correlated with the externalistic account, that is, with the idea that consciousness is partly determined by what lies outside of consciousness.3 Husserl’s account of consciousness in general is quite externalistic, despite the emphasis on essences and categorial intuition. Externalism in Husserl cannot be claimed completely because the ego supplements its own excess of meaning to originating intuitions. Yet, the genetic phenomenology of judgements, historical and cultural generativity of consciousness, and passive syntheses of the world-horizon all begin from sensory “earth-ground” of perception (Steinbock 2001). They share the same originating ground, just differ in the scale of time and their relationships to the duration of the individual life. Since evidence in religious experience does not depend, at least overtly, on external sensory input, religious experience remains unconnected to Husserl’s metaphysics in the sense of the first philosophy. Likewise, one does not find a reference to religious experience in Aristotle’s metaphysics. The absence of such reference is not because at the times of Aristotle, division between the everyday and religious experience had not yet taken place. We simply cannot bridge directly religious experience with metaphysics as the first philosophy until, and if, we prove that religious experience contributes to the understanding of reality by the sciences. This absence of an apodictically given connection between religious experience and metaphysics is why, e.g., Kuravsky (in this Special Issue) finds links between religious traditions and Heidegger, not Husserl. The same took place in much of the philosophy of religion, e.g., in Iranian academia. The connection with Husserl’s ideas concerning metaphysics becomes apparent beginning only with the second period in the development of Husserl’s concept of metaphysics.

Beginning in 1906–1907, as De Santis indicates, with Husserl’s lectures on Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge, Husserl’s idea of metaphysics transforms itself along with the rise of his theory of transcendental consciousness. He recognizes metaphysics now as constitutive accomplishments of the transcendental ego, and not a product of naïve perception of the world. Accordingly, “metaphysics” amounts to the re-interpretation of the actually given as the constituted. And, by extension, the sense of metaphysics now includes the transcendental ego (see, e.g., the paper by Louchakova-Schwartz in this Issue). The eidetic of the sciences—a discovery pertaining to the transcendental concept of ontological regions—also transforms the understanding of metaphysics toward a greater emphasis on the role of consciousness. Thus, the place of being “the first philosophy” is now given to the science of consciousness, while the metaphysics of the real world and of the sciences takes the place of “the last philosophy”. Evidenz, which is a concept that is rather linear and formal in Prolegomena to Logical Investigations (Husserl 2001a), becomes much more detailed in Ideas 1 (Husserl 1983). Since any Evidenz can serve as a foundation of knowledge, if religious experience produces Evidenz, the latter can become the source of metaphysics. And if religion has its own province of meaning (Barber 2017), it can also be understood in terms of the eidetic of such a province, and can possibly be interpreted as an ontological region in which a specific mode of givenness can be rationalized as an aspect of reality. This is exactly the conceptual equipment which motivated the call for papers for this Special Issue of Religions. We see the concepts of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology being applied to the analysis of metaphysics in the papers by Costello and Litvin.

Something is given in religious experience. We call it “God”, “Truth”, or “the Absolute”, but we cannot readily determine what it is. However, as Wiltsche (2022) argues, a possibility of originary givenness, rather than originary givenness itself, can be the foundation of rationality. This gives us the space for vast interpretations of the connections between religious experience and the metaphysics of reality. De Santis (2023b, p. 144) states that “the ‘metaphysical interpretation’ of factually given reality corresponds to reason (Vernunft) ‘interpreting’ (interpretieren) factual reality as the domain in which it strives towards realizing itself (telos) through the activity of the many positive sciences. Reason “interprets” factually given reality as its own realization via the sciences”. Can we assume that religious experience can also be a form in which reason attempts to realize itself, but in the absence of things materialized and understood as the objects? Peiró Pérez, in her paper in this Issue, argues that rationality can overcome an apparent contradiction in the notion of being emerging ex nihilo by recognition of the true nature of being. The rationality of being is incompatible with any sort of univocity, equivocation, ambiguity, or constitutive frailty. By contrast with the rationality on Husserl’s concept of metaphysics, Zhao (in this issue) argues that the vagueness of categories in Heidegger’s metaphysics serves to break down the naïve categorial apparatus which is unproductive in the description of the world.

As one can see from the exposition of developing relationships between phenomenology and metaphysics (De Santis 2023a, 2023b), the treatment of metaphysics is closely tied to the concept of phenomenology. Their ordering in a philosophical discourse to a large degree defines the validity of the phenomenological interrogation. Husserl responded to Heidegger’s metaphysical–anthropological interpretation of Dasein by differentiating between the transcendental and monadic ego, with the latter concept being introduced in Fourth Meditation of Cartesian Meditations (De Santis 2023b, vol. 2, p. viii). One can “slice” subjectivity differently, with its ontologies articulated on different levels of abstraction. Formal and transcendental expressions of such abstraction are self-explanatory: the formal is consciousness as it is analyzed in Logical Investigations (Husserl 2001a, 2001b), including the elaborations in the Appendix to the second volume, and the transcendental is consciousness as it is explained in Ideas 1 (Husserl 1983). Monadic consciousness is more concrete, thus being closer to the actuality of human life with its delimiters of birth and death, but not concrete enough to count as individual consciousness. The structures found in the monadic ego can be generalized. With this concreteness of the ego understood as a monad, Husserl’s metaphysics now expands (he calls it “new metaphysics”) to cover the so-called limit phenomena, to which religious experience is necessarily connected (Husserl 2014; Steinbock 2017). New metaphysics is no longer the rational metaphysics of the sciences, but a metaphysics which includes the irrationality of human life. De Santis (2023b, pp. 148–49) gives a clear-cut description of the distinction between the ontological form of intelligibility or rationality (Rationalität) and the transcendental one (Vernünftigkeit), followed by an analysis of their relationships with irrationality. Religious experience fits with this problematic like a glove: it widens the limits of perception, and brings into the picture a metaphysics based on theology, that is, the metaphysics of the invisible and the metaphysics of non-objects (two aspects of the phenomenological metaphysics featured in the research of the Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience, www.sophere.org). Lala’s paper in the present volume contains a very interesting idea derived from the Islamic phenomenological metaphysics, of the realities of religious experience manifesting in real (individual or monadic) life. Similarly, the paper by Oliva combines the Husserlian phenomenological approach with a metaphysical analysis of prophetic thought in Aquinas, and in the same monadic context, Barber discusses the pragmatic encroachment of religious experience. The monadic view, however, connects with formal concepts of phenomenology in the Nyaku treatment of Scheler, and in Pietrogrande’s paper on Derrida (in the present Issue).

With the idea of totality viewed in the monadic context (Husserl 2014), one gains a new logical entry into the problems of ontological and logical priority of Dasein vs. God vs. phenomenology. For discussion of related themes, see the paper by Cassara. The problem widens from the Dasein-phenomenological terrain to the inclusion of the ultimately transcendental aspect. Following the Husserlian motion in metaphysics, one attempts to engage rationality which is based on the transitivity of presentations4 with the things which lie beyond this kind of rationality but may be not irrational at all.