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.
8.
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.
9.
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.
