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PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE MAILBOX

Grant unto us men the skill, O God, in a little thing to descry those notions as be common to things both great and small.

—Augustine, Confessions, XI, 23

INTRODUCTION

Fides et Ratio spoke of several levels of truth: first of everyday experience, second of the sciences, third of philosophy, and fourth of religion (FR §30 / p. 42). They are all both distinguished and linked. The first three have their origins in common human experience independent of revelation; the fourth depends upon revelation, i.e., upon special human experience. That might be said of any religion. In this exercise we will focus attention upon common human experience—at least in our culture which is literate and has a mail system: we will explore the structures of experience found in doing a phenomenological description of a mailbox. Though not all cultures are literate and have mail systems, many of the features of experience involved in knowing and using the mailbox are found in cultures generally. And Fides et Ratio from the very beginning (FR 1/9) sets our sights upon Eastern as well as Western cultures.

Everyday experience is presupposed by the other levels. Even revelation is addressed to everyday experience. Fides et Ratio claims that God comes to us in the things we know best and can verify most easily, the things of our everyday life, apart from which we cannot understand ourselves (FR 12/21). Science itself takes root in and presupposes ordinary experience. The evidence that science appeals to is based upon looking and manipulating as well as upon linguistic communication. The latter is not only that which appears in scientific literature but that which is used by scientists when they talk to one another: Can you fix this spectroscope? How about a cigarette? (Horrors!) What are you doing for lunch? A scientist might even say, Lord, help me to see things aright and make a contribution to my field! None of this is communicated in scientific language.

We already know how to operate in the sensory environment and in the world of everyday linguistic communication before, during, and after we set about engaging in science. Being involved in the everyday world, doing science, and living religiously present the data that philosophers reflect upon. So, before we set about these other tasks, it is important to reflect upon what we always already know as fully formed adults. Such knowledge is purely functional and is usually not made explicit. Often what we might think about experience—our “theories” about it—do not match what we know in the mode of “how to,” but not in the mode of explicit description. We might, for example, think that knowing is a matter of sense experience alone and that it takes place inside our head, as a matter of brain processes—though the deliverances of ordinary experience speak against those views.

The article employs the method singled out by the John Paul as the phenomenological method (FR 59/78). (He wrote his own doctoral dissertation on the German phenomenologist Max Scheler.) The term “phenomenology” is derived from the Greek terms phainomenon or “appearance” and logos or the attempt to get at essential, universal, and necessary features (the same as in bio-logy, psycho-logy, theo-logy). The fancy term for the universal and necessary is “the eidetic” from the Greek word eidos which translates as “type” or “kind” or “form.” Phenomenology is based upon careful description of the essential types of features of things appearing and of modes of attending to that appearing. Using the phenomenological method of isolating essential features involved in such appearance, the piece that follows distinguishes several aspects involved in recognizing and utilizing a mailbox.

The first is the level of so-called empirical objectivity. What that technical philosophic expression indicates is the environment of things presenting themselves through our senses “objectively,” that is over-against us (from the Latin ob-jectum, that which is cast—jectum, from iacere, to throw—over against—ob, as in “obstacle”). The term “empirical” is from the Greek empeiria or experience. We see, handle, hear, smell, and taste things: that is the realm of empirical objectivity. The senses are the ways in which we come to know things; they are the immediate phase of how things appear to us; they present the original phenomena. John Paul says that it is a great challenge at the end of the millennium to move from phenomenon to foundation (FR 83/105). Our descriptions will prepare the way for that.

The second aspect is most important: it is that of our own consciousness. It is the crucial feature in following the command “Know thyself” with which Fides et Ratio begins and which originates in the ancient Greek oracle at Delphi followed by Socrates (FR 1/9). How do you think about your own consciousness? It is surely that which is most intimate to you. But it is not like the things that appear to consciousness. It has no color, shape, smell, etc. No one can touch it. And it is not locked into what the senses deliver: through our reflective awareness we can come to know something about the senses that the senses do not immediately deliver. Human awareness not only senses, it reflects. Most significant, it can know the universal, necessary features of each of the sensory fields, not simply the individual things that happen to appear within them. Awareness is not an object, but the central feature of the subject who knows objects; it is the sphere of subjectivity. Its most crucial feature is the employment of the notion of Being, an odd notion that includes absolutely everything, and everything about everything; but it includes it all initially in an empty manner. That is, we do not know everything, but we are by nature referred to everything in the mode of a set of questions peculiar to humans: What’s it all about? How do we fit into the whole scheme of things? What is this “whole scheme”? Religions and philosophies are attempted answers to those questions. That is closely linked to the John Paul’s calling for a recovery and renewal of the philosophy of being (97/119).

Third, the mailbox is not given by nature but by human artifice: it is an arti-fact. In order to make a living, someone made it to function within the mail system. So it fits into a system of production and exchange as well as into the mail system. Such systems function in independence of my own individual awareness and mediate my relations to those connected indirectly to me by these systems. Humans live with one another mediated by regular, habitual practices developed over significantly longer time periods than the time of those who now operate within them. Institutional mediation is an essential aspect of my relation to the mailbox. It involves our essentially belonging to a community (FR 31/43).

Further, the foundation of this mediation is the primal institution: language. It is the clearest indication that we are not self-made humans but are essentially embedded in tradition. Language has two central modes: spoken and written. It can also be signed by hand signals or semaphore or embossed in braille.

Human are believed to have existed on the earth for some one and three-quarters million years. Writing emerged very recently, around 3000 BC. It changed essentially our relations to time and space and to one another. The mailbox functions in terms of written communication.

Finally, the mailbox functions in the absence of the person or persons addressed. There are essential differences between the ways in which persons, animals, plants, and nonliving things present themselves and the ways they are absent.

The general features uncovered reflectively from what we already know functionally furnish the bases for the “big questions” and the test for the adequacy of the answers offered in terms of how such answers do justice to the whole field of experience. The inventory of such features is presupposed but not made explicit in the attempt to interpret scripture and tradition in theology.

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PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE MAILBOX

Earlier in the century Adolph Reinach, one of the pupils of Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology, devoted an entire semester to a course on the phenomenology of the mailbox. Given the great questions of human origins and destiny, human freedom and responsibility, and the meaning of the cosmos, such inquiry seems trivial. However, these larger questions arise on the basis of certain features of the field of human experience in their different relations. And it is features that appear in the field of such experience in their peculiar modes of togetherness that furnish the evidence for testing the larger claims. People are free to make whatever ultimate claims they wish, but it is only appropriate evidence that tests the validity of those claims, so that the prior quest should be a making explicit of the initial forms of evidence that found our theoretical claims. Such is the role of phenomenology or the discipline that attends to the essential features of what is given within the field of experience. Such givenness entails both features of objects of attention and the always, but usually only implicitly present, features of the conscious subject in the togetherness of his or her different acts of attending.

The mailbox has a certain advantage in that recognizing and using it involves several different strata in its appearance. It is first of all an object within our sensory fields: we see it and take hold of it. When we open it, it emits a certain sound. We might also smell and, less likely, taste it. Second, it is an artifact which exhibits features over and beyond its being like sensory objects of nature. Third, it functions within the mediations of institutions like the production and exchange systems which manufacture and sell mailboxes. But we buy it in order to function within the postal system. Fourth, it presents the written word, which is to be set in contrast with and in relation to the spoken word. Fifth, it involves the absence of the communicator, which is to be set in contrast with and in relation to his or her presence. We could go on to consider other features, but let us limit ourselves to the five we have listed—at least for the time being: empirical objectivity in general, artifaction, institutional mediation, writing and speech, intersubjective presence and absence. In and through all these considerations we have to attend to the differing intentional acts or modes of attending involved in such layers of recognition.

What we are after in philosophy are the basic concepts that determine a given field, not the particulars that may occur or be discovered in that field. Thus we are not as such interested in seeing this or that but in what is essential to seeing and what is essential to being seen. In the form of first philosophy or ontology or metaphysics (it has been given different names historically), philosophy is after the basic concepts that are found in all things. In fact, it takes one of its names, ontology, from the most basic of notions, the notion of being (Greek to on, genitive tou ontos). We will make a great deal out of that in studying the thinkers and the matters about which they speak.

For purposes of better illustrating some points, let us consider a rural mailbox set on a post by a roadside at some distance from the house and encompassed by the rolling fields of farmland.

Consider first the mailbox as a visual object. It has a kind of silver-gray surface set upon a light brown post. On one side it has a moveable little red flag attached to a pivot. To appear as a visual object it must exhibit a certain color or set of colors. Even the so-called color-blind see shades of black, white, and gray. What appears as colored must be extended, ultimately linked to three-dimensional solids which have an inside and an outside. In the case of the mailbox proper, it has a hollow inside. In the case of the post upon which it is mounted, it has a full inside. Further, it can only appear in a space separated from the viewer and filled with light. The filled space does not extend indefinitely: it appears within a horizon as the limit to the field of vision. We look out beyond the mailbox to the surrounding hills, beyond which perhaps we see the sky and the clouds. Such horizoned space moves ahead of us as we move forward. We carry it with us as a kind of psychic hoopskirt, though it is not merely psychological. It is the condition for the visual appearance of things to a bodily situated observer. Though the perceived space is limited by the horizon, it nonetheless always presents itself as linked to an indeterminately surrounding space spread out in all directions from our bodies. And by reason of the relation between the bodily location of our viewing and that horizon, three-dimensional objects appearing within the horizon are perspectivally shortened, shrinking as they recede from our viewing position. Again, any extended thing only exists in measurable relation to other extended things in its environment. Within the visual field the objects upon which we focus are set off from the others that then appear only marginally or obliquely until we attend to each of them successively. When we do so, the others we attended to earlier become marginal in their turn.

We have spoken as if the viewing subject were immobilized. As a matter of fact we are always changing our visual viewpoint, moving our heads from side to side and moving ourselves bodily to differing positions vis-à-vis the objects present visually. As we do so, the perspectives alter. And yet, they perspectively present themselves as coherently relating to previous perspectives and as linked, immediately and spontaneously, to those that will follow. As conscious subjects we retain the immediately past and expect the immediately following presentation. In fact, what we have previously experienced mediates our expectations as to what will follow the perspectives we have just experienced, not simply in terms of the peculiarities of a given situation, but in terms of empirical objects generally. We expect, for example, that every front will have a back, even though we might have never seen the back of a particular body. We walk around to the other side of the mailbox and see that it has a dent in the back.

Even though our current interest is theoretical, our basic lived relation to the mailbox is not theoretical but practical: we check it to see if we have mail. Seeing is for the sake of apprehending. We go up to it, reach out, and open it. When we do so, its metal sides feel hard and smooth. If in the winter, they would feel cold and usually dry. In the summer they might feel hot and sometimes damp. When I might have first set it on its post, it would have felt rather light. Hardness, smoothness, coldness, dampness, lightness: all are not absolute but relative terms. The sides of the mailbox are harder than the muscle on my arms, slightly tensed when I first carried the box to its current location and installed it; but not as hard as, let’s say, the gaudy diamond ring on my finger. Furthermore, properties such as coldness are relative to the thermal state of the one who takes hold of the object. For one who is hot, it might feel cooler; for one who is cold, it might feel warmer. But though doubly relative—to their opposites and to the bodily state of the one who feels them—that is their objective nature; that is what such properties actually are: relations of a manifest object to an embodied conscious subject.

I open the box and take out the mail. I notice that there is a lingering fragrance left from a perfumed letter I received yesterday. As I close it, it emits a peculiar clank, louder or softer, depending upon how hard I push it closed. I knock on it and it produces a different sound. Both fragrance and sound diffuse themselves into the space surrounding the smelling and sounding object, diminishing in intensity as they recede from their irradiating object, with the fragrance lingering longer, but in a more reduced area, than the sound. I open one of the letters: it is a valentine with some little red candy hearts. I pop one in my mouth: it is smooth and hard with the sharp but sweet flavor of cinnamon. Taste is a variation on touch: the object exhibits the tactual qualities and adds its own specialization: flavor with variations between sweet/sour, sharp/flat, and the like. Flavors interplay with smells; hold your nose and you can’t taste anything.

Now all these features—visual, tactual, olfactory, audile and also gustatory—are spontaneously linked together as features of the object I have come to call my mailbox. But it is not these features to which we ordinarily attend. Regularly we attend through each feature to the thing, the aspects appearing only subsidiary in our attention focused on the thing. And each presentation points beyond itself to the sum total of possible perspectives within each of the senses in their togetherness. I intend the mailbox itself in and through the subject-dependent perspectives on it that sensation affords me. The mailbox presents itself as exceeding each of the perspectives but containing all of them.

Now we have been attending primarily to the mailbox itself. The thing presented through the continual variations of its sensory features stands present to me outside my body. Attend now more carefully to that awareness. Though my awareness is grounded in my body which furnishes me my mobile point of view on the thing and the organs for sensation, awareness itself is not in the body the way my eyeballs and brain are. I attend from my body to the thing outside. My awareness is literally with the mailbox, not as one body alongside and perhaps in contact with another, but in the distinctive mode of manifestation, of appearance. The mailbox is shown as existing outside me, its viewer and user. It is present as other than me. The condition for that happening is my self-presence as a conscious being, other than which the other is present. Embedded within the darkness of material processes with their blind action and interaction, a clearing, “a lighting” occurs, an open space in which things not only are but are shown, they appear, they become manifest, they become phenomena.

The first condition that makes this possible is involved in every sensing being, namely touch. Some animals, like worms, seem to have only touch. Animals who have other senses must also have touch. The reason for this is that the point of sensing is to present opportunities and threats to organic development and sustenance. The latter is served by apprehending the appropriate objects, eating them, mating with them, struggling with them, caring for them.

One of the peculiarities of touch is that, though the hands are the typical locus of its operation, the organ for touch is the whole surface of the body. That contrasts with the other senses that have specifically localized organs: eyes, eardrums, mouth, nose. There is another feature linked to that: touch involves the suffused self-presence of the animal that is functionally, pre-focally aware of its entire body. As aware, it lives in and from its body, not as something that it simply has, as it has any other instrument, but as something that it is, with which it is identified. The body is mine as consciously self-directive and is me myself in one of my phases. Awareness is related to body, not as one thing to another, but as a pervading, overarching presence to the whole functioning organism, a kind of concrete universal in relation to the particulars of its organic parts. Of course, that presence does not involve even implicit awareness of all of the body’s parts. There is no lived awareness of one’s own cell-structure nor of one’s brain. Most of the body remains beneath the threshold of awareness: an animal is present to it as a functioning whole, implicitly aware of what it needs to do to move itself in reacting to its environment. The field of awareness in its pervading the lived body is an expression of the fundamental pervading of the whole organism in all its parts by the unifying principle of its kind of life, by what Aristotelians call the “soul” (psyche). The soul is the principle of holistic functioning involving conscious, and in the human case reflectively self-conscious capacities.

The lived body is both other than and the same as the body observed in physiology. Analogous to the same body seen and touched, each human body is both exteriorly apprehensible and lived from within. But in the latter mode of access, it is not entirely other than the awareness that lives it. Its otherness is more like the otherness of the liver in relation to the brain: two features of the single functional whole we call an organism. But unlike the relation between the liver and the brain, the relation of feeling to its organic base is not a relation of two separable parts but of a self-presence to its own dark basis.

The diffuse self-presence of the animal organism in the mode of feeling is the basis for the manifestation of what is other than the conscious organism. Manifest otherness presupposes self-presence, other than which the other is manifest. Tactual sensitivity spread over the whole surface of the organism is the result of primordial self-presence in the mode of feeling. It is the basis for the differentiation of sensibility found in relation to localized organs.

Linked to this are the kinesthetic feelings whereby I operate through the organism, moving from position to position, sensing in various ways and taking hold of things. As I take hold I feel myself feeling things, feeling the effect things have upon me. There is, in addition, the sense of balance as there might be a sense of dizziness as I stand and move from place to place. Pervading my awareness of identity with my body there might also be a sense of vigor or weariness or perhaps nausea.

Again, there is the frequent recurrence of hunger, thirst, and sexual desire experienced in relation to certain organs of the body. Whereas the various sensory capacities are oriented toward aspects of things in the environment, the natural appetites are oriented toward the things presented through these aspects, namely those kinds of things that can nourish or can fulfill sexual desire. Feelings expressive of such appetites are linked to the appearance of certain sensorily present objects in the environment or even to the inner recollection of such objects. When such desires become intense, they seem to pervade our whole organism and magnetize our attention. When they become very intense, they rise to the level of pain. But when they are being satisfied, there is the feeling of pleasure.

Awareness is thus rafted upon an underlying organism whose needs dictate the way in which I am engaged in the environment outside my organism. I find myself always thrust “outside,” always engaged in the things that are opportunities or threats to my organic well-being. I am always “tuned,” anticipating feeling pleasure and pain in relation to the things given outside.

The organically based desires are latent as I approach the mailbox, but other desires are operative. Perhaps I am a bit anxious about a letter I am expecting. Will I get the grant for which I applied? Did my friend accept my apology for having offended him or did the offense produce a final breach to our long friendship? So I am engaged in another way: in expectations linked to my relation to other persons mediated by practices that are not themselves directly organic.

As I go to open the mailbox, I cut my finger on a sharp edge. There is a feeling of pain. Pain arises both from bodily injury and from the frustration of intense desire as pleasure does from the satisfaction of that desire and in proportion to the intensity of the pain of desire. If I receive the grant and secure forgiveness from my friend, I am pleased; if I do not, I am saddened. Both being pleased and being saddened are in proportion to the value I attach to the objects of that happiness or sadness.

There is another feature involved in our attention thus far. In order that the thing may be manifest as enduring through the variations of its various presentations to me, I myself must be self-present as likewise enduring, as the same one who first saw the mailbox at a distance, approached it, opened it, smelled its slight aroma, and heard the clank of its closing. I must—or rather my psycho-neural system must—retain the first moment of encounter through the whole experience. Indeed, I must further retain the integrated experience as the ground for my re-visiting the mailbox in my mind while in its absence as the condition for my intending tomorrow to revisit it as the same mailbox I approached yesterday.

Attend to still another factor involved in the analysis thus far. As I look, apprehend, smell, and hear the object, my attention is focused upon it as an individual in the field of my own individual awareness and as having its own peculiar individual sensory features. The features are all actual and the individual thing is immediately present in them. However, our interest now is not in those individual features but in the eidetic constants they exhibit. Our aim is to disregard the contingent variations in order to attend to the universal and necessary constants that constitute the framework of each of the sensory fields. To that end, the real presence of a mailbox is irrelevant: an imaginative construct, such as the reader is now employing, is sufficient. What we apprehend as eidetic is characterized as universal, and that means as possibly instantiated in an indefinite number of particular instances, wherever and whenever we might encounter it. The senses give us the individual and actual; what we then come to call “the intellect” gives us the universal and possible.

The recognition of the redness of the flag on the mailbox is not given in the single experience of the flag. This red is given now in sensation, but redness is not. It is the result of past experience and the extraction of an ideal object which given sensory instances approach or from which they deviate in various degrees. The red on the flag is not the identical red of the cardinal fluttering through the tree above the mailbox nor the red on the pickup truck coming down the road. Other ideal types of visual objects are isolated: blue and yellow together with red being primary, pleonastically called “chromatic colors” (or colored colors) in contrast with black, white, and gray as oxymoronically termed “achromatic colors” (or non-colored colors) which “color-blind” people see. Particular shades and borderline cases are produced by combination of these “elements.” But, we recognize, overarching these color variations, color as the genus correlative to the power of seeing. Whenever I see, I see color. But it is only in individual colored things, things of a particular shade, that I come to know the genus color. Indeed, I only come to recognize the genus when I recognize the species in the individual instances. But whereas redness has visible instances, there is no instance that exhibits just color the way the cardinal exhibits redness. Color is free of both species and instances of it as capable of being applicable to both.

When we come to recognize the generic object of seeing in color we at the same time come to recognize the nature of the capacity to see. The actuality of both the act of seeing and the seen color are always individual occurrences in a given Here-and-Now. But the capacity of seeing is a universal orientation toward the kind of object we call color, whenever and wherever its individual instances can be seen. Kinds are naturally correlative to powers. Furthermore, the seen individual has the natural capacity of being seen; and that, too, involves a universal orientation toward the kinds of organisms that can see. So individuality is manifest on both sides of the subject-object relation in sensing generically, but universality is involved on both sides in the reflectively discernible active and passive capacities and their objects. Kinds or types are correlative to the natural powers, active and passive, of individual things. Though it takes the work of sorting and thus abstracting from the welter of concrete visual experiences, such work is a matter of focusing what is already operative in things, namely, their natural powers. Universality in these cases is thus no relatively arbitrary construction of the human mind but a revelation of the inner nature of natural things as such, with the intellect as one of the functions of nature, nature as manifest in its capacities and kinds and not simply in its individuals.

From the proceeding, we can see that the recognition of the eidetic is not fixation upon an isolated universal. Each such universal presents itself as embedded within a hierarchical structure of samenesses and differences. The silver-gray of the mailbox, the red of its flag, the light brown of the post upon which it is mounted fall under the general notion of color as the sameness running through all of the kinds and individual instances of color, each of which is at the same time different from all the rest. Color, in turn, is a sensory feature set off from other such features by being perceptible through sight. And each sensory feature is a dependent feature of things, set off from other dependent features such as weight, height, and functionality. Specific clusters of types of features identify things of various sorts that are themselves linked in hierarchies of sameness and difference.

Such features as universality and particularity, sameness (generic and specific), and difference (universal and individual), along with other features like affirmation and negation, possibility, contingency, necessity, and existence, thing and properties are categories that operate through the other more directly present features like silver-gray, red, light brown, or heavy and light, smooth and rough, and the like. The level of the categorical, of both the sensorily restricted and the non-sensorily restricted universals, stands fixed atemporally over against the flux of sensations (both external and internal), sensorily given things, and our awareness. Categorial awareness invades our immediate sensory awareness since we always attend to the individual given features and their clusters as something, as instances of types. But categorial awareness is subsidiary to my focus upon the individual: in our example, upon the mailbox and its perceptible features. The universal structures function like glasses: I look through them, not at them—except in the present case where I am making them the object of my reflective attention. By reason of this reflective capacity I am able to take apart my experience by isolating some of these features and then relating them back to the objects in the judgments I make about what is focally given in perceptual experience.

But just that attention involves another structural level of my awareness. Not only am I, as conscious, outside the body that grounds and situates my awareness; I, as eidetic inquirer, am outside the Here-and-Now of the embodied sensory situation by being referred to the whole field of space and time where instances of the eidetic are found. That is, I come to apprehend the eidetic constants as holding anytime and anyplace the conditions for their instantiation are met. Reflection puts me at a distance from my immersion in the Here-and-Now because it is based upon my reference to the whole of space and time. It involves a shift in my disposition: from one engaged in the world of hopes and fears gathered in the mailbox to the simple desire to attend to the eidetic features apart from any other motivation.

There is a final consideration along these lines. The overarching notion within which all the sorting of samenesses and differences goes on is the notion of Being. Whatever I recognize, I recognize as being. And everything I recognize about anything I recognize as being. Everything, and everything about everything, is included indeterminately in the notion of Being. Consequently, the horizon of all our wakeful life is the totality of things. We live out of an anticipation of the character of the Whole within which we find ourselves—not only the cultural whole or cultural world, but the Cosmos itself. As the Stoics saw, we are, by nature, cosmo-politan, our home is the Cosmos as a whole.

The notion of Being pries one loose from all determinants, organically produced, culturally shaped, and personally chosen. It sets one at a reflective distance, making possible both the simple desire to grasp the eidetic as such and making possible and necessary our each choosing our way among the possibilities afforded by our situation and our understanding thereof.

Providing various handles in and through my various sensory capacities, the mailbox is in general the same as any other empirical object. But it stands over against the general class of things provided by nature and stands in the class of things provided by art. As we already noted, the mailbox is also embedded in a general system of production and exchange.

The relatively perfect geometrical shape of the box itself indicates not only a refashioning of what is given by nature but a developed process of machine technology that allows for great exactitude in shaping things according to geometric idealization. Mass production supersedes handwork. Over time various techniques develop of extracting raw materials from nature and of transforming such materials into forms that serve the ends for which we produce them. The early techniques were rather crude. The people who developed them have died long ago; but the techniques are passed on to others, some of whom refine them and, in turn, pass them on to still others.

Monetary exchange supersedes simple barter as things are subjected to quantitative evaluations that establish equivalencies. Again, the system of monetary exchange is developed and passed on as the institutional framework of operation in which we now live. So I was able to go to the store and purchase the mailbox instead of building one for myself.

In addition to functioning within the production and exchange system, the mailbox functions as the end intended by those systems within another system, the postal system. Its final end is the exchange of written statements.

Such systems within which I function involve the mediation of my relations by anonymous others through those I directly encounter: the salesperson or the postman. The postal system aims at a mediated presence, a presence-in-absence, of others whom I intend directly as the recipients of my own letters or the authors of those directed to me. Such presence-in-absence develops out of an original situation of immediate encounter.

I see the postman bringing the mail. He is an empirical object, in that respect like other such objects: the trees, the hills, the dog running around the yard, the mailbox, the birds fluttering above, the clouds. He is set off from the hills and the mailbox which are inanimate objects. He has something in common with the trees in that he is an organically living process. The latter is set off from the inanimate by exhibiting developmental phases of a single, functional whole. An organism is a self-formative process, self-sustaining, self-repairing as well as self-reproducing. It thus necessarily appears as an individual of the kind belonging to its reproductive line. The notion of “self” here refers to a kind of centeredness, operating “from inside outward” and resisting that which would dissolve it. Its self-formation depends upon specific kinds of mineral elements, oxygen, and light in its environment. Its native powers, active and passive, are oriented toward the kinds of individuals in the environment correlative with those powers.

The postman is an organism, but he is different from the trees in that he is, like the birds, sensorily aware. Such awareness adds a dimension of self-manifestation as correlative to the manifestation of what stands outside it as sustaining, threatening, or indifferent to its own existence. Its sensory life is focused upon individuals and is immediately linked to its organic needs experienced in terms of desire and the pleasure and pain of possession or its lack regarding beneficial and harmful goods.

The postman is different from the birds, not only in physiological structure, but in his whole style of behavior. For one thing, he is clothed—usually in a uniform that identifies his functioning in an official capacity within the postal system. Being clothed places him within a set of cultural practices with its different styles of dress, but also, as with the mailbox he opens, in the systems of production and exchange. He functions by reason of knowing his way about within these systems.

But he is not simply a different sort of object sharing identical traits with other sorts of objects appearing in the environment. He is another self whom I experience as “you.” He looks; he smiles; he speaks to me. The look and the smile are expressive of the inwardness of his disposition. His state of mind is directly available in his comportment. But the fuller content of his mind is available through his speech. Here he rests, like I whom he addresses, within the same linguistic conventions as I do.

The postal service is itself made possible because of the invention of writing. Writing is a kind of surrogate presence of other subjects as it is a kind of surrogate for living speech.

Speech itself is a temporal flow. Sentences are generated in such a way that the sound of the beginning of each has passed away before the sound of its end is generated. And each sentence flows into the next. Indeed, we do not ordinarily think in terms of sentences but in terms of the objects about which we speak in continuous discourse. Sentences are analytically isolatable from the flow of discourse. We can carry out the analysis further when we isolate the words: the nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, articles, prepositions, conjunctives. Some are subjectable to inflections of various sorts: declensions in terms of gender, number, and case with regards to nouns and (in some languages) adjectives; conjugations, for example, in terms of time-relations (variations on past, present, and future) and relations to the intent of the speaker (declarative, interrogative, optative, and imperative) as well as the abstract infinitive in the case of verbs.

Speech is embedded in sound. When we carry on a phonological analysis, we find that the unit proximate to words is the syllable, but the ultimate units are vowels and consonants. The vowels are basic: a, e, i, o, u; the consonants “sound with” (sonare con) the vowels by clipping them in various ways termed dentals (d and t), labials (b, f), gutturals (c, g, k), sibilants (s, z), and the like. Vowels and consonants are based upon the sound possibilities of the human oral cavity on the one hand and an idealized selection of certain ranges of sound that carry absolute identities. In the case of “a,” for example, there are many concrete individual modulations for individuals or groups when sounding out the same identical “a” sound. And to determine how a given sound counts for “a” one has to hear it in relation to the way in which the other vowels are sounded by that individual or in that group. In other words, the vowels and consonants form part of an eidetic system of humanly selected ideal units. They are subservient to communicating identical meanings abstracted from and applied to things originally given in the environment, for example, features like colors, tactual qualities and the like. Linguistic sounds arise by historical selection out of the sound-generating capacities of the organism that situates human awareness in the environment. They are themselves the incarnation of distinctively human awareness. We come to ourselves as thinkers as we incarnate our thought in speech or writing.

The spoken sentence persists in memory, until it is forgotten. Of course, much depends upon the quality of one’s memory. It is memory—good or poor—that allows one to return to the same singular historical event long after it has flowed down the stream of time. But writing rescues memory from its tendency to weaken over time. Memory also implies that the past event, long since flown away, still retains the sameness of objective immortality to which our memory refers and which we attempt to revisit through deliberately employed techniques of recovery.

Writing is an exterior supplement to the native, interior memory which is inclined over time to forget what was said. The Romans noted: Verba fluunt, scripta manent: Spoken words flow, written words remain—a warning by the pragmatists to be careful what you commit to writing, but also a significant observation about the relation of speech to writing.

Writing also changes the scope of the audience. Speech is restricted to the immediate situation of the interlocutors—or eavesdroppers: to the space within which the voices can be heard and the time within which the conversation occurs. But writing opens up to all those capable of reading the language, wherever they might be spatially located and whenever they might read the text for the duration of the time when the material medium supports the text. The same words can be read again and again. But the flux will inevitably overtake the medium. However, these same words can be written again and again by copyists and later reproduced by mechanical means. Indeed, today the living voice itself can be transcribed electronically—thus significantly disambiguating by tonal dynamics what, as written, could remain ambiguous.

Not only the written message sent and received through the postal service, but the very account we are giving is made possible both because of the various levels of structure involved in my awareness and because of the antecedent development of the English language. Language places me from the start into a peculiar space together with others. Those who taught me language brought me out of my bodily point of view as a needy sensing being and into a common set of eidetic structures. Language holds in place the eidetic recognitions and creations of those long dead. It is the system within which all the other systems function, the basic openness of the Whole for a tradition. Each of us lives in it in such a way that we are brought out of our own privacies and into a public space. It is within this space that we carry on all the operations we have been examining. It is within this space that we are able to carry out the sciences that have inter-subjective validity.

Return now to the character of the subject who is carrying on this inquiry. It is a single, embodied subject. As such it is in the midst of a career as an organism that began as a fertilized ovum replete with the unobservable potentialities directed toward the adult stage of a human being. It will inevitably end with the dissolution of the organism. The most detailed inventory of all the empirically available features of the fertilized ovum will yield absolutely nothing of its potentialities. Only reflective intellect can uncover them by working backward from the actual course of development to the powers. But reflective intellect, operating out of the horizon of orientation toward the whole of Being, also lives out of the horizon of anticipating its own demise. The human being exists as one of the mortals. Running ahead in thought to that term, one can bring one’s own life as a whole into focus.

The mailbox appears as such because we are able to recognize the eidetic, because we situate it within a shared horizon of institutions governed by collective ends and personally appropriated by placing our individual ends within those institutional frames. But the eidetic appears because the immediately present things like mailboxes are finally horizoned by our anticipation of the Whole and the whole of our own life as sealed by our own demise. How we view the Whole (our philosophy or theology) and how we anticipate the final shape of our own individual lives governs how we approach even the simplest things in life—things like the humble mailbox.

With all this attention to the eidetic, to the system of essences as the glasses through which we look at things in the environment, have we not lost existence, have we not lost this actual mailbox? There are certain privileged moments when the individuality of its existence might come to the fore. Consider the mailbox alongside the road just after sunrise. The clouds are tinged with an orange-gold glow reflected on the surface of the mailbox. The morning dew is still on its surface. A spider has woven its web between the edge of the box and the post on which it sits. The dew on the web and on the box glistens in the sunlight. A sense of freshness and promise pervades the cool air. We are gripped by the display, held by its beauty. In the functional world within which we operate, the pre-understanding in virtue of which we take up things in certain ways involves our focus upon the goals under which we subsume what presents itself. Being halted by the beauty of a particular display pulls us up short, sets us in the Now in a transformed way—even opening out to a possible theophany. As Martin Buber said, “Sunlight on a maple twig and a glimpse through to the Eternal Thou is worth more than all the [mystical] experiences on the edge of life.”

But no matter what our focus, the lure of the Whole constitutes the implicit background within which we come to understand anything and to grasp and pursue our goals. It is that lure which generates the questions that set in motion the history of philosophy. What is the nature of the Whole? How can we come into proper relation to that Whole? How does that relate to our everyday focal concerns? How is our awareness related to the dark biological ground that underpins it? How is it related to the community that antecedes it as the source of the institutions whereby I define and realize my own individual possibilities? What does it portend with respect to my own inevitable demise? The descriptively available evidences we have explored both lead to such questions and relate the putative answers back to the togetherness of such evidences in order to test the adequacy of our larger claims.

These observations lead us to a view of human nature as culture-creating nature and thus as essentially historical. Human nature is the constant; culture and history are the variables. Based upon what we have seen, human nature presents itself as bipolar, as organically based reference to the Whole.

We are obviously organisms, some of whose organs are the basis for sensory experience. The organs serve the powers of perception but also the desires for food, drink, and sex served in turn by perception of what is beneficial or harmful to our flourishing as organic beings. The objects of perception and biological desire are ever present in wakeful life as individual and actual. They are the most obvious inhabitants of “reality.” This establishes one pole to our experience.

The less obvious feature of experience is an empty reference to the whole of what-is that founds the questions, What’s it all about? What is our place in the whole scheme of things? And, What is the whole scheme of things? That reference is a function of the notion of Being which makes the mind to be a mind. Everything is included in its scope, for outside being is nothing. But by itself it yields no knowledge of anything in particular. We begin to fill in that empty reference by experience and inference governed by the principle of noncontradiction that holds for the whole of experience and what we might infer from it.

It is that reference to the Whole via the notion of Being that is the basis for both what we call intellect and what we call will. Being directed to the Whole of what is, we are also directed to the whole of space and time which allows us to abstract eidetic features that refer to anytime and anyplace such features might be met in the individuals given in sensory experience. Abstraction leads to judgment which puts the abstractions together with the experienced objects. And judgment allows for inference when we put judgments together in reasoning processes following the principle of noncontradiction.

That same reference to the Whole is what makes will possible as the freedom to choose. Referred by our nature to the Whole, we are free in the face of anything less than the Whole and are thus able to determine ourselves. But that can only happen insofar as we understand the possibilities for our choice given by intellectual operations. Thus intellect and will are like two sides of the same coin: each presupposes the other. We cannot understand unless we choose, and we cannot choose unless we understand the options.

The building up of our view of the Whole is linked to the limitation of our experience and the inadequacy of the frameworks for understanding that experience. That is why science has a history of uncovering nature. And our choices are limited by our understanding of possibilities. At first they were extremely limited. Over time each of us attains to habitual ways of understanding and choosing. Passed on to others, these ways sediment into institutions, that is, loci of practices that focus and hone our possibilities for acting. Because of the differing ways of understanding and the differing character of institutions, cultures are necessarily plural. And because understanding and choice develop over time, cultures have a history—much of it brought about by interaction between cultures.

Each of us is born and raised in a determinate culture as mediated by the more or less limited understanding possessed by those who raised us. That process focuses the possibilities given by each of our individual genetic makeups. So when reflective awareness begins to emerge in each of us, we are already determined by two structures we did not choose: our genetic makeup and our cultural shaping. These give us the initial motivational structure for choosing. When we begin to make our own choices, we further determine our own habit-structure within the frameworks of the genetic and cultural stamps given to us. At any given moment then we have three already determined levels that constitute any given Me: a genetic level, a cultural level, and a personal-historical level. We cannot erase the fact that Here-and-Now we are each determined by these three levels, in the peculiar forms they have taken in each of us. But any given person has the bipolar structure sketched above. Reference to the Whole grounds the I as the ability to understand and choose from among the possibilities afforded by the I’s own Me. The Me is the artist’s material for the I, the already determinate stuff for the I’s choosing. What am I going to do with Me? is the question each one of us always faces. And what we do depends upon how we understand the possibilities afforded by that tri-level structure.

The interplay of these levels sediments into a dynamic center that a long tradition has called “the heart.” It is the ground of our spontaneous tendency to move in certain directions, to be attracted by certain possibilities and repelled by others. It is our more or less automatic pilot, the default position for everyday action. But being directed toward the Whole, I am always placed in conscious life at a reflective distance from Me, on account of which I have to ask myself: Where is my heart? Is it where it ought to be? Where ought it to be?

Reflective distance makes the individual responsible for its own actions. It becomes the cutting edge of the culture which it can sustain, develop, or subvert. Its full development lies in the cultivation of its spontaneous proclivities for action when thought reaches the heart. Religiously, that means when God moves from object of thought to a living Presence.

Now the function of philosophy is to make the invariable structures explicit, those that are present phenomenologically and those that underlie foundationally. That is why John Paul points to a move from phenomenon to foundation. We will follow that move in the treatment of the various philosophers we have selected.

The practice of philosophy stands at a distance from our own hearts in order to arrive at an understanding of what and why our hearts desire what they do and in order to arrive at criteria for judging the movements of our hearts within a responsibly developed view of the Whole. Philosophy holds open the space for the fullest development of the heart and clarifies the heart to itself. But philosophy itself is not directly a matter of the heart; it is a matter of the intellect and its pure, unrestricted desire to understand, apart from how we might feel about things.

* * * *

Armed with the basic concepts we have highlighted in our dealing with everyday things, we turn to focus upon select highlights in the history of thought, beginning with Plato, passing through Aristotle, on to Augustine and Aquinas, who took up Plato and Aristotle respectively, and then to Descartes, Hegel, and Heidegger. The aim is not to present how they used to think and thus satisfy historical curiosity, but to learn how to think by attending to the things with which the classic texts deal. The lives of the thinkers are to that extent irrelevant. It is the things themselves that we learn to focus in various ways by studying the great philosophers.1

QUESTIONS

1. What are the essential features of each of the sensory fields?

2. What is the difference between the “lived body” and body object? You know of bodies by sensing them in various ways as objects appearing within your sensory fields. But you know your own body in a different way. Describe that difference as exactly as you can.

3. What is different about touch than is the case with the other senses?

4. How is intellection different from sensation?

5. How is a natural capacity different than a sensory object? How is it like the intellect? How is it different?

6. Heraclitus once said: All things flow and nothing remains the same. You can’t step into the same river twice. Is that true of all of experience and its objects?

7. Red thing, redness, color, sensory feature, quality, property: these terms are arranged from more concrete to more abstract. Each more abstract term covers more items in experience than the more concrete terms that precede it. This is an instance of a logical hierarchy—parallel to the Church hierarchy in which you find broader and broader spheres of authority. How do the notions of sameness and difference function in this logical hierarchy?

8. Universal notions function like glasses. How so?

9. How are humans related to space and time?

10. The pope says that what we need is a renewal of the philosophy of being (FR 97/119). How does the notion of Being enter into the discussion of the mailbox? What features of human experience does it make possible?

11. What are the essential features of the way in which different kinds of things present themselves: the nonliving, the living, the animal, the human?

12. What are the essential features involved in speech? How does writing modify those features?

13. How does aesthetic experience move us from essence to existence?

14. How are the big questions made possible by the structure of human awareness?

15. Describe the bipolar structure of human existence. How does that make the human being the culture-creating animal?

16. Describe the distinction between I and Me. How does the heart fit into the picture?