The religious attitude

This essay begins from Husserl’s argument, in the Crisis of European Sciences, for a conversion from a pre-reflexive, ‘natural attitude’ to the world (in which the constitution and significance of surrounding things is taken for granted) to a phenomenological attitude that attends to the ways in which things and their significance are constituted in our awareness. For Husserl, religious faith is a manifestation of the natural attitude, and is superseded by phenomenological attention to the world. This essay argues for a more complex understanding of a distinctive religious attitude that shares with the phenomenological attitude a reflexive interest in the ‘how’ of object constitution, but involves a commitment to the constitutive agency not only of the self but also of God. The essay develops this description by analogizing a religious attitude to attitudes relevant to aesthetic experience.