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.
2.
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.
3.
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
