Abstract
After a sketch of how Cairns learned from his master, a phenomenology is offered of how eidē are always intended to, i.e., at least when situated in what Aron Gurwitsch called the margin of the field of consciousness, a matter that becomes clearer when a case of what Husserl called “empirical types” is considered. A manuscript by Cairns on eideation, including empirical types, which are vague eidē, IS edited in the appendix.
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- 1.
“In 1924, after studying philosophy at Harvard for 5 years, I was awarded a traveling fellowship. During the academic year of 1923–1924, I had learned from Winthrop Bell enough about Husserl to persuade me to begin my foreign study in Freiburg. With letters from Bell and W. E. Hocking, I called on Husserl toward the beginning of the winter semester of 1924–1925. He put me to work at once, on the second volume of the Logische Untersuchungen and on the “Phänomenologische Fundamentalbetrachtung” in the Ideen. At the same time he told me, in effect: ‘We cast no magic spells here. Everything depends on you seeing for yourself the things we describe. It is up to you to follow our descriptions and either confirm or correct them. Read slowly, pen in hand, and then bring me your difficulties and objections.’” Dorion Cairns, “Nine Fragments on Psychological Phenomenology,” ed. Lester Embree, Fred Kersten, and Richard M. Zaner, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 41 (2010): 3.
- 2.
Cairns may be alluding here to Aron Gurwitsch, whose work, The Field of Consciousness, he had recently refereed for Harvard University Press and whom he said on other occasions tended to reify the noema. After all, who else was writing extensively about the noema in that time?.
- 3.
Dorion Cairns, “The Many Senses and Denotations of the Word Bewusstsein (‘Consciousness’) in Edmund Husserl’s Writings,” Life-World and Consciousness, Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester E. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 19–31. See my “Objects Inside and Outside the Body According to Dorion Cairns,” Thinking in Dialogue with the Humanities: Paths into the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, ed. Karel Novotný, Taylor S. Hammer, Anne Gléonec, and Petr Špecián (Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2010), 13–30.
- 4.
Cairns also based his critique and alternative to Husserl’s Ideen I. See Lester Embree, “Wisdom more than Knowledge and more than Loved: Dorion Cairns’s Revision of Husserl’s Philosophic Ideal,” Journal of British Society of Phenomenology 41/2 (2010).
- 5.
Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. Fred Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 41.
- 6.
Most of Cairns’s lecture is in the appendix of this chapter and quotations are from there.
- 7.
Reprinted as Chapter 10 of Aron Gurwitsch, Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, ed. Lester Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974).
- 8.
It seems that even Husserl recognized that he sometimes confused universals and concepts, for the following is translated from his marginal note on Copy A beside the passage from Ideen I, §22 quoted at the beginning of the present essay: “False. Idea and essence are identified here, and signification taken as essence.”
- 9.
Aron Gurwitsch, “On Thematization,” ed. Lester Embree, Research in Phenomenology 4 (1974): 35, hereafter cited as “Thematization.”
- 10.
Cairns may be alluding to Alfred Schutz’s “Type and Eidos in Husserl’s Late Philosophy” (1959), Collected Papers, Vol. III, ed. I. Schutz (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966).
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Embree, L. (2013). Dorion Cairns, Empirical Types, and the Field of Consciousness. In: Embree, L., Nenon, T. (eds) Husserl’s Ideen. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 66. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5213-9_14
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