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.
4.
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
