The Question of Animism Phenomenologically Revisited

LUIS ROMÁN RABANAQUE

Kaohsiung

Congreso; Phenomenology as a Bridge between Asia and the West, IV; 2014

National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan

Animism can be addressed in many ways, and it has given rise to a vast literature among scientists and philosophers. From a scientific point of view it has been a major issue both for ethnology and anthropology. For philosophers it has usually been a matter of history of philosophy, e.g. the characterization of Hylozoism among the pre-Socratic thinkers in the dawn of Western philosophy. As to the former, two chief modalities seem to have largely prevailed in empirical investigations on animism, one predominantly descriptive and comparative, contrasting so-called high civilizations with so-called "primitive" societies by stressing their differences, the other predominantly evolutionary, seeking to reconstruct the origins of animism and thus the transit from primitive to civilized man. By adopting a revised form of Husserl's phenomenological method, Cairns is searching for the invariant, i.e. a priori features of this human experience. Anthropology and ethnology dig into the layers of active sense-giving and also of secondary passivity where sedimentation of experience and thus culture and cultural transmission take place. By means of his use of the Abbau method, Cairns is digging into a deeper layer, that of primary passivity, which is located at the bottom of all cultural layers since it grounds them all, it is the condition of possibility for any active and secondarily passive sense-formation and sense-transfer.