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.
1.
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
