Johannes Hessens Philosophie des religiösen Erlebnisses (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 221 Finally, Johnston's account of Collingwood's professional enviromnent is radically objectionable. In part, the blame may be laid at the door of CoUingwood's Autobiography , but what serious historian would rely on that book uncritically? Johnston's chief fault is anachronism: he imagines that the academic climate of British philosophy during Collingwood's life was what it became (as Collingwood foresaw) after his death. While he lived, most British philosophers were neither Cambridge analysts nor CookWilsonian realists. Until 1934, two of the three Oxford professorships were held by Idealists (J. A. Smith and H. H. Joachim), and then Smith was succeeded, not by a realist, but by Collingwood. Even if he felt isolated, he had no difficulty in securing academic preferment. Johnston embroiders his description of the academic life of the time with caricatures of Collingwood's opponents. G. E. Moore is the principal victim. Johnston evidently knows little about him, but even a little knowledge should have forestalled the falsehood that Moore "excluded in principle" that philosophy should "guide moral life" (138). This would be unjust even of H. A. Pritchard, who did hold that we should determine our duties in concrete situations by intuition rather than by reasoning. Of Moore, who expressly repudiated this view (Principia Ethica, x) and whose ethical theory was taken as a guide to life by an influential group (see the autobiographical writings of J. M. Keynes and Leonard Woolf), it is also absurd. ALANDONAGAN University of Illinois Johannes Hessens Philosophic des religirsen Erlebnisses. By Hubertus Mynarek. (Abhandlungen zur Philosophie, Psychologic, und Soziologie der Religion, ed. Joseph Hasenfuss; Munich, Paderborn, and Vienna: Ferdinand Schtiningh, 1963. Pp. xii+ 166. $3) This book is a document in the controversy between modern Augusrinism, represented by Johannes Hessen (born 1889), and modern Thomism, represented by Hubertus Mynarek. In the first part Mynarek gives (17-71) a careful description of Hessen's philosophy of religious experience based on a comprehensive conspectus of his works (ix f.: impressive list of rifles from 1916 to 1959). Mynarek extricates the general (sensitiveness; denying a weltanschauung which contradicts the contents of religion) and the special (purity, humility, reverence, charity) conditions which are, according to Hessen, preliminary to and sufficient for any rise of religious experience. And he demonstrates how this kind of experience for Hessen, who is interpreting Augustin and agreeing with Max Scheler, is founding an unmediated, objective, and ontological knowledge of God. Mynarek's contraposirion (75-166) is that faith does not result from a basically emotional experience but has to precede it. Faith cannot only arise without preceding religious experience and even seems to be a presupposition necessary for religious experience (106). Under just such a presupposition one can also distinguish between experiences which claim to be religious and those which actually are. The intellectual component of faith is evaluated by the evidence given in psychology of prescientific thinking, scholarly--including mathematical--training, education, and tradition . This kind of faith essentially constitutes religious experience, though in it feelings and emotions which have in themselves no function for religious knowledge (141) may predominate quantitatively (126). Mynarek's statements are obviously in accordance with that type of psychology which convincingly holds that a certain frame of reference has to be given before an 222 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY experience can arise. Nevertheless, the refutation of intuitional ontologism (127) clings to notions like perception, feeling, intuition, experience (of values) which have notions like knowledge and cognition for synonyms (117, n. 448). Pointing to these synonyms and stressing them, the Augustinist could deny the contradiction which the Thomist tries to indicate (122), in other words that it is the same feeling having to be recognized and being unable to do so. The complex of gnoseological elements includes, according to Hessen, some intellectualism, and controversy is just what it must have to guarantee a correct acknowledgement of values. This is the first alternative to which the problem can be reduced. On the other hand, for Mynarek a very direct mystical experience like that of Tberesia de Jesu can convey the absolute certitude of the conviction that God Himself is present (127-142). But this is possible only on the two highest ranks...