Continental Philosophy Review (2006) 39: 79–96

DOI: 10.1007/s11007-006-9021-6 
c Springer 2006

Aufbau to Animism: A sketch of the alternate methodology and

major discovery in Dorion Cairns’s revision of Edmund Husserl’s
“Fifth Cartesian Meditation”

LESTER EMBREE
Philosophy, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA
embree@fau.edu

Abstract. After a review of his revisions of Husserl’s methodology, Cairns’s new version of the
procedure of Abbau or 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.

Introduction

Intersubjectivity and so-called “empathy” are central concerns for Husserlian

phenomenology. They were able to emerge after Husserl showed at the turn
of the last century that the representational theory has no standpoint from
which it can be verified. This is the theory in which it was alleged that there
is always an idea, image, or representation between experiencing and the
thing experienced, which is certainly the case in experiencing via pictures
and symbols specifically, but does not hold universally. Thus, in perception
and recollection as well as in the intuiting of ideal objects, experiencing gets
right to its object without any mediation.
What is the problem of “other minds”? While one’s own mental processes
can be presented in self-observation and the presentive experiencing of them
can justify the highest degree of certainty, the mental processes occurring in
other minds are at best appresented for us. They are like the other side of a
house when the side in front of us presents itself, except that the appresented
other side of such an object can become presented if one moves around it.
The mental process in the other mind can never be presented. One can then
wonder how such processes come to be appresented.
Husserl called the experiencing of other minds Einfühlung and a good
translation is “empathy,” provided one remembers that the mental process
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referred to is predominantly experiential rather than affective, which some

forget. He classified empathy as a species of Vergegenwärtigung. This word
is translated as “re-presentation”—with a hyphen—by John Brough, which
is felicitous because it is clearly audible in English and less artificial than the
older translations of “presentiation” and “presentification.” Cairns objected,
however, that empathy cannot be a re-presentation because it can never have
previously been a presentation as a recollection, for example, was (009182,
cf. 009162).
The problem of the sense-constitution of the alien or others was impor-
tant and long vexed Husserl. Without others, there is no intersubjectivity
and objectivity is the correlate of intersubjectivity. He did not finish and
publish the second book of his Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und
phänomenologischen Philosophie because he considered it inadequate with
respect to intersubjectivity. There are interesting remarks in Formale und tran-
szendentale Logik (1929), but for decades the published text on this question
was the fifth of his Méditations Cartésiennes.1 That meditation is almost half
the length of that whole book and is practically an independent treatise. The
contribution that initiated focused public discussion of this aspect of Husserl’s
position was Alfred Schutz’s “Das Problem der transzendentalen Intersubjek-
tivität bei Husserl.”2
In 1931, however, when Husserl suggested he write a review of the medita-
tions, Cairns replied, “I said that I had thought of writing an exposition of the
Fifth Meditation, as a narrower subject would have the advantage of allowing
greater detail. Even so it seemed to me, I said, that such points as the nature
of the Paarung <pairing> which is at the basis of our experience of other
minds should be elucidated in such an account, and such an elucidation would
involve an exposition of the general structure of passive association.”3 Husserl
supplied Cairns with a hand-corrected carbon copy of German original of the
meditations, i.e., “Typescript C,” during this same period. What prevented
Cairns from writing such an account is not known, but there are fragmentary
manuscripts in the Cairns papers.4
Dorion Cairns (1901–1973) was arguably Edmund Husserl’s closest fol-
lower. He studied with him during two visits to Freiburg, one in the mid-1920s
and one in the early 1930s, for a total of three and a half years; the Conver-
sations with Husserl and Fink documents much of the second visit. Above
all else, Cairns is exemplary in attempting to verify his master’s descriptions,
and where he found them mistaken or incomplete, he attempted to correct
them phenomenologically in a lifelong project of bringing all of the previous
thought published by Husserl up to the level of Formale und transzendentale
Logik and Cartesianische Meditationen, both of which texts he translated into
English.
 AUFBAU TO ANIMISM 81

Some of Cairns’s revisions of Husserl have already been published. In one,

Husserl’s goal of philosophy as a strictly scientific first philosophy in which
the world and all positive sciences or second philosophies would ideally be
grounded is replaced by “Philosophy as a Striving towards Universal sophia
in the Integral Sense,”5 in which critically justified valuing and willing—and
thus axiology and praxiology—play roles on a par with critically justified
believing and thus epistemology and theory of science. In the second case,
Cairns rejects Husserl’s doctrine of hylē and morphē, contending instead that
there is a distinction between “sensa” and the “sensings” in which they are
constituted, the sensa being transcendent of mental life.6 (This second revision
will be revisited below.)
A third revision concerns intersubjectivity. None of the incomplete
manuscripts in the Nachlass pertaining to Cairns’s revision of the Fifth Medita-
tion deserve editing. It is unfortunate that he was unable to fulfill the intention
to compose an essay on this theme. The present interpretation is merely a
sketch of the salient features of two aspects of this revision: (1) there are two
changes in the methodology for the unbuilding of mental life; and (2) the build-
ing up of this life discloses a panpsychism or animism in primary automaticity
that few if any phenomenologists, or even Husserl scholars, have recognized.
As far as Cairns knew, Husserl himself did not recognize it (019562). Other
aspects of Cairns’s revision will not be pursued here, e.g., how Husserl ap-
proached the other in a “Victorian” way, i.e., as something seen at a distance
rather than predominantly touched in the near sphere, as occurs in making
love, an example he gave in class.

Unbuilding

The general approach that Cairns accepts from Husserl can be described as
reflective theoretical observation and eidetic analysis. Reflective observation
is undertaken first of all in the empirical or factual perspective, and hence
seeks to intuit actual and probable noetico-noematic correlations in the present
or past of one’s own mental life. Then there is recourse to eidetic epochē,
free-phantasy variation, and eidetic evidencing of the universal essences that
fictively as well as seriously observed mental processes—and the things-as-
intended-to in them—exemplify. This would seem sufficient to characterize
the approach as phenomenological.7
Husserl has the “Fifth Cartesian Meditation” begin in an attitude that is ad-
ditionally not natural but transcendental and thus involves an ego encountering
a multiplicity of self-mundanized transcendental subjectivities like as well as
including herself. In contrast, Cairns believes that one can best approach the
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issues of how others are constituted while remaining in the modified natural
attitude of phenomenological psychology (011950). Then one does not re-
frain from accepting the being-in-the-world of mental lives, but instead only
refrains from accepting the so-called real relations between this life as wordly
with other worldly realities—to begin with the organism and the surrounding
world.
Real relations are temporal and causal and presuppose the independent
existence of their relata, while under the psychological epochē, the indepen-
dent things beyond the mind are reduced to things-as-intended-to. Cairns
not only considered such a purely phenomenological-psychological approach
possible, but also considered it preferable because it is easier to follow,
and because the transcendental attitude is easier to adopt beginning from
psychological phenenomenology (014014; cf. 011958). After all, the con-
tents are the same for both attitudes even if the statuses of these con-
tents are not. He furthermore hoped that the findings in a well-developed
phenomenological psychology could be correlated with relevant results of
purely biological and physical science.8 Were Cairns challenged about his re-
course to phenomenological psychology, he would have referred to Husserl’s
mature works, i.e., Formale und transzendentale Logik and Cartesianische
Meditations.
It deserves mention that Cairns agreed with Husserl on a sharp distinction
between physical and mental things. For the latter, he preferred “mental life”
to “conscious life” in his lectures, but in his very last years he urged speaking
of “minds” so as to include not only mental or intentive processes, but also
the egos who engage in them and busy themselves with what the processes
are intentive to. Both expressions will be used here. Phenomenology is then
chiefly concerned with minds for Cairns, but he was also emphatic that minds
cannot exist without bodies.
Beyond this question of the psychological specification of the generic phe-
nomenological attitude, Cairns revised his master’s methodology concerning
intersubjectivity in two respects. He found it impossible to follow one proce-
dure as Husserl described it and he believed another procedure was necessary
at the outset. Both procedures belong to the Abbau phase of the Abbau-Aufbau
method (Cairns’s translations here are “unbuilding” and “building up”). In the
first phase, noetico-noematic strata are successively abstracted from, and in the
second phrase, these abstractings are successively relaxed. (The main features
of this two-phase approach will be sketched here, with extensive supporting
quotations from Cairns’s lecture scripts included in the notes.)
The most important distinction within minds for Cairns is between two
of what might best be called macrostrata—namely, between what he called
“actional mental life” and “automatic mental life.” This terminology revises
 AUFBAU TO ANIMISM 83

Husserl’s distinction between “Aktivität” and “Passivität.” In the actional

macrostratum—also called “spontaneity”—occur those mental processes in
which egos are engaged. These include acts in which logical and mathematical
objects are constituted, but furthermore include processes of willing, recollect-
ing, reflecting, etc. that also have ego qualities. In contrast, automatic mental
processes go on by themselves, making up what Husserl called “primär Pas-
sivität” (Cairns’s “primary automaticity”), and egos cannot engage in them.
There is also “sekundär Passivität” in which the non-ego-engaged processes
refer back to egos having previously engaged in them. These secondarily
automatic processes usually go on by themselves in what can also be char-
acterized as an habitual way, although egos can and do re-engage in them
on occasion. The world as cultural correlates with this type of automaticity.
Cairns usually deals with it in combination with the actional life from which it
originates.
The first revision of Husserl’s Abbau-Aufbau methodology that Cairns
advocates consists in beginning with an abstractive epochē from both ac-
tional and secondarily automatic mental life. This was not the first step
of unbuilding for Husserl (01325). Included in that which is abstracted
from in this first procedural step advocated by Cairns are the ego herself
and the mental acts in which things are syntactically formed, as well as
how they are actionally and habitually perceived, recollected, expected, be-
lieved, valued, and willed.9 These things-as-intended-to—and the syntheses
in which they are constituted—do not disappear from the field of reflective
observation, but are systematically disregarded by means of this abstractive
epochē.
What is left in consideration after this first step of unbuilding according to
Cairns is the macrostratum of primarily automatic mental life and it includes
several substrata. Because secondary automaticity is temporarily set aside
along with actional mental life, and because the cultural is constituted in sec-
ondary automaticity, the resulting world constituted in primary automaticity
is the natural world. This nature is unified spatially, temporally, and causally;
it includes psychophysical things; and all things in it are possible if not actual
objects of other actual or possible minds, which is to say that no reduction to
any sphere of “ownness” has yet been performed.
Cairns follows Husserl in still calling things and the world at this stage of
primary automaticity “Objective” (one might also call them “public”). This
automatic macrostratum of mental life constitutes itself as one life among
others for all of whom it can thus be an Object. He doubted that Husserl rec-
ognized the need to begin with this reduction to pure automaticity (01325).
Instead, Husserl recommended beginning with the so-called reduction to the
sphere of ownness as first step in his method for analyzing the constitution
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of intersubjectivity. Cairns not only denies that the ownness-sphere

reduction is the first procedure to be performed, but rejects it completely on
the grounds that it is impossible to perform. It is impossible because it calls for
abstracting from the noema of the intentive syntheses in which other minds
(and thereby the Objective world) are constituted without abstracting from the
correlative syntheses themselves on the noetic side of this noetico-noematic
correlation.
What Husserl proposed is like abstracting from the wall-as-seen that makes
a wall-seeing a wall-seeing and retaining simply the seeing without how it
is intentive to what is seen in it. Even if was possible, would that abstract
result still be a seeing? Cairns thought Husserl made this mistake because,
under the influence of Franz Brentano, he often conceived of intentionality as
he had done in the Logische Untersuchungen, i.e., as a real relation between
independently existing things, while it is more accurately characterized as a
property of meaningful pointing to an intentional object whether that object
exists or not (011816, cf. 009327 ff.). It would have been better, Cairns thought,
if Husserl had always remembered that the term “noema” was introduced in
Ideen I (1913) as “der noematischer Sinn des Noesis.”10
As the second step in unbuilding, Cairns next follows what Husserl calls the
reduction to the primordial world.11 To get to this second lowest substratum
of automatic mental life, one abstracts from the higher substratum, which
is the one in which others are constituted and thereby all things, oneself
included, are intended to by at least other possible minds. When this is done,
nature (along with its space, time, and causality) still remains for the resulting
substratum, and an automatic mental life still “reads itself” into it, but it has
become a nature for only one mind—more precisely, it is intended to in a now
doubly reduced automatic stratum of a single mind. It can also be said to be
“private.” (More about the constitution of this primordial world will emerge
in the second section of this essay.12 )
Cairns next digs down to the substratum of the “phantom world.” This
third level down is reached by abstracting from causal relations among things
and correlatively from the intentive syntheses in which the causal relations
are constituted.13
Fields of sensa can be distinguished here. As mentioned, Cairns replaced
Husserl’s doctrine of hylē and morphē with descriptions of sensings inten-
tive to auditory, kinaesthetic, tactual, and other sensa fields. This extends the
noesis-noema distinction to all Erlebnisse, which are then all intentional or,
as Cairns prefers to say, intentive. Moreover, all sensa are transcendent of
mental life and no mental process is itself spatially extended, colored, warm,
sweet, heavy, loud, etc. (A different type of abstraction is used here so that
the different sensa fields—and the correlative sensings—can be investigated
 AUFBAU TO ANIMISM 85

separately.14 ) And now the bottom, so to speak, of mental life has been
reached.

Building up

Aufbau or building up consists in relaxing the previous abstractions one by one

and observing how lower strata genetically motivate higher ones. Ultimately,
the concrete Objective world and a multiplicity of minds in it who can intend
one another is attained, one in which there are also cultural things, so that
one might speak of an Objective sociocultural world. Already on the lowest
level the intentive life reads itself into the sensa fields, and this continues to
happen in the higher strata. But in the lower strata constitutive of the phantom
world and above that the primordial world, the most remarkable thing that
is intended to as transcendent of mental life is the organism (Leib) of that
life.
When the abstraction necessary for the analysis of the constitution of sepa-
rate sensa fields is relaxed, things-as-touched, things-as-seen, things-as-tasted,
things-as-smelled, etc., come together into objects of what can be called in-
tersensorial syntheses and one and the same thing, e.g., an apple, is touched,
seen, smelled, tasted, etc. (014106). But this is still a “phantom” apple because
causal relations with other things, e.g., apple trees and pollinating insects, con-
tinue to be abstracted from.
Causal relations come back into play with the next relaxation, which yields
the stratum in which the primordial world—but not yet the Objective world—
is constituted. There is still only one mental life being reflectively described
eidetically, i.e., descriptive claims are produced that hold for any primordially
reduced automatic mental life whatever, which is to say, for a mind without
intentiveness to, and intendedness by, other minds. Many things are constituted
in this stratum that are transcendent of mental life—e.g., pollinators, sunlight,
water, soil, etc., that make up the causal circumstances under which apples
are born, grow, rot, etc.
The crucial foundation for what happens in the higher substratum is the
primordial organism:

Even at that level I find one particular physical thing that alone has the
sense of being my organism. It is the only physical thing, the only body,
on or in which my fields of sensation are spread out. It is the only physical
thing that includes my “organs of sensuous perceiving”—i.e., things on the
physical states and positions of which the occurrence and natures of my
sensuous perceivings depend. It is the thing the motions of which are most
directly ensuant on my kinaesthesia and which can move most immediately
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in consequence of automatic striving. It is the only immediate “field of

expression” of my automatically constituted mental states and processes.
(014015)

Next, how the Objective world is constituted can be observed when the
abstraction that led down from that stratum to the primordial world is relaxed.
The Objective world most notably includes other psychophysical things, and
is the world in which every automatic macrostratum intends to itself as able
to be intended to by the automatic macrostrata of indefinitely many minds.
It does not yet have the upper macrostratum in which there are egos, where
actional mental processes occur, and in which the values, uses, and syntactical
structures of culture are originally constituted.
But how do others come to be automatically constituted? The key con-
cept here is Sinnesübertragung; Cairns renders this word as “universal trans-
fer of sense.” This concept is central to the account in the “Fifth Cartesian
Meditation” and involves a type of intentive synthesis that Cairns refers to
in his earlier lectures as “associative synthesis” of similarity (Ähnlichkeit)
and difference (Verschiedenheit) and he later preferred to call “assimilative
synthesis.”15 Once a self-identical thing is constituted, its objective sense is
automatically transferred to all other things intended to and it may or may
not be to some degree confirmed and/or canceled by them. For example, on
the level of thinking, once anything is first judged about, everything else is
thereafter encountered as something that can be judged about. Then again,
on the preconceptual level of perception, once lumps of dried chewing gum
are found underneath one school desk, all other such desks are believed to
have such lumps until some are found without them. Assimilative syntheses
are presumptive (038588), i.e., absent evidence to the contrary, anything of
which there is consciousness is automatically believed in with certainty, and
thus there is what Cairns calls “primordial credulity” (037866).
When the abstraction leading to the primordial world is relaxed, the sense
“psychophysical thing” presented to oneself in the primordial world is auto-
matically transferred to absolutely all other things intended to. Cairns believed
he went beyond Husserl in this respect.16 What is especially interesting is that
the canceling of the transferred sense cannot occur with respect to other minds,
because their absence cannot be presented. Only her own life and its tempo-
ral and causal relations with her own organism can be presented to an ego;
other mental lives and their embodiments can only be appresented for her.
Therefore, the transferred senses, “other mind” and “other organism,” cannot
be canceled.
The result is panpsychism or animism. Everything is psychophysical. Dur-
ing lectures, Cairns would sometimes call a chair a Bodhisattva, but a stupid
 AUFBAU TO ANIMISM 87

or lazy one.17 Any distinction between the animate and the inanimate is a
distinction conceived on the higher level that is thinking and sedimented in
secondary automaticity and thus culture, not nature.

Further considerations

The law of universal transfer of sense has wide application for Dorion Cairns. It
is crucial for the original constitution of material universals (010943–010952),
the constitution of a future expected to be like the past (011168), unshattered
glass being believed brittle (037871), an ability to recollect even when one is
not recollecting (037893), the uniformity of nature, including human nature
(011170), and much else. His whole account will be presented on another
occasion.
Concerning intersubjectivity, there is some complexity and, when taken to-
gether, some systematicity to Cairns’s scattered remarks. Some children and
also adults in ancient and so-called primitive cultures believe even conceptu-
ally that everything is alive (011091, 036654). Not only real things, but also
ideal things are originally constituted in primary automaticity as bodies of
minds (009339). Others are divided in two ways. First of all, there is a divi-
sion between individuals and groups. Groups can have collective mentality
ascribed to them, e.g., the will of the people (037853), but Cairns’s emphasis
is on individual others. The second division is a preconceptual division into
human, sub-human, and super-human others (037855). Others constituted by
adults are originally constituted as adults, while others for children are origi-
nally children, others for members of a given culture are constituted originally
as of the same culture, etc.
Where sub-humans, i.e., brutes, are concerned, Cairns offers little detail, but
clearly this category is vast. First of all, there are higher mammals with whom
one may or may not have social relations, e.g., in herding sheep or hunting
(037850, 036643–036647). Then it would seem that not only lower mammals,
birds, reptiles, insects, plants, protozoa, and viruses belong here, but also the
stones to which Cairns often referred. The mental life of a stone is what one
would have if one’s body were a stone. In general, things that resist human
willing include “brute” facts and can also be called “stubborn facts” (037854).
If the differences between the three categories are constituted in terms
of power—Cairns does not give the differentia specifica—it would seem that
rivers, mountains, and the sky (037609) and also lightning (008797) belong to
the super- rather than sub-human category. Otherwise considering the super-
human, Cairns seems not to refer to polytheism, but it is implied in the assertion
that universal animism can be pluralistic as well as monistic (036640). His own
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emphasis is on a monotheistic world soul founded on the spatial, temporal, and

causal unity of nature, which is then the organism of a single mind (037607). In
this connection he holds that the sense “artifact” is also universally transferred,
so that the thing-world has the preconceptual objective sense of being “God’s
handiwork” (037608), purposiveness and artifactuality being also compatible
with animation (037611).
Much more can be said here, especially concerning groups and sociality,
including how nature includes sub-conceptual mutual recognitions between
primarily automatic strata of minds. There is as well the automatic constitu-
tion of values and uses that are then parts of the transferred senses (037871).
Moreover, automaticity provides a foundation for what comes to be variously
believed, valued, willed, and construed on the actional level and sedimented
as human culture. And then comes the question of how all minds, even those
of stones, are recognized to be fundamentally non-worldly or transcendental
when the transcendental epochē is performed, but perhaps enough has been
said to show how Cairns revised and creatively extended Husserl on intersub-
jectivity.

Notes

1. Trans. Gabrielle Pfeiffer and Emmanuel Levinas (1931). The German original appeared
as the first volume of Husserliana in 1950.
2. Philosophische Rundschau, vol. 1957, English trans. by Fred Kersten in Alfred Schutz,
Collected Papers, vol. III (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966).
3. Dorion Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink, ed. The Husserl Archives in Louvain,
with a Preface by Richard M. Zaner (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), p.53.
4. The Cairns papers are held in the Archival Repository of the Center for Advanced Research
in Phenomenology, Inc. at the University of Memphis. Intersubjectivity is discussed in 1935
(016263–72), in 1950 (016260-62), 1952 (036469), the thousand pages of commentary
preparatory to Cairns’s translation of Cartesianische Meditationen in 1960 (028576 ff.) and
also in the substantial correspondence with Schutz about the latter’s 1957 essay (011926-
33 and 035214-77). The chief source for this interpretation is Cairns’s notes for a special
course, “Problems in Phenomenology,” taught at the New School for Social Research
in Spring Semester, 1966. His script for this course (011613 ff.) is unusually sketchy,
but Professor Jorge Garcı́a-Gomez has fortunately made his practically verbatim notes
available to the present writer, and is hereby thanked for that. Hereafter, the Cairns Nachlass
will be cited with merely the six-digit page numbers. Professor Richard M. Zaner is
thanked for permission to quote from the Cairns papers. Much of Cairns’s revised Abbau-
Aufbau method has been presented in Fred Kersten, Phenomenological Method: Theory
and Practice (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989).
5. Ed. Lester E. Embree in Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester E. Embree
(Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press
of America, 1984), 27–43.
 AUFBAU TO ANIMISM 89

6. Dorion Cairns, “The Many Senses and Denotations of the Word Bewusstsein (‘Conscious-
ness’) in Edmund Husserl’s Writings,” in Life-World and Consciousness: Essays for Aron
Gurwitsch, ed. Lester E. Embree (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972),
19–31. The following segment of a lecture script for August 22, 1961, elaborates his
position.
“By following the method of Abbau (unbuilding), we have uncovered and reflectively
objectivated the fields of visual and auditory sensa. The other fields of sensa would be
uncovered by following the same method. Each field of sensa is unified in itself, and
differentiated from others, by a generic quality peculiar to it. E.g., the generic qual-
ity of which sound-quality and silence-quality are species. Furthermore, because of
specific differences within each field, the parts that I have been calling ‘sensa’ stand
out, from a background and from one another, in simultaneity and succession. Husserl
does not call these parts ‘sensa.’ The word has not been accepted into the German vo-
cabulary. Sometimes he calls them just ‘Abgehobenheiten’ (outstandingnesses, promi-
nences, saliencies), partly in order to emphasize that they are essentially parts of wholes
(fields).
“But he does not restrict this name to ‘sensa.’ He calls anything, prominent within a
whole, an ‘Abgehobenheit’—in order to differentiate such an affair as prominent automat-
ically from the same affair as objectivated in an ego act.
“At other times he called sensa ‘sinnlichen Daten’ (sensuous data) or ‘Empfindungs-
daten’ (data of sensation). As applied only to sensa, the name ‘Daten’ (Data) may be
misleading: It suggests the opinion that, whereas they are indeed given, everyday physical
things are not given but inferred. Husserl rejects this proposition. According to his account,
not only sensa but also perceived physical things are strictly given.
“Ordinarily the sensa that are outstanding parts of certain fields of sensation (the tactual,
the visual, the auditory, the gustatory, the olfactory fields, and certain others that lack
everyday names) function as what Husserl calls ‘Abschattungen’ (‘foreshadowings’ or
‘adumbrations’) of perceived physical things in respect of their sensuously presented
determinations. Other sensa, notably the sensa that Husserl calls ‘kinäesthetische Daten’
(‘kinaesthetic Data’) do not function as such adumbrations.
“I call sensa that function as adumbrations of perceived physical things ‘adumbrative
sensa.’ Husserl called them ‘hyletische Daten’ (‘hyletic data’) and simply ‘Hylē.’ He did
this because he thought of the purely intentive perceiving of a physical thing and the
sensa that function as adumbrations of that thing—because, I say, he thought of these
as making up a whole in such fashion that the purely intentive part (the noesis) is re-
lated to the intrinsically non-intentive part (the adumbrative sensa) as animating morphē
to animated hylē—that is: as Aristotle thought that an animating soul (or form) is re-
lated to an animated body (as matter). It seems to me that the conception of the purely
intentive perceptual noesis and the purely non-intentive adumbrative sensa as the two
parts of a whole is false. Therefore, I do not use the terms ‘hyletic data’ and ‘hylē’ as
names for adumbrative sensa. A sensuous perceiving, I believe, should be conceived as
a stratified process in which the highest stratum is the perceiving of a physical thing
and the lowest stratum is the sensing of the sensa that adumbrate the perceived physical
thing.
“When we were analyzing perceivings of physical things, before we had started the pro-
cess of Abbau, we noted that the perceiver’s own organism is itself sensuously perceived
whenever anything else is sensuously perceived. Now physical things (among them, the per-
ceiver’s organism) and their determinations are perceived as unities ‘through’ multiplicities
90 L. EMBREE

of quasi-objective appearances. We say, moreover, that the typical nature of the variable
appearances, through which a physical thing is perceived, is given as functionally depen-
dent on—among other conditions—co-posited (and often co-perceived) typical states of
motion or rest of the perceiver’s organism and particular organs of perception. (For ex-
ample, the typical nature of the quasi-objective appearances through which I see physical
things is given as functionally dependent on the co-posited typical states of rest and motion
of my whole body, of my head relative to my body, and of my eyes in their sockets.)
“Now these sensuously perceivable typical states of somatic motion and rest are, in turn,
given as functionally dependent on intended typical flow-patterns of sensa of a particular
sort. If these sensa flow in patterns of one particular type, then the organism or a part of it is
perceived or, at least, believed to be either at rest or else moving in a particular manner. On
account of their functional correlation with the rest and motion of the perceiver’s organs
or whole organism, these sensa are called ‘kin-aesthetic.’
“But they do not function as adumbrations of a perceived rest or motion of the perceiver’s
physical organism or of some part of it.
“Since, as already said, the typical nature of the quasi-objective appearances through
which any physical thing is perceived is dependent on the perceivable typical states
of motion and rest of the organism, and these states, in turn, are dependent on pat-
terns of so-called ‘kinaesthetic’ flow, there is also a correlation between the typical
quasi-objective appearances of physical things and patterns of kinaesthetic flow. Now
the process of Abbau (in its later stages) involves abstraction, first from the perceiver’s
organism (along with all the rest of the world of real physical things) and then, step
by step, from the hierarchy of noematic objects that function as appearances of the or-
ganism. Thus we abstracted also from the peculiar correlation of kinaesthesia with the
real physical organism and its quasi-objective appearances. At the present stage of un-
building we still have, as part of our theme, the variable fields of sensa that function
as adumbrations; and we still have the typical patterns of ‘kinaesthetic’ sensa corre-
lated with typical patterns of adumbrative sensa. This correlation is the fundamental
one.
“Husserl calls all data of sensation, all sensa, ‘Erlebnisse’; and, because no datum of
sensation, no sensum, is intrinsically intentive, he divides all the things he calls ‘Erlebnisse’
into two classes: a class of things that he calls ‘intentionale Erlebnisse’ and a class of things
that he calls ‘nicht-intentionale Erlebnisse.’ Now the concept that he expresses by the word
‘Erlebnis’ is the concept of something that is a ‘reele Bestandteil’ (‘a genuine component
part’) of a ‘Bewusstseinsstrom’ (a ‘stream of consciousness’). Thus, in calling data of
sensation ‘Erlebnisse,’ he is expressing his opinion that these are genuine parts of a stream
of consciousness, despite the fact that they are not intrinsically consciousness of something,
not intrinsically intentive, and also despite the fact that analyses he himself presented in
his Lectures Pertaining to the Consciousness of Internal Time show that data of sensation,
sensa as presented, are noematic correlates of intentive processes that surely deserve to be
called ‘sensings.’
“I myself am almost completely sure that sensa are not genuinely immanent, in mental
lives, as intentive processes are. Accordingly, I do not call sensa ‘mental processes’ and I
do not call them ‘Erlebnisse.’ On the other hand, I give the name sensings (‘Empfinden’)
to those intentive processes in which (as Husserl himself made evident) sensa themselves
are presented originaliter.
“By the method of Abbau each of us has uncovered and reflectively objectivated the
lowest intentive stratum of his mental life or of any eidetically possible variant of his
 AUFBAU TO ANIMISM 91

mental life. Each temporal phase of this stratum is intentive, on the one hand, to things as
other temporal phases of this stratum and, on the other hand, to things as not phases, not
genuine parts, of this intentive stream. The distinctive characteristic of the lowest stratum
is that it is intentive to the latter things just as sensa, as actual or possible outstandingnesses
in sensuous fields.
“We have abstracted from all the relations of sensa to things intended to in higher levels
of mental life. Nevertheless we shall continue to call some sensa ‘kinaesthetic’ and others
‘adumbrative’ because we shall find, even at this low level, an important difference and cor-
relation between the former sensa and the latter. The difference is that protended changes
and non-changes in the field of kinaesthesia can be actualized in immediate consequence of
strivings, whereas changes and non-changes in other fields of sensation can be actualized
only by actualizing changes or non-changes in the field of kinaesthesia. And the correlation
is such that changes or non-changes of certain types in the kinaesthetic field are ordinar-
ily accompanied by changes or non-changes of certain types in a field of adumbrative
sensa.
“We shall use the procedure called ‘Rückfrage’ to investigate this intentive stratum.
That is to say, we shall take any sensum as such, or any sensuous field as such, or any
correlation among sensa as such purely as a noematic objective sense and use it as a clue
to the essential nature of the mental processes (the noeses) that are intentive to it.—And,
first of all, as a clue to those noeses in which a sensum, or a field, is itself given originaliter,
itself given ‘in person.’ These processes we shall call ‘sensings.”’ (013273–013285)
7. Under extensive influence from, but with some implicit differences with, his teacher Cairns,
the present writer has attempted to show students and other interested researchers what
this investigatory (as opposed to the scholarly) approach consists in. See Lester Embree,
Análisis reflexivo. Una primera introducción a la investigación fenomenológica / Reflective
Analysis. A First Introduction into Phenomenological Investigation, Edición Bilingüe,
trans. into Castellano by Luis Román Rabanaque (Morelia: Jitanjáfora, 2003).
8. (028086), cf. Dorion Cairns, “Phenomenology and Present-Day Psychology (1942),” ed.
Lester Embree, Fred Kersten, and Richard M. Zaner, Phenomenology and Cognitive Sci-
ence, vol. 1 (2002), 1:69-77.
9. In his lecture script for March 29, 1960, Cairns writes as follows.
“One can discriminate two sorts of mental spontaneities.—The first sort includes all
syntactically formative intending—for example: collecting, counting, predicative judging,
inferring a conclusion, producing a connected story, or a theory, or a whole science or
pseudo-science. These are examples of doxic syntactical intending. Some syntactically
formative intendings, however, are not doxic. There are, for example, intentive acts whose
noematic theses are expressible by exclamatory or optative, or imperative sentences; and
these syntactical acts are not doxic but emotional or volitional. Among the noematic-
objective products of syntactical intendings are included not only syntactically formed
affair-complexes, value-complexes, purpose-complexes, and the like, but also the senses
of noematic objects as actual or possible substrates underlying such syntactically formed
objectivations.
“The second discriminable sort of spontaneities, on the other hand, is made up of those
characteristics that mark some non-syntactical intendings as acts, in the pregnant sense
of this word: acts of the ego. A spontaneity of this second sort distinguishes an I-perceive
from a perceiving that goes on automatically, or, in general, an I-believe from an automatic
believing, or an I-like, or I-desire, or I-will, from a purely automatic liking, desiring, or
striving.” (013221, 013224)
92 L. EMBREE

10. In his review of his previous lecture, Cairns points out the following on November 14,
1958.
“It was not adequately explained why we ought to abstract from all spontaneity before
abstracting from consciousness of others and consciousness of a common world. Let me
remedy this deficiency.
“It seems possible to omit this step and merely abstract from all consciousness of
subjectivity other than mine, together with the sense of objects as intendable by others. This
procedure and its effect would be more like what Husserl presents in the Fifth Meditation.
The residuum, to be sure, would not contain everything contained for Husserl in my monad,
since it would not contain my intending of others and of objects as objects for others. But
it would contain all my active intendings and their effects except precisely those active
intendings that relate to others and their effects. Accordingly, when I effected such an
abstraction, the residual noematic object would contain a quasi-human ego, an ego that
actively busied himself with things, judged about them, grasped ideal affairs, and (in short)
did everything that my concrete human ego does, except intend other intermundane egos
and a common world of realities and idealities. This solitary self would be conscious of a
cultural world—not, however, as relative to a society, but as relative just to him. Science,
for him, would be just ‘my’ science, not ‘ours.’ Furthermore he would reflect and grasp
his mental life as his, though not in the sense of being not someone else’s.
“When we explicate in this manner the result of such an abstractive procedure, we
become increasingly aware that the noematic residuum is an impossible fiction. Let us
carry the explication a little further. The solitary quasi-human being, as having his one-
man science, would have his one-man scientific literature. He would have his literature of
every other kind; and, of course, his one-man language. Yet his language would not have
any conceivable relation to the vocal sounds produced by physical bodies other than his
bodily organism.
“The root of the paradoxes that thus become apparent is the failure to do justice to the fact
that the automatic constitution of a common world is presupposed by all one’s spontaneous
intending. If we move on from a static to a genetic analysis, we find that a common world
was constituted for me automatically before I first reflected, before I grasped anything, and
therefore before I grasped any cultural formations. Language is there for me in the first
place as my already made mother tongue. The ego awakes to a world already constituted,
in his automatic mental life, as a world in which other subjects have already been active.
“These considerations point to the necessity of first abstracting from all spontaneity—
that of my own or that of others—and from its products. This procedure leaves a
self-consistent substratum of actual intersubjectivity and of the actual common world.”
(013216–013219)
11. A chapter from Cairns’s dissertation entitled “The Egological Reduction,” forthcoming in
Alter, can be consulted to see how far he had come in working out the present account.
12. “In it [the ‘primordial’ world] my subjectivity constitutes itself for itself as solus ipse—not
in a privative sense, as though at this level others were meant as absent, but in the sense
that, in the primordial world, I am the only intended psychophysical thing, and nothing is
intended in my mental processes as an object for even possible others.” (014016)
13. In his lecture script for August 21, 1961, Cairns also writes as follows.
“Wherein does the primordial sense “causal” consist? In what respects does it differ
from the founded sense ‘causal,’ which is part of the founded sense ‘Objective real world,’
actively or habitually posited in my mental living? Let us consider this founded, higher
sense ‘causal (world)’ first.
 AUFBAU TO ANIMISM 93

“Living straightforwardly, I believe the real Objective world to have a causal character. If
I regard this believed-in causal-character purely as part of the noematic-sense ‘world,’ and
take it as a phenomenological clue, it leads me back to the intentive syntheses in which it is
constituted. Now I happen to have thought about causality. I have followed and understood
(correctly or incorrectly) some of the statements that others have made about causality. As
I understood them, I have accepted, questioned, or rejected various of these statements.
The effects of all this thinking about causality have, as Husserl says, been sedimented; they
now make up an upper stratum of the causal sense of the world for me. This upper stratum
points now to potential spontaneous acts in which it would be actively reconstituted. In
principle, moreover, I can discriminate this upper stratum of the sense ‘causal’ by paying
attention to a lower stratum, which is presented to me purely experientially, regardless of
what I think, or might conceivably think, about causality. Now it is just this substratum
of the intended causalness of the Objective world that has its counterpart in the intended
causalness of the primordial quasi-world.
“The real Objective world is presented to me purely experientially as a psychophysical
world. At least some of the particular things that stand out within it, and are actively
apprehended by me, are experienced as psychophysical things. And the experienced causal
character of this world embraces its psychic as well as its physical aspect. Any concept
I may have of a purely physical world, and any concept I may have of a closed purely
physical system of causality, have their source in thinking, not in experiencing. At the
sub-conceptual, sub-ratiocinational, level of mental life, mental or psychic events as well
as physical events are experienced as both causes and effects; the psychic and the physical
are experienced as interacting.
“Furthermore, although I may mean the real Objective world as objectively exact and
unambiguously determined, no concrete thing and no abstract determination of a concrete
thing is presented experientially with the exactness and unambiguous determinations that
I may impute to it. The like is true of causality. I may conceive exact, unambiguously
determined causes as having exact unambiguous effects. No causes and no effects are
presented with the complete determinateness that I may impute to them intellectually.
“Finally, although I may believe intellectually that causal circumstances that are alike
always determine effects that are alike, experience presents me with no such universal
regularity. On the basis of experience alone all I should say is that, as a rule, more or less
similar causal circumstances determine more or less similar effects.
“This, then, is the causal sense of the real Objective world that has a counterpart in
the causal sense of the primordial quasi-world: A world of more or less unambiguously
experienced psychophysical things and events occurring under circumstances which are
such that, as a rule, more or less similar things and events occur under more or less similar
circumstances.
“The difference between the two senses is this: the psychic part of the primordial quasi-
world consists exclusively in the primordial substratum of my mental life, self-apperceived
as part of the primordial quasi-world. This substratum of mental living involves a believing
experiencing of itself as causally related to the primordial organism and to the rest of the
primordial world, even though I as phenomenologist, refrain from believing in this causal
relatedness.
“In this substratum of mental life, automatic strivings to actualize movements of bodily
organs are experienced as successful or frustrated, as causing or failing to cause, the auto-
matically expected and desired physical effects. Conversely, circumstances that are similar
are experienced as regularly causing psychic events that are similar. But the primordial
94 L. EMBREE

organism, though unique qua organism, is not unique qua material thing. Qua material
thing it stands in causal relations with the rest of the primordial physical world.” (013229–
013234; cf. 014017–014022)
14. In the script for his lecture of January 12, 1956, Cairns writes as follows. “By following
the phenomenological method of unbuilding (Abbau) we have uncovered and reflectively
objectivated the noematic-sense: purely visual phantom-world. It is called ‘a phantom-
world’ because its parts do not have the sense of being interrelated causally. It is called
‘purely visual’ because it includes only such determinations as are, or might be, presented
visually. Nevertheless each of the particular visual phantoms distinguishable within it is
constituted as an identical unity intended through a multiplicity of actual and potential
quasi-objective appearances. Thus the same kind of synthetic structure is present in the
constitution of the purely visual phantom-world that is present (1) in the constitution of
the primordial world (as causal) and (2) in the constitution of the Objective world (the
world for everyone in it). And, since the constitution of the purely visual phantom world
is an abstracted part of the constitution of the Objective world, the concrete constitution
involves unities, intended through multiplicities of appearances, each of which is likewise
a unity, intended through multiplicities of appearances.
“In this visual phantom-world there is one unique phantom, which may be called ‘the
visual phantom-organism’ since it functions, in the more inclusive noematic constitutional
structure, as the visual appearance of the full phantom organism. Of all the purely visual
phantoms, it is the only one that is always seen. Furthermore it functions uniquely as
phantom visual ‘organ,’ in the phenomenological sense. That is to say: Changes of some
kinds in the appearances through which other phantoms are actually seen are correlated
with changes in the co-intended spatial relations between spatial relations between this
particular phantom and others. For example: when it is near another phantom, the latter
appears through an appearance of one kind (a so-called ‘near’ appearance); when it is far
from that phantom, the latter appears through an appearance of another kind (a so-called
‘far’ appearance). Or again: If the visual phantom organism is seen as moving about among
other seen phantoms, not only do those appearances change, through which the latter are
seen, but other phantoms and other sides of the already seen phantoms come into view.
“Furthermore, certain typical changes in the flow of so-called kinaesthesia are still
correlated in a typically familiar manner with typical changes in the appearances through
which visual phantoms are seen. A particular visual phantom is meant, let us say, as there
to the right but outside the actual range of vision. If kinaesthesia now flow in a certain
familiar typical manner, then that phantom will become actually seen. Meanwhile others
that have been seen as toward the right will become seen as near the center of the field
of vision. At the same time, the appearances through which those phantoms are seen as,
perhaps, unchanging, will change: The shapes and colors of the phantoms will appear more
clearly; their parts will appear more distinctly. Furthermore, the relevant typical changes
in the flow of kinaesthesia are more or less subject to immediate ‘control’ by striving,
and thus, indirectly, the nature of the appearance of a visual phantom is likewise subject
to such control. For example, a moving phantom will present itself continuously through
appearances at the center of the visual field, if the relevant kinaesthesia flow in a certain
typically familiar manner.
“Moreover, typical flows of kinaesthesia are correlated with typical changes in the
appearances of visual phantoms in an indirect manner. When the visual phantom organism
is seen to move about among other visual phantoms (and the latter are accordingly seen
through changing appearances), the flow of kinaesthesia has a particular familiar style
 AUFBAU TO ANIMISM 95

different from its style when the visual phantom organism is seen as at rest. And, in this
case too, the relevant typical changes in kinaesthesia are subject to immediate control by
automatic striving. Thus indirectly the seen rest and motion of the organism phantom and,
even more indirectly, the nature of the appearances through which other visual phantoms
present themselves, are subject to control.” (014044–014048)
15. In his lecture script for November 17, 1959 (013416–013424), Cairns explains the nature
of associative synthesis as follows. “Suppose that a numerically differentiating synthesis
is effected: that is to say, that two or more things are intended, each as self-identical and, at
the same time, not identical with the other or others. They are not intended merely as not
identical with each other. They are intended also as more or less, in extreme cases, either
as absolutely alike or else as absolutely different.
“This is a matter of intentive synthesis—not identifying or numerically differentiating
synthesis, but associative synthesis, which obviously involves an identifying of each of
the things with itself and a numerical differentiating of it from the other things. Husserl
calls it, more particularly, associative synthesis of similarity (Ähnlichkeit) and difference
(Verschiedenheit). (Obviously we must not confuse this kind of difference with mere
numerical difference.)
“How does associative synthesis take place? What is its intentional structure?
“Let us consider a specific case, an associative synthesis in the sphere of sensuous per-
ceiving. Something is itself presented as being here and something is itself presented as
being there at the same time. The presented simultaneous hereness and thereness conflict.
Therefore not one but two things are intended. In other words[,] a numerically differen-
tiating synthesis is effected. But, as just said, something is itself presented: Some shape,
size, color, or texture, as here; some shape, size, color, or texture, as there. Not just the
things but also these determinations are numerically differentiated.
“But that is not all. The presented determinations of each presented thing is, as it were,
transferred to the other and, together, the presented and the transferred determinations
found a synthesis. Let us suppose that simultaneously a round shape is presented here and
a round shape is presented there. The transferred round and the presented round found a
synthesis, not of identity but of perfect likeness in shape. Let us suppose that simultaneously
a red is presented here and a pink there. The transferred red and the presented pink found
a synthesis, not of perfect likeness, but of similarity, in color. And the same is true of the
transferred pink and the presented red. In short, each of the two things is perceived as
exactly like the other in shape and similar to the other in color.
“Now let us suppose that the red thing here is presented both visually and tactually,
while the pink thing there is presented only visually. Here, let us say, a surface is presented
tactually as rough; there, nothing is presented tactually. Still the roughness here is, as it
were, transferred to the seen thing there. But what happens then? There is no presented
texture there, no felt roughness or smoothness there, to join with the transferred roughness
in founding a synthesis of likeness or unlikeness in texture.
“Nevertheless, the pink thing there is intended and, in a broad sense, perceived as having
some texture, even though its texture is not presented. A texture is appresented there, as
Husserl would say; the visually perceived thing there is apperceived as having a non-
presented, an appresented texture. Furthermore, this appresented texture is not intended
as merely some texture or other; on the basis of the visually presented determinations it
is believed more or less certainly to be a texture of a particular kind—rough or smooth,
as the case may be. And this appresented texture and the transferred roughness found a
synthesis of likeness or unlikeness. Each of the two things is thus perceived as similar or
96 L. EMBREE

dissimilar to the other in texture, even though the texture of only one of them is presented.
“But what about the appresented texture? How does it happen that, in our example, the
merely seen physical thing is intended as having a surface-texture? In general, how does
it happen that a thing actually perceived in just one sensuous manner (visually, tactually,
or auditorially, and so forth) is intended as perceivable in the other sensuous manners, and
as having determinations that are not actually presented but would be presented?
“This fact points back to earlier presentations of the same thing or of similar things, in
the other manners, and to associative syntheses founded on present and past presentations.
“[Then there is the] apperception of perceived physical things as live organisms related
to other mental lives as this organism is related to mine.
“[The] ultimate generalization, not explicitly stated [by Husserl] (so far as I know):
Universal assimilative transfer: [the] sense of every intended object [is] automatically
transferred associatively to every other. As transferred, [it is] confirmed, weakened, or
canceled, according to its congruity with the non-transferred, primary sense.”
16. “Then again, the full effect of automatic associative transfer of the sense, ‘my organism’
has not been made explicit in those of Husserl’s writings with which I am acquainted. In
them he mentions the automatic constituting of only those objects that I spontaneously
accept or reject, more or less certainly, as psychophysical realities. But at the level of
primary automaticity—apart from my own original conceptualizations and those I have
taken over as part of the social tradition—there is perhaps no complete cancellation of
the transferred sense ‘organism.’ Then there is panpsychism, also pantheism, and even
animation of abstracta, of idealities, which is not merely a matter of poetic imagination.
There is also the problem of the dead and, finally, the automatic transfer of artifact sense.”
(009330)
17. Extensive notes by Cairns have survived from a course on Indian Philosophy at Harvard in
Spring 1923 with a “Professor Wood.” This is probably the J. H. Wood who translated the
Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali in the Harvard Oriental Series, vol. 18 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1914). There are allusions to Indian philosophy in the Conversations
with Husserl and Fink, op. cit., pp. 34 and 50.