Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LIII/1

THE ROLE OF INTENTIONALITY IN THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF RELIGION

EVAN M. ZUESSE Although there are many phenomenologies of religion, and it may even be said that phenomenology is now a la mode in Religious Studies throughout at least the non-Communist world, there has been remarkably little scrutiny given to the theoretical and, if one likes, the epistemological foundations of this discipline. The major classics of the phenomenology of religion, such as Mircea Eliade's Patterns in Comparative Religion and The Sacred and the Profane, or Gerardus van der Leeuw's Religion in Essence and Manifestation, perhaps properly devote very little attention to 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 indifference to or ignorance of the philosophical consequences of their methods can lead to serious distortions. Phenomenological philosophy has itself changed over the years; so adherence to older assumptions may not always be justified. Who indeed can be sure that even the above-mentioned leaders in the phenomenology of religion have succeeded in entirely avoiding problematical areas, knowledgeable though they obviously are in their craft? It may therefore be useful to turn back to the founders of phenomenology as such, to determine the major varieties of approach, with the implications that flow from each, and their consequences for the study of religion. Our own study naturally cannot hope to be comprehensive; in the following remarks we shall merely trace some of the main lines of the phenomenologists of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, whom I take to be representative of two quite different lines of a single tradition. Our chief interest will be in the varying ways "intentionality" has been treated by these two thinkers. Following these surveys, some applications to the study of religion will be ventured.

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

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion EDMUND 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 neologisms and horrendous Teutonic style but also because he himself was uncertain of where his thought was leading him. He confessed that his various works were only experiments in articulating a perspective which even for him was not always too clear. Phenomenology, he said (perhaps making a virtue out of a frustrating necessity), requires ever new beginningsanyone claiming to have reduced it to a cut-and-dried system has simply not understood what phenomenology is about (see Speigelberg, 1969, 1:76 and especially the humorous/pathetic footnote there). At his death in 1938 at the age of 79, he left a veritable mountain of unpublished manuscripts for his assistants and disciples to sift through, amounting to some 45,000 pages of shorthand! Even the published work is filled with paradoxes, undeveloped lines of thought, and unresolved, sometimes undetected contradictions. One can understand why he has been so amazingly stimulating in the history of modem thought, for he offers richly diverse original insights into some of the most basic areas of existence and philosophy. As one reads through such a seminal work as Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (which first appeared in 1913 in German), one has the sense of beholding a powerful mind groping indefatigably but uncertainly through an almost impenetrable thicket. Husserl, after all, was a pioneer in one of the most daunting and lawless of all regions, consciousness itself. Nevertheless, Husserl's goal was to map out in all their actual and especially potential permutations the absolute structures of consciousness, constituting a science that would sum up total reality and would be the queen of all sciencesfor all sciences are necessarily founded by and in consciousness. Husserl sought nothing less than to fill in the gaping void left by the demise of the theological verities of the Middle Ages, and thus to restore certitude and values to a declining Western civilization. The reader of Husserl will in fact be occasionally taken aback by passages of unrestrained proselytizing for his phenomenology, and almost religious claims for its power to reverse the spiritual decay of the West. As is well-known, Husserl began this quest for his holy grail with the cry: "To the things themselves!" So ended his first major work, Logical Investigations (the first edition appeared in 1900-1901). With this cry he sought, firstly, to point to the true "things" that we know, namely, the necessary and essential logical structures of the mind, and, secondly, to dismiss the prevailing naively positivistic scientific theories which assumed 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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human and material spheres, of value and fact. For, he insisted, "things" only constitute themselves as such through consciousness, and are relative to a knowerall consciousness is "consciousness of," and thus instead of there 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 the Main Phenomenological Theme": Husserl, 1962:222). Of course, there were criticisms from the start that Husserl was sinking into a subjectivistic idealism, in which the entire world becomes merely a shifting phantom of the mind; he indignantly rejected such "misconceptions" in his early career (although Logical Investigations explicitly sought "the ideal types of logical experience corresponding to the ideal logical laws; whether or not they had counterparts in actual experience was immaterial to him": Spiegelberg, 1969, 1.102). However, by his later years Husserl's own logic had inexorably led him to what he called "transcendental idealism" or "phenomenological idealism," which he found it necessary to distinguish at length from solipsism (cf. Husserl, 1973:83-90, et alii).1 Husserl was anxious to show that through intentionality we will our entire world into being and give it shape. So, for him, the truly fundamental question must be: How is it that awareness of things, of primal identities, is built up, or "constituted," in consciousness? How is the "intentional act," the "idea," that this chair exists "synthesized" out of the "raw data" of consciousness? (Note the distinction here between intentionality and raw data; we shall return to it.) Husserl teaches us to attend closely to the "chair" quality of the chair, until we arrive at the primal constituting idea or "essence" of "chairhood." The act of cognition of the chair is in this way disassembled into its constituent partsone recognizes an essence of "redness," for example, an essence of "cloth," and essence of "wood," and so on, which can all be distinguished from the organizing, intentional essence, the "archon" or controlling synthesizing 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 whether or 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 early Logical Investigations and the very late Cartesian Meditations are clearly idealistic, but that the integrity of Husserl's thought leads him in both to statements that have realistic implications; the same remains true even where, as in The Crisis of European Thought, Husserl devotes a good deal of attention to the life-world (on which, see Carr). Kockelmans gives a long discussion over to just this issue, surveying all the various positions, and espouses basically the same conclusion (see Kockelmans: chap. 11: "Realism or Idealism?" 315-55).

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opposition between "essence" and "intentionality" which is most significant. Essences are the building blocks, the sensations per se, the "raw data," which intentionality puts together in additive fashion into a synthetic unity, i.e., a posited, "thetic" meaning. Meaning, then, can be and is the sum of discrete parts, items which can be analytically isolated and then put back together again, unlike Humpty Dumpty. In any case, in this approach the experienced and contextual chair is transposed into an isolated datum of its own by the achievement of the phenomenological reduction, in which it stands forth as a thing in itself, a pure "idea" detached from its immediate environment. Husserl is in fact not interested in the concrete chair, but in "chair" as a typification: he wishes to define the structural types of thought itself. To understand this typification better, however, it is necessary 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 analysis. The given world is therefore merely the occasion for a wider study of consciousness; or, more truly, "reality" is not to be found in the actual fulfilled experience of the chair, but precisely in its infinite potential variations, in its transcendence of givenness. This is one of the most profound of HusserPs insights. It is only due to the endless potential forms of the chair, which are available to and in a sense even known as an indeterminate "fringe" around the perceived chair by the cognizing self, that the changing perspectives on the chair as experienced from moment to moment in everyday life can all be synthesized by intentionality into forms of the single, "real" chair. That is, without a sense of other possible perspectives or forms of the chair, we would not only not be able to recognize a particular kind of chair as a "chair," but we would even be unable to keep this actual chair in mind as a chair from instant to instant in all shifts in perspective and use. So a main characteristic of intentionality is that it gives a continuing identity to the varying modifications of the 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 identity on those data, discovering within them a transcendent enduring object. The recognition of a level of consciousness which is given over to typifications 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 to Husserl have been generated out of sedimentations of previous experience: acknowledging "red" many times, we come finally to know of a typical "red" which informs any particular instance. Through typical forms, then, reality itself becomes known. Essences are these typical forms.

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Since "reality" is only known through typifications, a science of reality must concentrate on the potential essences of consciousness, not merely on givenness. The goal of analysis, to quote Husserl, is "to clear up, in respect of all internal structures, the essential structure of the dimensions of infinity that make up systematically the ideal infinite synthesis of this evidence . . ." (Husserl, 1973:63). There are infinite modes of any "real" thing; phenomenology discovers the structures governing this infinity, and thus arrives at the fundamental reality of the thing. One extraordinary way of doing this recommended by Husserl is to vary the forms of the "thing" freely, in fantasy, shifting about particular qualities so as to arrive at the ultimate structures defining the "thing" in any conditions. We may also collect in consciousness ah1 the actual modes of the "thing," so as to arrive at the same end. (In the phenomenology of religion it has been customary to collect actual, rather than wholly imaginary, instances of, say, "sacrifice" or "world tree" so as to arrive at the "essential structures" of sacrifice or world-tree-as-such. Particular 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 it has only the immediately presented horizon. A painted stone possesses only a single perspective. Real stones, however, have a top, a bottom, sides and a back; they also have insides and outsides. The reality of the stone is implicitly confirmed when, as we shift our position or the stone changes relative to us, other sides or horizons are presented. At no one moment are all horizons presented to us, and this very absence of "givenness" is the proof that the stone is real. Only through transcendence of reality is reality constituted; what is not makes what is. If we could ever delineate explicitly the laws governing all possible horizons, we would have achieved a total description of the Beyond, of Being itself. This was Husserl's greatest goal, but one which he knew was not possible of complete fulfillment by one person. His unceasing attempts at it help explain those 45,000 pages of shorthand left at his death. Certainly it was no cliche for him when he insisted that all phenomenology begins in radical wonder, wonder directed to the "beyond" quality of all experience. The systematic operation of radical wonder consisted of the "transcendental reduction." Husserl was never quite sure that he had fully attained to the perfect form of this reduction, but that it contained the essence of his approach was not in question. Disciples have confessed that the kind of conscious awareness that it requires has taken them many years of constant practice to master (Natanson: 70). What seems to be involved, however, is the induction of a meditational state very similar to certain Zen and Tantrie conditions, or to schizophrenia as it has sometimes been described in medical literature. In a full transcendental reduction, the "world" as a

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coherent unity disappears, idiosyncratic and pragmatic personal purpose likewise drops away, and the world of things and ideas therefore stands forth unveiled, each of these with its own fringe of horizons, and even more primal, each constituted out of its own "essences." Things dissolve into shifting essential qualities and perspectives. These essences are eternally themselves, and only manifest themselves through empirical experience. The phenomenologist is able through the reduction to contact them, and to vary them freely in imagination: the bird flying through the air becomes air surrounding a hollow shape, or two birds, or a griffin, or nothing 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 trance states in Zuesse, 1980:198). In a world so totally dismembered, what provides the unity? Obviously, the self. Husserl frequently referred to his method as an egological science. Not for nothing was one of his last, and most readable and decisive, formulations of his phenomenology entitled Cartesian Meditations. He founded his all-encompassing phenomenological "doubt" or reduction on the rock of the ever-present self, and from there sought to reconstruct the whole of reality in all of its actual and potential forms of consciousness. Yet the self that remains after the bracket of the reduction is applied cannot be the biographical ego of the natural world. All "natural" intentionalities, and worldliness as a whole, are put into suspension, of course. What remains is a contentless ego, a pivot of thought, in relation to which all things and ideas appear. It is this ego which wills a world and even other persons, whom it constitutes on an analogical basis from itself (see Cartesian Meditations, passim). This ego itself stands on nothing. The analysis here has a fascinating resemblance to the psychology of Hindu and Buddhist yoga, even to the insight that all things are composite constructions and that the self along with all else is empty. One may say that Husserl here begins an analysis of the soul, the self beyond the self. In any case, this is the foundation on which he proposes his science of consciousness be built. As he writes at the very end of Cartesian Meditations: "The Delphic motto, 'Know thyself has gained a new signification. Positive science is a science lost in the world. I must lose the world by epoche, in order to regain it by a universal selfexamination. 'Noli foras ire,' says Augustine, 'in te redi, in interiore homine 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 Phenomenology However, Husserl is too rich and complex for us to end our summary of his thought here, high and dry in a transcendental idealism. For one thing, he confesses that the contentless ego is itself given a location

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and a pivot by the body. This is an absolutely crucial insight, which if taken to its logical conclusions would even seem to alter Husserl's whole idealistic system. For it will be remembered that the sole characteristic of the "ego" of the transcendental reduction is that it is the fulcrum and pivot of thought: it is the necessary pole before which all things appear, which wills experience and ideas. But what does the ego pivot onwhat location can it have other than the humble body? Does not this suggest that the transcendental ego is simply the first efflux in consciousness of the inwardness of the body itself, that it is the most "subjective" experience of the body? The pivot of the pivot, the soul of the soul, would then be the sentient flesh, the content of the "contentless ego" is that physical person with the ski nose, bushy mustache and beard, vest and watchchain (cf. the photograph in Speigelberg, 1969, 1:73), and we are plunged from the transcendental reduction back into the given world with all its existential and experiential facticities, in which the self is limited by a specific biography and skills, by particular other persons, by otherness, disease, and death. In this case, a total transcendental reduction is certainly not possible, for an essential aspect of all thought at its foundation would then be embeddedness in a given world and embodiment. From the Buddhist anatman (no-self) we are thrown back into the fusion of nefesh (life-soul) and guf (flesh): here arises the chasm between fundamentally different world-views. Yet what a delicate distinction lies at their root! And, when we take the bodily foundation of consciousness seriously, it is not hard to see how contemporary existentialist phenomenologies have arisen out of such Husserlian hints. Many of the unpublished and published manuscripts of Husserl are devoted to the analysis of how precisely things come to be synthesized in awareness. Here we are at the opposite pole from the ego, focusing on the "things" of consciousness. There were, according to Husserl, two ways we could go about analyzing this process, a formal analysis, or a genetic one. The formal-logical or formal-ontological approach is concerned with all the potential modalities and structures of consciousness, and employs the technique of "free imaginative variation" we have already mentioned. The material ontological, genetic analysis centers on the breakdown of an intentional unity into the horizons and essences underlying its synthesis, so as to understand its givenness and its "reality." But Husserl found that at the end of such an analysis, if he was thorough, he had arrived at the "life-world" (Lebenswelt) as the logically necessary horizon. Despite the exorcism of worldliness at the beginning of the transcendental reduction, it had a way of reappearing at the end. Another side of the same dilemma was the genetic analysis of how a specific "thing" came to be constituted as such. Husserl hoped to show that every intentional unity had its original source in an "active synthesis," that is, in an act of the ego whereby it posits an identity in the "raw

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data" or essences that confront it. But, as he is forced to admit in his Cartesian Meditations, he found that the origin of the perception of a cognitive unity in experience was always a "passive synthesis," given to the self but not formed by it, which in turn became the material for active syntheses. This language of passive and active syntheses refers to precisely the same process that Jean Piaget later called "accommodation" and "assimilation"a process which perhaps under the influence of Husserl and his followers he regarded as basic to the development of cognitive complexity in human beings. Piaget, too, finds that infants begin by accommodating themselves to their environment, and discovering their world by responses to its cues. From this we begin to build up a self, and thus 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 phenomenological idealism runs into some basic difficulties. Indeed, one might well go on to ask how universal the supposedly universal and absolute essences of Husserl are. For example, the essence of redness which is so often mentioned in Husserl's writings as a final datum of consciousness may not exist as such at all. Even "essences" may be contextual. There are cultures, anthropologists tell us, where red is not admitted to be a primary color, and in which there is no term as such for it; a member of such a culture, beholding what we would take to be a shade of red, might well view it as a form or shade of yellow. No doubt the same wave lengths of light would be perceived, but their intentional meaning would be different, and yellow might be used interchangeably with red in ritual or symbolic contexts. But even if "redness" does seem to be recognized in most cultures (as would seem to be indicated by ethnographic research: see Turner: 59-92, and especially Berlin and Kay, and Sahlins), the same need not follow for nonperceptual, cultural structures, or even certain aspects of sensory life that are culturally dependent. If this is correct, then far from his work's constituting an analysis of absolute transcendental consciousness, Husserl's analysis might at least partly consist of an analysis of the essential structures of (central) European consciousness. To a considerable degree his analysis may even be merely of the connotative and denotative referents of various terms in European languages. For Husserl's analyses of essences, after all, were exercised on and by European adults whose acculturation was largely completed and whose sense of the world had already been internalized from long years of unself-conscious speech and interaction. In Husserl's last published works before his death, and even more in his unpublished manuscripts, the consequences of such reflections are evidenced in an increasing interest in culturally generated structures and the Lebenswelt. In The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (first published in 1936), Husserl shows that the life-worlds of

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Congo farmers or Chinese peasants are quite different from ours, but a doctrine of cultural relativism is overcome "when we consider that the lifeworld does have, in all its relative features, a general structure . . . [which] is not itself relative. We can regard it in its generality and, with sufficient care, 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, found in the original). In other words, the a priori essences include the basic structures of culture as well as the sensations with which he was concerned in his earlier works. As the English translator of The Crisis remarks, however, perceptual structures may not change since they are part of our bodily malce-up, but cultural structures certainly do. Moreover, cultural creations are clearly "intentionalities," in Husserl's terminology, and therefore by definition the product of "essences," and secondary in constitution. How can they be essences as well? What is needed before Husserl's position can be justified is a "stratified constitutive analysis" showing how from universal 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 own thoughts, hold the promise of a very different kind of phenomenological analysis of intentionality and essences. Husserl, in fact, in one of his earliest works, recognized two kinds of intentionality. He 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 its referent. It is possible that further study of this type of intentionality might have revealed to Husserl the primacy of contextual fields of awareness rather than specific things or ideas taken in isolation one from the other. But, in perhaps the most crucial decision affecting the development of his phenomenology, Husserl assumed that symbolic meaning could only be the offspring of intentional acts which establish "objectivity"first a thing or a sign must be, before it can symbolize or be symbolized, thus symbolic intentionality is derivative and secondary. So, in terms of the constitution of conscious meanings, we first have elementary essences, synthesized into unities by localized intentionalities, which then relate to each other through symbolic meanings. The possibility that we come to know things only through symbolic fields of awareness did not occur to him. In a very interesting passage, made in passing as such remarks so often are with him, Husserl acknowledged "the eidetically valid and self-evident proposition, that no concrete experience can pass as independent in the full sense of the term. Each 'stands in need of completion' in respect of some connected whole, 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 passage in question to maintain that the "inner uniqueness" of a perception remains identical with itself despite context, and so he did not give his insights into what he called the "marginal zone" much importance.

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Logical Investigations, in which Husserl laid down the first orientations which would govern his method, appeared in 1900-1901 (with a second edition in 1913), and made a considerable impact. The guiding lines of the phenomenological method were articulated over the next three decades, helping to generate or sustain a whole school of German phenomenological and introspective psychology. (However, this school was developing before Husserl's work, and Natanson is at pains to dissociate Husserl from the Introspectivists; Natanson: 42-43). At the same time, this school provided the chief dissent from the behavioristic psychologists who employed a strongly mechanistic and positivistic theory. However, in 1912 a young academic psychologist named Max Wertheimer published an obscure article on the stroboscopic effect (such as we see in the movie theater, where rapidly illuminated still photographs convey the impression of flowing movement); this laid the first stone in a new theoretical edifice, Gestalt psychology. The Gestalt school really became significant in the twenties and thirties, towards the end of Husserl'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 phenomenological Introspectivists, with whom they shared many common assumptions. It is interesting to read, for example, Wolfgang Kohler's Gestalt Psychology (rev. ed., 1947), and find an entire chapter devoted to a criticism of "Introspective psychology," following immediately after a chapter on the Behaviorists. The chief failing of Introspectivism, according to Kohler, was that it took local sensory data (e.g., redness or roundness) in isolation from its experiential context. In sharp opposition to this view, Kohler writes: "Our view will be that, instead of reacting to local stimuli by local and mutually independent events, the organism responds to the pattern of stimuli to which it is exposed; and that this answer is a unified process, a functional whole, which gives, in experience, a sensory scene rather than a mosaic of local sensations. Only from this point of view can we explain the fact that, with a constant local stimulus, local experience is found to vary when the surrounding stimulation is changed" (Kohler: 62). There are, then, no "raw data" or a priori essences which intentionality "synthesizes," only patterned fields of awareness; the problem Introspectivists as well as Behaviorists fail to answer, according to Kohler, is that of "organic order" (64). It is not surprising that Husserl was so enormously influential in his time: his richness of insight was extraordinary. But it is perhaps also not surprising that his most notable disciples dissented from his "transcendental" and idealistic program, and in one way or another emphasized other possibilities in his theory. Alfred Schutz, while accepting Husserl's methodology, analysed the intersubjective realm solely from the natural viewpoint. As H. Pietersma has recently shown, Heidegger differed from

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his master Husserl above all in his rejection of the possibility of a complete transcendental reduction: we are irreducibly Dasein (a Husserlian term meaning "Being-in-the-world") and cannot escape the natural world, facticity, specific identity, and death. We do not complacently spin 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 of consciousness. Sartre followed Heidegger in this, as did Ortega y Gasset, giving Existentialism a new depth and prestige. Strictly within the phenomenological tradition, perhaps the greatest follower of Husserl was Maurice Merleau-Ponty. We turn to his thought now. MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY (1908-1961) As is the case with any thinker, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was very much a man of his time. Just as Husserl is thoroughly a German of the Kaiserian epoch in his idealistic but thing-oriented academic philosophy, and comes to reflect as well the feeling of apocalyptic despair common to many humane thinkers between the wars as decent institutions seemed to collapse under a barbarian scientism, so too Merleau-Ponty matured as a scholar during the Second World War, and became completely disillusioned with "the conventional lies of French society" revealed by the Vichy cooperation with Nazi savagery. He became a Marxist humanist, holding that there is" always a systematic, functional coherence between the idealisms and the deeds of historical societies: informing all aspects of social life is a patterned order which serves the underlying and real "Idea" of an age. All things are implicated in each other. (However, he was unable to apply this insight in turn to Russia, when the "show trials" and the Gulag were first brought to the attention of post-World War II European intellectuals by Arthur Koestler and others: cf. his essay "The Yogi and the Proletarian," first published in 1947 in French, and translated in Merleau-Ponty, 1964.) Philosophically, just as Descartes, Berkeley, and Kant lie behind Husserl, Hegel is a continuing inspiration to Merleau-Ponty. Fascinated by psychology (his first book was The Structure of Behavior, published in 1942), Merleau-Ponty also read the Gestalt psychologists closely while his own ideas were still in the formative stage, and he was deeply influenced by them. It is perhaps not wholly surprising, then, that as a philosopher he turned to Husserl for insight into psychological realities; even the Gestalt theorists acknowledge HusserPs influence. But for Merleau-Ponty it went further than that; he found Husserl so deeply stimulating he ended up almost appropriating him, often defending the "true" Husserl not only against HusserPs critics but especially against Husserl himself. For evidence of this, and insight into the specific understanding of intentionality of Merleau-Ponty's masterpiece, The Phenomenology of Perception

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(1945), we only need to turn to the "Preface" of that work. In fact, this entire preface, so widely acclaimed as a lucid and persuasive introduction to Husserlian phenomenology, is from beginning to end a polemic against Husserl's idealistic approach. The unsophisticated reader can be forgiven for missing this, however, for with the utmost delicacy Merleau-Ponty presents himself as the defender and elucidator of Husserl's complex and sometimes admittedly ambiguous pioneering insights. The "Preface" begins by posing the question, "What is phenomenology?" and goes on directly to admit that the answer still remains somewhat obscure, due to Husserl's ambiguity. For example, Husserl's doctrine of "essences" has sometimes been criticized as being in opposition to his insistence on existence and the given world. Merleau-Ponty sets himself, therefore, to clarify the basic insights of Husserl. Phenomenology, he says, is of course the return to the things themselves, which means to the things as experienced, or even more accurately, to the world which alone permits things to exist. This move to the experiential world is "absolutely distinct from the idealist return to consciousness" and to the ego as the foundation of consciousness (Merleau-Ponty, 1962:ix). Descartes and Kant were in error in making such an idealistic analytical reduction, as Husserl correctly understood (sic\; ibid.:x). For "[t]he world is there before any possible analysis of mine, and it would be artificial to make it the outcome of a series of syntheses which link, in the first place sensations, then aspects of the object corresponding to different perspectives, when both are nothing but products of analysis, with no sort of priority." Here Merleau-Ponty has pithily summarized and dismissed Husserl's concepts of the a priori "essence" and the "horizons"! He goes on:
Analytical reflection believes it can trace back the course followed by a prior constituting act and arrive, in the 'inner man' to use Saint Augustine's expressionat a constituting power which has always been identical with that inner self. [But on the contrary:] The world is not an object such that I have in my possession the law of its making; it is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not 'inhabit' only 'the inner man' [a footnote here cites Augustine, In te redi, etc., but omits that the source for this reference was Husserl], or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself. (ibid.:x-xi)

Similarly, Merleau-Ponty describes the account given of intersubjectivity and other persons in the Cartesian Meditations as if it were the argument of an anonymous school of thought, and adds, "For Husserl, on the contrary," things are not so cut-and-dried (xi-xii). The true purpose, then, of the phenomenological reduction is not to dismiss the natural attitude to the world, but the very opposite, to raise it to consciousness and make it the subject of investigation. The natural

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world of actual experience is the only proper subject for phenomenological 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 misunderstood. It really refers, not to local sensations taken out of their context and made a priori, but to the nature of things in experience, their beingquality. "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 be understood . . ." (xiv). We require the epoche or transcendental bracketing to disclose the ideality of experience, so that having overcome our ordinary thoughtless immersion in things we can behold the actual facticity of our world. In a telling footnote to a later chapter of The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty is much more explicit: he asserts that Husserl himself came in his last years "tacitly" to give up the doctrine of essences altogether, as he grasped more adequately the consequences of phenomenological theory (49, n. 1; also see note 1 to this paper). An entire chapter of The Phenomenology of Perception is given over to an analysis of sensation, which is the analogue of Husserl's essences. Drawing on the Gestalt psychologists, some of the earliest work of Piaget, and various monographs on brain damage, Merleau-Ponty shows that no sensations are merely local nor of isolated qualities. The meaning we discover in experience, even on the rudimentary level of sensation, determines what we experience; this meaning is part of a total human being-world continuum which cannot be broken up, parsed, or objectified: indeterminacy is essential to our experience of the world (6-9). Perception proceeds from the whole to the parts, not vice versa as empiricism pretends; neither can the whole be constructed (or "synthesized") from parts, since the meaning which shapes the whole arises from the whole as such in relationship to a yet larger controlling field. Merleau-Ponty draws our attention to the background against which our explicit perceptions stand out: the non-explicit halo which sustains all explicit thought is essential to the meaning of that thought (for a convergent study of "the tacit dimension," see Polanyi, 1958 and 1966). We can begin to examine this halo through study of the "horizons" of things and ideas, as Husserl said. But Merleau-Ponty's use of this technique is far more concretely contextual: As we have seen, in his phenomenology, "things" do not exist isolated from other things; instead, through coexistence, things emerge into distinct identity. That the back, top, bottom, sides, and inside of the stone I see are "potential" horizons possessed by an isolated thing and waiting to unfold would not occur to Merleau-Ponty: they are actual horizons, part of the total tacit existence of the world they inhabit. For a perspective that may be potential for me is assumed as the actual perspective of other parts of my experienced world:

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion Thus every object is the mirror of all others. When I look at the lamp on my table, I attribute to it not only the qualities visible from where I am, but also those which the chimney, the walls, the table can '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 as objects form a system or a world, and in so far as each one treats the others round it as spectators of its hidden aspects which guarantee the permanence of those aspects by their presence. Any seeing of an object by me is instantaneously repeated between all those objects in the world which are apprehended as co-existent, because each of them is all that the others 'see' of it. (68)

Any particular thing implies therefore as a ground the entire world of things. The figure-ground relationship, as it is known to Gestalt psychology, is the subject of some of Merleau-Ponty's most brilliant meditations. Not only is it the condition for any particular explicit perception, but it also applies to ideas and even to clear consciousness. That is, Merleau-Ponty tries to show that all reflective, distinct or rational thought of whatever kind rests on and emerges from and refers back to "preconscious" awareness. With such language, Merleau-Ponty not only applies Husserl's insights about prepredicative thought, but also appropriates the positive insights of the psychoanalytical schools. He eschews the term "unconsciousness," because for him the outstanding trait of preconscious thought is not its refusal to become conscious, but its flux and indeterminacy, which makes preconscious thought as such unable structurally to be clear and determinate thought. Preconscious thought is antepredicative, that is, it is before language, but language is its revelation and even self-revelation. From its silence emerges the word, for it is not a silence bereft of meaning; quite the contrary, no words can exhaust its meaning. Intentionality, in such a setting, can only be worldly and contextual in its basic nature. "Consciousness itself is a project of the world . . ." (xvii). Particular intentionalities rest on more global ones, residing in the antepredicative unity of the world and our life. A phenomenological analysis of any particular perception must rest that perception or thought in the vast embracing life-world of which it is a product, and in terms of which it takes on meaning. But even more interestingly, Merleau-Ponty begins in his phenomenological researches to sketch out multiple levels of intentionality, each providing a basis for the others. In particular, he was interested in the genesis of thought, and followed closely such researches as Piaget's. As he shows in The Phenomenology of Perception, the body and its movements, which generate global, prereflective or preconscious patterns of sensation and apprehension, are the foundations for all reflective thought. The multiple levels or modes of consciousness permit or rather demand multidisciplinary research; as personal thought enters into intersubjectivity and more general social

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structures, we must move from psychological categories to sociological and historical ones. Of course, in each case we are concerned as phenomenologists with the interconnections of these realms, not with any one solely in itself: Whether we are concerned with a thing perceived, a historical event or doctrine, to 'understand' is to take in the total intentionnot 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 of existing expressed in all the events of a revolution, in all the thoughts of a philosopher. It is a matter, in the case of each civili- zation, offindingthe Idea in the Hegelian sense . . . that formula which sums up some unique manner of behaviour towards others, towards Nature, time and death: a certain way of patterning the world which the historian should be capable of seizing upon and making his own. (xviii) As a result, we can start our search for historical understanding with a study of ideology, or psychology, or politics, or religion, or economics or more adequately from all these and other perspectives simultaneously, for all of these are true perspectives, all imply each other, and we shall find the same pattern underlying everything: "All these views are true provided that they are not isolated, that we delve deeply into history and reach the unique core of existential meaning which emerges in each perspective" (xix). Merleau-Ponty's use of the field-theory of understanding is so enthusiastic that he even applies it, as we can see, to the study of whole civilizations, and even further, to the entirety of history. "Considered in the light of its fundamental dimensions, all periods of history appear as manifestations of a single existence, or as episodes in a single drama . . ." (ibid.). Here we may be forgiven if we find not a phenomenological datum, but purely a statement of faith. It is evident, in short, that Merleau-Ponty has found it easy to sup from a discussion of lived contexts to just the study of contexts. But if no one person experiences world history, how can we be sure that it is all one single drama? It is precisely the transcendental Spirit that unifies Hegel's phenomenology that Merleau-Ponty's Marxist materialism cannot accept. Phenomenologically, that is, strictly in accord with lived experience and specific existences, it would seem impossible to make such affirmations, although as individuals each of us will inevitably have a genuine personal experience of that history, and may wish to assert this experience in the form of a larger philosophical or theological statement. This criticism of Merleau-Ponty suggests others. Even in the case of an actual life-situation involving more than one person, can we assert phenomenologically that the meaning of the situation really is the same for everyone concerned, that it is all one single drama? Granted that

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phenomenologically even the slightest gesture has meaning (xviii), need it always be the same meaning? It is not more accurate to say that meaning may differ from person to person and even moment to moment? We can take our skepticism one further step, and direct it to the texture of experience for a single person. Without denying the basic orientation towards coherency in all humans, it would seem most faithful to actual experience to admit that levels or modes of meaning may not cohere tightly, and may indeed be differently oriented at different times. Finally, Merleau-Ponty's own phenomenology suggests that it is a basic error 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 plaything of our fantasy. The "otherness" of every thing, and especially of every person, is our experiential warrant for knowing it to be truly existent (cf. our earlier remarks; the profound implications of this insight are explored by Levinas). CONCLUSIONS We have seen that there are two major forms of phenomenology, which we may call essentialistic and contextualistic. (The four varieties distinguished by Jacques Waardenberg may be grouped under the above two headings as subvarieties; see Waardenberg: 105f.) The two methods have not had an equal impact on the phenomenology of religion, however. The classic methodological works in the phenomenology of religion have generally used an essentialistic approach, and it is only recently that explicitly worked-out methodologies for a more contextualistic approach 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 traditions have been assiduously made, even if only based on an ad hoc approach which borrowed and continues to borrow its methodologies from whatever nonphenomenological discipline looks at the time most attractive, whether historical, philological, anthropological, psychological, or sociological. 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 are no doubt many. This is the obvious fact that at the time of the early development of the discipline of the objective study of religion, during the first two generations of its formation when a search was made for a method that promised to be nondogmatic, scientific, and a legitimating base for a distinctive discipline of religious studies, Husserlian phenomenology had just achieved its greatest acceptance and was generating many applications in all fields of knowledge. Husserl's aims, to develop a

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scientific and all-embracing theory which would be nonreductionistic, held out the hope that religion could be sympathetically and yet objectively dealt with on its own terms. These were certainly powerful lures, especially when we remember that most early scholars of religious studies were theologically trained and ill-disposed to a merely positivistic treatment of religion. For most of them, their real research was into "Comparative Religions," the handmaiden of theology. Rudolf Otto, with his pioneering and confessedly essentialistic study of The Idea of the Holy (first published in German in 1917), certainly is an example of this: the aforementioned work in effect shows how all religions are striving for and achieve their fullest realization in Christianity as interpreted by Schleiermacher. As such, the work is a study in what can also be called "natural theology." Gerardus van der Leeuw, whose Religion in Essence and Manifestation is certainly one of the towering accomplishments and general summations of that first period of modern religious studies, also exemplifies these observations. His masterpiece, for the first time explicitly basing the comparative study of religion on Husserlian assumptions, appeared in 1924 in Dutch and went through many translations and editions, the last of which was in 1956. It is significant that even after the appearance of existentialism and contextualistic phenomenologies like Maurice Merleau-Ponty's and even after the full impact of Gestalt theories had been felt, van der Leeuw preferred the new researches of Carl G. Jung, who in the post-war period held out the chief promise of a new scientific rationale for an essentialistic methodology of religious studies (Waardenberg: 222). Mircea Eliade, whose works hold the commanding position in the third generation of phenomenology of religion that van der Leeuw's held in the second (Chantepie de la Saussaye may be said to represent the first generation), has in a nondogmatic way combined the Husserlin and Jungian approaches in his own works, which accordingly emphasize an essentialistic methodology as well. Yet Eliade's students are almost all more contextualistic than essentialistic, reflecting not only the openness and broad sympathies of Eliade but also a new orientation in the field. A major reason for this is probably the strong impact of anthropology, which in its British and American versions has concentrated on contextualistic issues. Another is the growing importance in general culture of field theory such as Kurt Lewin's, personalistic philosophies such as Michael Polanyi's, and existentialistic thought in general. But perhaps even more decisive is the fact that most doctoral students of religious studies are no longer trained in theological studies first, but come to the subject from a variety of undergraduate backgrounds (usually from the humanities or the social sciences). This new perspective is reflected, not only in the development of centers where contextualistic phenomenology is emphasized, as at Harvard under Wilfred C. Smith or Lancaster under

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Ninian Smart, or even Chicago where Eliade's students and colleagues spend a good deal of time in the faculties of anthropology and Asian area studies, and generally adhere to a more "historical" and anthropological approach than the master, but also in the sudden flood of monographs critical of the theological and/or ontological agendas of van der Leeuw or Eliade. For, as our study has shown us, the essentialism of Husserl does tend to reflect, or to lead to, an idealistic a priori system of some sort: it is implied in the epistemological structures of the method. Moreover, even from within this epistemology, fundamental contradictions arise which suggest its ultimate untenability, as we have seen. Yet if the coming generation of phenomenologists of religion are going to be more inclined to contextualism than ever before, our study also points to some further cautionary remarks. We have, first of all, noted the general absence of a solid theoretical basis for most non-essentialistic phenomenologies up to the present. It would appear that Maurice Merleau-Ponty's modification of Husserl supplies a large part of that base, although its applications in the phenomenology of religion still remain to be worked out.2 But, even
What would a contextualistic phenomenology of religion look like? It would, first of all, 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 multidisciplinary analysis of religious behavior, taking into account the sensory-motor, egocentric, social, "ideological" and transcendental fields of awareness, in which preconscious and conscious awareness interweave on all levels. The psychological studies of Piaget, as well as the independent researches of Heinz Werner and Bernard Kaplan, have showed in rich detail how a constitutive analysis of the sort that Husserl calls for in The Crisis of European Thought might unfold. But the most striking attempt to date to develop a truly constitutive and multi-disciplinary analysis of religious behavior is that of the recent symposium 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 would devote 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 religious behavior the intentionality oriented to the dynamic framework controlling all less ultimate networks of meaning; we might call this an intentionality of transcendental structure. Rudolf Otto has informed us of the structure-shattering Wholly Other. But in addition to or even instead of this primordial Being there is in all religion an intense and devout attention to the deep structures and even the impersonal processes that assure the perpetuation of the world and all sanctified things in it. This structure, too, is Other, and transcendental. In it the whole normal round is sanctified. Thirdly, in this phenomenology, in which context, and not timeless "essence," is central, it will be necessary to take the human body seriously as the foundation of all meaning. This phenomenology must therefore 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 African religions (Zuesse, 1980) or in my essays on ritual (Zuesse, 1975, 1983); no doubt more satisfactory versions will emerge from other hands in the future. Here we have an entirely new and exciting field in the phenomenology of religions to explore.
2

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more importantly, it must be admitted that a solely contextual approach to phenomenology is almost certain to be seriously deficient. There are excellencies in the essentialistic program, and weaknesses in the contextualistic one, which must be noted. Let us mention some of them. Every student of the history of religions has had the heady experience of discovering in the course of research amongst some little-known sects or religions, in far-flung corners of the world, religious structures, ideas, and insights remarkably like those previously thought to be unique to some better-known religion (better known, at least, to the student). A solely contextual approach has no way of handling such palpable similarities, for in itself it only knows uniquenesses. Nor can Merleau-Ponty's suppositions about universal historical ideas supply the lack, for as we have seen his Hegelian ideas are not inevitable consequences of his basic methodology, but posited in spite of it. There should be some consistent way of recognizing not only the differences between religions, but also their similarities, for if these are noted only on an ad hoc basis, it is likely that the student will be led to inadmissible and naively hasty conclusions 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 phenomenology of religion, is as much enhanced by recognition of the common elements and aspirations in outwardly very different religions, as it is by recognition 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 systematically. Of course, it is evident that similarity in a particular case may well be due to historical factors such as past contact between the cultures in question, or a common historical source, even though this does not really explain why particular structures are chosen by the religions as part of their own meaning systems, and others are ignored. We also find that similar symbolisms, etc., even if historically linked, serve very different meanings in different religions or in the same religion in different regions or ages. Evidently, even in the study of "similar phenomena" the contextualistic approach cannot be replaced. But we cannot overlook the possibility that there may indeed be a surplus of meaning, beyond context, that a merely contextualist approach cannot reach, which is revealed by a comparative analysis. Even if some versions of this attitude (the Jungian "collective unconscious," Frithjof Schuon's esoteric "transcendent unity of religions," etc.) come perilously close to a most unphenomenological and indulgent mysticism or mysterymongering, it remains the case that an agnosticism about the basic issues is becoming to a discipline still in its first stages. It is perhaps too early to write off entirely any notion of basic cognitive structures which, if they are not "universal" or "absolute," are at least surprisingly widespread. A

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resurgence of interest in Lamarckian biology and psychology may even help to confirm some of Jung's at present too speculative ideas. Perhaps Husserl is even more accurate, and there truly are universal and necessary structures of thought, common either to all humans or even to any thinking beings. Structuralist linguistics and structuralist anthropology certainly argue that this is the case. There is no doubt, in fact, that consciousness does proceed by way of "typifications" as Husserl called themsedimentations of experience which assume ideal and finally even abstract status in our prepredicative consciousness. Inasmuch as we all share a human and worldly environment it is not extreme to grant that some, at least, of these typifications are held in common. The implications of structuralist anthropology not only support this, but remind us of some of the paradoxes of Husserl's method: if certain structures prevail across many or all cultures, the conscious meanings given to them in any one culture are almost, or perhaps entirely, irrelevant. Such structures must operate at a preconscious level below and outside of any apparent contextual logic. As is well-known, Levi-Strauss does not accept either Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology or Sartre's existentialism (cf. Levi-Strauss, 1966,1964-1971, especially the conclusion of the last volume, and also the contributors to Rossi). Such an approach can lead to a paradoxical rejection of any meaning at all (cf. Sperber, Sahlins and others in the same volume, and especially Levi-Strauss's own irritable rejection of religious meaning as literal *non-sense" in his 1966:227f.), in effect overlooking completely the importance of the quest for meaning even in forming the "sensory-motor complexes'* (Piaget's terms) and the most elemental typifications which, when fully mastered, sediment themselves in the preconscious as the axiomatic assumptions making later stages possible. Meaning creates the whole. However, the least speculative religious "typifications" are those found in historically related religions. Analysis of both similarities and differences is most illuminating in such cases. Here contextual and essentialistic study can interweave with each other in fruitful dialogue. Essentialistic perspectives can contribute even more profoundly to contextualistic study by reminding us that there may always be a "surplus" of meaning that cannot be captured even by a multi-disciplinary and many-leveled analysis. The openness of the real may finally go beyond context: even if there is a drive towards coherence in us, our experience, as Merleau-Ponty and Husserl both stress, is also always recalcitrant and resistant to such coherence, and this indeed is proof of our "thrownness," our reality and the reality of what we encounter. As long as essentialistic conclusions are admitted to be tentative, they keep alive in us an awareness of hidden possibilities and wider significances than even the most thorough contextualism can reveal, meanings that might indeed only be disclosed in the wider history of a symbol within a

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religion, or more broadly within several religions. In this way essentialism keeps contextualism open to the wonder of "the things themselves," and humble in face of it.

REFERENCES
Berlin, Brent, and Paul, Kay 1970 Basic Color Terms. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carr, David 1977

"Husserl's Problematic Concept of the Life-World." In Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, ed. by Frederick A. Elliston and Peter McConnick. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

D'Aquili, E. G., ed. 1979 The Spectrum of Ritual: A Bio-Genetic Structural Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press. Husserl, Edmund 1962 1964 1970a 1970b 1973

Ideas: General Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans, by W. R. Boyce-Gibson. New York: Collier-Macmillan. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Trans, by James S. Churchill. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Logical Investigations. Trans, by J. N. Findlay. 2 vols. New York: Humanities Press. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans, by David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans, by Dorian Cairns. The Hague: Martin us Nijhoff.

Kaplan, see Werner Kockelmans, Joseph J. 1957 A First Introduction to Husserl's Phenomenology. Louvain: Duquesne University Press. Kohler, Wolfgang 1947

Gestalt Psychology. Mentor Books. New York: The New American Library.

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Levinas, Emmanuel 1979 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Levi-Strauss, Claude 1964-71 Mythologiques. 4 vols. Paris: Librarie Plon. 1966 The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1962 The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans, by Colin Smith. New York: Humanities Press. 1963 The Structure of Behaviour. Trans, by Alden Fisher. Boston: Beacon Press. 1964 The Primacy of Perception, and Other Essays. Edited by James M. Edie. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Natanson, Maurice Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks. Evanston: 1973 Northwestern University Press. Otto, Rudolf 1959

The Idea of the Holy. Trans, by John W. Harvey. Baltimore; Penguin.

Pietersma, H. 1979

"Husserl and Heidegger." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research XL,2:194-211.

Polanyi, Michael 1958 1966 Rossi, Ino, ed. 1974

Personal Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The Tacit Dimension. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday 4 Co.

The Unconscious in Culture: The Structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss in Perspective. New York: Dutton Press.

Sahlins, Marshall 1977

"Colors and Culture." In Symbolic Anthropology: A Reader, ed. by Janet Dolgin et al. New York: Columbia University Press.

Shaw, R. D. M., trans, and commentator 1961 The Blue Cliff Records: The Hekigan Rohu. London: Michael Joseph.

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Rethinking Symbolism. Trans, by Alice Morton. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Spiegelberg, Herbert 1969 The Phenomenological Movement: An Historical Introduction. 2d edition. 2 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Turner, Victor 1967

The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

van der Leeuw, Gerardus 1963 Religion in Essence and Manifestation. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Row. Waardenburg, Jacques 1978 Reflections on the Study of Religion. Religion and Reason, 15. The Hague: Mouton. Werner, Heinz, and Kaplan, Bernard 1963 Symbol Formation: An Organismic-Developmental Approach to Language and the Expression of Thought. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Zuesse, Evan 1975 1980 1983

"Meditation on Ritual." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43/3:517-30. Ritual Cosmos: The Sanctification of Life in African Religions. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. "The Absurdity of Ritual." Psychiatry 46/1:40-50.

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