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.
5.
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.
6.
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.
7.
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
