Phenomenology as Soteriology: Husserl and the call for “ Erneuerung ” in the 1920s

Hegel claims famously in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion that “Philosophy is itself, worship; it is religion.” In this essay, it is argued that such a claim could also have been uttered by Husserl – with the much expanded sense that authentic philosophy is equivalent to phenomenology. It is especially present in what might be named Husserl’s “proto‐ Crisis ” texts of the early 1920s. In his call for “renewal” not only of philosophy and science, but culture in general, we see this entanglement of philosophy and religion. In the first part of the essay, it is shown that Husserl’s “critique” of religious tradition is parallel to his critique of the “garbs of ideas” that forms the incomplete “rationality” of the natural sciences. In the second part, attention is given to Husserl’s more positive description of the core rationality that can be found in the religious “lifeworld,” and how this allows him to see phenomenology itself as analogous to religious life. In the conclusion, some of the positive aspects, and also some of the dangers, of Husserl’s analogy between phenomenology and religion are addressed.