Aufbau to Animism: A sketch of the alternate methodology and major discovery in Dorion Cairns's revision of Edmund Husserl's “Fifth Cartesian Meditation”

Abstract

After a review of his revisions of Husserl's methodology, Cairns's new version of the procedure of Abbauor unbuilding is followed from the Objective world down to the primordial world and then from there down to the phantom world within which sensa fields can be analyzed. Then the abstractive epochēs by which lower strata were reached are successively relaxed in the Aufbau or upbuilding procedure and, most interestingly, the sense “psychophysical thing” originally constituted within primordial automaticity is found to be transferred automatically and with presumptive certainty to everything in the Objective world. Any differences between “animate” and “inanimate” things are only constituted at a higher level and pertain then to culture and not nature.