References
- Dorion Cairns, “Philosophy as a Striving toward Universal sophia in the Integral Sense,” ed. Lester Embree, in Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester Embree, Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, and University Press of America, 1984, p. 42; hereafter cited textually with two-digit numbers.
- The Nachlass of Dorion Cairns, Archival Repository of The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, University of Memphis, 0093 31–32; hereafter cited with embedded six- digit page numbers. Professor Richard Zaner is thanked for permission to quote from the Cairns Nachlass.
- Cf. Dorion Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink, ed. The Husserl-Archives in Louvain, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976.
- Concerning the difference of modern philosophy, a short manuscript entitled “Medieval & Modern” and dated December 1946 reads as follows:
- “The distinction between medieval and modern is originally chronological, part of the tripartite temporal division of human history into ancient, medieval, and modern, made and first accepted at a time when historians were almost completely ignorant of history outside the Mediterranean basin. It remains useful primarily as a division of Western history.
- “It is fashionable to seek an essential distinction between all phases and aspects of temporally medieval culture on the one hand and all phases of temporally modern culture on the other hand. One important difference, however, is between the doctrine of reason predominant in the middle ages and that predominant in modern times.
- “The doctrine that was predominant in the middle ages is that human reason has an essentially limited scope, that there are truths necessarily beyond the range of human reason, truths which nevertheless can be, and are, delivered to man by revelation and faith. In modern times, the predominant doctrine is that the scope of reason is universal, extending ideally to all being and all truth. The alleged truths of revelation and faith must submit to rational human criticism. So too, in the realms of value and will or action, the scope of reason is unlimited. Alleged values and alleged hierarchies of values, allegedly valid codes of right and wrong conduct, and allegedly right political and social institutions must be critically examined. And, finally, the ideal of man as a rational animal, living rationally in a rationally ordered society, striving toward rationally justified goals by rationally justified means is modern rather than medieval” (009352–3).
- (009422) To show that uncertainty and disillusionment about Western culture had been growing since about 1890, Cairns mentions the writings of Henry Adams, Oswald Spengler, and John Maynard Keynes, and offers a list of events:
- “It is well to start with a list of the most striking phenomena which seem to indicate that Western culture is sick.
- 1. World War I.
- 2. The history of Russia under Stalin.
- 3. The extension of Nazism.
- 4. The Great Depression.
- 5. The Spanish Civil War.
- 6. World War II.—Military collapse of France.
- 7. The extension of Stalinism after the end of World War II.
- 8. The breakdown of beliefs and modes of behaviour that have given Western society harmony and cooperative direction: Christian dogma and morality. Belief in the importance of one's duties as a citizen (009355).
- It seems worth noting that most of Cairns's musings about Western culture were written while he was a patient in a Veteran's Administration hospital recovering from tuberculosis and may have been the basis for lectures to fellow officer patients.
- Cairns's note: “See Überweg-Prächter 1922, p. 4.”
- (p. 35) “Or, if we wish to limit the extension of ‘knowing’ to knowing facts, we may say that the most fundamental knowing is based on a judging warranted by ‘seeing,’ i.e., a judging in which someone predicates of an evident thing some property that evidently belongs to it. For example: I am aware of a green surface as itself presented; I see it. In a broad sense this seeing awareness is ‘knowing’ the green surface. I then go on to judge: ‘This is a surface; this surface is green.’…I am believing that this surface is green; and my believing is a knowing; it is a believing warranted by seeing it or, in other words, a rational believing” (p. 34).
- Cf. Dorion Cairns, “Reason and Emotion,” ed. Lester Embree, Fred Kersten, and Richard M. Zaner, Husserl Studies 17 (2001), pp. 21–33.
- (009332) Cf. Lester Embree, “Dorion Cairns: The Last Lecture Course on Ethics,” in John J. Drummond and Lester Embree, eds. Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002, pp. 139–160.
- See Lester Embree, “Some Noetico-Noematic Analyses of Action and Practical Life,” in The Phenomenology of the Noema, ed. John J. Drummond and Lester Embree, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992, pp. 157–219 and “Advances regarding Evaluation and Action in Husserl's Ideas II,” in Issues in Husserl's “Ideas II,” ed. Thomas Nenon and Lester Embree, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996, pp. 173–98.