The Role of Dorion Cairns in the Reception of Phenomenology in North America: The First “Born American” Phenomenologist

Abstract

In the first part of this Chapter there is a brief review of my personal experiences with Dorion Cairns, including how and why I came to become his Literary Executor. The Chapter then provides a focused overview of his philosophical life and central ideas, especially his life-long reflections centered on unraveling and developing appropriate language to express adequately and accurately the Husserlian conception of phenomenological method, especially evident, Cairns shows, in Husserl’s exploration of what, in his Logical Investigations, he refers to what the “cautiously shrewd person” does when faced with what is believed to be showed turns out to reveal the basic features of that method. Our already acquired familiarity, in short, especially when matters are vitally important, provides the soundest clue to understanding what Husserl frequently called the fundamental principle of phenomenological method.

In his other writings—most unpublished in his lifetime—Cairns similarly elucidate others of Husserl’s central ideas, and beyond that extends his carefully worked out reflections to other issues, including important concepts in ethics and value theory. Of equal importance, I think, are Cairns remarkable translations of Husserl’s at time quite difficult texts, making what would otherwise be inaccessible to us.

Dorion Cairns was born July 4, 1901, in the village of Contoocook in the town of Hopkintok, New Hampshire. His father, James George Cairns, was the pastor of the Methodist Church in Contoocook, and Dorion was the first child. In his early life, the family moved frequently as his father was assigned to various Methodist Churches in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. He had one sibling, a brother, Stewart Scott Cairns, who was born May 4, 1904 and later became a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois.

Dorion Cairns studied at Harvard, graduating with a Ph.D. in Philosophy (1933). Thanks to several fellowships from Harvard—1924 to 1926, and again in 1931 and 1932—he studied and was in close contact with Edmund Husserl. From 1933 to 1950 he was a Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at Rockford College, Illinois, and from 1950 in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, New York, eventually writing his dissertation on Husserl (1933).¹ This dissertation was eventually published as the first of many publications of the papers he left at his death on January 4, 1973, in New York.

Except for his dissertation, Professor Cairns published only a few articles and book chapters.² Nevertheless, thanks to these papers and his reputation as teacher, especially for graduate students at The Graduate Faculty, he became one of the foremost disseminators and interpreters of Husserlian phenomenology in North-America.

Based on his intimate knowledge of Husserl’s published writings and unpublished manuscripts and on the many conversations and discussions he had with Husserl and Eugen Fink during his stay in Freiburg i. Br. in 1931–1932, Cairns’s dissertation is a comprehensive exposition of the methodological foundations and the concrete phenomenological analyses of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. The lucidity and precision of his presentation is remarkable and demonstrates the secure grasp he had of Husserl’s philosophical intentions and phenomenological distinctions. Starting from the phenomenological reduction and Husserl’s Idea of Philosophy, Cairns proceeds with a detailed analysis of intentionality and the intentional structures of consciousness. In its scope and in the depth and nuance of its understanding, Cairns’s dissertation and later articles gave him the well-deserved reputation as a preeminent interpreter of Husserlian phenomenology, confirming Husserl’s belief that Cairns had been his very finest student.³

During his periods of study with Husserl, especially between 1931 and 1932, he had become immensely impressed with the striking philosophical quality of Husserl’s conversations with his students and co-workers. Not unlike his daily writing (5–6 h a day was not uncommon (as Cairns reported in his dissertation), the nature of which was a continuous searching, reassessing, modifying, advancing and even rejecting of former views), Husserl’s conversations, especially evidenced from Cairns’ record, were remarkable for their depth and probing character. Because of this, and because of the important light they threw on Husserl’s written and published works, Cairns had early resolved to set down in writing, as accurately as possible, the details of these conversations.⁴

Many years ago, together with my close friend Fred Kersten (also one of Cairns’ students at The Graduate Faculty, and among the very finest scholars I have ever known), we edited a volume of essays to honor our teacher.⁵ Thanks both to editing that volume, and to studying with Professor Cairns for many years, we were privileged to experience first-hand his generosity of spirit and meticulous scholarship, clearly confirming for us Husserl’s judgment of Cairns as “among the rare ones who have penetrated into the deepest sense of my phenomenology… who had the energy and persistence not to desist until he had arrived at real understanding”.⁶

The indebtedness to this great teacher is evident: his precision in articulating themes and implications in each lecture was awesome. Students were left in no doubt about connections among these themes, nor about their systematic and historical significance. As Kersten and I wrote in our introduction to that volume, he was unquestionably among the very few philosophers whose presence as a teacher was quite as remarkable as Husserl found him to be as his student in his several visits to Germany. Whoever had the opportunity of talking with and listening to Cairns came away with that unmistakable sense of having been with a truly great teacher and an uncommon human being. Not only was Cairns a superb scholar but also a kind and compelling teacher. He came meticulously prepared—lectures most often written out in detail in his own hand, from which he, again most often, read aloud, only infrequently setting off from these on a journey to some related topic, but returning with incredible precision to the very point from which he had first departed, looking up with a faint smile on his lips as he returned and, with hardly a break, picking up on the next topic. At the heart of each lecture was a finely tuned critical understanding, set within a carefully worked out explication of whatever the overall theme of the course was: whether his painstaking development of Husserl’s theory of intentionality (this always took more than one, two or even three semesters to present), late British thinkers’ ideas of epistemology, or the intricacies of value theory. In fact, so impressive was his ability to present the detailed complexities of each theme, students were invariably impressed with how little this great man had actually published. Later, close to the time of his death, he went over with me, again and again, what he considered, of the many writings he had actually completed (or was near to completing), those he believed most likely to weather the rigors of publication. He had asked me to undertake the arduous responsibility of compiling his Nachlaβ for later publication—after his death, I learned that I was to be the Literary Executor of his estate.⁷

There were more than four large four-drawer filing cabinets, each drawer filled with haphazardly gathered papers. Included were his hand-written lectures mentioned already—although it was soon learned that few of these were actually what I had anticipated. They were, instead, mostly notes, which of course made those lectures all the more impressive for the depth and detail with which they were presented in those classes. Still, how in the world could anyone ever be able to organize these so as to ensure good reading and good sense? There were also a few that could be more readily organized: formal presentations he had delivered, some articles he had prepared, or was in the process of preparing, for publication. But the bulk of this truly massive set of papers was hardly organized at all, and thus would perforce have to be carefully studied and prepared.

As it eventually happened, one of those marvelous accidents of history, friends and colleagues, especially Lester Embree and Fred Kersten, were able to do much of the work these papers required. And, it should be said, their work was almost as extraordinary as what Cairns had written and stuffed away. The list is, I must say, impressive; the work it took to get these papers in shape for such publication, equally impressive.⁸

As with most everything characteristic of Cairns’ philosophical understanding, most of his mature reflections centered on the crucial theme of method—as did Husserl himself, especially after he published the first volume of his Ideen.⁹ He was especially concerned to reach clear understanding and linguistic expression for Husserl’s central notions of phenomenological reduction and epoché. As Cairns often insisted, it was not until after 1913 when that first volume of his Ideen appeared that these notions figured prominently in Husserl’s writings, although something very much like them was already at work in his earlier Logical Investigations (1900–1901)¹⁰ and in his famous lectures on inner-time consciousness (1905–1906).¹¹

Already in his early career—during those periods of intense study he had as a Sheldon Scholar at Harvard—Cairns had begun to work in depth on these and several others of Husserl’s central ideas: specifically, on the ideas of “intentionality” and “constitution”. These notions formed the central thematic of Cairns subsequent philosophical life. Focusing here primarily on that of method, he realized early on that “reduction” has nothing whatever to do with any attempt to simplify or economize, much less to try and explain one region, state of affairs, or objectivity by showing it to be reducible to another—as in classical reductivism. To the contrary, the basic thrust is found in the literal meaning of the ancient Greek term, which suggests a leading-back to origins or beginnings that have become obscured by other matters. What Husserl, in Ideas, calls the “fundamental meditation” of phenomenology throws light on a rudimentary, unquestioned and in this sense natural, unreflective commitment to, or belief in, there being “the world”. Not unlike what Santayana called “animal faith”, or even Hume “custom and habit”,¹² Husserl wrote of the “natural attitude” and its “general thesis”. This thesis is not an explicit judgment but rather an elemental attitude or orientation (Einstellung) towards what is; namely, that there is “the world”, distinct from whatever may from time to time be cancelled out of it as an hallucination or illusion.

This rudimentary orientation (animal faith, habit, belief) at the basis of every experience of worldly things (experienced as things in the world) is precisely an attitude, an orientation towards things (in the world), a way of regarding which is not so much an explicit action as it is an implicit, tacit informing of our lives at every moment. It is, moreover, “natural:” that is, it is expressive of the elemental tendency of our awareness and experience “to posit” or “to take a stand toward” whatever is encountered or experienced, and in whatever way it may be. The phenomenological epoché and reduction is the deliberate, systematic effort to focus on that natural attitude itself as the explicit object of reflection. Thus, as Cairns repeatedly emphasized in his many lectures on phenomenology, Husserl’s mathematical metaphor of “bracketing” (einklammern) in no way denies or rejects what is naturally believed in or unreflectively posited by us in our natural lives—no more than the mathematician denies or rejects the operations indicated but placed within parentheses. It is rather the deliberate attempt (Beruf) to suspend, put in abeyance, or to focus explicitly on that attitude in order to examine it in depth.

Several examples will serve as clues to the details of the method. First assume that a serious problem emerges in a person’s life—where “serious” indicates only that the matter is serious for this person. What happens? Among other things, the occurrence of the problem signifies that it has become important, perhaps even imperative, for this person to know how matters actually stand, what things really are which now must be contended with: what must now be reckoned with and how that reckoning will be done.¹³ The person’s usual ways of acting and thinking have proven to be inadequate or mistaken (otherwise there wouldn’t be a “problem”), and precisely in view of the seriousness of the situation it is now imperative that the person find out what is really going on. If his/her values, beliefs, habits, etc., are inadequate or otherwise not helpful in resolving the problem, he or she can no longer take their efficacy for granted: they have become, if only for the moment, in-efficacious.

Accordingly, as John Dewey once remarked, the person must now “stop and think;” so long as the problem remains serious, he or she is obliged to probe and question in the effort to find out, to know what is correct, to determine what to do. The problem, in other words, calls for resolution, and if the usual ways of doing this do not work, the person is forced to seek other ways—if, that is, the problem continues to be serious. The person may well wish to continue holding these or those values, beliefs, etc.; but to the extent that they prove inadequate or wrong in the face of the current concrete problem, they must be set aside and others sought. The person stops—that is, calls into question and seeks for possible other ways to deal with the situation. If the person is serious and deliberate, the subsequent course of action will be to assess the situation (what things actually are) for him/herself. The person knows already from his/her own experience the difference between accepting something to be true on the basis of actually encountering it him/herself; accepting it on the basis of his/her own past experience; accepting it on the basis of someone else’s judgment (who may or may not have actually encountered it); and so on. He or she knows, too, that these bases for acceptance are not equally good: accepting on the basis of one’s own experience is in general by far the best. One therefore tries to obtain the best possible evidence to be able then to assess the situation correctly, and eventually settle the matter. From this it is a small step to a principle that is fundamental to Husserlian phenomenological methodology, hence important for grasping the sense of epoché and reduction. In Section 5 of his Cartesian Meditations, Husserl remarks:

Because the sciences aim at predications that express completely and with evident fitness what is beheld pre-predicatively, it is obvious that I must be careful also about this aspect of scientific evidence. Owing to the instability and ambiguity of the common language and its much too great complacency about completeness of expression, a new legitimation of significations by orienting them according to accrued insights, and a fixing of words as expressing the significations thus legitimated. That too we account as a part of our normative principle of evidence, which we shall apply consistently from now on.¹⁴

Several features of this passage drew Cairns’ attention. First, that “normative principle of evidence” itself; second, the issue concerning how we are to regard the need to “fix” the language we use to express legitimated significations, when that language is apparently so ill-suited for this critical task—a task inherent to that normative principle.

In his remarkable lectures and in the few writings Cairns published during his life (especially his important essay, “An Approach to Husserlian Phenomenology”¹⁵). Cairns says, for Husserl, this constitutes the fundamental principle of Husserlian phenomenology:

No opinion is to be accepted as philosophical knowledge unless it is seen to be adequately established by observation of what is seen as itself given “in person”. Any belief seen to be incompatible with what is seen to be itself given is to be rejected. Towards opinions that fall in neither class—whether they be one’s own or another’s—one is to adopt an “official” philosophical attitude of neutrality.¹⁶

Pointing out that the sense of this principle derives both from an already acquired familiarity with the difference between awareness of something as itself given and awareness of something not itself given, and from accepted traditional theories, Cairns went on to show how both traditional rationalism and empiricism failed to embody the full sense of the principle. The empiricist, by restricting the principle solely to the observation of individual (and in many instances, only sense perceptual) affairs, is then led to ignore in the name of theory matters of which one is in fact aware. The rationalist, on the other hand, by proceeding by first setting up formal definitions and postulates and then formally deducing consequences, is misled by failing to keep the matters thus judged about continually present. In Cairns’ words,

To take conceptual stuff already on hand and fashion a cloak of theory for things in absentia, then call them in for a partial fitting—that is at best only a way to botch together another ingenious misfit to hand way with how many others in the lumber-room of history.¹⁷

At every point, even affairs merely referred to, much less judged about or argued for, must continually “be tested and, if necessary, corrected by original observation”.¹⁸ Perhaps the best clue to understanding the sense of that crucial principle is the “already acquired familiarity” to which Cairns refers. As Husserl expressed it in his Formal and Transcendental Logic, if we would seriously and with fundamental self-responsibility seek knowledge, we do well to adopt

the same method that a cautiously shrewd person follows in practical life wherever it is seriously important for him to “find out how matters actually are”. That is the beginning of wisdom, though not its end…[which] we can never do without, no matter how deep we go with our theorizing—a wisdom that we must therefore practice in the same fashion when at last we are judging in the absolute phenomenological sphere…¹⁹

As I see it, the point is painfully obvious, however difficult it is to adhere to it, and however often philosophers fail to keep it vividly before themselves in their actual work. We all readily understand what Husserl means by that “cautiously shrewd person”: the clear difference between a judgment made on the basis of one’s own actual encounter with something (say, in one of Cairns’ examples, judging the color of the Statue of Liberty), a judgment made on the basis of a recollection of actually encountering the Statue, a judgment based on seeing a picture of the Statue, a judgment based on someone else’s judgment (who either actually encountered, remembers, or saw a picture of the Statue, etc.), and still others. We know this particularly when, as Husserl remarks, is it “seriously important” to know “how matters actually are”—such as when, it may be, one’s small child’s life is at stake. Clearly, we give far more credence, in general, to judgments made on the basis of actual encounters with the affair in question than we do to those based on one or another mode of non-actual encounter (whether recollection, awareness of a picture, hearsay, or whatever).

Our “already acquired familiarity”, in short, especially when matters are vitally important for us, provides the soundest clue to understanding the fundamental principle of method in acquiring knowledge. Our knowledge is lodged in judgments, and judgments are not only assertions about certain states of affairs; they also point to a mode of encounter appropriate to those states of affairs—the mode of evidence that justifies, to one or another degree, these judgments. Of course, we know from our daily lives that not every judgment is based on that actual mode of encounter termed “sense perception”, or even an encounter with individual things. We believe in and incorporate our beliefs into judgments about a rich and diverse range of affairs other than those directly open to sensory perception: past affairs, mental states, political and social goals, laws and social “recipes of action”, institutions like the family or the church, symbols, signs, as well as ethical, aesthetic and religious values, and so on. Hence, where the principle Cairns expresses asserts the necessity of “adequate observation”, this must be taken literally and contextually: one must “get at” the affairs themselves being judged about, observe them in the way most appropriate to them—and what kind of observation is called for will necessarily vary according to what is judged about, believed in, or what we seek to know.

The principle asserts, then, that no belief is philosophically acceptable unless it is established on the basis of adequate evidence. This is a condition of legitimacy of any epistemic claim.²⁰ However, such claims not only have this epistemic function, but also what Cairns identifies as a “communicative function”. One may say that every epistemic claim is essentially dual in character: each asserts something to be the case, and each serves as a communicative guide to apprehending that about which the assertion is made. In Cairns’ words:

Statements that are strictly phenomenological in the Husserlian sense are to be used as guides for observation, much as one might use a previous observer’s description of a landscape as an aid in distinguishing its features while all the time it lies before one’s eyes…[Such] assistance is useful not only because some observations are intrinsically difficult but also because prejudices are likely to induce one to overlook or explain away what is actually there to be seen. The Husserlian phenomenologist’s appeal to “immediate” inspection is not made on the assumption that a Husserlian phenomenological proposition need only be understood for its truth to become evident forthwith. The truth of an opinion is seen “immediately” only when its coincidence with a given fact, as judged on the basis of the very matters entering into it, is seen. And often it is a long and hard road to a position from which one can see the truth of an opinion—“immediately”.²¹

The first clue to understanding epoché and reduction, then, is this fundamental principle of method. The second clue can now be readily stated. What Cairns states in the citation given above is also found within the “already acquired familiarity” of daily life—and is thus a sort of non-thematic or ‘quasi’ principle of method. If I were to be asked, say by my wife, what amount is still in our retirement fund, it is so to speak perfectly obvious what I need to do: go to that account and ‘see’ for myself what is the amount. The expression of an opinion in a judgment—that is, linguistically—is necessarily both epistemic (i.e. a claim that something is thus and so) and communicative. The linguistically expressed judgment is a sort of invitation for others to “look and see” for themselves whether what the judger has claimed is as he has supposed—although this might well be difficult to do, and even though prejudice may block the way to “immediate” inspection. One need only consider, again, how things must go on in daily life in such matters as criminal trials, federal investigations, or even more trivial matters. Any such judgment has to be “checked out”, and the “shrewd person” does so by taking the linguistically expressed judgment as a “guide” or “clue” to the affairs themselves talked about—especially, and sometimes only, where it is really important to do so. Thanks to that already acquired familiarity each of us has a sense of the principle of method, we in that sense appreciate the need for further clarity and strictness, if any of us would truly seek to “see how matters actually are”. Such procedures as continuing to sharpen the focus of one’s attention, become more reflectively cognizant, learn to restrict or shorten the focus of attention, become increasingly rigorous about these attentional shifts and their consequently established “attitudes” (that is the epoché and reduction), and so on. Through such procedures, Cairns insisted, the fundamental principle of method is necessarily presupposed as operative. Therefore, what Cairns succeeded in showing in a few striking passages is indeed the fundamental methodological principle of Husserlian phenomenology – expressed to be sure, in his own native language, English. “No matter how deep we go with our theorizing”, Husserl emphasized, that shrewd wisdom of the truly concerned practical person can never be forgotten—on pains of missing precisely the fundamental sense of knowledge. Every subsequent step of method—each with its own specific tasks and strictness—proceeds on the basis of and is in fact but an increasingly refined expression of that methodological principle and its dual character of being both an epistemic claim and communicative guide.

It is Dorion Cairns’ uncommonly lucid grasp of phenomenology, and his unerring ability to find what Husserl termed a “suitable fixing of words” adequate to the task of expressing legitimated insights, which has made such matters of method readily at hand for the rest of us.

Cairns had often insisted – principally in his remarkable lectures at the Graduate Faculty of the New School – that attaining a fair and accurate view of Husserl’s enormously rich and complex that his Cairns’ lectures between 1956 and 1964 are especially important.

After coming to the Graduate Faculty, his publications increased, as did his important and celebrated translations of Husserl’s works:

• 1950. “Phenomenology”. in A History of Philosophical Systems. Edited by Vergilius Ferm. New York, NY: The Philosophical Library, pp. 353–364.

• 1972. “The Many Senses and Denotations of the Word Bewusstsein (“Consciousness”) in Edmund Husserl’s Writings”. in Life-World and Consciousness, Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch. Edited by Lester E. Embree. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 19–31.

• 1973. “My Own Life”. in Phenomenology: Continuation and Criticism, Essays in Memory of Dorion Cairns. Edited by Fred Kersten & Richard Zaner. Den Haag, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 1–13.

• 1973. “An Approach to Phenomenology”. in Phenomenology: Continuation and Criticism, Essays in Memory of Dorion Cairns. Edited by Fred Kersten & Richard Zaner. Den Haag, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 223–238.

• 1973. “The Ideality of Verbal Expressions”. in Phenomenology: Continuation and Criticism, Essays in Memory of Dorion Cairns. Edited by Fred Kersten & Richard Zaner. Den Haag, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973, pp. 2239–250.

• 1973. “Perceiving, Remembering, Image-Awareness, Feigning Awareness”. in Phenomenology: Continuation and Criticism, Essays in Memory of Dorion Cairns. Edited by Fred Kersten & Richard Zaner. Den Haag, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 251–262.

• 1973 Guide for Translating Husserl. Den Haag, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.

• 1975. “A Letter to John Wild about Husserl”. Revue internationale de philosophie. Paris. 5: 155–181.

• 1976. Conversations with Husserl and Fink. Edited by the Husserl-Archives in Louvain. Den Haag, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.

• 1983. “Philosophy as a Striving Toward Universal Sophia”.Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch. Ed. Embree. Washington, D.C.: The University Press of America, pp. 28–43.

• 1991. Embree, Lester. “Two Husserlians Discuss Nazism: Letters between Dorion Cairns and Aron Gurwitsch in 1941”. In Husserl Studies. Vol. 8, no. 2, 77–105.

• 2000. “Reason and Emotion”. Husserl Studies. 17(1): 21–33.

• 2001. “Theory of Intentionality in Husserl”. In Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. May 32(2): 116–124

• 2002. “The First Motivation of Transcendental Epoché”. In One Hundred Years of Phenomenology: Husserl’s Logical Investigations Revisited. Edited by Dan Zahavi. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 219–231.

• 2002. “The Fundamental Philosophical Significance of Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen”. In Husserl Studies. 18(1): 41–49.

• 2002. “Phenomenology and Present-Day Psychology (1942)”. In Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, 1:69–77.

Translations by Cairns:

• Langrebe, Ludwig. 1940. “The World as a Phenomenological Problem”. Translated by Dorion Cairns. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Volume I, pp. 39–58.

• Husserl, Edmund. 1964. Cartesian Meditations: an Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Dorion Cairns. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

• Husserl, Edmund. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic. Translated by Dorion Cairns. Den Haag, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Logic. Translated by Dorion Cairns. Den Haag, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.